On the News Hour last night, writer and former student of John Updike, Nicholas Delbanco, remembered his teacher and friend. At the end of the interview Delbanco read this lovely Updike poem in tribute:
'A Rescue,' it's called.
Today I wrote some words that will see print. Maybe they will last forever and that someone will read them there, ink making a light scratch on his mind or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction upon a yellow bird, a gold finch that had flown into the garden shed and could not get out, battering its wings on the deceptive light of the dusty, warped, shut window.
Without much reflection for once, I stepped to where its panicked heart was making commotion, the flared wings drumming, and with clumsy, soft hands pinned it against a pane, held loosely cupped this agitated essence of the air, and through the open door released it like a self-flung ball to all that lovely, perishing outdoors. – from the News Hour Website
For the entire interview and a 2003 Jeffrey Brown interview with John Updike, click here.
JEFFREY BROWN: So not a better writer, but still writing?
JOHN UPDIKE: Still trying. It's become a habit, of course, and it's -- there's a kind of a bliss to writing. I was aware of that just the other day. Often it feels like a job, and why am I doing this, and who cares anymore? There are these shelves full of Updike. I'm embarrassed to look at my own works in toto.
But, nevertheless, there is a kind of a spiritual health in trying to express, like I said, reality. When you feel you've captured it, if only in a phrase or the correct adjective, there's something very happy-making about it, and I'd hate to give up that kind of happiness. – from The News Hour Website
Also, Michiko Kakutani remembers John Updike in the New York Times.
In one of these collections, Mr. Updike summed up his love of his vocation: 'From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.' – from “A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries, by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
