Novelist John Updike’s Interviews: Remarks and Scenarios that Indicated He Had Alternate Personalities

When John Updike’s interviews indicated that he had alternate personalities, nobody ever asked him about it or followed-up, because interviewers and literary critics have never thought in those terms. They assumed he was joking or speaking metaphorically. And if you haven’t read this blog, you might think so, too.

Interviewer: How does Mrs. Updike react to your work? Time quotes you as having said she never entirely approves of your novels.

Updike: …if I sometimes…persevere without her unqualified blessing, it is because somebody in me—the gagster, the fanatic, the boor—must be allowed to have his say. (1, p. 29)

“I’m of two minds about the events in novels. One has this sense that the old-fashioned novel, and indeed films and television plays, are falsifying life terribly by making events happen, by creating tensions and then resolving them…On the other hand, there is a delight in making things happen…” (1, p. 48).

Note: There is no continuous “I” in the way he phrases it. He does not say, I am of two minds: On the one hand I have this attitude, and, on the other hand, I have this other attitude. Instead he says, “One has” one attitude, and then “there is” also this other attitude.

Another thing Updike did was publish three “interviews” in which John Updike is interviewed by Henry Bech, one of his fictional characters. The first of these was “Bech Meets Me” (1, pp. 55-58). Note: In multiple personality, it is common for two personalities to speak to each other.

In another interview, in which Updike is discussing The Centaur,

he says that one of the main things he wanted to express in that novel is “the sense that everybody comes to us in guises” (1, p. 96). Well, that happens to be one of the main features of multiple personality: Alternate personalities usually come and go incognito, which is why, clinically, the diagnosis is so often missed.

To write the three sequels to Rabbit Run, Updike said he did not have to reread it, because he “had faith that Harry [‘Rabbit’] Angstrom would be there for me yet again as he has been before.” Although the character did not usually come out between novels, “I was conscious of him watching the Phillies in those playoff games,” and when the team won, “He was very pleased” (1, pp. 156-157).

How alive was that character for Updike? Alive enough to die, as he was on the verge of doing at the end of the last of the four books in that series. After all, said Updike, “we’re all mortal, including fictional characters” (1, p. 236).

Finally, says Updike, about writing, “That manipulation of the alternatives that we all have within us is the most creative and honest thing we do…my alternative selves” (1, p. 206).

1. James Plath (ed). Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.