Although he’s best known as a novelist, and as the creator of middle-American everyman Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, John Updike has worn just about every literary hat there is: poet, essayist, short story writer, critic, even children’s author. He’s also a virtual award magnet, with two Pulitzer prizes and a National Book Award to his credit, along with a slew of other honors. This week he arrives in town to accept the Nashville Public Library Literary Award. Previous recipients include journalist David Halberstam and historian David McCullough. Updike spoke with the Scene by phone from Massachusetts, where he lives. The conversation began with the controversy over a speech he delivered last spring at BookExpo America*, a publishing industry convention in Washington, D.C. Updike was responding to “Scan this Book!”—an article by Kevin Kelly in the May 14, 2006 New York Times Magazine, which celebrates a future in which all books will be freely available on the Internet. In Kelly’s vision, traditional authorship and copyright will cease to exist; all literary output will meld into a single, fluid information entity, from which Web surfers can cut and paste snippets at whim. Updike attacked “this…grisly scenario” and launched a passionate defense of authorial integrity and traditional books. Scene: The idea of the decay of authorship is pretty horrifying to anyone who writes, but I wonder if there’s anything about Kevin Kelly’s vision of the future that engages you, or that you find encouraging or optimistic? Updike: Well, The Internet as it exists is undoubtedly a great tool, and has made that trip down to the library unnecessary, though the local library is where I consult the Internet when I do…[Kelly’s is] a vision of a future in which individuals matter less and less. Maybe that’s okay. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out years ago, in the village of old the individual submerged his identity in the group identity. Kevin Kelly seems to see such a glorious erasure coming in the form of authorless books and sourceless information. I can’t think of his phrasing, it was very evangelical in a way—a sea of information which is constantly being edited by anonymous people… . Updike: Well, The Internet as it exists is undoubtedly a great tool, and has made that trip down to the library unnecessary, though the local library is where I consult the Internet when I do…[Kelly’s is] a vision of a future in which individuals matter less and less. Maybe that’s okay. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out years ago, in the village of old the individual submerged his identity in the group identity. Kevin Kelly seems to see such a glorious erasure coming in the form of authorless books and sourceless information. I can’t think of his phrasing, it was very evangelical in a way—a sea of information which is constantly being edited by anonymous people… . Scene: One giant liquid book. Updike: Right. If it comes to pass, it will make literary lives such as I’ve lived very unlikely. But I think the unlikeliness is beyond controlling, and if this is the future I must submit to it. There have been changes in just my lifetime over the kinds of markets that a writer of articles and short fiction consults. [There are] fewer and fewer middle class magazines. Newspapers used to have qualities of being literary carriers, they used to print poetry and fiction. All that’s kind of faded away. I guess what we want seems to be news, and not too much of it. We want to know where we are in the world as the world disconcertingly shifts around us. So I guess, struggling as I am to find something good about Kevin Kelly’s vision, I can only say that there’s something democratic about it. It does away with any authorial elite or professorial elite and suggests that knowledge and information are ‘free’; they’re not properties that can be copyrighted Scene: Do you have any sense of what a writer’s life is going to be like in 50 years? Will people still be doing the kind of writing you have done, or is substantive work going to be abandoned in favor of “the snippet of the day?” Updike: Fifty years isn’t very much in the evolution of culture. I don’t foresee a total disappearance of bookstores. … I think as one generation replaces another, the generation that’s grown up with the Web and the Internet and this whole concept of email, and all these other abbreviated and unreflective ways of expressing oneself, that generation I don’t see producing my kind of author, or Charles Dickens’ kind of author. In Dickens’ day, print was hot, it was the hot medium. People waited at the docks in New York City to get the latest bundles of The Old Curiosity Shop. Abraham Lincoln became and succeeded as president in part because he was willing to master the new medium of the printed word. That moment won’t come again. I felt it in my childhood even. I was excited by the idea that you could write something on a piece of paper and have it turned into print, and then published and distributed many times. That idea still excites me. But in this electronic world where you can send things all the way around the world at the touch of a key, I think other excitements obtain. Scene: Well, while there still are books, what excites you when you go in a bookstore these days? Are there new writers that interest you? What do you pull off the shelf? Updike: This town I live in does have a bookstore in it. It’s almost one of the last of the smaller bookstores on the North Shore. I go in there a lot. I look with a kind of a specialist’s eye—in a way, a cold eye. I look at what books are about and what fiction is attracting notice. As to younger authors, there truly are many. I’m one of the older authors—there are only authors younger than I! But it’s hard to find too many actual careers in which a succession of works has followed one after the other in a kind of growth or progress—or lack of progress even could be observed—[work that shows] the kind of devotion to the written word that Hemingway often expressed, and his whole generation. They were really mostly interested in producing books, and in communicating with a large audience, the