What Roth and Updike Thought of Art and Each Other

Today's quote of the day comes from Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth:

One consolation [of not winning the national book award for Portnoy] was Roth’s induction, on May 26, as the youngest member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Six years before, Updike had been elected at the even more tender age of thirty-two, and he and Roth were sometimes mentioned as the most likely successors, among their age cohort, to Hemingway and Faulkner. Roth often made the point that major writers born roughly ten years earlier than Updike and he—Mailer, Styron, Shaw, James Jones, et al.—were particularly burdened by ideas of manliness inherited from Hemingway: “If you’re just a writer you’re a sissy,” Roth explained, “but if you’re a drinker and a boxer and whatever else, then you’re not a sissy.” Such writers had fought in the war and cultivated the kind of glamor associated with wealth and getting recognized at the Stork Club; but the booze, above all, hampered their productivity, whereas the abstemious children of the Depression—Roth, Updike, DeLillo, et al.—tended to avoid the limelight and keep their noses to the grindstone, hence their astounding output relative  to their elders’. “We weren’t idealistic about much,” said Updike of his coevals, “but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition—not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.” Roth likewise longed to emulate such “saints of the imagination” as Flaubert, James, and Conrad, and pointed out that his and Updike’s was “the last pre-television generation” who believed that fiction occupied a sovereign place in American culture, that a serious novelist strove to “meet the measure of one’s colleagues” in claiming the attention of their best readers. “To think that I had to run alongside that remarkable stallion all my writing life,” he said of Updike, whose death in 2009 would lead to Roth’s becoming, a few years later, the longest-serving literary member of what was known by then as the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Back in 1970, the two writers were already a little uneasily aware that they were running neck and neck. Both had published their first acclaimed books in 1959, whereupon Updike, a year older, anticipated Portnoy with his own sexually explicit best seller of 1968, Couples. The following year Updike made a droll reference to the most obvious difference between them when he sent Roth a copy of his long autobiographical poem, Midpoint, with the title crossed out and Poor Goy’s Complaint inserted. Indeed, Updike couldn’t resist reimagining himself as a somewhat more hapless writer, Bech, who is Jewish—a lampoon Roth disliked but forgave, more or less, in light of a kinship that transcended labels of whatever sort. “We’re hicks,” he said. “It’s just because we’re such hicks that we’ve all become so sophisticated. Look at John Updike. Shillington, Pennsylvania. John’s the biggest hick of us all, and he’s the best writer of us all.” Certainly Roth’s all-but-unstinting regard—not always reciprocated—endeared him to his rival, who made a point of cordially introducing himself to Roth’s parents when their son was inducted into the Institute of Arts and Letters. The three Roths, Updike recalled, “radiated wonderful family feeling—fondness for each other and good cheer toward the world at large.”