John Updike

When I was a student in the creative writing program of Ohio University, an assigned text included the following passage, which rocked my world, and, frankly, made me despair of ever being a writer:

All the warm night the secret snow fell so adhesively that every twig in the woods about their little rented house supported a tall slice of white, an upward projection which in the shadowless glow of early morning lifted depth from the scene, made it seem chinese, calligraphic, a stiff tapestry hung from the gray sky, a shield of lace interwoven with black thread.

At the time, like many young pretenders to literary glory, I had no real voice of my own, and was busy grafting the freewheeling, Tom Robbins-like constructions onto my own small business one week, and the fragmentary prose of Richard Brautigan the next. The common thread of these prose models was that it was different from the prose I'd read before college. Young people like different. They often equate different with good, or better. Somewhere in there, the word "cool" lives. (I have no time for cool writing these days...I prefer precision. It's a maturity thing, I hope). I find "cool" to be easy writing, path-of-least-resistance writing. Which is why it is attractive to young writers, who want to be thought of as innovative, without earning that praise through work.

But then I read the above passage by John Updike, from his short story The Crow in The Woods, and everything changed for me. The precision (that word!) of it, the visual truth interwoven with the abstract concept forced me to understand the job of the real writer. It turns out the years have borne me out as an appreciator rather than a practitioner, but it was Updike who made me understand the pedigree  of a real writer.

I didn't read all his books. Frankly, I preferred his short stories. Years could go by between my readings of his work. But let's face it, it was a better world with him in it. When I walked through the bookstores, looking at shelves full of chick-lit, low-rent murder books, and romance novels, I could make myself feel better by remembering the literary world still had giants roaming the plains-- Updike was still pumping them out. Now a hole exists in the world.

Here's to a master, a suddenly absent friend: John Updike 1932-2009.