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Slate Bids Updike AdieuEditors and writers remember John Updike.

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

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3/14/2000. "Here is a poem I've been trying to work into shape, though the material may be refractory."
3/21/2000. "Well, knock me over with a jellyfish, I'm delighted you want to take that poem. … Being invisible with only your food showing–disgusting to think about, actually."
6/1/2000. "I've been worrying about 'Transparent Stratagems'–it seems long for what it does, and the four-line stanzas spin it out a little clunkily. Try this version, without the stanza breaks and the blank verse a bit regularized."
7/2/2000. "I have gratefully bowed to your preferences—most noticeably, in restoring the quatrains, which do indeed break up the somewhat dense matter and work, sometimes, as verse units. I just am wearying, I guess, in my verse, of these ghost forms—sonnets that don't rhyme or break into octave and sestet, quatrains that run on like free verse."
7/17/2000. "Do you think our correspondence will make it into the Fitzgerald-Maxwell Perkins category, or shall we settle for Granville Barker-Bernard Shaw?"
Undated. "All this for $100?" (Actually, we paid him $50.)

Can it really be that John Updike will never write another sentence?

Michael Agger, senior editor, Slate
I read John Updike as a Pennsylvanian. Beached in my hometown of Bethlehem ("The Christmas City") one summer, I sped through the four Rabbit novels. They're set in a fictional version of Reading, Pa., and Updike's writing entered and magnified everything around me. The squat brick homes now vibrated with uneasy dreams, and the low ridge of mountains were now Updike's "damp green hills" of Pennsylvania, a landscape from which young lives were launched and where they sputtered.

The Rabbit books also inspired my first (and only) literary pilgrimage: I visited Updike's town of Shillington, found his old house, and found the alley that must have been the model for the opening moments of Rabbit, Run when Rabbit joins a pick-up basketball game with school kids. I couldn't believe how such ordinary stuff, such a day-to-day little place, had been reworked into a multiplex human fiction. To this day, I still think of Rabbit Angstrom as someone I knew, an uncle who died when I was in college.

Updike wrote so much that there are many Updikes. I cling to the Pennsylvania Updike—the questing narrator of "Flight," the ironic ad-man of Of the Farm. Those books contain slivers of my own past rendered more precisely than I ever could. The danger of reading Updike is that he overwhelms your native sensibility (see Nicholson Baker's U and I), but I'm not complaining. It's a bit like having been Proust's neighbor in Combray. Farewell, John. Thanks for the memories.

J. D. McClatchy, poet, editor, the Yale Review
In 2007 I had the honor of presenting John Updike with the Gold Medal for Fiction at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It is not given often, and over the century had been presented to William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and a few others. The first award the Academy had given John was in 1960, for his very first novel, and four years later he was elected a member. There is a good deal of gray hair on the top of those academicians, and it is astonishing to realize that John was just 32 when he was tapped. Henry James was 55 when he was elected, Edith Wharton was 64, and Sinclair Lewis 55. But by 32 Updike had already written The Centaur and Rabbit, Run, and staked out the territory he explored with acuity and virtuosity for decades. As a realist, he knew that the novelist's task is not merely the accumulation but the illumination of details. That, in turn, was accompanied not merely by a keen observation of the murky secrets repressed beneath the bright façade but by revealing that tension between inner and outer in sentences of astonishing lyrical grace and rhetorical power. If sex and religion—his moral arena—preoccupied many of his chronicles of American life, it was because he wanted to discover how we cling to the moment and to something beyond the moment, or what he once called "the tension and guilt of being human."

When he came up to the lectern that afternoon to receive the medal, he reminisced about all his years as a member of the Academy, but then went on to talk about the mysteries of fiction. "Its purpose is a matter of debate, its practice a matter more of feel than of rules. For all that is said, and taught, about the art and craft of fiction, there remains something incorrigibly amateurish about it; time and again a novice puts his or her hand to it and leaves us so-called professional practitioners in the shade. After more than a half-century of living by and for fiction, I can only tell you that it takes everything you can give it—every inspiration, every flight of imagery—and wants more; and that, in the writing of it, when it's going even half-well, there is a distinct bliss to it; and that there is nothing like it for taking hold of the many-sided, volatile, fraught, live truth of the human condition." That is just what he gave us. He painted the nation's spiritual portrait, and in times to come we will return to his novels to find ourselves—sympathetically and mercilessly displayed—in ways that will continue to startle and stir.

Ann Hulbert, books editor, Slate
John Updike was a writer you could entrust to a young editor: His prose required no tinkering. It welcomed a devoted eye. More than two decades ago, when I worked on the New Republic's back-of-the-book section, I was thrilled to be handling what I'm pretty sure was the first piece on art he ever wrote for the magazine, on Fairfield Porter. I proudly ushered his tidy typewritten manuscript—how neatly he'd penned in a few last-minute changes—through the typesetting process. Then I eagerly awaited the task of going over the galleys. Scrutinizing those sentences was a chance to learn from the master—to appreciate up close the way he made words do what Chardin's brush could manage with a peeled lemon: At his best, Updike caught the depths, the shifting lights and shadows, beneath the exquisitely rendered surfaces. I marked the typos as neatly as he had made those small revisions of his and I mailed the long galley sheets back, along with a letter (how I slaved over it) asking him to let me know if he saw anything I'd missed.