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BIO
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.
--- Over his long and distinguished writing career, John Updike
has received numerous awards and literary prizes. Among
them:
--- The National Book Award for THE CENTAUR
--- Three National Book Critics Circle Awards: for HUGGING THE SHORES,
RABBIT IS RICH, and RABBIT AT REST.
--- Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction: for RABBIT IS RICH
and RABBIT AT REST
--- The American National Book Award for RABBIT IS RICH
--- He has received, over the years, the Signet Society Medal for
Achievement in the Arts, the Edward McDowell Medal for Literature,
the Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist Award, the Lincoln Literary
Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor.
--- Most recently he was awarded the 1998 National Book Foundation
Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
--- He has twice been on the cover of Time Magazine.
--- Two of his books have been adapted for film: RABBIT
RUN and THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK
INTERVIEW
OF
PRIZES AND PRINT
By John Updike
Remarks Delivered on the Occasion of His Receiving the 1998 National
Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters
When I was told of this handsome honor, my mind flicked back to
the two other times when I have been so fortunate as to be summoned
by the National Book Awards. The first occasion, on March 10, 1964,
was immortalized by a young reporter for the now-defunct New York
Herald Tribune who signed himself Tomas distinguished from Thomas
Wolfe. His coverage began with these two paragraphs:
No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight
again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them
all last night, for all time. Up on the stage in the Grand Ballroom
of the New York Hilton Hotel, to receive the most glamorous of the
five National Book Awards, the one for fiction, came John Updike,
author of THE CENTAUR, in a pair of 19-month-old loafers. Halfway
to the podium, the spotlight from the balcony hit him, and he could
not have ducked better if there had been a man behind it with a
rubber truncheon.
First he squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eye glasses.
Then he ducked his head and his great thatchy medieval haircut toward
his right shoulder. Then he threw up his left shoulder and his left
elbow. Then he bent forward at the waist. And then, before the shirred
draperies of the Grand Ballroom and an audience of 1,000 culturati,
he went into his Sherwin-Williams blush.
In illustration of the tricks that memory plays, I remember the
event as rather intimate and sedate. There had been a late-winter
snowstorm in New England, and my then-wife and I had risen very
early to catch a train, and arrived rumpled and sleepy for this
moment of triumph. Newspapers don't lie, so the Hilton Grand Ballroom
it must have been, but my impression was of a small low room with
a scattering of librarians in flowered hats on folding chairs. They
smiled benignly, I remember that, and I also remember that just
as I was about to step out into the spotlight for my turn at bat,
somebody pestered me to sign his program, or scorecard. That, and
the subsequent report by Tom Wolfe, were my first taste of the joys
of celebrity.
The second occasion took place on April 27, 1982, in Carnegie Hall.
The prizes at that point were, for no doubt valid reasons, called
the American Book Awards, and only the winners were expected to
show up. What I remember of that proud occasion is that my editor,
Judith Jones, who sat beside me in the great concert hall, confided
early during the ceremonies that she had just come from gum surgery.
This is some editor, I thought at the time, and I think it still;
Judith has been brave and loyal on my behalf for nearly forty years
now. The ceremonies needed two hosts on stage, like the two interlocutors
in minstrel shows of yore, Barbara Walters and William F. Buckley,
Jr., by name, and their interspersions were so witty and well-considered,
and the acceptance speeches of the other winners so heartfelt and
elaborate, that as the allotted hour wore on, and as I sat there
with the folded pages of my speech gathering dampness against my
breast, it became clear that there would not be time for the fiction
winner, who spoke last, to say anything at all. A concert was scheduled
for that evening, and we could hear, in the foyer and the wings,
the musicians arriving with their clattering cellos and woodwinds,
conversing of Stravinsky and Mahler and even emitting a few impatient
toots on the French horn. Barbara Walters's voice, normally so soothing,
approached the strident as she advised us that our time was up;
in a few gratefully applauded seconds I dashed up the aisle, grabbed
my award from the large hand of Arthur Miller, and scampered away.
The speech I never gave can be read in my collected works.
And now, as they say on television, this. Like some graying comet,
every seventeen years or so, I return from the outer darkness of
the un-nominated. From under my thatchy medieval haircut I peer
out and what do I see? Tuxedos! Sequins! Plunging necklines! I must
be in Hollywood. There are, just as at the Academy Awards, quintets
of nominees, to be shortly boiled down to one modestly blushing
winner and four gamely smiling losers. As in the annual film ceremonial,
there is a gala air of ritual sacrifice, and some docile old buck
or doe of the trade is brought forward to be given a medal whose
reverse side holds the invisibly engraved implication that the time
has come to retire. Is there anything worrisome, anything Heaven-storming,
about American publishing, whose saintly minions labor day after
day far past dark over their endless proofs and their eerily glowing
computer screens, putting on the dog for one night of the year?
A Hollywoodian touch of glitz and glamor does not, let's hope, entail
a Hollywoodian bewitchment with the mass market, with billion-dollar
grosses and gross-out courtship of the adolescent mind. One of the
strengths and charms of the book industry, and industry it of course
is, has been its relative modesty, bow tie more than black tie,
a modesty that translates into a relative mobility, an ability to
publish, without catastrophic loss, books which will appeal to few,
and to give the public an immense variety of products, a variety
that is both a proclamation and an enjoyment of American freedom.
