FOCUS ON JOHN UPDIKE'S PEERLESS GOLF PROSE: RICHARD GILLISmakes a case for the writer many see as the finest chronicler of golf's delusions and delights
WHEN JOHN Updike died in January, the tributes were unanimous: here was one of the greatest, and most prolific writers of the 20th century, someone whose influence was matched only by a very small handful of American literary icons. “He has done more to enrich us than all of Wall Street’s bankers and brokers.” said the writer Peter Conrad, “and his books, unlike the papery profits of the Stock Exchange, will not lose their value.”
It was as if, wrote British novelist Martin Amis: “nothing human seemed closed to his eye”, and it was to the game’s eternal good fortune that Updike’s eyes spent many an hour locked on to golf, which featured regularly in his work, both in the novels and in non-fictional essays for American magazines The New Yorker, Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated.
Updike’s most celebrated novels chart the life and times of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a character he revisited four times in all. Rabbit, Run (which was banned on publication in Ireland in 1962) was followed by Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990).
I first read Rabbit, Run 20 years ago, nearly 30 years after it was published. When Updike died I read it again, and it was like reading a different book; or more accurately, I was a different reader. As a twentysomething, I was too young to appreciate the jokes and the complexity: the small details of adult life that was Updike’s territory, a place where marriages go astray and suburban lives move slowly toward what he called “the Big Fella’s range”.
Updike, who took up the game aged 25, recognised its ability to unmask our true character, a priceless asset for any novelist. We have all, at some stage he wrote, played a perfect shot; a high, floating iron that flew from the clubface with so little effort that we get an insight, however brief, of what it might be like to be a pro. Why, he asks, can’t we do it again and again? The answer cannot lie in our physical limitation, we’ve done it once, we should surely be able to repeat it. No. Our self-analysis leads us quickly to interpret our shortcomings as a failure of character: “Our bad golf testifies, we cannot help feeling, to our being bad people – bad to the core.”
In this way at least, golf is democratic. However rich or powerful we are before we put on our soft spikes, the game will find us out. I thought of Updike last week, at a pro-am event in Switzerland. In the group ahead was the marketing director of a major European company, dressed in subtly fashionable golfing garb, his greying-at-the-temples hair held in place by designer sunglasses. As his playing partners looked on he took an air shot off the tee with a big-headed driver, almost falling over on the through swing. However good a schmoozer you are, it’s hard to come back from something like that.
“Most of us don’t really know how well we’re doing, in real life, and imagine we’re doing not so bad,” wrote Updike. “The world conspires to flatter us; only golf trusts us with a cruelly honest report on our performance. Only on the golf course is the feedback instantaneous and unrelenting – the ball cannot be browbeat out of the place in the poison ivy into which it just so sickeningly plonked. A putt that rims the cup is definitely not in, no matter what you write on your scorecard. The game and your swing provide a barrage of criticism that there’s no evading. What other four hours activity can chasten a magnate with so rich a variety of disappointments, or unman a Lothario with so many unbuffed desires?”
Throughout the Rabbit novels, golf is a social barometer, forming the backdrop of Angstrom’s rise from young public course hacker through to aspiring country club member and then, finally, semi-retired Florida resident.
In the first book, our hero is taken to the course by his father-in-law, from whose daughter Rabbit has recently separated. The scene plays out at a fictional public course in New England, the clubhouse a big cinder-block building fronted with its name, Chestnut Grove Golf Course, “lettered between two Coca Cola insignia”.
The older man, a lay preacher, patronises him and gives him a four-footer, kicking the ball back from the hole, a move filled with “the arrogant assumption that his strokes are past counting”.
This fondness for public “muni” courses stayed with him, and his views were formed by the prejudices and preconceptions of someone who expects to queue at the first tee. Updike learned the game - “or, rather, began to learn that I would never quite learn it” – on the overused, under-maintained public courses of his native New England. He first picked up a club aged 25, given to him by his aunt-in-law and was hooked thereafter, venturing on a love affair which for the most part went unrequited.
