Updike: Ironman of Freelancers
About a decade ago, when I was an editor for Philadelphia magazine, one of my first projects was to compile writerly reminiscences of the city for an anniversary issue. I decided to go big, and mailed an obsequious plea to Updike’s Massachusetts address, offering to pay the extravagant rate of, as I put it, “a couple bucks a word.”
The reply came back within a week, manually typed on a tiny white postcard. He was willing to reminisce about Philly, despite its being some 60 miles down the Schuylkill River from his native Shillington. But he honed in on my sloppy, un-Updikean wording: “When you say ‘a couple bucks a word,’” he wrote, “do you mean the literal two, or something closer to three?”
I was only supposed to offer one dollar a word for these pieces, not three, so to my boss I was now simultaneously a hero and a budget-busting fool. Not that I cared: The piece came in right on time, and of course it was perfect, 500-odd words that hummed with warmth, like the old Philco radio that used to play Phillies games in the Updike home. "I bet he wrote it on the can," a colleague sniped. "I hope so," I shot back.
I'd learned two valuable lessons about surviving as a writer: First, always ask for more money. Can't hurt, and they'll probably say yes. Second, and more important, always be writing.
As critics and readers debate whether or not Updike was the Great American Novelist, or whether he deserved a Nobel in addition to his pair of Pulitzers, one of Updike’s key singularities is likely to be lost: He was that rare American writer who actually made his living by writing. And I mean from Day One. He didn’t take teaching jobs or pimp for grants and fellowships, or accept any of the other petty blandishments that the American literary establishment has to offer. He was the Ironman of freelancers. He wrote stories and sold them, so they had to be good. He would write on almost anything, true, from women’s fashions to 19th-century painting to, well, his somewhat slender memories of a city where he had never really lived. And if his vast output had its weak spots as well as its Rabbit, Runs and Witches of Eastwicks, does anyone really remember those, or care? He wrote to live, but only because he lived to write.
The reply came back within a week, manually typed on a tiny white postcard. He was willing to reminisce about Philly, despite its being some 60 miles down the Schuylkill River from his native Shillington. But he honed in on my sloppy, un-Updikean wording: “When you say ‘a couple bucks a word,’” he wrote, “do you mean the literal two, or something closer to three?”
I was only supposed to offer one dollar a word for these pieces, not three, so to my boss I was now simultaneously a hero and a budget-busting fool. Not that I cared: The piece came in right on time, and of course it was perfect, 500-odd words that hummed with warmth, like the old Philco radio that used to play Phillies games in the Updike home. "I bet he wrote it on the can," a colleague sniped. "I hope so," I shot back.
I'd learned two valuable lessons about surviving as a writer: First, always ask for more money. Can't hurt, and they'll probably say yes. Second, and more important, always be writing.
As critics and readers debate whether or not Updike was the Great American Novelist, or whether he deserved a Nobel in addition to his pair of Pulitzers, one of Updike’s key singularities is likely to be lost: He was that rare American writer who actually made his living by writing. And I mean from Day One. He didn’t take teaching jobs or pimp for grants and fellowships, or accept any of the other petty blandishments that the American literary establishment has to offer. He was the Ironman of freelancers. He wrote stories and sold them, so they had to be good. He would write on almost anything, true, from women’s fashions to 19th-century painting to, well, his somewhat slender memories of a city where he had never really lived. And if his vast output had its weak spots as well as its Rabbit, Runs and Witches of Eastwicks, does anyone really remember those, or care? He wrote to live, but only because he lived to write.
posted by Bill Gifford at 11:09 AM
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