John Updike

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a writer. He was born the clever and only son of a Pennsylvanian school teacher, and lived a quiet provincial life until he went to Harvard at the age of eighteen.

Presenter0:42

His desire to write drew him to the New Yorker magazine. He became a staff writer there in the fifties, and in nineteen sixty he published Rabbit Run. It was this book, together with the three later Rabbit novels, which contributed to his reputation as one of modern America's most important writers. Couples, his novel about marital infidelities in the sixties, made him a millionaire, and The Witches of Eastwick became a major feature film.

Presenter1:07

a day, at sixty three, he remains a witty, thoughtful, but always sure footed observer of America's changing way of life. Of his own life he has this to say

Presenter1:18

It's been a struggle to become normal, but I think I'm getting there. He is John Updike.

Presenter1:25

What's abnormal about a a decent, God fearing Pennsylvanian boy who grows up to become a famous and prolific writer?

John Updike1:33

Well, I felt growing up that we were not quite normal, but perhaps it was my mother's writing ambition, which I thought was abnormal. She did have this itch to be a writer, and sure enough, I caught it. I was an only child, and to that extent I missed some of the stimulations that my more prolific family friends had.

Presenter1:55

So you felt abnormal'cause you were outside of the pack, did you?

John Updike1:57

I did.

Presenter1:58

But what was abnormal about your mother wanting to write?

John Updike2:01

Oh, I thought it was very abnormal. I mean, nobody else in that county wanted to write. The most normal thing was to be a good athlete, which I wasn't. And the height of professions around there was to be a full-fashioned knitter. So I don't know. I began to stutter at a fairly early age out of some sense of abnormality. And then I got psoriasis quite early, as a skin.

Speaker 22:14

Nope.

John Updike2:22

Disease that never used to be discussed, indeed pronounced. Now it's rather more out in the open. I've kind of come out of the psoriasis closet, but I think that helped me feel abnormal.

Presenter2:33

So you've tried to become normal. What is normal to day, now you're sixty three?

John Updike2:38

to be uh psoriasis free and to stutter only under uh stress and to uh have written forty books and have had four children and two wives and uh

John Updike2:52

I moved out of New York City, which is a very abnormal place, and moved to what I thought was a more normal kind of America, and really tried to create out of my suburban environment in my thirties the kind of identity I think I longed for as a schoolboy.

Presenter3:10

I want to revisit some of those places, both normal and abnormal, with you, if I may. But first of all, we're going to put you in a very abnormal situation, because what we do here is send you alone to a desert island with only your music for company. Does the idea appeal at all?

John Updike3:23

As an only child, I'm not totally afraid of a desert island, and it'll be very good for my skin, I expect, if it's a sunny island. Hearing the same music over and over again is a little intimidating, but I've tried to pick pieces that I could bear to hear at least twice. Tell me about the first one. First one is Fatswalder singing, You're Not the Only Oyster in the Stew. A good friend of mine.

John Updike3:46

and I somehow discovered uh jazz when we were about eleven or twelve.

John Updike3:52

He was the one with a lawyer for a father, so he had the money for the equipment and the records. But I used to go over to his house and listen. For both of us it was a window into a totally other world than Schillington, all white Schillington. Somewhere uh Larkin talks about uh a giant yes that floats down from the

John Updike4:11

Playing with Sidney Besche, and I suppose I felt that same giant yes in Fatzweller.

Speaker 44:17

You're not the only artist that is still

Speaker 44:23

Not the only tealing in the tea.

Speaker 44:27

However, I'm convinced.

Speaker 44:30

Completely, fully, firmly convinced.

Speaker 44:33

You're the only one for me.

John Updike4:33

Yeah.

Speaker 44:37

You're not the only wriggle in the room.

Speaker 44:43

You're not the only apple on the tree.

Speaker 44:48

Telling all a fact. Perfectly logical positive fact.

Speaker 44:53

You're the only one for me.

Speaker 44:58

Yeah.

Speaker 45:02

Baby, your smile is refreshing.

Speaker 45:05

Because it's so unique.

Speaker 45:09

When I'm round, I'm susceptible and weak.

Speaker 45:13

I love ya. I love ya.