These early lessons, unlike those on the swing, never leave us: the feeling you are an intruder in to someone else’s well-watered garden; the childish thrill of finding a new Titleist in the rough or the fear that at some point a grown-up will come and ask to see your ticket.
Thirty years later, in Rabbit at Rest, Updike turned his eye to the booming golf residential market, placing Harry Angstrom in Florida, where his fear of a slice was of nothing when put against the anxiety caused by the twinges in his chest. His regular fourball included Bernie, who had the “slack look of a plump man who lost weight because his doctor told him to”.
There’s something reassuring that enjoyment of the game does not correlate with course condition. “Golf’s big bad boom” has raised our sense of entitlement but not the standard of our play and a common Updike theme is that some of the magic of “being alone, in the tawny buffalo grass rough with a problem to be solved at your own pace” has been lost. It is to golf’s detriment that we are now made to feel guilty by “the networking young bucks in their electric chariots pressing you impatiently from behind”.
The Hollywood movies of the Depression era often showed the rich swaggering from the 18th green straight in to their tuxedos, and to this day golf plays on its image of “lush grass and palatial clubhouses of bronzed, trim, grey-haired men swapping swing tips and stock tips in a dappled atmosphere of having it all”.
The very length of time the game consumes implies lives “rich in leisure and its space implies folks able to afford a playground the size of three farms”.
As good as his novels are, my relationship with Updike has largely taken place in the pages of magazines, via his warm and wise essays, which quietly undercut the bluff and bluster of most golf reporting.
His account of watching Tom Kite in the latter years of his career, is just one such example. The player was a favourite of his, to the extent that he appeared as a doctor in one of Updike’s earlier books (“with his ghostly half-smile”) along with Ray Floyd and Greg Norman. On this occasion, however, the real Tom Kite needed a five down the last to win the Atlanta Classic and claim his first tour win for two years, a period when the press was claiming he’d lost his nerve. Against this backdrop, the veteran could have chosen to lay up and take his five, but instead hit a four-wood from the rough to the final green, with “a swing that left the club hanging down his back and back foot up on its toe like a ballerina’s in its little pink slipper . . . certain undying joy in the game had gone into that marvellous trust in his swing, that saintly letting go that golf asks of its devotees”.
Many of John Updike’s obituarists agreed he was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. I’d go further: If he wasn’t the best golf writer of the 20th century, he’d certainly make the play-off.
Updike on Golf
On the bliss of the swing
Just a few shots a round keep us coming back; what other sport offers such sudden splendour in exchange for so few calories of expended energy? In those instants of whizz, ascent, hover, and fall, an ideal self seems mirrored. If we have that one shot in us, we must have thousands more – the problem is to get them out, to let them out. To concentrate, to take one’s time, to move the weight across, to keep the elbow in, to save the wrist cock for the hitting area, to keep one’s head still, down, and as full of serenity as a Zen monk’s: an ambitious program, but a basically spiritual one, which does not require the muscularity and shapeliness of youth.
– From The Bliss of Golf (US Amateur Championship Annual 1982)
On golf’s morality
Golf morality runs to paradoxes. He who hits down sees the ball soar. He who looks up tops the ball in to the tall grass. He who tries to hit hardest loses yardage to the supple devil-may-care. He who strives to steer the ball in to the hole winds up stubbing the putt. ‘He who would save his life must lose it,’ a rabbi once advised. ‘Let the nothingness in to yer shots’, the imaginary pro Shivas Irons instructed his disciple in Michael Murphy’s lovely Golf in the Kingdom. Don’t try too hard, we might more simply say. Or: seize the day. Golf’s ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal centre of enjoyment: relax in to rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand. Not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
– From Moral Exercise (Golf Digest 1992)
Both taken from Golf Dreams, a collection of the best of John Updike's golf writing, published by Penguin Books.
