The Tribune's Missed Opportunity

The Eagle-Tribune didn't print this obituary (kind of) for John Updike that I penned the evening of his death. Here, I share it with you.

Adieu, Mr. Updike

By Matthew Osgood

“Who will do it again? That’s it: No one;

Imitators and descendants aren’t the same.”

-John Updike, Perfection Wasted (1990)

During my second semester of college, I, as a young journalist, was introduced for the first time to John Updike though his iconic 1961 article in The New Yorker, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” about Ted Williams final game at Fenway Park. If you haven’t read it, look it up. It is required reading for sports fans and non-sports fans alike. As a writer green to the profession, I was stunned and awed by the deviation from the characteristic restriction of language usually displayed by journalists. The lyricism, the insight, and the mastery of consciousness and idiom showed a level of journalism I’d never seen. The language impacted legions of journalists. Of course, I was one of the many to count his influence.

I was blindsided by the news of his death when I heard through a friend in the newspaper business on Tuesday evening. We lost a giant of the writing field, who, at the time of his death at the age of 76 had produced an incredibly immense portfolio of fiction, short stories, essays, and poems. If he wasn’t the greatest writer of our time, he’s on the very short list. To provide a little perspective, news of Updike’s death appeared on the main page of the online versions of at least the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

I learned about Updike’s writing during my undergraduate years at Springfield College through my journalism professor. This valuable recommendation encouraged me, as the years progressed towards my own endeavors into the education field, to share Updike’s writing with own my classroom. He was a champion for the cause of the literary-minded; He was not a sports writer, he was a writer who wrote about sports on occasion.

When a favorite writer dies, it’s an odd sensation. You feel like you’ve spent countless hours with him because, in essence, you have. If you’re a writer, you read authors like Updike and marvel at their use of tone, syntax, and language. You read every individual sentence with an incredible amount of attention to detail and shake your head at the idea that anyone can write that way. It’s like watching Larry Bird hit jumper after jumper. That’s what John Updike did. He used erudite words that sometimes necessitated a dictionary and they were always used correctly, he provided an insight into American society that no one else could have provided, and he made you feel, as you read his essays, novels, or criticisms, that he was writing to and for you.

Updike was a staunch Red Sox fan. A native Pennsylvanian, he came to the Commonwealth to study at Harvard University and never left. He wrote numerous pieces on the Boston Red Sox teams from the ill-fated 1967 squad to the present day juggernaut. He was one of the very few remaining old-fashioned journalists. Updike lived the writer’s dream of doing the one thing he loved for a living. It’s a pipe-dream for some, but he made it seem that much more realistic.

Time and time again we return to our favorite writers. Their ability to enliven us and console us is unmatched. We re-read in between other writer’s novels. We dog-ear pages with our favorite passages, and overzealously share them with our friends. We look to our favorite writers to articulate our sentiments on love and death, weddings vows and national tragedies. When that writer’s voice is silenced, the words endure, which is where the deceased author’s fans take solace. The well will eventually run dry, new words will cease to emerge, but the enduring ones will persist and resonate even more profoundly than ever.

Every writer fantasizes about a chance meeting with one of their literary heroes. This is especially encouraging with Updike, who lived a short drive away in Beverly Farms. He seemed accessible to writers in this area, a guy who you’d run into after church on an idle Sunday morning who would be willing to grab a coffee and talk about the craft of writing, or recommend a book.

And so we waited, like Updike did in the “lyric little bandbox” that is Fenway Park on September 28, 1960 for our hero to give us a curtain call, to emerge from the dugout one final time and give us just a wave of the cap. I should have known better; As Updike told us in that article many years ago, gods do not answer letters.