Truth: Memories of my breakfast with John Updike

Tortoise sees ...
Mort  Gerberg
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It was about this time of year, twenty-two years ago, when I had breakfast with John Updike.  I was a freshman at Agnes Scott College, and he was visiting the campus.

There were a couple of public opportunities over a two day period to hear him read from his works and speak, and I enjoyed at least one of them.  But a Junior who was a fellow English Lit major encouraged me to show up for the early morning breakfast in the dining hall.  She said it might be a small group.  Any student could have joined, but few had expressed interest in getting up so early.

So I rolled out of bed, threw on a matching skirt and blouse (but no makeup) and headed over to the dining hall.  It was a bad hair day, but I felt sure John Updike wouldn't care.  I got my tray, looked around and sat down at a table in the middle.  I was a tad early.  Then he came, along with the Junior who had invited me, and maybe two or three other students.  Small, intimate group.  He sat down next to me, on my left.  I'm sitting next to John Updike and having breakfast, I thought.  He's talking to me.  I was a little starstruck.  In fact, I still have a hard time believing it.

John Updike was a very pleasant and affable gentleman, though.  His presence was not daunting or haughty, despite his enormous career and accolades.  He had a magnetic smile and wild, white, unruly eyebrows.  I mostly listened as he chatted with the other three or four students and entertained their questions.  But I did ask him one question.

In my 18-year-old exuberance and foolishness, I had begun writing a few stories which were more snapshots or scenes than stories, as I had no idea where they would go.  I had been told by more than one advisor that I needed to know how it was going to end before I started.  Phooey, I had said.  Let the story take a life of its own, I thought, and bend with the wind, or else it's all a mathematical equation.  This was the 18-year-old's know-it-all theory.

So I asked the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner himself.  "Do you always know how the novel is going to end before you begin?"

"Oh, yes," he answered me.  Then he told me that there were bound to be surprises and twists along the way.  He said he was open to things that would pop up and change here and there.  But he confirmed that he always had the end in sight before he even wrote the first word.

Then, and only then, did I believe that that is how it must be done.  This concept is so simple, so basic.  And yet, with my hard head, it took a world-renowned master to tell me before I believed it.  I could have asked him anything, and there are so many more complex things I would ask him, if I had that same opportunity today.  My question was so elementary, that it embarrasses me now.

An artist doesn't put the brush to his canvas without knowing what he will paint.  He doesn't just start dotting and swiping, hoping that it becomes something.  Nor can a writer craft a story without projecting what it will be at the end.

So I do bend with the wind, and sometimes my characters surprise me.  But I make sure my roots are firmly planted before I bend.  Posthumous gratitude to John Updike for sharing breakfast and wisdom with a whippersnapper like me.