Presenter5:17

Fat Swalla singing You're Not the Only Oyster in the Stew

Presenter5:21

You've written a lot about your own life. You've written a lot about American everyday, average, normal life.

Presenter5:28

Mm a lot of you in your short stories, but I want to talk first of all, if we may, about the Rabbit books. Where did Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, come from? Because he wasn't you. He's nothing to do with you, is he?

John Updike5:38

Well, he was born in the same county, and in a sense, he went to the same schools that I did. He was a year younger than I.

John Updike5:47

The figure of the ex-athlete, the young American who peaks at the age of eighteen and has nowhere to go but downhill was

John Updike5:54

Very real to me and uh

John Updike5:56

I set out out of heaven knows what mingled set of impulses at the age of twenty six to write

John Updike6:02

a saga of one of these uh young men uh to whom adult life is an anticlimax.

Presenter6:08

Quite, because he's really rather a a shallow character. He's he's he's pathetic, really, isn't he, Butcher?

John Updike6:14

As we aged together, though, Harry got increasingly more charming, I think. Yes, in the first novel, The Rabbit Run, he's fairly shallow.

Presenter6:21

But do you like him?

John Updike6:22

Yeah.

John Updike6:23

Yeah, I liked him. A lot of readers didn't. One person tore the book up and sent it to me and

John Updike6:28

I don't think he accused me of being the Antichrist, but did accuse me of being a really sick person to have written this book.

Presenter6:34

But why why would they have thought it was sick?

John Updike6:37

Well, because uh the fellows sexual urges are rather more

John Updike6:41

spelled out than they tended to be in the fiction of that innocent long ago era.

Presenter6:47

That was nineteen sixty. You first wrote about him. You went on to write about him every ten years after that, and he won you two Pulitzer Prizes. Why did you kill him off? You killed him off in nineteen ninety one.

John Updike6:57

I thought it was a little bit more.

Presenter6:58

Rabbit at rest.

John Updike6:59

I thought his time had come. I thought it was very much in the nature of being an ex-athlete.

John Updike7:05

that he might die young.

Presenter7:06

of chocolate and hamburgers.

John Updike7:08

Yes, of overeating, or basically of self-indulgence is the whole the whole easy.

John Updike7:13

Death was much on my mind. My mother was dying or very ill and of course I'm always aware of my own death in me like a a baby getting bigger every day. But her illness, whatever morbid tendencies I have, her very authentic descent into old age.

John Updike7:30

was certainly there to remind me. I was trying to be a good son and shuttle back and forth to Pennsylvania. She was living alone. I felt guilty. I didn't quite know what the guilt-free path opened to me was. And

John Updike7:44

out of this mix of feelings, depressing realities, uh and her own hospitalization, which occurred about midway through my writing of the book, really helped the book because I was able to observe a hospital up close.

John Updike7:56

But anyway, he certainly is at the secret of the book in a way.

Presenter7:57

So you're always

Presenter8:01

Tell me about record number two.

John Updike8:04

A little later in my jazz period

John Updike8:07

If I can call it that, I somehow heard the Benny Goodman recording of the 38 Carnegie Hall concert and Sing, Sing, Sing, which is the longest section of it all, is the riff that the pianist Jess Stacey takes after hearing a number of other trumpet, clarinet, etc. riffs.

John Updike8:27

The story I've later read is that he was listening to Debussy somewhat before this concert and when his term

John Updike8:34

came to shine, the debut filtered into this jazz tune. It's really a marvelous, magical passage, a minute or two in the history of jazz.

Presenter9:43

Benny Goodman and his band with Jess Stacey on piano playing Sing, Sing, Sing that was recorded live at the Carnegie Hall in nineteen thirty eight.

Presenter9:52

Tell me more, John Updike, about your childhood.

Presenter9:55

The time spent anywhere in Shillington was delicious, you've written. Why so?

John Updike10:01

Or it seemed so later. It probably was very mixed.

John Updike10:04

A mixed diet, uh like every other existence. Of, you know, old fashioned days, uh unlocked doors, uh left your key in the car, a child could walk anywhere.

Presenter10:15

You were in on your mother's secrets, weren't you? She wanted to know what you thought about this writing, she did.

