John Updike: The big picture

Never mind the Pollocks: John Updike denies that he stole the life of American painting's most celebrated couple. John Freeman talks art with the tireless novelist in New York

Long before he began writing novels, John Updike wanted to be a cartoonist. "Mickey Mouse and I are the same age," says the twinkle-eyed novelist on a recent afternoon visit to the New York offices of his American publisher, Alfred A Knopf. "Disney used to make movies about working in his studio. So I had a fairly clear imagine of what [a cartoonist's life] looked like, but I didn't quite know how to get from Shillington, Pennsylvania, to Burbank."

Instead, Updike, now 70, landed in suburban Massachusetts, where he launched a barrage of novels, stories, poems, criticism, plays and children's books unparalleled in modern American literature. With his 20th novel, Seek My Face (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), the author draws upon his unrequited love affair with the art world to create Hope Chafetz, a 79-year-old painter who, as Updike describes it, witnessed the "go-go days of Abstract Expressionism" and lived to tell the tale.

Seek My Face takes place in one day during an interview that Hope grants to one Kathryn D'Angelo, a twentysomething art historian from New York. Their conversation snags on Hope's early years, when she was married to Zack McCoy, a volcanically talented artist based on Jackson Pollock.

While he lived in New York during the time that Pollock was gaining fame, Updike never crossed paths with the great painter, never hoisted a glass with him at the Cedar Tavern. That was not his scene.

"Art, however," he says, "was in the air." In the late Fifties, Updike had just returned from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and was in the process of discovering he would not be a painter. "I used to paint these still lives," he says with a chuckle.

For all his self-deprecation, Updike has nurtured a serious interest in art ever since, writing essays on exhibitions for Art Forum, The New Yorker, and other publications. They were eventually brought together in the collection Just Looking (1989). He is also almost continuously involved in the production of his books, sometimes even bringing in jacket sketches and ideas for how he'd like them to look.

And yet, Seek My Face is less an exorcism of Updike's failed career as an artist as it is an exploration of another man's tremendous success, and how that success undid him. Not surprisingly, Pollock casts a long shadow over the novel, something that has earned Updike some harsh criticisms in America.

In a scathing review, the principal New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani complained that "Zack's life is such a carbon copy of Jackson Pollock's that the novel reads like a graceless rewriting of recent art history."

When asked about the complaint, Updike, who speaks in low, measured tones, winces briefly, then smiles and says, "Why not hang fairly close to the facts, which are so nicely set forward in a number of books, but especially the book that I credit, the big biography? I sort of saw the facts as the flowerpot out of which something surprising would grow."

Indeed, while Hope does resemble Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, many of the details of her early and later life are invented, as is her interior world. The novel eventually moves on to Hope's marriages to husbands two and three, a pop artist and a financier respectively, neither of whom match up for Krasner.

Like Updike himself, who fled New York in the late Fifties for the peace and quiet of New England, Hope moves to Vermont, where she settles into a long, slow life of eating organic food and growing into her own gift for painting.

The big story of Seek My Face, then, is not its insight into postwar American art, but the unlikely bond between Hope and Kathryn that develops during their conversation about it. "The intimacy is set by Hope," Updike explains, "who comes out pretty confessional, pretty breezy, pretty aware that on one side you have her exciting bohemian life. Yet she is old and arthritic. And here is this young woman, with not a very exciting life herself, but all of the assets of a young woman. So they are jealous of each other, yet fascinated by each other, too."

The notion of Updike scripting such a scene between two women may cause some feminists to gasp. His novels about the solipsism of men – especially the infamous Rabbit Angstrom, who lurched through four decades from Rabbit, Run (1960) to Rabbit at Rest (1990) – have angered some readers, for their perceived objectification of women. It's not a criticism labelled lightly. His 1968 scorcher, Couples, for example, even had riffs on the color of a woman's public hair.

It would seem, then, that Seek My Face is an apology of sorts. Yet this is not Updike's first attempt at creating a novel based around women, as he points out to me. In the Eighties, he wrote three novels about women, including The Witches of Eastwick, which told the tale of three New England witches under the spell of a new guy in town, and S, a rewriting of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter from Hester Prynne's point of view.

That New England Puritanism – and the delicious pleasures of violating it – is again at the centre of this novel. During the interview, Kathryn asks Hope about her finances, her parenting, even her sex life, which leads to internal reveries about her tempestuous bedroom activities some five decades ago. Some of these she shares with Kathryn, others she does not.

This withholding is something Updike, who has been asked some pretty direct questions in his lifetime, can relate to. "[Kathryn's] forward in the way a star-struck person can be," he says. "People forget that you're not just a research resource, like an encyclopedia or a website, but you're a person with feelings and privacy."

In recent years, Updike has had to sit for more and more such interviews. "When I first set out on this trail, in the Fifties, writers were not expected to promote their books, go on the road, or sign them, none of that. You were supposed to produce the books, and that was about the extent of your responsibilities. Now producing the book is almost the beginning of your real responsibilities, which are to get out and sell it."

Although he has "gotten better at this part of the game", and has come to view such conversations as a necessary evil of sorts, Updike worries about their effect on art. "If an artist had a set of opinions to purvey he'd be a preacher or a politician. A work of art, a work of literary art ... is an attempt to make a kind of an object, with the mystery that objects have. You can look at it in one way, find another light, and see another. All these breaches of [artists'] privacy are in danger of taking the art out of it."

Yet, for a man who professes to dislike interviews, Updike remains unfalteringly cheery during an hour of conversation. Questions about his characters' motivations prompt the longest answers, launching him into minutes-long prose reveries, punctuated by the movement of his eyes, the waggle of his prominent eyebrows, and gestures of his hands, which are pink and somewhat gnarled, as if he has spent a lifetime vulcanising words, rather than twisting them into shape on the page. When he strikes upon a particularly felicitous turn of phrase, his blue eyes flash with an immodest mischief.

Graciousness aside, in the end it is clear that Updike would rather be performing this wordplay on the page instead of into the mouth of a tape recorder. Criticism won't be stopping him anytime soon. "Thankfully," he jokes, "these things come out after the type has been set." Like Hope, Updike is excited every day by the prospect of making something new. "Although it looks increasingly foolish from the outside, it doesn't feel that way on the inside."

He is also motivated by fear. "There's the fear that somehow you neglected to say what was really yours to say," Updike says, for once his voice rising. "It's not likely. I've written a lot. I must have somewhere touched on almost every aspect of my life and experience. Nevertheless, there's this haunting fear that the thing you left out is going to be finally captured."

As if to underscore this, the day before our interview, Updike's editor received in the mail a large package bearing –what else? – the manuscript for his next book.

John Freeman is a writer in New York who contributes to the 'New York Times Book Review', 'Wall Street Journal', 'The Washington Post' and 'Los Angeles Times'

Biography

Born IN Pennsylvania in 1932, John Updike graduated from Harvard in 1954 and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford. After a stint on the The New Yorker (1955-57), he moved to Massachusetts (where he still lives) and embarked on the prolific output of novels, stories, essays and poems that now fills 54 separate volumes. His 20 novels began with The Poorhouse Fair (1959) and include the Rabbit tetralogy, Couples, The Witches of Eastwick, The Coup, Brazil and now Seek My Face (Hamish Hamilton). His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, and a National Book Award. His criticism is collected in Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, Just Looking and More Matter; his stories include Bech; a book, Trust Me and Licks of Love. He has also written a memoir (Self-Consciousness), the poetry in Collected Poems (1993), and six books for children.