Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  The participants who returned to Earth found that their ardor for the game had permanently cooled. As singer Andy Williams put it, “I don’t know, it just feels down here like you’re swinging underwater at lumps of putty.” Plans were projected for the next year’s competition, with an enlarged purse and solar-powered golf carts contributed by the Russians; but that autumn the major powers, honoring their commitments to the contending factions in the Ethiopian civil war, staged a prolonged nuclear exchange, and in the subsequent regression of technology not only was the secret of solid-fuel rockets lost but of tapered tempered-steel golf shafts as well.

  Tips on a Trip

  I HAVE BEEN ASKED† to write about golf as a hobby. But of course golf is not a hobby. Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer’s eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass, the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves. If neither work nor play, if more pain than pleasure but not essentially either, what, then, can golf be? Luckily, a word newly coined rings on the blank Formica of the conundrum. Golf is a trip.

  A non-chemical hallucinogen, golf breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyperconsciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria—golf so transforms one’s somatic sense, in short, that truth itself seems about to break through the exacerbated and as it were debunked fabric of mundane reality.

  An exceedingly small ball is placed a large distance from one’s face, and a silver wand curiously warped at one end is placed in one’s hands. Additionally, one’s head is set a-flitting with a swarm of dimly remembered “tips.” Tommy Armour says to hit the ball with the right hand. Ben Hogan says to push off with the right foot. Arnold Palmer says keep your head still. Arnold Palmer has painted hands in his golf book. Gary Player says don’t lift the left heel. There is a white circle around his heel. Dick Aultman says keep everything square, even your right foot to the line of flight. His book is full of beautiful pictures of straight lines lying along wrists like carpenter’s rules on planed wood. Mindy Blake, in his golf book, says “square-to-square” is an evolutionary half-step on the way to a stance in which both feet are skewed toward the hole and at the extremity of the backswing the angle between the left arm and the line to the target is a mere fourteen degrees. Not fifteen degrees. Not thirteen degrees. Fourteen degrees. Jack Nicklaus, who is a big man, says you should stand up to the ball the way you’d stand around doing nothing in particular. Hogan and Player, who are small men, show a lot of strenuous arrows generating terrific torque at the hips. Player says pass the right shoulder under the chin. Somebody else says count two knuckles on the left hand at address. Somebody else says no knuckle should show. Which is to say nothing about knees, open or closed clubface at top of backswing, passive right side, “sitting down” to the ball, looking at the ball with the left eye—all of which are crucial.

  This unpleasant paragraph above, strange to say, got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed. Golf converts oddly well into words. Wodehouse’s golf stories delighted me years before I touched a club. The tales of Jones’s Grand Slam and Vardon’s triumph over J. H. Taylor at Muirfield in 1896 and Palmer’s catching Mike Souchak at Cherry Hills in 1960 are always enthralling—as is, indeed, the anecdote of the most abject duffer. For example:

  Once, my head buzzing with a mess of anatomical and aeronautical information that was not relating to the golf balls I was hitting, I went to a pro and had a lesson. Put your weight on the right heel, the man told me, and then the left foot. “That’s all?” I asked. “That’s all,” he said. “What about the wrists pronating?” I asked. “What about the angle of shoulder-plane vis-à-vis that of hip-plane?” “Forget them,” he said. Ironically, then, in order to demonstrate to him the folly of his command (much as the Six Hundred rode into the valley of Death),* I obeyed. The ball clicked into the air, soared straight as a string, and fell in a distant ecstasy of backspin. For some weeks, harboring this absurd instruction, I went around golf courses like a giant, pounding out pars, humiliating my friends. But I never could identify with my new prowess; I couldn’t internalize it. There was an immense semi-circular area, transparent, mysterious, anesthetized, above the monotonous weight-shift of my feet. All richness had fled the game. So gradually I went back on my lessons, ignored my feet, made a number of other studied adjustments, and restored my swing to its original, fascinating terribilità.

  Like that golf story of mine? Let me tell you another: the greatest shot of my life. It was years ago, on a little dogleg left, downhill. Apple trees were in blossom. Or the maples were turning; I forget which. My drive was badly smothered, and after some painful wounded bounces found rest in the deep rough at the crook of the dogleg. My second shot, a 9-iron too tensely gripped, moved a great deal of grass. The third shot, a smoother swing with the knees nicely flexed, nudged the ball a good six feet out onto the fairway. The lie was downhill. The distance to the green was perhaps 210 yards at this point. I chose (of course) a 3-wood. The lie was not only downhill but sidehill. I tried to remember some tip about sidehill lies; it was either (1) play the ball farther forward from the center of the stance, with the stance more open, or (2) play the ball farther back, off a closed stance, or (3) some combination. I compromised by swinging with locked elbows and looking up quickly, to see how it turned out. A divot the size of an undershirt was taken some eighteen inches behind the ball. The ball moved a few puzzled inches. Now here comes my great shot. Perfectly demented by frustration, I swung as if the club were an ax with which I was reducing an orange crate to kindling wood. Emitting a sucking, oval sound, the astounded ball, smitten, soared far up the fairway, curling toward the fat part of the green with just the daintiest trace of a fade, hit once on the fringe, kicked smartly toward the flagstick, and stopped two feet from the cup. I sank the putt for what my partner justly termed a “remarkable six.”