John Updike10:20

I was sort of an editor. I became at a very early age an in-house editor and I used to read her stuff from about the age of twelve or so on and would try to comment uh usefully about it. Uh I suffered with her really. I I suffered uh I think and so far as a child. The rejection slips. Yeah, the rejection slips.

Presenter10:35

The rejection slips.

Presenter10:38

But your relationship with your mother was was obviously very close, not least because of this psoriasis you suffered from, this skin condition. I just have a.

Presenter10:46

A picture of you, I think, obviously culled from your own memoir that you've written, that you didn't go off with the boys on a summer's afternoon fishing in nothing but your short trousers, that you were at home with your mother, lying in the garden, desperately trying to get rid of your psoriasis.

John Updike11:00

Well, that is an image, and there's some truth in it. It's true I did not like fishing. I thought it was a terribly cruel thing to do to these poor silvery fish.

John Updike11:08

To tempt them with food and then they wake up with a hook in their mouths. So, no, I never fished. I never went to summer camp either. Yeah, I wa I don't think we think we can blame this on the psoriasis, really. I just was a

John Updike11:21

Kind of timid, fastidious boy of

Presenter11:23

But you were ashamed of your body, weren't you, for a long time? Inevitably, I mean, if it was covered with scaly bits.

John Updike11:30

Well, it was, but only seasonally, you know, it did sort of go away, and I don't think I internalized it absolutely.

Presenter11:38

But it must have made your adolescence excruciatingly painful.

John Updike11:41

It was it had a it had this little kink in it, yes, that other people didn't have, but then there were other problems they had that I didn't. But yes, undoubtedly.

John Updike11:50

It helps me become a

John Updike11:53

A writer in that I didn't mind uh seclusion. I really had to find a profession I thought that would permit a certain amount of seclusion, hiding. A writer can look quite hideous, you know, and as long as'cause you only deal with the mailman, basically.

Presenter12:05

Not the corner

John Updike12:05

The corner grocery.

Presenter12:06

The rejections live.

John Updike12:08

So this secrecy, yes, this hiding and sending out these missives to the world, I guess, suited my psoriatic temperament.

Presenter12:14

And did it let me ask you a very personal question, did it make your virginity any the more difficult to lose?

John Updike12:20

Uh I was fairly slow by today standards to lose it, but when it's

Presenter12:24

We were all slow by today start.

John Updike12:28

At college, uh I uh courted a girl. I I wasn't uh sexless. And the college girl, when I explained my terrible secret, uh rather dismissed it and she had thought I was going to tell her much worse things. So uh psoriasis, let's hope is never uh quite as bad to other people as it seems to the the person who bears it.

Presenter12:50

Record number three.

John Updike12:52

In emerging from latency, I began to fall in love with

John Updike12:59

Movie stars, and I fell in love with Doris Day and remain really in love with Doris Day.

John Updike13:07

and of her many songs, I think with a song in my heart, Dar Dara Stay s somewhat sneered at, at least in the States, and not so much over here, I think, but she really had a marvelous voice and

John Updike13:19

It does make the hair on my neck stand up always when I hear it and probably will this time.

Speaker 413:27

With a song in my heart

Speaker 413:32

I behold your adorable face, just a song at the start, and it soon is a hymn to your grace when the music swells.

Presenter13:51

I'm touching your hand

Presenter13:55

Doris Day singing With a Song in My Heart by Rogers and Hart.

Presenter13:59

How old were you when you first identified that the New Yorker was where your ambitions lay?

John Updike14:05

I think about the time I fell in love with Doris Day I also fell in love with the New Yorker, maybe a little earlier, come to think of it. We were still in the Shillington House, which we left when I was thirteen.

John Updike14:16

When the New Yorker began to arrive, courtesy of my Aunt Mary of Greenwich, Connecticut, she was my father's sister and several notches up in a sophistication ladder.

Presenter14:25

'Cause she thought you should read this, Mike.

John Updike14:26

She thought we should. Maybe she thought my mother should read it too. Then I just liked the look of the magazine. I liked the type and the chastity of the author's name being only at the bottom. And there was a whole lot of c coolness. You know, cool was a plus word in those days, and the New Yorker was

John Updike14:43

to me seemed very cool. So uh I don't know what point I began to try to write New Yorker quote short stories, but uh certainly by college I was sending them things.

