“Updike and I” by John Updike (post 2): Essay on creative process, from book that seems to assume writers’ multiple personality is an open secret

According to the back cover, “Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process—so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on ‘the fictional persona behind the scenes,’ the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done” (1).

In explaining to the writers what he wanted, Halpern mentioned the famous mini-essay by Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” which people may think is a joke. But neither Borges’s essay nor Updike’s is labeled as fiction.

Here is an excerpt from “Updike and I”:

“…people, mistaking me for him, stop me on the street and ask me for his autograph. I am always surprised that I resemble him so closely that we can be confused…they do not realize that he works only in the medium of the written word…Thrust into ‘real’ time, he can scarcely function, and his awkward pleasantries and anxious stutter emerge…Myself, I am rather suave. I think fast, on my feet, and have no use for the qualificatory complexities…in which he is customarily mired. I move swiftly and rather blindly through life, spending the money he earns…

“That he takes up so much of my time…I resent…he spends more and more time being Updike, that monster of whom my boyhood dreamed…

“Suppose, some day, he fails to show up? I would attempt to do his work, but no one would be fooled” (1, pp. 182-183).

There are two schools of thought about the idea that most fiction writers have what I call “multiple personality trait.” Some people think the idea is ridiculous. Others think it is an open secret. Halpern appears to think it is an open secret. And maybe most fiction writers do, too. But they like to discuss it with a sense of humor, affording them plausible deniability.

1. Daniel Halpern (Editor). Who’s Writing This? Fifty-Five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process. New York, Ecco/Harper Perennial, 1995.