Josh's post

I never met Ted Williams and never met John Updike.  They are somewhat intertwined in my head, of course, because of this essay from 1960, republished in the Boston Globe on the occasion of Williams' death.

Now Updike has passed on as well and that occasion loses us as great a reporter of the times in which we have lived as there has ever been.
It is impossible for me, usually, to take time out during the week to write a diary, but it is equally impossible for me to let this event pass.  It is as important to me as was the death of Ted Williams and for many of the same reasons.  There was nobody better at what he did.

Harry Angstrom is probably the most famous of Updike's "spokesmen":  the Rabbit of "Rabbit, Run" and a series that ended with "Rabbit Remembered."  Harry, though also departed, remains with everyone who "knew" him as do so many others from so many books.  I never read anything that Updike wrote that was not compelling and revealing even of things I did not want to consider.  That was his greatness.

"Couples," "The Witches of Eastwick," the various descriptions of the life of another of Updike's stable, the quite imitable Henry Bech as well as the Maples, "Roger's Version"---all of these, plus his literary criticism, and essays were indispensable guides to growing up and when I wound up in college in the early 1970s, they told me many of the things nobody else was willing to communicate.

I am so sorry I never got to meet him, but I will get over it in part by this, written about the moments after Williams' last at bat, when everyone around him begged that he acknowledge the cheers due him for the home run he hit and the career that had ended:


I wonder what Reverend Eccles would say now.