John Updike14:53

And at the end of college, they took a story.

Presenter14:56

I was going to say, when was the moment? I mean, you must remember it after all this history of rejection slips.

John Updike15:00

Yes, everything was coming back.

John Updike15:03

But in college it began to come back with little notes on it, which was a sign of breakthrough. The ice was beginning to crack, the river was beginning to uh break up, and uh the very June I got out of college and I set about the serious business of becoming a real writer. The very first story I wrote

John Updike15:21

called the Friends from Philadelphia, they actually took

John Updike15:26

And uh it was in Pennsylvania that I received word I think the amount of money was

John Updike15:30

Five hundred and fifty dollars, which seemed quite sizable in those days.

Presenter15:34

Was your mother there at the time?

John Updike15:36

Yes, my mother was there. We were all in the house, and she shared my

John Updike15:41

My delight, as a good mother uh should, uh

John Updike15:45

She had to stand there and watch as I as I slowly ascended to the heights of published, somewhat known writer, and I suppose it couldn't have been easy for her. She later

John Updike15:58

uh told me in a burst of frankness that she just assumed that it had been her instead of me, but since it was me, she was no, we were all very happy.

Presenter16:07

More music.

John Updike16:08

When the moment came, I thought, to leave New York, we moved to a small town on the North Shore north of Boston called Ipswich.

John Updike16:17

There we joined a lot of things. We joined a set of couples, all of whom had small children. The children were a great link among us. And one of the things we joined was a recorder group. Both my first wife and I learned

John Updike16:30

In a fashion to play the recorder, and we played a lot of arrangements of Renaissance music, Purcell, Bird.

John Updike16:38

But the best and in a way the easiest to play was the Bach, I think most of the fugues and the well-tempered clavier.

John Updike16:46

uh written for the organ or the the clavier.

John Updike16:49

uh have been transposed to uh

John Updike16:52

Recorder music. And although I'd had piano lessons as a child, this was my first real experience of being inside music and the sense of the.

John Updike17:01

The mounting and the way the things return and build and come back in another key and all that conversation within that music does was never real to me until I

John Updike17:12

began to play uh box tugues on the recorder.

Presenter18:08

Fugue number one from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, played by Blondine Ferleigh, and memories of being in an adult recorder group, nineteen fifty seven onwards, in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where you say you've written You Ceased to Become a Radically Deflective Person.

Presenter18:25

What what was it about life in Ipswich Mass that made this made you so whole?

John Updike18:31

Well, I think we should give our my credit or credit credit is due uh to my first wife, who just by consenting to marry me and bearing my children enlisted me in humanity in a fairly forceful fashion and really without uh

John Updike18:46

Without Mary's forbearance and encouragement, I don't think I could have quite pulled it off about becoming a writer. And then we moved to this small town where we were, our family was very like others, 50s marriages, married pretty young, most of us, had children quite early, and really astonishing when you look back. By the time I was 28, I was the father of four. By the time young men are 28 now, they usually haven't married even. Various groups, a recorded group was only one of them. There was a political discussion group in which we debated whether Harry should have dropped the A-bomb. And there were some book groups. And anyway, it was a very good question.

Presenter19:23

It wasn't all serious stuff. I mean, there were kind of fancy dress parties. There was a lot of fun.

John Updike19:27

There was a lot of fun making some would say there might have been too much fun in the end, but no, no, parties were one of the fun.

Presenter19:34

I wanted to get to the bit that might be too much fun,'cause this is where the book Couples was was born, really, wasn't it?

John Updike19:39

Yes, Couples is uh it's not uh untrue to say that Couples was in part based upon uh the Ipsearch experience, although uh I took pains to make no one person identifiable. I mean to that extent it's fabulous, uh maybe too fabulous.

John Updike19:55

But it was a kind of fable spun from the

Presenter19:58

Suburban life.

John Updike19:58

Suburban life of that era.

Presenter20:00

But presumably within this community that you describe, Wale, there was a kind of I think you've said yourself, there was a mutual invasion of privacy. I mean that did lead on to, I don't know, wife swapping, or was it just simple adultery?

