HOME / culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.

Slate Bids Updike AdieuEditors and writers remember John Updike.

Posted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 3:24 PM ET

Click here to read Troy Patterson's obituary of John Updike, and here to read John Irving on receiving Updike's mail.

John Updike died of lung cancer in Danvers, Mass., on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009, at the age of 76. Updike's career spanned five decades, and his work brightened every corner of American letters. He is perhaps best known for his four Rabbit novels, which chronicled the life of a former Pennsylvania high-school basketball star, but he also wrote acclaimed stories, poetry, essays, criticism, and meditations on the meaning of golf. In the following roundup, editors and authors remember Updike.

RSS

Chip Kidd, author, graphic designer
My relationship to Mr. Updike and his work is varied and curious. First, I was born and raised in the exact same small town in southeastern Pennsylvania as he (Shillington). His father, Wesley, was my father's high-school math teacher, and they were quite fond of each other. As I grew up, my dad would regale us with stories about the "real" Harry Angstrom from the Rabbit books, a local former Shillington High basketball star since gone to seed.

In college, my very first assignment in Introduction to Graphic Design was to create a cover for Updike's Museums and Women, a short-story collection. My solution (which I'd thought brilliant at the time and which certainly was not) was roundly dismissed by my teacher, who suggested that perhaps I was better suited to another line of work.

So it was more than a little—what? ironic? fateful?—that I would be hired directly out of school to be a book-jacket designer at Knopf, eventually designing covers for … you guessed it. Working with and for Mr. Updike was an honor and a treat, and because he was so prolific—not only in quantity but in type of book (novel, poems, essays, criticism)—there were many different kinds of design scenarios. One extreme was his habit of drawing up by hand the entire cover layout, including type specs, which I or another of us in the art department would then execute. On the other end of the spectrum, he would occasionally let us do whatever we wanted. And then everything in between. The last book of his I worked on, Terrorist (a novel), was a very happy collaboration. He had found the art, but I ended up laying it out in a way he didn't expect at all (upside-down) yet was delighted by.

I feel so incredibly fortunate and proud to have known and worked with this truly great American artist.

Anne Fadiman, author
Updike surrounds me. Thirty-three of his books crowd my shelves, some of them read so often and so strenuously that their covers have parted from their spines. Above my desk hangs an author photo Xeroxed from the hardback edition of Assorted Prose, his first nonfiction collection. Updike sent it to me in 1997 after reading a nostalgic essay I'd written about the paperback edition. (I'd noted the courage he displayed in allowing his substantial nose to be photographed in profile; in the picture he sent me, he faces the camera head on, looking rumpled and heartbreakingly young.) No boy-band groupie could have been more overjoyed to receive a missive from the object of her affections. For more than two decades, Updike's ravishing sentences had set a bar I knew my own could never reach but toward which they longingly inclined.

Not long afterwards, I became the editor of a small quarterly called The American Scholar. Over the next seven years, Updike submitted work, mostly poetry, at regular intervals. The arrival of an envelope from Beverly Farms, Mass.—cheap, white, with the home address stamped smudgily in the top left corner—never failed to make my heart skip. My favorite Updike poem was "Transparent Stratagems," nine unrhymed quatrains inspired by a Scientific American article on transparent marine animals: siphonophores, Venus's girdles, jellyfish, and roachlike creatures whose needle-shaped guts rendered their partly digested but still-opaque contents as inconspicuous as possible. (Who but the polymorphously curious Updike could have found poetry in this subject?) He didn't let us publish "Transparent Stratagems" until, over the course of six months, he had sent in four versions. It didn't matter that our circulation was modest and our honoraria microscopic. What mattered was getting every word and rhythm right. He changed "boundariless" to "unbounded" and finally to "boundless"; "unsolid" to "sun-shunned" and then back to "unsolid"; "slants" to "tilts"; "tear" to "shred"; "seized" to "ambushed." He deleted qualifiers ("a bit," "so-called"), replaced a comma with an exclamation point and a dash with a semicolon. I'd always imagined that his sentences were born perfect, like Athena from the head of Zeus, but it was even better to see that perfection required work.

On Tuesday morning, when I heard he had died, I took out the Updike file and, swallowing hard, reread the contents of the "Transparent Stratagems" folder. From his letters: