Lit Fans Bid Updike Adieu

January 27, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A completely non-sociological post.)

Here’s my story about John Updike. It’s just a rumor, and I probably shouldn’t be repeating it (nil nisi bonum and all that). But here it is.

One of Updike’s most famous essays is “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” about Ted Williams’s last game. It begins, “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” It ends nearly 6000 words later with Williams, in the last at bat of his career, hitting a home run.

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. . . . 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.

Famous line, that last sentence. The essay is anthologized everywhere– sports books, literature books, Boston books.

“I arrived early.” That’s the first line of the second paragraph, and that’s where the rumor I heard begins. Updike had been living for years in Ipswich, north of Boston, with his wife and children. But in 1960 (and perhaps other years) he was having an affair with a woman who lived on Beacon Hill in Boston. Updike had come down to Boston that day for a tryst, but when he went to her home, she wasn’t in and apparently wasn’t going to be back for a while. With time on his hands and nothing else to do, Updike decided to go to Fenway. He arrived early.

Had he not been cheating on his wife, had his mistress been at home, we would never have this essay.

Is the story true? I don’t know. I heard it maybe twenty years ago, though I can’t remember where or from whom. I had forgotten it completely until my wife was converting some of our old family videotapes to DVDs, and I heard myself on tape telling it to my cousins. I’ve searched for confirmation on the Internet, but I can’t find anything.

Is it possible that it was that easy to get last-minute seats to a Redsox game? There’s nothing in the essay about it, of course. But as I was looking at it just now, this one sentence took on added meaning.

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories.

I did meet Updike once. He was walking across Harvard Yard, carrying one of those dark green canvas book bags that were popular with students then, though he was well into his thirties at the time. None of the few people in the yard seemed to notice him. I caught up with him on the steps of a library. I didn’t know what to say. If I had said that I liked and admired his fiction, I’d have been lying. So I said that I very much liked his lighter poems and wished he’d write more of them. We talked for a minute – I can’t remember what either of us said – and as he turned to go in, he said he’d try to write more of the light verse. I think both of us knew that he didn’t really mean it.
Here’s an example of what I meant (I’m doing this from memory, so I might have the punctuation wrong. Roger Bobo was a tuba virtuoso.)

RECITAL
ROGER BOBO GIVES
RECITAL ON TUBA – headline in the Times

Eskimos in Manitoba
Barracuda off Aruba
Cock an ear when Roger Bobo
Starts to solo on the tuba.

Men of every station – pooh-bah
Nabob, bozo, toff, and hobo
Cry in unison, “Indubi-
Tably there is simply nobo-

Dy who oom-pahs on the tubo
Solo quite like Roger Bubo.


Update: A Boston.com article from September 2008 says that Updike himself, in a 1977 epilogue to the essay, recounted the missed connections that took him to Fenway that day.

I took a taxi to Beacon Hill and knocked on a door and there was nothing, just a basket for mail temporarily hung on the door. A bright brown basket. So I went, as promised, to the game and my virtue was rewarded.

Those last five words seem quintessentially Updike – the combination of being oh-so-pleased with himself and yet being able to look at himself with irony.

Curiouser and Curiouser

January 25, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – I saw it Saturday night, and the thing I found most curious was the passivity of the hero.

In case you hadn’t heard, the film is about a man who is born old and wizened and ages in reverse. As the years pass, his body grows ever more youthful, while his mind grows older in the usual way.

The film contains three stories:

1. A love story – Benjamin and Daisy. Fated to become lovers, and when they finally get together, they know that their love is doomed. Daisy will grow older while Benjamin physically becomes a child.
   
   
2. US History 101. The film paints Benjamin’s life, and Daisy’s, against the broader canvas of historical events – from Armistice Day to Hurricane Katrina – with some notable omissions, like the Depression.
   
   
3. Mother-daughter. Daisy, dying in a New Orleans hospital in the present, has her daughter read Benjamin’s diary to her. The Button story is told in these flashbacks. The mother satisfies her nostalgia, but the daughter is angry. “This is how you let me know who my father really was?” Or words to that effect. It was the only real dramatic conflict in the movie.

Through it all, Benjamin is strangely passive, especially for an American hero. Most leading men in US films don’t express much emotion, except anger. But they are usually men of action. (The trailers that preceded Button were full of guys chasing, shooting, fighting, blowing things up. Even the young women in the chick-flick trailer (Bride Wars) were slugging it out.) American protagonists take steps, tackle problems, compete, outwit outfight, etc. Benjamin, however, drifts along on the waves of history. He winds up in a naval battle, but as the bullets fly, we see him mostly lying on the floor of the tugboat while the boat ultimately destroys the German submarine.

He is passive with women as well, including the love of his life Daisy. He does go to Paris in pursuit of her, but when he finds that she has a boyfriend there, he’s very willing to take no for an answer and goes back to New Orleans. Years later, Daisy shows up and asks him to sleep with her. Here we finally see Benjamin as an active young man, riding a motorcycle, piloting a sailboat, making love. But these years, the late 1950s and the 60s, fly by in a nearly wordless montage that takes up only a few minutes in a film that lasts well over two and a half hours.

In the rest of the movie, Benjamin moves through life with a homey fatalism.

Along the way you bump into people who make a dent on your life. Some people get struck by lightning. Some are born to sit by a river. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim the English Channel. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people can dance.

No surprise that the screenwriter is the guy who wrote Forrest Gump. What is surprising – no, curious – is that these protagonists who passively observe life rather than trying to change it are the center of highly regarded American films – films that get nominated of Golden Globes and Oscars.

The Inaugural II - Just Another Word

January 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Barack Obama used the word freedom three times in his inaugural speech. Presidents often invoke values in their inaugurals, so I would have thought we’d hear more about freedom. I guess my baseline expectations had been raised during the Bush years. George W. used the word 27 times in his second inaugural. That was unusually high. But three is not unusually low. By historical standards, it’s about average.

I had been thinking of freedom as one of those eternal American values. But that’s not the picture that emerges from the chart of inaugural speeches.



Freedom seems to be mostly a word of the post-War era. Several earlier inaugurals use the word not at all – among them both of Washington’s, both of Lincoln’s, and FDR’s first two.

Freedom is also favored more by Republicans than by Democrats. Combining all post-War Republicans and all post-War Democrats, we get

• Democrats – 2.4 freedom per 1000 words
• Republicans – 4.4 freedom 1000 words

The Inaugural I - Talking ’Bout Generation

January 22, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a Wordle of President Obama’s inaugural speech. (And by the way, how does it feel to you to say that phrase, “President Obama”?)

(Click on the Wordle to see a larger version.)

The word that is strikingly present here in comparison with other inaugurals is generation. Ronald Reagan used the word not at all in his first inaugural and only once in his second – a call to protect future generations from government spending.

Other presidents have spoken of generations, but the word usually appears as part of the unity-of-history theme. The inaugural is a ritual, and rituals exist in sacred time, a time that links the present with the past. So inaugurals often refer to America “across the generations” and to our obligation to future generations.

But over this continuity-of-generations line, some presidents sound a different theme – the theme of generational change. The most notable and most quoted version is JFK’s “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Kennedy saw that new generation as already formed. He pointed to their shared experiences – “born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage”– and the shared values that emerged from those experiences – “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed.”

Obama, by contrast, sees himself and the generation that was such a crucial factor in his campaign with some uncertainty. It’s not about what they already are, it’s about what they will become. And that depends on how they respond to the crises that the previous generation has dumped on them. We are living in “a moment that will define a generation.”