Updike was here
I miss John Updike. He died in January at 76, an age he seemed to make awfully young.
It's not that I miss waiting for his next novel to appear. I don't think I read one since the wonderful "In the Beauty of the Lilies" was published in 1997. I didn't hold my breath in expectation of those often-convoluted book reviews that showed up in The New Yorker. It's not that. I miss his being around.
Updike was a Pennsylvanian, a New Yorker, and then a New Englander, who never completely abandoned a previous home. He invoked no tiresome privilege about the virtues of living in Boston, but the city, the North Shore, and their geographical remove from the braziers of Manhattan's literary inferno clearly agreed with him.
At the Globe, I felt we worked in the shadow of Updike. I could imagine him puttering around Beverly Farms, just a half-hour's drive away. He was watching over us; more to the point, he was reading us, as he always made clear in his sporadic interactions with writers and editors. In the first of two Time magazine cover stories celebrating his work, he was photographed "catching up on current events," with the Globe in front of him. I am sure that other great minds scan the paper, but Updike mattered more. Much more.
For one thing, he honored us by writing for us, better, I dare say, than any of us ever did. In 1979, he wrote a Page One story, on deadline, about Opening Day. Updike shambled into the Sports department around 6 p.m., was escorted to a typewriter, and handed over his copy a couple of hours later. When Jim Rice homered that day, Updike declared himself to be "back in Red Sox heaven, where extra bases flow like milk and honey."
In 1986, before the doomed World Series, Updike wrote a 1,500-word essay for the Globe, "Rapt by the Radio." His eyes saw things others didn't: "Clemens so full of the Right Stuff his uniform fairly pops its buttons." He reviewed the movie "Overboard" for us, really an homage to one of his favorite actresses, Goldie Hawn. He once sent us a poem, gratis, for which we eventually paid him a pittance. It was a piece of doggerel called "Publication Day," bemoaning the fate of all published books: "Your shiny, priceless book, upon this date/Goes forth to meet its anti-climactic fate." He published over 60 of them.
About 15 years ago, Updike sent a letter to the editor. "I can't believe that you're cutting 'Spiderman,' " he wrote, "the only comic strip in the Globe, except for 'Doonesbury' half the time, worth reading. Do think again in making way for what sounds like one more jejune set of unfunny panels pitched at the nonexistent (or at least nonreading) X-generation."
We did think again. If you are reading this on paper, turn back two pages, and you will find Peter, Spidey, Jonah, and Mary Jane, exactly where John Updike wanted them to be.
But it's not just his newspaper work I miss. He did everything a writer does - magazine work; nonfiction books; short stories; novels; humor; the pot-boiler; criticism; poetry - better than almost anyone. He set a standard worth aspiring to. For me, it's too late. But not for everyone.
I understand that he had critics. Was he misogynistic? I doubt it, although he certainly had a boyish enthusiasm for prose sex that didn't appeal to everyone. Were he and his characters too self-absorbed, as David Foster Wallace wrote? Probably. And so? Was his prose too "pretty," as many suggested? Too pretty? Really. You must be kidding.
Updike was canny about publicity, and his public-ness. Photographed in the celebrity columns? Rarely. Answered his own phone? No. But if you had a couple of days, and wanted comment for a story, you could write him a note, that would be answered, type-written, on a miniature rectangle of note paper. To paraphrase his famous essay on Ted Williams, he was a god who did answer letters.
He was find-able. I once bearded him at a reception and asked for his reaction to "U and I," an oddball meditation on Updike by Nicholson Baker. "The thing that mattered most," Updike said, "was that Baker didn't use up any of my time." Updike appreciated, as I then did not, that time is, really, our only possession worth husbanding. I wish he had had more of it.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com 
