John Updike is probably best known for his ribald tales of suburban sexual meanderings in mid-20th century America; award winning literary novels rendered in prose so heartbreakingly lyrical, it takes your breath away. His characters inhabit wealthy New England towns - suburbs of New York or Boston - and their hedonistic quest for meaning in this superficial society, frequently leads them to adulterous liaisons that end badly.
Many of these flawed and fragile characters play golf, which is not surprising considering the country club world they live in, and also because Mr. Updike himself was so passionate about the game. - This passion led him to write about golf a fairly regular basis.
Updike's "Golf Dreams" is the best golf writing I've ever read. It's a collection of essays, poems and short fiction, originally written for publications such as The New Yorker and Golf Digest. Amazingly these pieces are as soaring, sparkling and full of breathtaking descriptions, as his novels.
John Updike was a master wordsmith, and whether his words were spilling onto the austere, frost-stiffened December fairways of a Massachusetts golf course, or furtively navigating the cloistered lushness of a leafy Connecticut cul-de-sac, they often inspired me to ask myself, "How did he make that passage so beautiful?"
John Updike died today of lung cancer at age 76. He will be much missed.
Well put. He will be missed.
ReplyDeleteHere is a quote from the man himself...
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/updike-v-golf.html
Otherwise, though once in a while a 7-iron rips off the clubface with that pleasant tearing sound, as if pulling a zipper in space, and falls toward the hole like a raindrop down a well; or a drive draws sweetly with the bend of the fairway and disappears, still rolling, far beyond the applauding sprinkler, these things happen in spite of me, and not because of me, and in that sense I am free, on the golf course, as nowhere else.
Isn't this a wonderful, wonderful game...??
ReplyDelete"...falls toward the hole like a raindrop down a well." John Updike and Boo Weekley, and everyone in between, paint the landscape of golf for us.
I'm speechless. I am without speech.
Updike's descriptions of winter golf are particularly fine...and with the winter we're having in many parts of the US that's about the only kind of golf we can imagine right now. In "December Golf" he wrote,
ReplyDelete"Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the fairest golf of the year"
You must read the whole essay if you live in a place with cold winters. It's wonderful.
You Inspired me to quote an Updike passage from an essay on "Golf" written in 1973 for the New York Times.
ReplyDelete"June 10, 1973
Golf
By JOHN UPDIKE
I think I have been asked to write about golf as a hobby. But of course, golf is not a hobby. Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass, the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves. If neither work nor play, then, if more pain than pleasure but not essentially either, what, then, can golf be? Luckily, a word newly coined rings on the blank Formica of the conundrum. Golf is, let us say, a trip.
A non-chemical hallucinogen, golf breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria -- golf so transforms one's somatic sense, in short, that truth itself seems about to break through the exacerbated and as it were debunked fabric of mundane reality."
Very well said. He did know how to write about everything in the most sensual way.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorites:
"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."
I am so guilty of this...
Everything I know about sex I learned from reading John Updike. Most of what I know about golf too. ;)
ReplyDeleteUpdike wrote a great short story, though I can't recall its title about an American golfing in Scotland who hires a highly recommended old Scottish caddy. Not only does the caddy give him advice on how to play the course but he seems to have insight into the Americans' messy personal life and advises him on that too. Funny, spooky and beautifully written like so much of Updikes' work
ReplyDeleteRIP John, we love you we'll miss you.
John Updike possessed a truly beautiful mind; he didn't just write well, he wrote wisely
ReplyDelete