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John Updike
I've read very little of Updike's work, so I'll leave the eulogizing to the better-informed. But this paragraph from his Ted Williams piece "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" (from the 10/22/60 edition of The New Yorker) has always stuck with me - in fact, the phrase "as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of" inexplicably popped into my head yesterday during my frigid, two-block walk from the evening train to my car.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.
January 27, 2009 in Books | Permalink
Comments
Hi, are you the Charles Simmons who wrote "Powdered Eggs", one of the funniest books I ever read!
Posted by: Jay at Jan 27, 2009 7:21:09 PM
When I was 17 in 1968, I read "Couples" and loved it, though I suspect a lot of the novel went past me. Updike was the subject of a cover story in Time Magazine - which then mostly commissioned oil paintings of its cover subjects - and I collected autographed Time Magazine covers (I have about 200 of them dating from '62-'68, so Updike is one of the last ones) so I wrote a long letter to him about "Couples" along with the autograph request and my usual SASE.
He responded with a short note, very kind and sweet, and he signed the TIME cover, "I'm glad you liked Irene. - John Updike," referring to a minor character in the novel, Irene Saltz, whom I said I thought was really well-done in so few strokes of his pen.
I am teaching "A & P" on Friday and Saturday this week - it was already scheduled. Minor Updike, to be sure, the kind of story that always gets into the community college anthologies for composition & lit classes, but I've read it maybe fifty times and still love it.
My favorite books of his are the ones I read when young, like "Rabbit, Run," "Couples," "Pigeon Feathers," "Bech: A Book," and "The Coup." And the Maples stories.
This is my favorite Updike poem, "Dog's Death":
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog!
Good dog!"
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
Good man.
Posted by: Richard Grayson at Jan 27, 2009 7:52:06 PM
