Ian McEwan on John Updike
In his autobiography Self-Consciousness, a “big-bellied Lutheran God” within the young John Updike looked on in contempt as he struggled to give up cigarettes. Many years later the older Updike, now giving up on alcohol, coffee, and salt, put into the mouth of that God the words of Frederick the Great excoriating his battle-shy soldiers—”Dogs, would you live forever?” But all the life-enhancing substances were set aside, and writing became Updike’s “sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality.” In the mornings, he could write “breezily” of what he could not “contemplae in the dark without turning in panic to God.” The plain facts of life were (from the NY Review of Books, March 12, 2009)
unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light —in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it—approaches blasphemy.