right audience, that way. Now I just feel that young people I meet are excited by the idea of going to Hollywood and writing a TV show, writing for the Simpsons, say. Beyond that, [with] the notion that, with the electronic tools at your disposal, everybody can kind of get published, the whole sense of a cherished or lucky few who do get published and the many others who consume what that few write—that distinction is sort of breaking down, I guess. Scene: Is that an essential distinction if good work is going to be produced? Updike: I think it’s hard to produce good work if you don’t fully own it, and take primary responsibility for it, and a kind of craftsmanly pride in it. I wonder how those feelings or motives will survive into Kevin Kelly’s [vision]. He even described things melting into one another, a kind of information blob that would grow like one of those giant mushrooms that appears at the base of trees. Remember, [in the BookExpo speech] I was addressing booksellers, who are sort of stuck in the same predicament I am, in the same racket, and who would be eased out of Kevin Kelly’s world. Scene: Kelly predicts the disintegration of proprietary authorship; yet he also talks about how writers will become celebrities, who make their living not by selling books but by giving interviews and readings, by providing access to the author. Isn’t that a paradox? Updike: Exactly, that is a paradox, and Kevin Kelly tries to address the question of what happens to the author. He says the author will go around and interact with an audience live, and his person—his three-dimensional body and brain and tongue—all that will go on the road. He becomes a sort of performer, a teacher performer, a guru performer. Scene: But isn’t that also something that’s being pushed now by the publishing industry? Writers are encouraged to get out there and be all bright and shiny in order to sell their books. Updike: Indeed, if you have any gift of gab at all, you’re sent out on the road. It happened to me with my last novel. I never have been on a book tour. I’ve gone on occasional spot appearances, but that was my first tour, and it was by no means the most extensive that they will set up. But yeah, the author has become an advertisement for his own product, more interesting in a way as somebody on stage invited to answer questions from an interviewer or an audience. The whole notion of the invisible author, a godlike invisible author, sending out these little worlds he makes from time to time certainly seems a far cry from the actual duties of authorship in today’s market. Scene: It’s hard to imagine how you would have had the time to produce the volume of work you’ve produced if you had spent that much time out promoting yourself. Updike: Well that’s certainly what I feel. [In the course of] my day, a lot of energy is devoted to sort of ‘being me’. This interview, for example, a pleasant example, but nevertheless in the 50s when I began and hung out my shingle, you weren’t really expected to do much in this line, as I remember. Maybe because my persona didn’t have any drawing power! More and more an author is expected [to play the game]. Those who don’t play the game like Thomas Pynchon—and, famously, Salinger—are viewed almost as freaks of a kind, and their avoidance of the publicity business is itself publicity-worthy. They’re famous for avoiding the spotlight. It all sets up a kind of clamor, in which it’s a little harder to settle to the patient task of writing a novel, getting the silence that you need. Scene: On the subject of clamor, I guess you’re aware that there are websites devoted to you and to your work. The people who post there say things like “I am Rabbit Angstrom.” Does it trouble you at all that people take the work so personally, or is that part of what goes on between an author and a reader? Updike: I think the latter, which you phrase quite well. There is a wish to communicate behind the authorial impulse, however much you try to insulate yourself against static. You do write in the end because you’re trying to make contact with a reader. My own writing, so far as I can speak of it, is fairly personal. I’m trying to describe my own impressions of life. So no, I can’t complain if people respond personally. And as to Rabbit Angstrom, that seems to have been my lucky day when I invented him, but again, it was a personal impression. My father was a schoolteacher and would bring home tales of these former high school stars who had fallen on muddled and unsatisfactory times. So [the fact] that there existed this particular kind of American was gathered firsthand. I used my own high school years and adolescence to animate this guy—stuck, stuck, stuck in that hometown, whereas I got out of mine. But otherwise he and I have a lot in common. So I think it’s nice, but on the other hand there’s something unhealthy about, well, about “author-worship,” insofar as it happens. But it’s been with us a while. … It’s not a totally new thing, although the electronic dimension to it all is new, and the kind of celebrity culture, the TV, movies, the ‘whatever comes next’ kind of culture is new. I’m old enough now that I keep seeing photos of celebrities and I don’t even know who they are. The world has passed into the age of the unknown celebrity whose claim to fame is being a celebrity. Scene: Well, I’m younger than you and I have the same problem. It would basically be a full time job to keep track of all the celebrities. Updike: They do make them faster than they used to, don’t they? Scene: You’re often credited with being the writer who brought sex into respectable literature. It seems in the last 40 years that sex has become a very commodified thing: it’s used to sell everything; it’s used as a political cudgel, as in the “values debate.” Does it trouble you at all that things have taken this turn? Do you ever regret your role in bringing sex into mainstream culture? Updike, laughing: I can’t take much credit for this great change. I did, in writing parts of Rabbit, Run and in writing a book called Couples, I did think that there was territory here of middle class or middle American sexual adventure that hadn’t been anatomized