‘A Standard Of Beauty’

The most wonderful thing about John Updike, who died Tuesday of cancer at 76, was that there was an Updike for anyone who loved to read. If you craved realist fiction about the American middle class, you could go to his series of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the small town Pennsylvania basketball star turned Toyota dealer. If you wanted quiet, beautifully written stories about married life, there were the stories about the Maples, a Massachusetts couple that Updike observed through a long string of short stories. Craving something steamier? Try "Couples," his 1968 bestseller about marital infidelities in suburban small towns. There were also comic novels about witches, a novel of social unrest in Africa, a novel about a Muslim terrorist, a retelling of the saga of Tristan and Isolde and a prequel to "Hamlet." There was a play about President James Buchanan and three novels about Updike's alter ego, a Jewish novelist named Bech. If you got tired of fiction, there were nine collections of poetry and goodness knows how many collections of his criticism—that would be literary criticism and art criticism. There were a couple of collections of just plain old essays, and a book about golf and a book about himself. He was, in other words, more literary conglomerate than author, something like General Motors in its heyday, turning out small cars, big cars, trucks and everything in between.

The knock on Updike was that he had a gorgeous prose style and not much to say with it. When it came to his fiction, I tended to agree. It wasn't that his novels were bad—just that they didn't speak to me. His nonfiction was something else. My reaction to his literary criticism was pure professional jealousy. My reaction to his other nonfiction work was simply admiration and, in at least one case, outright adoration.

As a teenager –don't ask me why—I bought a paperback copy of his nonfiction collection called "Assorted Prose," which contains "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," his account of Ted Williams's last game at Fenway Park in 1960. That was the first piece of his I ever read, and it made me hungry for more. But when I tried the rest of the articles in that book, they didn't measure up. The same thing happened when I tried "Rabbit, Run" and some of the short stories. This is not because there is anything particularly wrong with those other works. It's just that the Ted Williams story is that good. I think it's probably the single best story I've ever read about baseball, but it had been a while since I last read it, so before I wrote this, I went back and checked. I found nothing to contradict my original judgment. If anything, it was better than I remembered.

Here's how Updike describes Williams's last at-bat in the 8th inning against an Oriole pitcher named Jack Fisher:

"Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. 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. 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, as far as I could see, 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."