John Updike20:12

There were never any key parties in my crowd. Everything was uh covert.

John Updike20:19

What Couples was trying to describe was really a sort of community situation rather than a sexual situation. The sex was part of the communal effort. It was an era pre sixties, early sixties, when

John Updike20:32

Revolution was nowhere near in sight and yet we'd all kind of didn't have much faith in any of the standing institutions or even our own jobs. Sex will rear its head almost anywhere you give it half a chance and certainly it had at least a half a chance there and we were too young too old, pardon me, too old for the sixties, but

John Updike20:55

Uh it became our version of the revolution in a way, and indeed uh we did sort of dress like that. The women dressed in mini skirts and the men began to dress down into vests and T shirts and uh

John Updike21:07

I even had some love beads. I don't know what ever happened to them. I sometimes wonder where are my love beads now.

Presenter21:12

Ha ha ha.

Presenter21:14

Record number five.

John Updike21:15

A part of my Ipswich life in those years was to sock the psoriasis with a dose of sun, which was the only cure. I would go to the Caribbean sometimes with my wife, once or twice with my entire family, often alone.

John Updike21:32

And it was in the Caribbean that I first heard a steel drum.

John Updike21:37

Music uh on Anguilla. The boy down the down the road would play this, practice it to himself at night. It was the first time I'd heard a steel drum played.

John Updike21:46

I never tired of hearing it. It always seemed very magical to me there. When you hear it in a northern climate, it's a little less magical.

John Updike21:54

I certainly wouldn't mind hearing it again.

Presenter22:30

Yellow Bird played by the original Trinidad Steel Band.

Presenter22:34

Your marriage, John Updike, in fact, broke down finally after some twenty years or so and four children. You've written that it felt like the worst thing you ever did. Do you think it it probably was?

Presenter22:46

Even now, twenty years on.

John Updike22:47

Uh yes, I haven't done anything as as painful uh since. Uh I I'm I'm a observer, you know, of life's uh passing parade and uh have taken rather few decisions. One of them was to leave New York with my wife's agreement and uh

John Updike23:02

Another one was without her agreement.

John Updike23:06

leaving her and the four children. Uh they were they were oldish but by no means uh adults and um I thought that if now was the moment, if ever,

John Updike23:17

That there would never be a pain-free uh time and uh I like to think it's worked out fairly well. My first wife has remarried uh happily.

John Updike23:26

My children are all married and so on. Nevertheless, yeah, it was it was dreadful to have caused so much grief. Um

John Updike23:33

And so much loneliness.

John Updike23:36

The sense

John Updike23:38

of uh of a a fatherless household um

John Updike23:43

Thirty miles away, uh

John Updike23:45

remains with me as as a

John Updike23:47

An awful thing, yet it seemed necessary, and well, what can I say?

John Updike23:57

It's a very successful first marriage, it seems to me. Somewhere a New Yorker cartoon says that, and I think that would be a fair description of my own first marriage. It was a very successful one.

Presenter24:06

But you say you're an observer, and that's what I wanted to ask you about, really, because, you know, you've since written about the breakup of a marriage. It seems to me that no friend or relation or acquaintance of a novelist i is ever free, are they? I mean, however intimate the experience that you have with them, you can always end up on the page. Do you think it makes sense?

John Updike24:22

There is that risk, yes. So you should pick your friends carefully. And if you have a great thing about privacy, you shouldn't include a

Presenter24:23

Yes, sir.

John Updike24:29

A working fiction writer among your friends.

Presenter24:31

But do you think it makes people wary of you?

John Updike24:33

I've never noticed that it did. You know, I became a character in my mother's fiction and uh never thought that she really got got me right at all. So I'm sure people uh feel that way about uh mine, and to which the only defense is I wasn't trying to do justice to you. I was trying to create a fictional character and

Presenter24:51

If you then attempt to write non-fiction, and you have in your memoir, for example.

Presenter24:55

Do you think that you rewrite history at that time? Do you think you don't quite recapture it as it was?

John Updike25:01

I became, for the purposes of uh that memoir, a kind of fictional character myself. It didn't feel so different than if I was writing fiction in an odd way.

