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Boston Blotter

John Updike, Really

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — After arriving at the Dunes of Ogunquit motor court after midnight and in a drizzle, My Beloved Wife and I gave ourselves permission to take it easy today, not push. We have through Thursday morning in Maine and we don’t want to waste a minute, but we don’t want exhaustion, either. The cabin had a small refrigerator and when I woke, MBW had driven in our rental car to Wells to a grocery for cereal, cream cheese, rustic bread and milk — and throwaway dishes and flatware.

Soon we drove into Ogunquit and walked its Marginal Way, a mile-long path along the Atlantic. At the other end we hit precisely one gift shop, our limit, then on its recommendation Caffe Prego for coffee and a look at the alt weeklies. One agate brief in the Portland throwaway said John Updike — the John Updike — would give a reading in Portsmouth, N.H., that very night. He was promoting his new novel, Terrorist.

While MBW drove to York to see some historical stuff about 5:30 p.m., I in the passenger seat phoned The Music Hall. The box office manager said my call was lucky: They sold out at noon, but two minutes earlier a pair of tickets were returned. I gave him my Visa number and asked for his favorite nearby restaurant.

We had a fun, funky meal at downtown Portsmouth’s The Friendly Toast, a block and a half away from the restored theater. The writer’s performance was a benefit for New Hampshire Public Radio and included an on-stage interview by the network’s Laura Knoy. She solicited questions from the audience, and I came up with one: What would he like to write that he hasn’t yet? We carried binoculars, to be used Tuesday at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, and I could see my 3×5 card in Knoy’s hand: She hadn’t rejected it!

Indeed it was her penultimate question. Updike said he had tried several times to write a historical novel about President James Buchanan but was unable to. He also said he never has completed writing a drama. Buchanan is a good novel character because he “got burned early in life, played it safe for decade after decade, he was called a good safe man and he got burned at the end by the Civil War, which happened under his regime. There are some writers who find the historical novel congenial. I seem to need to be there, to need memory.”

From listening again to the program online, here are favorite quotes:

Some Arab Americans feel he’s caricatured or failed to understand the beauties of their world in the new book (afterward, I bought a signed copy in the lobby). What do you say to them? “I say it’s too late.”

“A fiction writer has a duty to be as daring as he can be, and you must fight for your right to try to animate without first-hand experience, to animate on the basis of having lived 74 years and to having absorbed a lot of unconscious impressions, [that] I am as entitled as the next person to try to write about these matters.” Adding he wrote once about Buddhism and often in the minds of women: “I think that’s your job if you’re going to be an imaginative writer.”

He was a cartoonist as a youth and through college, at the Harvard Lampoon. Those skills “helped me in composition of images [in writing]. … I wanted to be printed everywhere not just my own local newspaper. … A cartoonist of the kind that appears in The New Yorker needs about 20 ideas a week of which one is chosen. Rather, a novelist needs one idea about every two years.”

“You almost know as much at the age of 24 as you do at the age of 74. Furthermore you’re fuller of your mission: You’re full of material you’ve absorbed in the first 20 years of your life. Only you have seen these things. Only you have this particular slant on life in Pennsylvania. Domestic life in Pennsylvania was my great topic. You are the news; you are the newest wave. You have a lot to say or so you think. And the older you get the less possibly you do have to say. [Most older writers are spent. Even Henry James stopped writing novels when he was about 60. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were washed up by the time they were 40.] So to have a prolonged career as an American in a way goes against our native grain. … [America treats] writing as a kind of ecstasy, a kind of fit of inspiration that comes upon you like athletic prowess when you’re young, and once you lose the limber muscles you’re through as a writer.”

Knoy last asked Updike about any preparatory rituals: “I write a few letters. [Tools include a] word processor, pencil and paper, a manual typewriter. [Notes that people need to trust writers to solve literary problems when they’re doing other things, such as driving, golf, trying to go to sleep. In the mornings, I find] that first couple of sentences breeds others, then you get into it, your feet lift off the ground and you’re writing for a couple of hours and imagining and you’re there and you come down slowly and you have the rest of the day to do useful things.” -30-

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