Updike (27 page)

His first swing of a golf club came just a few months after the move to Ipswich. A relative of Mary’s—she was actually her mother’s cousin, but Mary called her aunt—lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts; she was a keen golfer, and in her shady backyard showed Updike how to grip a driver, then told him he had a “wonderful natural swing.” She took him to her local club to get him started. “The average golfer,” he later wrote, “is hooked when he hits his first good shot.” In his case, the addiction was immediate and enduring. In the fall of that year, he wrote his first golf story, “Intercession,” in which Paul, a young man who resembles Updike—he writes the plot for a syndicated cartoon strip—has recently been “initiated” into the game by his wife’s uncle. Out on a golf course on his own for the first time, on a drought-stricken summer’s day, he feels guilty—guilty about leaving his wife alone in the house with their little girl, “about not working all day long like other men, about having grown up at all and married and left his parents alone together in Ohio, about being all by himself in this great kingdom of withered turf” (all sentiments Updike might have shared). The day goes badly; the story ends with a curse (“Damned game”), and it’s entirely possible that Paul’s first outing will be his last. For Updike, things went very differently: he shrugged off any twinges of guilt and continued to play golf, to think about it, to dream about it, to write about it, for the rest of his life—“the hours adding up,” he admitted, “to years of
temps perdu
.” The easiest explanation for his long love affair with this “narcotic pastime” is that the game gave him huge amounts of pleasure: “I am curiously, disproportionately, undeservedly happy on a golf course.” Rounds of golf, he wrote, were “islands of bliss.”

Bliss and frustration—with his “modest” eighteen handicap, he described himself as a “poor golfer, who came to the game late, with frazzled eye-hand connections.” He practiced and practiced, dutifully studying the reams of advice aimed at his fellow duffers—advice he gently mocked in a succession of satiric essays. Golf is a cruel and exasperating sport for anyone with a perfectionist streak as pronounced as Updike’s; it dangles hope—the tantalizing prospect of self-improvement—then yanks that hope out of sight with the next errant shot. He described, in a burst of colorful prose, the torments of this humbling cycle:

The fluctuations of golfing success were charted on a graph craggier than those of other endeavors, with peaks of pure poetry leaping up from abysses of sheer humiliation—the fat shot that sputters forward under the shadow of its divot, the thin shot that skims across the green like a maimed bird, the smothered hook which finds the raspberry patch, the soaring slice that crosses the highway, the chunked chip, the shanked approach, the water ball, the swamp ball, the deeper-into-the-woods ricochet, the trap-to-trap blast, the total whiff on the first tee, the double-hit putt from two feet out.

It’s a sign of his sturdy self-confidence that he was able to endure these trials on a weekly or twice-weekly basis. One wonders whether the game didn’t satisfy some masochistic need on his part for mild chastening punishment, whether the pain wasn’t part of the pleasure.

Like every golfer, he had to endure the famous insults the game attracts, and parry oft-repeated accusations about its being the chosen pastime of wealthy philistines—“the idle and idiot well-to-do,” in Osbert Sitwell’s acid phrase. In his Pennsylvania youth, Updike remembered, “golf was a rumored something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.” But in Ipswich, once hooked, he conveniently discovered that it was a pleasure “democratically exploited”—by working-class golfers, say, flocking to the municipal course at the end of a long shift. (Wishful thinking contradicted by the sinister line from his poem “Golfers,” in which those who play the game “take an open stance on the backs of the poor.”)

It’s true that he played with all kinds of people in all kinds of settings. “Golf,” he wrote, “is a great social bridge.” For many years, he was joined in a foursome by a local druggist, the same pediatrician who played in the poker group, and the owner of an automatic car wash; they played weekly from April to October on public courses in Ipswich and neighboring towns such as Essex, Topsfield, Wenham, and Newburyport. Although Updike was content with humble layouts, he gladly accepted invitations to enjoy the “spongy turf of private fairways.” Eventually, in his early fifties, when the sport’s expanding popularity meant that his favorite public courses were more and more crowded, he joined the exclusive and expensive Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, Massachusetts, which boasts a famously beautiful course designed in the late nineteenth century by Herbert Corey Leeds.

