A Conversation with John Updike [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 369-384]

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LENKA PROCHAZKOVA
more than I knew before. A number of Russians, of course, are read
by literate people in the United States, from Gogol up to Nabokov.
The work of Nabokov I guess we can also include under this Slavic
rubric, and I'm a great admirer of Nabokov and have more or less
read translations of all of his Russian work and all of his work in
English. He did something-he brought something quite unusual to
American letters in the '50s and '60s, and I'm sure my own work
would be different if it were not for the example of Vladimir Nabokov.
There are a number of other writers that occur to me, but Kafka is the
foremost Czech. I have several times begun to read The Good Soldier
Schweik, and am sure that it is indeed a classic, but think it's one
that will have to wait a little longer for me to read it through.
Q: Do you believe in friendship between a man and a woman?
A: Oh yes, oh yes. I think (laughs) it tends to exist as a matter of facteverything in our natures proposes us, or disposes us toward it. If
the question means friendship without sex, of course that exists too.
As it happens a lot of my colleagues in my professional life have been
women. My first editor at the New Yorker was a woman. Katherine
White, my present editor at Knopf and my editor for many years
at Knopf, which is my publishing house, has been a woman. It's a
field where women, perhaps earlier than many, acquired some positions
of importance and influence. I would rather, in fact, work with a
female editor than with a man. I find that the esthetic responses of
women are more subtle, and also their spirit is less competitive. So
yes, in that sense I certainly have enjoyed and a hundred percent
endorse the friendship of women. In my social life there's always the
shadow of sex falls over any relationship between a man and a woman,
but it need remain in the shadows and can just be there as a kind
of a sweetening, a sweetening of friendship. Yes, I really-really feel
much more friendly in the presence of women, than in the presence
of men.
Q: Do you think that Women's Lib is nonsense?
A: Oh no, not at all. I think there were many just complaints, and the
phrase is perhaps a little-not an ideal phrase because there's something rather cute and saucy about it that is part of the image women
were trying to do without. But no, I think it not only is not nonsense,
but I think that the movement as a whole, whatever you call it, has
done a great deal to improve the quality of life in the U.S. And it
was good for men to hear these things-it really was. If you're raised
by a mother in the old-fashioned way, it's very easy to expect that