Presenter25:10

So did it become fictional, therefore?

John Updike25:12

Possibly, possibly. It certainly is a greatly simplified version of my life with many things left out.

John Updike25:19

If there is a future biographer, I want to get this on the record before he or she says anything.

Presenter25:24

Do you hope there will be?

John Updike25:25

No. No, I don't look forward to that, and certainly during my lifetime I'll do what I can to frustrate any biography. My life, fortunately, has kind of been basically dull.

John Updike25:36

And uh nobody has really come on in a invasive way.

Presenter25:42

More music.

John Updike25:42

Uh yes, it wouldn't do to have only uh pop tunes uh on this desert island and we must have some Mozart uh in trying to sift through it my own mind, and I'm not a very musically educated person.

John Updike25:54

In fact, my wife wanted me to reassure the listeners that I really hate music and always ask her to turn the radio off.

John Updike26:02

But when I'm not writing, I'm happy to listen to Mozart and certainly I'd be extra happy to listen to piano concerto number 21 on my desert island.

Presenter26:59

Part of Mozart's piano concerto No. Twenty one, played and conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Presenter27:06

You've always written to order, haven't you, John Updike? You you've set yourself a quota and you've done it and at that stage you can take the day off if that's what you want to do. You're an ordered man.

John Updike27:16

somewhat orderly, or maybe I impose this order because I'm not so orderly, but uh being fortunate enough to uh be able to be a freelance writer and not to be saddled with academic duties, I thought the least I could do would be to try to maintain a businesslike schedule.

John Updike27:32

And I quite early drew up the following rules to work.

John Updike27:37

In the morning

John Updike27:39

And to rest content with three pages.

Presenter27:43

But describe to me the process of writing, because your your prose can read as if it's been honed and honed again. I think somebody said, one of the critics, that your sentences have a stuffed perfection. I'm not quite sure that's entirely complimentary. How much do you work on them and work over them again and again?

John Updike28:01

I'm not a great rewriter, actually. I I try, of course, each go at it to make it better and to read it afresh, because a writer is just a reader turned inside out, and you go from being

John Updike28:12

writer to reader very rapidly.

Presenter28:15

But what your detractors say, and there aren't many of them, I mean

John Updike28:18

No, there are enough.

Presenter28:19

Everybody agrees you're a brilliant technical matter. What they did to say is that

Presenter28:23

The fact that that there is this stuffed perfection about a lot of your prose i means that it's not as easy to read as it might. It makes a demanding read. It's um somebody said that the miraculous lacquer of your prose sometimes gets between you, the novelist, and the reader. You're too good for your own good, is actually what they're saying.

John Updike28:42

Well, it all there may be some truth in all this. I don't mind making demands of the reader. I think the the good stuff does make demands on us, actually, the stuff that's worth rereading.

Presenter28:55

Record number seven.

John Updike28:56

At one point in our um

John Updike28:59

Ipswich existence, I thought we were in danger of becoming provincial and uh couples which came out in uh sixty eight also did make uh a fair amount of money, I mean certainly more money than I had ever made before or uh since for that matter.

John Updike29:16

And I felt I could afford the luxury of taking my family abroad. Where better than to go in those days than London. So we

John Updike29:26

Lived here from September of 68 to June of 1969. The Beatles were in there.

John Updike29:34

We didn't know it then they were in there.

John Updike29:37

Their last years. They were very much around. We actually saw Paul looking quite unshaven from a bus one time and

John Updike29:45

I fetched a member of that year. Toward the end of it, Hey Jude came out.

John Updike29:51

It's a great song of farewell, isn't it? Farewell to London, farewell to the Beatles, as it turns out, and mounts in a way that most of this music does to a kind of ecstasy. It really is a thrilling piece, showing the Beatles at their most adventurous and offhand at the same time.

John Updike30:11

Hey Ju

Speaker 430:14

Don't make it by

Speaker 430:18

Take a sad song and make it better

Speaker 430:25

Remember to let her into your heart, then you can start.

Speaker 430:32

To make it

Presenter30:33

Hey Jude by the Beatles. You live nowadays in the same house you've lived in for thirteen years. You live with your second wife, thirty miles north of Boston. Five grandsons and another on the way, you said.

