PAST MASTERS: JOHN UPDIKE
JOHN AND THE KID
Tribute at the New York Public Library
Here’s a passage that John Updike wrote forty-nine years ago, after watching Ted Williams hit a home run at Fenway Park, in the final at-bat of his career. The date is Wednesday, September 28, 1960, and the lines are from John’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which ran in The New Yorker three weeks later. Most of you know them already.
Fisher threw [a] third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. [Center fielder Jackie] Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and vanished.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
Let’s fill in a bit. The game, against the second-place Orioles, was won by the seventh-place Sox, 5–4, an outcome that made absolutely no difference to either team. Attendance at Fenway Park that day was 10,454 and would have been 10,453 if a lady that John Updike had hoped to meet at her apartment on Beacon Hill that morning had not stood him up. He went to the Fens, instead, bought a ticket, and wrote what turned out to be the most celebrated piece of baseball writing ever. In the words of Fats Waller, one never knows, do one? The 1960 regular season continued for three more days, but this was Ted Williams’s last game ever. The home run was his twenty-ninth of the season, and his five hundred and twenty-first, lifetime. Here comes a fresh statistic, one you’ve not heard before. From the beginning of the modern baseball era, in 1901, to the end of that 1960 season, there were 66,112 other home runs struck in the major leagues, all noted and described briefly or at length by a writer or writers in attendance, not one of whom mentioned the Tappan Zee Bridge or feathers caught in a vortex, or conveyed the event with such economical joy.
I think John got a little tired of the attention paid to this piece, down the years. He never wrote about baseball again—golf was his game, as it turned out—and I imagine he had many dozens of other pages or paragraphs that he liked more—parts of “Rabbit Run,” for instance, which he’d finished a year before Ted’s last blast. When he and I talked about the article, as we did a few times, we each admitted—I with gratitude, he with customary modesty and class—that “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” might have set the tone for my own baseball stuff, which I had not yet begun or thought of, and perhaps also encouraged The New Yorker to publish a few more sports pieces than it had so far. Thank you, John.
In the preface to a special edition of “Hub Fans,” John wrote that he liked to think that the piece was “suffused with love,” because of his boyhood attachment to Ted Williams and his more adult feelings for the woman who’d not kept their date, but I’ll settle once again for joy—for the lift and lightness and intelligence that he himself and almost all of his writing conveyed, right to the end. You can go back and read him almost anywhere—this is the consolation he has left us—and see this and find him there once again. And if you think about that feather one more time it may come to you with another gleam of pleasure that the image carries the float and even the mildly lifting and falling shoulders of the contented everyday home-run hitter, suspended in time as he circles the bases and makes it safely back home again.
March, 2009
THE FADEAWAY
Colleagues for more than half a century, writer-editor partners for more than half that time, John Updike and I were close at a fixed distance—he at home north of Boston, I in my New Yorker office near Bryant Park—but spoke voluminously by telephone, by manuscripts and galley proofs, and also via his typed, cheerful two-and-a-half-by-five-and-a-half white postcards that bore his pale-blue name and address hand-stamped in the northwest corner. Now and then he would turn up at the office, startling me once again with his height and his tweeds, that major nose, and his bright eyes and up-bent smile; he spoke in a light half-whisper and, near the end of each visit, somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away. The fadeaway, as I came to think of it, may have had to do with his exile from his own writing that day, while travelling; the spacious writing part of him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its engrossing daily stint back home. Informally august, he stayed young after his hair turned white, but the additions of fame and a vast work now made him seem Colonial, ready for the portrait on a postage stamp.
A similar sense of shift and distracting clarity often overtook a reader in one of Updike’s stories when an ordinary enough event or small-town American scene—a slight earthquake, a 5.4 on the Richter scale, awakening a man at home in bed in the early morning; a mother on her way to work in the nineteen-thirties running for a streetcar in Pennsylvania; a man in his late fifties outside his living room in the winter finding the moons of Jupiter with his new home telescope—slides to another breadth and meaning in the space of a sentence or two. This is what Updike has had in mind for us all along. He invites us into his story and walks us easily along; all is recognizable and reassuringly alive, but then—we’ve had no warning—we’re seized with a flooding fresh knowledge, in the same fashion that sadness or some ancient night remembrance can sometimes take us in its teeth. Updike was in his twenties and thirties when most of his seventeen stories about the Maples were being written, but his expert and unpatronizing account of a suburban marriage—husband and wife, neighbors and kids, meals and affairs and politics and anxiety—also carried this double view. There’s something terrifying about it all, because these young people, parents and children alike, are such beginners, not ready for so much life.