A round of golf, for Updike, was no more an occasion for literary chatter than a poker game; what he “did in print” was not a topic his regular foursome would be apt to broach. Although in later years he played frequently with a psychiatrist turned writer who claimed that he and Updike would ritually discuss, when they reached the eighth fairway, what they were reading and writing, this brief bout of book banter was an exception. The novelist Tim O’Brien had a very different experience playing with Updike; he said he found himself consciously suppressing literary questions: “I sensed that for John, at least in part, golf was a way of getting away from artistic and professional pressures.” Updike repeatedly remarked that he cherished the game’s “relative hush,” the “worshipful silence” on the green; “Golf,” he explained, “is a constant struggle with one’s self, productive of a few grunts and expletives but no extended discourse.” As if in warning to garrulous companions, he wrote, “Basically, I want to be alone with my golf.” Too polite to play a round in silence, he was also too fond of verbal display. O’Brien remembered having conversations about “ludicrously insignificant stuff”; even then, “John spoke very much as he wrote, with grace and precision and irony and impish humor and striking miracles of expression. I was never unaware that I was strolling down the fairway with John Updike.”

He worked at his golf, struggled with it, the way a less naturally talented writer might struggle with a tricky passage, revising, honing, maybe tearing it up in frustration; his emphasis on the mental effort the sport demanded, the intense concentration, the need for each player to act as his own coach, invites the comparison. But of course Updike’s good days at the typewriter, days when polished prose poured out of him, were more frequent than his good days on the links, where he was nagged by the sense that the basics of golf had to be relearned every week. “He seemed delighted when he won a hole or when he scored well,” said O’Brien, “and he concentrated fiercely over his shots, but for the most part he struck me as wistfully (sometimes wryly) resigned to the inconsistencies and imperfections of his swing.” When he did hit a sweet shot, however, his sense of exultation was dramatic. He wrote, “In those instants of whizz, ascent, hover, and fall, an ideal self seems mirrored.” The urge to recapture that golden moment contributed to the power and persistence of his obsession.

He reveled also in the range of competition the game affords. Thanks to handicap strokes, players of widely different ability can compete on terms of equality; this was the “inexhaustible competitive charm” that turned a struggle with oneself into the excitement of a contest with others. The presence of partners and opponents meant that when he wasn’t engrossed in his own shot, he had his eye on his companions, absorbing every last detail, registering not just the outline of a golf persona but the inner life as well. “Golf,” he explained, “is . . . a great tunnel into the essences of others, for people are naked when they swing—their patience or impatience, their optimism or pessimism, their grace or awkwardness, their life’s motifs are all bared.” What he saw of their essence seems not to have dismayed him; on the contrary, he felt joined to his regular foursomes by a powerful bond: “My golfing companions . . . are more dear to me than I can unembarrassedly say.”

When I interviewed him in 2003, more than forty-five years after his first swing, he humorously suggested that his continued devotion to the game (by now he was playing twice weekly) was perhaps hampering his career: “If I thought as hard about writing as I do about golf,” he told me, “I might be a better writer—maybe win the Nobel prize.” In fact, his obsession brought him good material right from the start; as he acknowledged, “Golf converts oddly well into words.” “Intercession” and “Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy (After Reading Too Many Books on How to Play Golf),” a parody he wrote for
The
New Yorker
in 1959 lampooning the inexhaustible genre of golf instruction, were the earliest fruits of his passion. Late in life he wrote “Elegy for a Real Golfer,” a lament in verse on the bizarre and tragic airplane accident that killed Payne Stewart in 1999. In between came several poems and short stories; notable golfing interludes in three of the
Rabbit
novels and in
A Month of Sundays
(which features a foursome composed exclusively of disgraced clergymen); and “The First Lunar Invitational”—a
jeu d’esprit
inspired by astronaut Alan Shepard’s famous antics with an improvised six iron—about a tournament on the moon under the joint sponsorship of NASA, ALCOA, MIT, and Bob Hope.