quite as completely as I was prepared to anatomize it. There aren’t many frontiers left, but in the late 50s and early 60s that was a kind of frontier, and it pleased me to write sex scenes, to try to interweave bourgeois life with this aspect of it, to bring that out from behind the closed bedroom door. All that was my hope, my mission even, in a very small way. I think if I didn’t do it, other people would and did do it, so it’s not something I can take much credit for. It’s a tide. And beyond the revelation and excitement of ‘oh boy people do this,’ there’s a further wave of getting bored with the fact that people do it, a kind of hangover. I think we’re in the hangover now. Writers assume it’s their right to describe sex acts, but it’s not enough to motivate them to write fiction. There’s less sex I think maybe in literary fiction than there was 30 years ago. Freud says very wisely that the tide of libido—I’m misquoting—libido needs some obstacle for it to rise to its fullest height. In a purely non-puritan world, a world without sexual obstructions—in the 60s we were pretty close to it—but paradoxically, the more easily sex can be had the less desire there is. The less potency there seems to be. Society itself, to conserve its potency, imposes certain taboos. We’re in a phase at the moment where we don’t really want to hear much more about sex. It’s amazing the way the ads, for whatever the product—beer or perfume or cars—they all are verging on pornography now. Scene: You’re often mentioned as a great chronicler of the American experience. Do you think of yourself as a quintessentially American author? Updike: [If] I think of myself in relation to the generation of Hemingway and Faulkner and others, I’ve never been really been an expatriate in that way. I’ve never rejected the American culture quite as forcefully as they did. I thought that my job as a writer was to stick around here and observe this fascinating experiment in democracy, and now in imperial power, and that there’s no better situation for a writer than the United States. This is sort of conscious thought, but also my temperament is kind of stay-at-homeish. I generated a family quite young, four children by the time I was 28. I had a family to support. And my own personal taste is kind of for staying put and living a quiet and productive life. To that extent there’s no conscious decision; it’s just a temperamental preference. There’s something cloying about presenting yourself as an American writer, and about including the word ‘American’ in your titles. I wouldn’t do that. On the other hand, yeah, I’m nothing if not American, and the few times when I have been living abroad, I’ve been very interested in the perspective it gives me on my own country, rather than especially exploring the country I’m in, the way, say, these numerous books about…Americans in southern France do. My expertise, so far as I have any, is in the American way of life. Scene: Do you ever think of yourself as a regional writer? Updike: Sort of, I have lived my life within the Northeastern states, beginning in Pennsylvania and moving to New England. I’ve switched regions in a way, but I suppose it’s all kind of one region compared to the South or the Midwest. Yes, I’m prepared to accept being a regional writer in that sense, and insofar as it makes much sense in connection with the modern-day United States. Travel time and regional accents and regional cuisine, all that has rather faded I think…. You still kind of know where you are in the States when you’re traveling, but basically we are a unified culture for better or worse. Scene: Down here “regional” is still a good thing, people are proud of being regional authors, but I’m not sure that’s true in other parts of the United States. Updike: To be a writer in Tennessee is a little different than being one in Massachusetts, somehow. And of course there have been regional movements come out of Nashville, from Vanderbilt. Coming from Pennsylvania, I’ve always been aware of myself as a Pennsylvanian, because for the first 18 years of my life I really hardly ever left Pennsylvania. Yet, compared to the South, it has a rather murky identity, ranging from the House Amish to those sort of grimy industrial metropolises of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It’s fun to try to think about being a Pennsylvanian, in my early fiction there’s quite a lot about Pennsylvania—Pennsylvania as a state of mind, Pennsylvania as a condition. Of course when you move away from where you have your roots you pay a price, but you gain something in freedom. People don’t know your grandfather, people don’t know you. You’re free of all the ties that rootedness brings. On the other hand, in a way, you’re always a tourist. I’m a tourist in New England. Scene: Even after all these years? Updike: It is a lot of years isn’t it? Fifty, more or less. But although I’m happy here and at home here, I don’t really feel I know the secrets of the place or have the rhythm. That’s something you get from being a child and growing up in a family, [in a] neighborhood. I suffer from this tourist business. I’ve written a number of novels located in New England, but they always have a little touristy gloss to them. Scene: Sometimes you see things more clearly as a tourist. Updike: I think so. You have a little freedom, the freedom that a stranger has. Scene: Well, I would love to ask you a lot more questions, but our time’s up. Updike: I think I answer questions at too great length. Scene: Oh, no, not at all. Updike: [These questions] make think, you know, they make me think about these existential issues, which you tend, when you’re actually practicing an art, to shuffle over in preference to the immediate problem—the sentence in front of you, the story ending, all that. Scene: Thanks for being willing to share some of your thoughts about the big issues every now and then. Updike: So far as I have thoughts. A writer isn’t basically a thinker. He’s more a singer. He’s an observer, but more than that, he’s somebody who is happy enough to be here that he wants to talk about it. *A podcast of Updike’s speech is available at http://bookexpocast.com/?p=12.