I was saddened to hear about the passing of John Updike today of lung cancer. Golf comprised a small part of his body of work—including a collection of stories in Golf Dreams and a lesser-known volume called In Love with a Wanton—and one of the highlights of my editing career was getting Updike to write an essay about Tiger Woods.
The essay, which appeared in the April 2007 issue, was quite possibly the last words he wrote about the game that he so enjoyed playing. (He was a longtime member of the Myopia Hunt Club outside Boston.) I was impressed by how much Updike knew about golf and about Woods, despite his protests to the contrary when I first approached him about the piece.
Communicating with Updike strictly via the mail. I would write a letter, and he would respond with a postcard on which he typed his reply. For someone used to communicating with writers via e-mail, I found this old-school approach charming and entirely appropriate, since Updike was a timeless writer whose works would transcend his time.
Updike's draft was remarkably clean. (You'd be amazed by how sloppy—grammatical mistakes and misspellings—the drafts of some famous writer can be.) We talked on the phone once, to go over the manuscript, and it was the most nervous I have ever been in the business, and Tiger Woods once challenged me to hit a ball during a photo shoot—with his driver. I felt the way Ved Mehta did when he described talking on the phone with New Yorker editor William Shawn as they went over Mehta's writing, line by line.
Updike went over the changes he wanted to make clearly and crisply—no indecision or uncertainty of purpose. At one point he wanted to add the word "epochal" to the text, and I just flat out choked.
"Do you mean apocryphal?" I asked.
"No," was his chopped reply.
"Apocalyptic?"
"Not even close."
Finally, he just sighed (and no doubt rolled his eyes while regretting taking the assignment in the first place) and spelled it out, in the manner of a kindergarten teacher: "E-P-O-C-H-A-L."
But he remained gracious and even thanked me for the assignment, all the while I was considering joining the French Legion.
Later, after months of therapy, I summoned the courage to invite Updike to join me for a round of golf near his home, hoping that he remembered the assignment as a whole and not my bumbling at the end. He declined, but with this note. Even on a postcard, John Updike's prose shines.