Updike’s writing is light and springy, the tone unforced; often happiness is almost in view, despite age or disappointments. He is not mawkish or insistently gloomy. Death is frequently mentioned but for the time being is postponed. Time itself is bendable in these stories; the characters are aware of themselves at many stages. This is Updike country: intelligent and Eastern, mostly Protestant, more or less moneyed. We understand and read on, and then—and then a middle-aged married man named Fanshawe remembers how he had “ceased to fear death—or, so to say, to grasp it”—at the moment when he first slept with a woman named Lorna Kramer. Or the young father, Richard Maple, at the end of a day when he and his wife, Joan, have been explaining to their young children that they are going to separate and try living apart for the summer, ending their marriage at least for now, is telling the news to his teen-age son, in bed and just home from a rock concert, and the teary boy stops him with a word: “Why?” He has forgotten why. Or that young woman from the past—Updike’s mother without a doubt, but seen this time as the mother of a man named Joey in a long 1990 story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse”—“running to catch the trolley, the world of the thirties shabby and solid around her, the porches, the blue midsummer hydrangeas, this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind.”
Updike’s sentences are fresh-painted. In all his writing, critical or fictional or reportorial, he is a fabulous noticer and expander; he’s invented HD. So armed, he felt free from the start to take up and engage with all that lay within the range of his attention and put it down on paper. As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: “Which one sounds better, do you think?” Sighing, he would take us back over the same few words again and again, then propose or listen to a switch of some sort, and try again. All writers do this, but not many with such a lavishly extended consideration. He wanted to see each galley, each tiny change, right down to the late-closing page proofs, which he often managed to return by overnight mail an hour or so before closing, with new sentences or passages, handwritten in the margins in a soft pencil, that were fresher and more inventive and revealing than what had been there before. You watched him write.
This process sounds old-fashioned, but Updike was probably the very first New Yorker writer to shift over to a computer, back in the early eighties. “I don’t know how this will change my writing,” he wrote to me in advance, “but it will.” He was right, of course: the flavor was mysteriously different, the same wine but of another year.
By the end, there were a hundred and forty-six John Updike stories that ran in the magazine, starting with “Friends from Philadelphia,” in the issue of October 30, 1954, and finishing with “The Full Glass,” in the May 26, 2008, issue. Another several dozen casuals or works of humor ran up to “A Desert Encounter,” on October 20, 2008. All this, of course, was in addition to his five hundred–odd reviews and poems and critical essays in The New Yorker, and to one side of or on top of the twenty-three novels, the art criticism for The New York Review of Books, and the steady rush of pieces and stories published elsewhere. He often insisted that he was about to run dry. When I became his fiction editor, early in 1976, succeeding William Maxwell, I was alarmed to hear from him that his best fiction-writing days were probably behind him. This was nonsense; his output then was a steady three or four first-class stories per year, but to hear him tell it the end was near. “Fiction is a young man’s game,” he said querulously. I had not yet understood how much he loved sounding old. Rabbit Angstrom, we might notice, dies of old age, in effect, in “Rabbit at Rest,” the fourth and final book of the celebrated work, at the age of fifty-six. By the time his production level did in fact slow a bit, twenty years down the line, I’d found a little trick that he and I enjoyed. Some mornings when we were talking idly on the telephone, perhaps still again about the Sox’ pitching, I would tell him that there was a sharp new story coming up in the next issue—something different, by a young man or woman we’d been following for some time now. “Rea-lly!” he would cry, his voice rising. He was still a close reader of every issue, and over the years as a reviewer for the magazine he had been amazingly generous to beginning talents. But this was beside the point, as we understood. A couple of weeks would go by and then—not every time, but sometimes—my little pile of morning mail would include a tan manuscript envelope with his name stamped in blue up in the corner: a new story by John Updike.
Talk, February, 2009