Internal Landscapes

The NYTimes has an intriguing portrait of the novelist John Updike, viewed through the lens of his manuscripts, notes, and personal correspondence that is well worth a read.

To wit:

“We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled,” Updike wrote to his parents in 1951, when he was 19. “This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic” — a prescient formulation of what he would later achieve in the Rabbit novels and his Pennsylvania short stories. “Whatever the many failings of my work,” he concluded, “let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”

This said after a rejection from a writing class taught by author Albert Guerard, who felt that Updike's style and his own would not be compatible in a teaching environment. What a fascinating glimpse into how younger writers were nurtured and how the gleaning for these selections was facilitated at the time from the Harvard faculty, at least.

And what a marvelous glimpse of Updike's ability to take a criticism and turn it on its head into an opportunity, even at the age of 19.  That is some serious spunk.



There is also a quote from Updike's correspondence regarding the publishing world in which his career began and flourished:

For all his self-sufficiency, Updike acknowledged, he had received much help, above all from “The New Yorker when it still published many pages of fiction and Alfred A. Knopf Inc. when publishing was still a gambit for sensible gentlemen who trusted their own taste.” These advantages reflected “a world where books were a common currency of an enlightened citizenry,” he wrote. “Who wouldn’t, thus conditioned, want to keep writing forever, and try to make books that deserve to last?”

Contrast that with the current commercialized bean counting in some publishing houses substituted for the culture Updike describes.  The publishing culture of Updike's early days was certainly exclusionary, especially on a class basis, but it also allowed for continued development instead of insisting that an author hit the ground running.

Which is better?  Damned if I know, but the evolution is intriguing, isn't it?

That inner glimpse of Updike's early years and his belief in himself despite criticism is inspiring.  And a lesson every writer can take to heart:  listen to your own inner voice and keep writing anyway.

(Gorgeous shot via agedsenator.)