W
hen I heard that John Updike had died on Jan. 27, 2009, at the age of 76, a series of thoughts ran through my mind simultaneously. I’ve been reading Updike since I was in junior high school. After I had finished my homework and studied for whatever exams, I would read one of Updike’s stories, because it put me in touch with “literature” and made me think about the subtleties of life. I remember Rabbit Run (1960), the first of four Rabbit novels, and how I looked forward each night to reading another chapter about this guy named Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom who ran out on his wife and child. My memory then jumped ahead, to how I used to promote Updike as a Nobel Prize candidate, putting him among the handful of American writers I thought worthy. I remembered what writers I had interviewed said about Updike. I also thought of Herb Yellin, the publisher of Lord John Press, who once mentioned he had every foreign and domestic edition of Updike’s. He began publishing Updike’s stories and essays as beautiful private editions in the ’60s 58
APRIL 2009
AM0904_p58.indd 58
AUTOGRAPH
and became a close friend of the writer. “He was very important to me,” Yellin told me when I called to express my condolences. “It’s been 50 years of knowing somebody. We had a special connection—we weren’t brothers or related, but it felt like that. I started reading him from the beginning; his writing spoke personally to me. We had a wonderful literary correspondence over the years. Whenever he came to Los Angeles I would see him, we’d go for dinner. He knew of my collection of all his books, and he said he liked that if anything ever happened to his own collection, he had my collection on the opposite side of the country.” I reminded Yellin that I had tried unsuccessfully to get Updike to agree to do the Playboy interview with me. Playboy rarely interviews writers, but Updike was on the short list, and try as I did, he never said yes. Not even after I told him how I had spent 10 days interviewing the reclusive Marlon Brando and had once served in the Peace Corps in West Africa, where his novel The Coup took place, and how I thought we could cover some of that ground in our conversation. He responded to my letter, but not in the affirmative. IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
3/12/2009 9:31:46 PM