John Updike30:47

That's true.

Presenter30:48

How's the social life?

John Updike30:51

Uh not much of it.

Presenter30:52

So life is a tame business these days.

John Updike30:54

Tame business. But I have tried trying to work. I'm approaching the twilight of my working career and I'm grateful I'm trying to be as d diligent as I can.

Presenter31:00

Bitch roll up.

Presenter31:04

Why do you say that? Why do you say you're putting it in the middle of the morning?

John Updike31:05

Oh, I don't know. What am I? I'm 63 and how many writers r write good stuff after 63?

John Updike31:13

Rather few if you look at the curve. A lot are dead at 63, Shakespeare, for one.

John Updike31:19

Milky might think for another

Presenter31:20

But writing

Presenter31:21

But writing is an ageless business, isn't it? I mean, you can be promising. They call you promising for years.

John Updike31:26

You stay young and promising for quite a while, well into your forties, and then suddenly the promise is gone and they wonder why you haven't done more and people are bored with you and you get reviews like, here's another updike. Oh boy, they say. Same old stuff. And you know, you're trying not to repeat yourself, but of course in being true to yourself you tend to surprise, surprise come up, just like your handwriting continues to repeat, so your writing does.

Presenter31:51

Will you write on your desert island, or will you stop because there's no one there to read it?

John Updike31:55

No, I think I would continue to write if I'm allowed to have the tools. I I have a hard time picturing this existence and I uh

John Updike32:02

But yes, yes, I might scratch out something on the inside of some bark if I could.

Presenter32:06

So it's a self-fulfilling process, is it? It doesn't matter if nobody reads it. You'd be you just need to write it.

John Updike32:11

It's a help if somebody reads it and even more of a help if somebody pays you for it. But it gets to be a habit, you know. It's like a kind of a secretion that you must produce or you begin to feel poisoned.

Presenter32:23

Mast record

John Updike32:24

Lastly, at the risk of seeming to take with me a bunch of old chestnuts, I did think that Beethoven should come along as well as Mozart, Beethoven, who took the music from the sublime to the personally powerful. I recently had to listen to at a concert to Beethoven's fifth. The way the music doesn't want to end, it's almost like a life struggling to stay alive. And the way he keeps saying the same thing, there are a number of places in the last movement where you think it's over and it's not. He goes back and does it again. It's like a man who can't stop telling you something. And it's so beautiful.

John Updike33:05

The passion, and it makes you think about music in general. That is, what is this message that music is so anxious to get to us?

Presenter34:12

The end of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klempere. If you could only take one of those records, John.

John Updike34:21

That's a very tough choice, my goodness. But at the risk of seeming Philistine, I think I'd have to vote for the the Goodman.

John Updike34:28

It's intricate enough, I think, I would not weary of it too soon.

John Updike34:32

Also, it's a young me I'd be taking instead of the the older me.

Presenter34:36

Benny Goodman and Sing, Sing, Sing. What about your book? You've got the Bible and you've got Shakespeare there already.

John Updike34:41

Well, that should be enough for anybody, one would think. But if I'm allowed a third and you can find Proust in one volume, let me take that. The glory of Proust's way of seeing and saying just a permanent inspiration to me and I didn't really become a writer until I'd

John Updike34:58

Began to read Proust.

Presenter35:00

and your luxury.

John Updike35:02

What is a luxury? You know, one man's luxury is another man's necessity, but what came to my mind, something I've never had and probably will never have, is a silken tent. And I would use it not for shelter, because that would make it a necessity, but I'd use it as a place to repair to. It would be somewhat translucent. You could see the sun and the sky through it, but also there would be a weave within the silken sides that would contain images, great paintings, The Last Judgment, some old Mickey Mouse stills. I'd always be surprised by what's in there. There would always be something new to see within my silken tent.

Presenter35:37

And you'd only go in there when you didn't have to.

John Updike35:39

Right, only when I didn't have to and I would never go in there for simple shelter. Whenever it rained, I would stay out and take my soaking.

Presenter35:47

John Updike, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

John Updike35:50

Thank you.

Speaker 235:59

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.