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Photo Credit: Michael
Chikiris |
John Updike
Remarks Upon Receiving the
National Book Foundation's Medal for
DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO
AMERICAN LETTERS AWARD, 1998
"Of Prizes and Print"
Remarks delivered
on the occasion of John Updike receiving the 1998 National
Book Foundation's 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 Tom -- as 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
eyeglasses. 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."
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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.
Photo Credit:
Martha Updike |
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 glamour 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, of course, is it's 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. It
is 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 "Vs"
and the "Us." 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.
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