RIP John Updike
Posted: January 27th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | 18 Comments »
“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.â€
– From Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
The New Yorker. October 22, 1960
By John Updike (1932-2009)
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“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” is quite possibly the most moving and visceral piece of baseball writing I’ve had the pleasure to read (no offense, Joe). My second favorite paragraph, next to the one quoted above, helps to explain the wonder of baseball. It crystallizes how people with a more sabermetric lens enjoy the game:
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Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, “W’ms, lf” was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell “blooper” pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman’s head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.
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For those who have not had the pleasure of reading the essay, it is available for free in its entirety at the following link:
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml
Wow. It feels kind of odd that I first heard about this news here, but the world of American literature lost one of its iconic figures. RIP, Mr. Updike.
Nearly 50 years after it was written, that piece still kills me.
A magical piece indeed. Of course, he could have left this part out:
“The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar.”
I guess we stunk even back then!!!
So sad…inner-circle, first-ballot American Literature Hall of Famer, and probably my favorite writerof all time. There might be a few who could write just as well, but none of them produced half as MUCH work as Updike did…
First David Halberstam, now Updike. The world seems to be getting smaller before my eyes. R.I.P. Mr. Updike…
“Gods do not answer letters” is a great line, but the paragraph Miles quoted above is brillance. Not just in its construction, but in its message. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that so completely captured the essence of its subject. You read that paragraph, and say yep, that’s Ted Williams. No other description necessary.
I saw the news in Arts and Letters Daily and gasped aloud. What a wonderful writer he was — the Rabbit books are collectively an unmatched chronicle of middle-class American life in his generation — which was my parents’, more or less. I wish my generation had his equal. Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe books don’t quite cut it.
Mr. Updike had a child (a stepson, if I recall) at Bates College when I was the SID there in the ’80s. In a couple of very brief interactions I had with him at parents’ events, he struck me as the sort of deeply decent man you might expect from his writing.
How many are left from that day at Fenway in 1960? The Internets say Jack Fisher, the Oriole pitcher who served up the Kid’s last hit, is still around. But others whom I well remember from my Red Sox-saturated youth and who were there when Ted hit No. 521 have departed — Pete Runnels, Curt Gowdy, Pinky Higgins, Tom Yawkey, John Kiley, undoubtedly most of the writers in the press box that day. And now Updike too, the gentlest yet mightiest chronicler of them all.
Rabbit, Run.
I wasn’t like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree. Richard Gere’s a real hero of mine. St–er, John Updike. John Updike would be another person who’s a hero. The writing he’s created over the years, I haven’t really read it, but the fact that he’s making it, I respect that. I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I’m selling? No. Do I know what I’m doing today? No. But I’m here, and I’m gonna give it my best shot.
I hope the assholes on the Nobel committee who denied him his rightful prize over and over and over again to give it to some minor national author writing bad things about the United States in an obscure language is happy with this outsome.
A true legend of the American written word. A sad day indeed.
Blue: I’m with you…Like the lady that read the poem(?)last week at the Obama Inaugural…She will probably win hundreds of awards. I thought that a precocious 5th grader could have written that silly garbage. It was such a downer after his speech. We could have used some great chior singing at that point, not a lengthy jumble of words about an everyday sort of day!
RIP, Mr. Updike…
Miles, thanks for linking to the full essay. I have passed the link on to many friends.
Greatest piece of baseball writing ever?
It’s strange, I hadn’t thought much about Updike recently. But last week he came up in a conversation about great essayists. Like David Foster Wallace, Updike could write a sports essay that would interest even a non-sports fan–because ultimately the essay would not be simply about sport. It would be about our humanness, our aspirations, our failings.
From the Hub essay, I always liked this line: “There will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.” That captures both sport and life–where indefensible hopes sometimes pluck events out of the future.
RIP.
[...] “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.” – John Updike, the New Yorker, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, October 22, 1960 [...]
for me it was always the preceding passage describing the home run.
“Fisher threw the 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.”
And also this description of Fenway: “It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.”
John Updike’s conventional wisdom seems to have affected a lot of people — I see little quotes of his all over