His Essays on Golf: Much Ado About Nothingness

For almost 40 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike has been writing about golf with perhaps as much passion and certainly more precision than when he plays the game.

He was inspired to do both, write and play, as a teenager in part by reading P.G. Wodehouse, who once said that he suspected that golf was less a microcosm of life than life was a microcosm of golf.

In the last of his four Rabbit Angstrom novels, “Rabbit at Rest,” Updike also tells us of the lessons in one that can be applied to the other when he writes:

“Always, golf for him holds out the hope of perfection, of a perfect weightlessness and consummate ease, for now and again it does happen, happens in three dimensions, shot after shot.

“But then he gets human and tries to force it, to make it happen to get ten extra yards, to steer it, and it goes away, grace you could call it, the feeling of collaboration, of being bigger than he really is.”

Rabbit eventually has a heart attack and is attended by doctors who resemble Raymond Floyd, Tom Kite and Greg Norman.

Unless a reader follows the PGA Tour and was paying close attention, he or she might not have picked up on that in the novel because the doctors are named Breit, Raymond and Olman.

But Updike lets us in on the joke in his latest offering, “Golf Dreams,” a collection of 30 of his essays about the sport that have appeared in magazines from Golf Digest to the New Yorker, as well as his novels.

Readers might not learn much about golf from reading the book, but they are guaranteed to learn about the people who play it. Upon completing the last essay, readers will not be surprised to learn that Updike once said, “I am curiously, disproportionately, undeservedly happy on a golf course . . . “

Here, he talks with The Times about golf, golfers and other related subjects:

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Question: It seems as if many of the most memorable books about sports in the United States have golf or baseball as their themes. What is it about those sports that lend themselves to the written word?

Answer: They both are visible games, unlike sports like football, hockey and basketball that are a little like scrums. Hidden. Baseball and golf are out there for people to see.

Also, both speak to Americans’ need for space, the sense of the lone agonist pitting his skills and wits against adversity. I haven’t played baseball in a while, but I remember it very clearly coming down much of the time to a duel between pitcher and batter. Certainly in golf, nobody can do it for you. Every stroke is your doing. Every mistake has a consequence.

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Q: You mention Wodehouse in your essays. How much did his writing about golf influence you to play the game?

A: As a kid in Pennsylvania, I read a lot of Wodehouse. The game seemed amusing and European, the greenness and frills of it all. It was all pretty funny. Yet, a certain sense of the game came through. I also read English murder mysteries. In both Agatha Christie and Niall Marsh, golf figured as a pertinence of upper middle-class life.

I couldn’t play until I was 25 and had moved to New England. Golf was unattainable at our economic standard. We weren’t country-club people. But all of that reading enhanced my sense of golf as a green heaven on my horizon.

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Q: You also refer in your essays to Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom,” which is a look at the mystical side of golf. If beginning golfers asked you which books they should carry in their bags, would you recommend that one or others with more traditional, instructional advice?

A: I was much taken with “Golf in the Kingdom.” Let the nothingness into your swing. That’s a perfect description of how a golf swing ought to feel. You have to let it happen instead of making it happen. That’s one book you should have.

Harvey Penick’s books also return us out of this morass of golf tips. He says a swing should be like swinging a weed cutter. That seems like a fairly natural motion. So there would be that one.

As for instructional books, I read many of them. Ben Hogan was a marvelous golfer, but his “Power Golf” was anything but nothingness. There is too much effort in his version of a swing. I prefer Tommy Armour. He tries to make the game seem fairly simple.

But I’m not sure if you can carry around more than about two thoughts about your game on the course. All the instruction seems to melt away. What works on Wednesday doesn’t on Friday.

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Q: You returned last week from playing golf in Scotland, which is treated almost as a holy land in “Golf in the Kingdom.” Do you find something mystical about playing there?

A: Maybe I’m brainwashed, but you do feel you’re at the source of a magical game. There’s also a real beauty to seaside links. It’s an exhilarating landscape.

You feel that golf there is the way golf should be played. Certainly it’s an illusion, but it seems as if the courses are on land there that was meant for nothing else but playing the game. The courses don’t seem to be carved out of the land like they are here.

There’s also a fair but strict sort of punishment. The worse your mistake, the more severe the penalty. Fairways are green troughs lined with less green rough that represents a slight penalty. On the outside of that is brown, harsher rough. Then there is the gorse, which is hopeless. In that way, the courses teach you how to play golf. The only way to hit the ball is into the green.

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Q: One of the chapters in your book is called, “The Trouble With Caddies.” That must mean you don’t like to use them. Did you have one in Scotland?

A: I always try to avoid caddies. They add an element of self-consciousness to the experience.

Until the last day in Scotland, I carried my own clubs, which was not difficult because I only carry a couple of metal woods and a set of irons. The last day, I did have a caddie who was very nice and eager to please and overwhelmed me with advice about how to hit it.

If you’re not a robotic personality, you conduct an inner struggle with the caddie. I played well until the last round, and the last round undid me. But Scotland is experiencing difficult economic times, and as I was a visitor in their country, I felt I should hire someone.

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Q: You write that you’ve spent too much of your life watching other men play golf. Does that include the pros? What can average golfers learn from them?

A: I watch a lot of golf on TV and one thing you learn from the professionals is about character. All of them have good swings. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t. But there’s something else that the Nicklauses, Palmers and Trevinos have, an extra something from inside. Maybe Tiger Woods has it. He certainly seems to be taking the game to another level, if that can be done.

You also learn what a great variety of swings can produce a great shot. It’s not the mechanical thing we sometimes think. Look at Lee Trevino, all his low scores and championships. I don’t know how he did it all those years.

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Q: If you could play with any professionals from the past or now, who would you choose?

A: It has to be a discouraging experience to play with really good golfers. It would show off my own shabby game. But if I had to choose someone, it would be Sam Snead. His swing was the ideal of integrity. I’m also drawn to Tom Lehman. He has that same animal grace that Snead has.

But I’m really not a celebrity chaser, just like I’m not a celebrity course chaser. For me, any course will do. I have the same problems on all of them.

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Q: Are there authors or characters in literature that, if they played golf, you’d like to have in your foursome?

A: I would like to have played with Marcel Proust. People imagine that he was always ill, but he was a robust soldier when he was young. I would imagine that his swing would have been effortless, easy and fluid. Nobody writes as fluidly as he did.

As for characters, not Gatsby. I imagine that he would have been jittery, always asking for a gimme. Not Ahab. His peg leg would have made dents in the greens. How about Pierre from “War and Peace?” He was big, bearish and clumsy, but truly heroic. I could have played a round with Pierre without feeling outclassed.

I don’t mind playing with women. I grew up in the same county as Betsy King, and I always followed her game. I don’t know if Madame Bovary would have had much of a swing. But Anna Karenina? Yes, she was athletic, elastic and a straight shooter.

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Q: Forgive the impertinence, but what is your handicap?

A: Nineteen. It would be higher if I turned in all my scores.

I was down to 17 at one point, but I really have played poorly the last couple of summers. I would like to be a bogey golfer. I’d like to get it down to 18. If you play each hole one over par, you can have a lot of fun.