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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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"Some people say that I am," he replied with a grin.

"Oh. My name is John, too."

My witty riposte hung in the air for a long moment, until finally the elevator doors opened on the sleepy lobby. It was Updike's opportunity to flee, and if I'd been him, I'd have taken it. Instead, he asked if I was from Beverly, and seemed genuinely pleased to discover that we lived off the same loping street, down near West Beach. He asked what brought me to the library. Surely he had more pressing matters before him—a review of a new Helen Keller biography would appear a few weeks later in The New Yorker—but he took the time to be neighborly to a tongue-tied shopping-cart shagger. Such gifts, but also such graciousness. Hey, Philadelphia—you can keep the Navy.

Sven Birkerts, author
Like some others, I had my "Updike problem" in recent years. I thought he should have practiced more literary "tantra," holding the prose back for better eventual issue—this in spite of the fact that I understood deeply his contention, made public I forget where, that only by writing every day could he certify not just his literary citizenship, but his title to existing. Still, since I heard the news of his death, he has been front and center in my thoughts. It's as if another vast shelf of language, a landmass outcropping, had sheered off. Bellow, Mailer, Sontag, and now Updike. These were the presiding figures of my first formation, the ones who gave me the certainty that writing mattered. Updike was the sentence guru; he showed me just what lyric accuracy a string of words could accomplish. Back then, in my teens, it was all about surfaces—the world rendered. Now I see that it's more about memory, the life of the senses refracted back through time, becoming a code for the emotion of being alive. Being alive is an emotion—Updike persuaded me of that. Harry Angstrom working the remains of a caramel from his molar is a straight shunt to the living human now.

My one contact with the man lasted for a stutter and a gulp. I was in New York, attending some large literary event. There was a reception, and in the breath-catching moment when the crowd opened, I saw that I was just a few feet away from Updike. John Updike. He was—could this be?—unattended. I took it as my sign. I stepped over and introduced myself. I offered the standard-issue, but sincere, praise of the work. As memory has it, Updike blinked and tipped his head down so that he was looking over his glasses. There was a pursed smile. "You look so much younger than you sound on paper," he said. "I thought you'd be a good deal older." A compliment or a subtle dig? I'll never know, but I grinned like the young man I was. And I felt right then that a circuit had closed, one that had started in early high school when I bought the blue paperback of The Centaur and took in the first sharp cut of his prose.

Brad Leithauser, poet
For the aspiring young writer—such as I once was and as my students are today—there's an especially acute if poignant pleasure in feeling that someone has gotten in just ahead of you. You come across a bright observation, an astute simile, a nimble play on words, and you think, I might have come up with that. While you may regret being pre-empted, there's a compensatory thrill in feeling that you've become part of a loose collaborative exercise, that you're pursuing the same ends: You're a writer among writers, combing the streets in search of unexpected vistas, curious encounters, lost coins.

It's mostly a misconception, of course—this sensation that you might have arrived at the same admirable observation, simile, wordplay … But one remains forever grateful to the writer who inspires this illusion, and when I first began to read Updike seriously—in the late '60s, when I was in high school—I was time and again struck by this feeling. I mention this only because so many writers of my generation had the same experience; in our populous but scattered literary world, the debt to Updike runs very deep. He continually left one imagining, If I'd only been a little more astute or industrious or venturesome, I might have thought of that. Or, If I'd only been John Updike, I might have written like John Updike.

Paul Berman, author
I love Updike's writing so much I can barely read it. My eye falls on a sentence. My mood has already improved. I slam the book shut. Another sentence may do me in. Still, I read on, and my mood goes vaulting upward yet again. This isn't reading; this is drinking. I read him in order to become ebullient. Those extra words he plunks into his sentences, the unusual images, the way that everything seems to shimmer, his habit of dissolving each new visible thing into microscopic radiant glints of God knows what—every last over-the-top element of Updike's prose has the effect of lighting me up.

I think Updike became somewhat neurotic in his later years, annoyed at his own readers, intent on finding ever more aggressively humble postures to adopt. I blame America. Updike was well-appreciated, but not sufficiently well, even if he won all the prizes. There are two parties in the American literary world, the Updikeans and the anti-Updikeans, and the Updikeans will someday be redeemed. He wrote better book reviews than everyone else. But why didn't he like Emerson more than he did? My first emotion on learning that Updike had died was a stab of regret that now I will never learn. I am stuck with my own puzzlement—the form my reader's grief has taken.