Review

Updike's simple secret of great writing

Making History With Roger Mudd: A Conversation With John Updike airs at 7 tonight on the History Channel.

When Roger Mudd asks John Updike - gray eminence of American literature, author of more than 50 books, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards - to divulge the secret of a great literary career, Updike says, "It's a matter of patience. Sitting ability, really."

He tells Mudd he writes 1,000 words each morning and says with a sly smile, "If your viewers wrote every morning, they could write 50 books." Maybe, but not the way Updike does it.

Mudd's interview with the author is the premiere episode of the History Channel's quarterly special series Making History With Roger Mudd.

Though Updike has called interviews "a form to be loathed," he delivers an hour of graceful and witty talk about his craft. He needs only occasional prompting by Mudd's thoughtful questions: "The sound of my own voice must please me, because it goes on and on."

The interview has something of an elegiac tone, but an oddly cheerful one. Updike is 71 - "I look in the mirror expecting to see somebody else" - and says that in American writing and art, "It's basically youth that is worth reading about and youth that is worth writing about."

His most recent book is The Early Stories, 1953-1975, 103 stories written at the height of his youthful powers. He says, "The young man who wrote those stories could do things I couldn't do now" and compares him to a younger brother who's "kind of a showoff, but you forgive him because he's young."

His best-known books are four novels about businessman and has-been athlete Rabbit Angstrom, but he doesn't consider them his best. "The best of my books are somehow more prickly and disagreeable," he says.

Updike, an accomplished literary critic, dives into the subject of other writers, admiring Herman Melville and Philip Roth, gleefully reviving his feud with Tom Wolfe and calling much of William Faulkner's work "windy."

Despite all the talk about youthful art, Updike is still a vital writer (his 21st novel is due in the fall) and a wickedly smart observer of his culture. The History Channel has found a survivor who's actually worth watching.

- Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

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