As Adlai Stevenson noted in a 1952 campaign speech poking fun at President Eisenhower’s famous enthusiasm for golf, “Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses.” Updike spread his bets, worshipping in church and also casting his golfing experience in theological terms. A secular pastime commonly associated with material well-being, golf, oddly, gave Updike a spiritual thrill; from the very beginning, he was acutely sensitive to what he called “the eerie religious latency” of the game; when he wrote about it, he invariably invoked the supernatural. “Intercession” set the pattern, ending with a curse and turning on a seeming miracle. On his second time around, long after his progress across the course has become “a jumbled rout,” Paul yearns for divine intervention:

All he wanted was that his drive be perfect; it was very little to ask. If miracles, in this age of faint faith, could enter anywhere, it would be here, where the causal fabric was thinnest, in the quick collisions and abrupt deflections of a game. Paul drove high but crookedly over the treetops. It dismayed him to realize that the angle of a metal surface striking a rubber sphere counted for more with God than the keenest human hope.

On Paul’s next drive, however, it seems that his halfhearted prayer is answered, that God does intervene: “The ball bounced once in the open and, as if a glass arm from heaven had reached down and grabbed it, vanished.” Quitting in disgust, walking off the drought-parched course, he imagines that the one green he’s missed seeing is “paradisiacal—broad-leaved trees, long-tailed birds, the cry of water.”

For Updike, golf was like a cycle of mystery plays covering the entire Christian calendar from Creation to Judgment Day. An unplayed course is a Garden of Eden, from which the duffer is expelled with his first wayward shot (“We lack the mustard-seed of faith that keeps the swing smooth”); during a bad round one suffers torments of the damned; yet “miracles . . . abound”—not least the “ritual interment and resurrection of the ball at each green”; and next week’s game holds out the promise of paradise regained. He found it hard to resist the urge to draw moral lessons: “Our bad golf testifies, we cannot help feeling, to our being bad people—bad to the core.” Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.

T
WO YEARS AFTER
“Intercession,” teeing off on the page for only the second time, Updike pitted Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom against an Episcopalian minister, the Reverend Jack Eccles, and used their first round together as a pivotal moment in
Rabbit, Run
. The novel is usually associated with basketball, the sport that briefly turned Rabbit into a local teenage celebrity, but it’s on the golf course that Updike supplies his hero with tardy justification for the impulsive act that sets the narrative in motion.

Feeling trapped by drab domesticity, Rabbit has run away from his pregnant wife, Janice, and young son, zigzagging into the arms of a blowsy part-time prostitute. Eccles, by inviting him to play golf, thinks he’s doing his pastoral duty, coaxing home a parishioner’s wayward husband. In the car on the way over to the Chestnut Grove Golf Course, the minister chats about the theological wrangles between his father and grandfather (who was, he explains, the bishop of Providence); the talk is of family worship and belief in hell, of atheists dwelling in “outer darkness,” the rest of us in “inner darkness”—all of which sets the scene for a round of golf freighted with religious significance.

Updike once described Harry Angstrom as a “representative Kierkegaardian man”:

Man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of the social contract and the inner imperatives.

“Twisted,” indeed. Rabbit feels “dragged down, lame”; at the first tee, his drive “sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin.” Although Eccles encourages him, praising his “beautiful natural swing” (Updike’s “natural” swing was similarly admired), his play deteriorates: “Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease.” His vision warped by guilt, he looks down the fairway and sees Eccles in the distance; the clergyman’s shirt resembles “a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.” Rabbit’s nightmare round resembles Paul’s “jumbled rout”—until he reaches the fifth tee, where he produces a superb shot, a drive that climbs and climbs “along a line straight as a ruler-edge.” He exults: “That’s
i
t
!” His miracle drive washes away the nightmare and utterly defeats Eccles—not in the game, but in their simmering wrangle over Rabbit’s unorthodox religious beliefs and his reasons for leaving home. The “it” in Rabbit’s jubilant “That’s
i
t
!” is at once the supernatural “something” he identifies as his faith in God (“I do feel that somewhere behind all this . . . there’s something that wants me to find it”); the element missing from his marriage (“There was this thing that wasn’t there”); and the essential kernel of his self, his soul (“Hell, it’s not much. . . . It’s just that, well, it’s all there is”). This multipurpose “it” offers Rabbit absolution of a kind that makes the prospect of Eccles’s forgiveness irrelevant. With one miraculous swing of a golf club, he has legitimized, in his own mind, his defection from married life; “it” shows him that he was right to abandon his pregnant wife and toddler son, and no mere argument will persuade him otherwise.