Updike Delves Into ‘Terrorist’ Mindset

John H. Updike ’54 discussed his decision to depart from studying the mind of the suburban middle-class citizen in favor of the disturbed mind of an outsider, at a book reading of his new novel “Terrorist” yesterday at First Parish Church.

In an interview with The Crimson before the event, Updike, 74, said, “When you get to be my age almost everything you write reminds you of something you’ve already written.”

And while “Terrorist” has been called a departure for Updike, it touches upon issues like faith, idealism, and sexual relations with which his writing has long grappled. Like many of his previous works, “Terrorist” focuses on the insecure and impressionable late-teens period of life.

“You’re at a point in your late teens when your hormones are very active and your idealism is at as high a pitch as it will ever be,” he said. “You want the world to measure up to high standards and you try to make yourself measure up to high standards.”

Updike said that reasons why young men are willing to kill themselves for ideals puzzled him, and he was compelled to study the mind of a terrorist.

“I just thought it was something I could do. I could show what it’s like to be an 18-year-old American who was a devout Muslim and might be drawn bit by bit into a terrorist plot,” he said.

Updike said that he found similarities between being a terrorist and being a soldier in war. “Once you’re enlisted, you can be asked to perform self-sacrificial acts which almost look crazy from the outside but make perfect sense from the middle of the battle.”

CRISES OF FAITH

As he wrote his new novel, Updike noticed similarities between how the Christian protagonist David in his early short story “Pigeon Feathers” and Ahmad in “Terrorist” become skeptical of leaders in their respective faiths. Both young men are concerned about whether their mentors believe in the Scripture that they profess.

“Whether they’re Christian or Muslim or whatever—they get in their profession and can’t back out,” Updike said of clergymen.

Throughout the novel, the protagonist Ahmad frequently admonishes his fellow human beings for “taking away” his faith. Updike explained that such a concept is “the assertion that all the world’s religions contradict much of what we see in the real world. People—even believers—don’t act as though they believe so much of the time.”

“Perhaps it’s unrealistic for [Ahmad] to expect the world to reinforce his beliefs, but he does rather look to that,” Updike said.

YOUNG AND AT HARVARD

More than fifty years ago, when Updike himself was in his late teens, he was an English concentrator at Harvard and president of the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine. As an undergrad, he was involved in an infamous conflict between The Crimson and the Lampoon that led to the kidnapping of a bird and a president.

In the spring of 1953, Crimson editors stole the Ibis from atop of the Lampoon castle. In retaliation, the Lampoon kidnapped Crimson President Michael Maccoby ’54 one night as he walked home.

The Crimson managed to get Maccoby back and send the Ibis to New York, where they presented it to the Russian deputy ambassador at the Russian embassy.

“It was all a little mysterious to me,” Updike said yesterday of this and other pranks in which the Lampoon was involved. “I didn’t realize [the Lampoon] was also a social club.”

Updike said that as an undergraduate he was primarily concerned with getting the magazine out and with starting his literary career.

However, he did go along with some pranks. After he was elected to the Lampoon, he and other newly-elected Lampoon writers had to pull pranks around campus as part of “Fools’ Week.” Updike dressed up as a blind beggar in the Yard, while fellow ’Poonsters dressed as priests nearby and cheated him of his money.

When Updike “sent up a terrible howl” in protest, as he recalls, those priests pulled dead fish out of their cossacks and proceeded to beat him with them.

Upon hearing that the Ibis today is reportedly safely in the Lampoon’s possession, he said he was glad and quipped, “Maybe the violent and terroristic activities of the Crimson editors has diminished?”

FUNNY MAN?

Updike made several jokes in this interview and at the event, making it seem implausible perhaps that a former president of the Lampoon and someone who drops one-liners could write a dark and ominous novel about a young terrorist.

Although Updike said that there are elements of comedy in his works, he added that “my vision of reality is too somber to be really like comedy.”

Updike said that the Lampoon was one of the reasons he chose Harvard and that he then hoped to become a humorist upon arriving at Harvard.

Eventually, he came to love his English classes, particularly one in his senior year called “Modern Poets” taught by Edwin Honig. In that course he came to appreciate Wallace Stevens, who, Updike learned, hailed from the same Pennsylvanian county as he.

“The cartoonist-humorist in me got subsumed by the novelist who’s trying to really give a world picture with all the elements that he sees in life itself,” he said.

Ultimately, he said, Harvard gave him confidence in his own acumen.

“[Harvard] made me feel rightly or wrongly that I knew a thing or two,” he said. He describes feeling more directed after leaving Harvard, as if “you have a map in your head and you can fill it in now.”

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.