And yet, to be honest, if I reflect on the psychological history
that led me to become a cottage laborer in this industry, an impression
of glamour was part of it. There was something glamorous about the
Reading, Pennsylvania, public library, a stately Carnegie-endowed
edifice at Fifth and Franklin, next to a sweet-smelling bakery,
where I would go with my mother from an early age, walking at her
side the block from the trolley-car stop at Fourth Street, climbing
the many wide steps, and stepping into a temple of books. The towering
walls of books seemed conjured from a realm far distant, utterly
mysterious and gracious, the little numbers inked onto the spines,
the pockets for a borrower's card at the back, all these angelic
arrangements. Who had done this for me? The well-thumbed volumes,
with wider margins and smaller pages than are now customary, had
a romantic savor of Thirties and Forties New York City. I read through
shelves of P. G. Wodehouse and Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie
and Robert Benchley, and expanded my borrowing to include the even
more glamorous books rented, for I think a penny a day, from a certain
counter at Whitner's department store. Those books had retained
their jackets, which were in turn jacketed in cellophane --- a very
glamorous touch, that.
And there was a glamour, a swank, in the chastely severe, time-honored
classics of English literature that one bought for courses at Harvard;
sitting in my little dormered room in Lowell House at midnight,
tilting back in my wooden Harvard chair, holding a cigarette in
one hand and in the other the blue-covered Oxford Poetical Works
of Spenser, with its tiny type, double columns, and Elizabethan
spelling that reversed the "v"'s and the "u"'s, I felt like a glamorous
person indeed, me and the Faerie Queene, together in the clouds.
And there was certainly a glamour in the sample pages I received,
some years later, from the firm of Knopf to show me what my first
novel, THE POORHOUSE FAIR would look like in print. The novel had
been a stumbling block for my initial publisher, and it was by the
happiest of flukes that a carbon copy fell into the hands of an
editor at Knopf, Sandy Richardson, who liked the book just as it
was; then it fell into the hands of Harry Ford, a perfect knight
of the print world, an editor and designer both, who gave me a delicious
striped jacket and an elegant page format, in the typeface called
Janson, that I have stuck with for over forty books since. To see
those youthful willful hopeful words of mine in that type, with
Perpetua chapter heads set off by tapered rules, was an elevated
moment I am still dizzy from. The old letterpress Linotype had a
glinting material bite that all the ingenious advantages of computer
setting have not quite replaced.
This is perhaps the fond moment to thank for manifold kindnesses
and encouragements my wife, Martha, who is here with two of her
sons and a glamorous daughter-in-law, and to express my human debt
also to my own four children, and their mother, and my parents,
now dead, and my mother's parents, long dead, who all together provided
along the length of my life warm and action-packed houses that accommodated
the presence of a stranger, my strange ambition to be something
glamorous. I was and am grateful. And to The New Yorker, which since
1954 has given me a home of another sort. And to Fawcett Books,
my paperback publisher since RABBIT, RUN.
The book industry scarcely needs glamour when it has at its command
something better, beauty, the beauty of the book. Though visual
imagery is in a sense more absolute, more vivid, less arguable than
the printed word, electronic projectors are clumsy and prone to
obsolescence compared to the physical object that bound paper forms.
Alfred Knopf, when he was alive, dressed up for publishing much
the way John Keats is alleged to have dressed up when he sat down
to write a poem.
In his purple shirts, expressionist neckties, and burnside whiskers,
he seemed a cross between a Viennese emperor and a Barbary pirate;
but the menace in him never frightened me because I knew I was in
the company of a man who loved books and cared about their beauty.
The books he published showed it. We assembled here should rejoice
in our venerable product; a book is beautiful in its relation to
the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the
human spirit.
November 18, 1998
ARTICLE
"If
I know about it, I'll write about it," John Updike said not long
ago.
His knowledge must be encyclopedic given the varied themes of his
many novels and short story collections. Updike has written about
male angst (the RABBIT books and AFTERLIFE,
among others), the writing life (the
BECH books), witches (THE WITCHES
OF EASTWICK) golf (GOLF DREAMS),
families (IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES),
and aging (TOWARD THE END OF TIME).
Updike published his first short story in 1954, and he's been writing
ever since. Oddly, he is not as well-known as he should
be, given that he's won numerous prizes for his short stories, two
Pulitzer Prizes, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, and
several other literary awards for his novels over the years. More's
the pity, I would argue, because John Updike is a wonderful writer.
The most ordinary people, the simplest objects, the most commonplace
events bloom on the pages of his novels and short stories. Consider
Rabbit --- Harry Angstrom --- a man whose life peaked when he was
the star of his high school basketball team --- it would be hard
to find a more ordinary man, yet Updike, in chronicling the vicissitudes
of Rabbit's life over four decades, has created an icon with whom
we can all relate. Or George Caldwell, the protagonist of THE CENTAUR
--- a simple schoolteacher in northern Pennsylvania whose search
for meaning in his life takes us all on an unforgettable journey.
At 66, he is still going strong. In May, ROUTE 6, his newest novel
will be published. It is the story of a man who searches for compassion
but finds, instead, only cruelty and ignorance.
John Updike is one of America's finest writers. He writes with intelligence,
humor, honestly, and compassion about people and issues that concern
us all. To read his novels and his stories is to discover writing
at its best.
--- Judith Handschuh
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