  In this mystical experience, some deep golf revelation was doubtless offered me, but I have never been able to grasp it, or to duplicate the shot. In fact, the only two golf tips I have found consistently useful are these. One (from Jack Nicklaus): on long putts, think of yourself putting the ball half the distance and having it roll the rest of the way. Two (from I forget—the comic strip Mac Divot?): on chip shots, to keep from underhitting, imagine yourself throwing the ball to the green with the right hand.

  Otherwise, though once in a while a 7-iron rips off the clubface with that pleasant tearing sound, as if pulling a zipper in space, and falls toward the hole like a raindrop down a well; or a drive draws sweetly with the bend of the fairway and disappears, still rolling, far beyond the applauding sprinkler, these things happen in spite of me, and not because of me. On the golf course as nowhere else, the tyranny of causality is suspended, and life is like a dream.

  Is There Life After Golf?

  GOLF IN THE KINGDOM, by Michael Murphy, 205 pp. Viking, 1972.

  Like a religion, a game seeks to codify and lighten life. Played earnestly enough (spectatorship being merely a degenerate form of playing), a game can gather to itself awesome dimensions of subtlety and transcendental significance. Consult George Steiner’s hymn to the fathomless wonder of chess, or Roger Angell’s startlingly intense meditations upon the time-stopping, mathematical beauty of baseball. Some sports, surely, are more religious than others; ice hockey, fervent though its devotees be, retains a dross of brutal messiness, and handball, though und
oubtedly it has its fine points, has not generated many holy books. Golf, on the other hand, inspires as much verbiage as astrology. In the television era, the sport has added to its antiquity and air of privilege the cachet of sudden fame and fortune earned by broad-backed boys from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. Millions now trudge out to the dawn starting lines inwardly clutching a tip from the Saturday sports page or the driving-range pro; an esoteric cult has become a mass cult while remaining esoteric. In Palmer’s disastrous lapses, in Casper’s persistent slump, golf reasserts its essential enigma. It is of games the most mysterious, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest. The exaltation of its great spaces; the eerie effortlessness of a good shot; the hellish effortfulness of a bad round; the grotesque disparity between a drive that eats up two-thirds of the fairway and the ten-yard dribble hit with an almost identical swing; the unpredictable warps and turns of fortune in the game; its tranced silences; its altering perspectives; its psychosomatic sensitivity to our interior monologue and the sway of our moods; the sullen, menacing sheen the monotonous grass can suddenly assume; the quirks of visibility; the dread of lostness; the ritual interment and resurrection of the ball at each green—such are the ingredients that make golf seem a magic mirror, an outward projection of an inner self. Even the most mechanical-minded books about golf evoke, for initiates, the game’s verdant mysteries; Michael Murphy, in his curious and benign memoir Golf in the Kingdom, takes these mysteries as his major topic.

  Mr. Murphy, a Californian, is a co-founder of the Esalen Institute, described on the book jacket’s back flap as “a research and development center established to explore those trends in the behavioral sciences, religion, and philosophy which emphasize the potentialities and values of human existence.” On the back of the jacket he is grinning with perfect teeth, and but for a faraway, faintly metaphysical gleam in his eyes he might be one of the interchangeable square-jawed young pros who clutter the tournament circuit with their competence. His book appears to be as open as his visage—he talks about himself as harried executive and student truthseeker; he names friends and gives dates, he describes rounds of golf we do not doubt he has played. Yet the basic autobiographical episode, involving a Scots guru/pro named Shivas Irons, is, like the name itself, frankly fantastic. The book liltingly begins:

  In Scotland, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay, lies the Kingdom of Fife—known to certain lovers of that land simply as “The Kingdom.” There, on the shore of the North Sea, lies a golfing links that shimmers in my memory—an innocent stretch of heather and grassy dunes that cradled the unlikely events which grew into this book.… There I met Shivas Irons, introduced to me simply as a golf professional, by accident one day in June 1956. I played a round of golf with him then, joined him in a gathering of friends that evening, followed him into a ravine at midnight looking for his mysterious teacher, watched him go into ecstatic trance as the sun came up, and left for London the following afternoon—just twenty-four hours after we had met—shaken, exalted, my perception of things permanently altered.

  Mr. Murphy was on his way to India, to study philosophy and practice meditation with the seer Aurobindo, and it may be that he retrospectively assigned much of what he learned there to this mythical golf instructor, who plays supernaturally well, keeps a library of the occult in his digs, and, in the dead of the night, scores a hole-in-one with a feather-stuffed ball and an antique shillelagh belonging to an immortal hermit named Seamus MacDuff. Yet the course, called Burningbush, is by its location and layout recognizably St. Andrews—golf’s holy place. The book never totally strays from its base subject of golf, and it even contains some practical tips: Don’t strain after a good score, play it as it lies, don’t seek total control. “Let the nothingness into yer shots,” Shivas tells Murphy—a memorable admonition to all of us who, not trusting the unconscious mechanics of the swing, smother the ball with too much hand and arm action. When Murphy tenses up on the first tee, Shivas makes a gesture that eases him “into a feeling of stomach and hips, making a center there for my swing.” The well-worn advice “Hit from the inside” is metaphysicalized to “Ken the world from the inside.” Warming to his theme of “true gravity,” Shivas bids his pupil “feel yer inner body.” Murphy, evidently a natural athlete, travels, club in hand, through a number of yogalike states (he feels like an hourglass, then enormously tall), and sees turquoise “auras” expand and contract, and experiences other vivid intimations of “energy-dimensions” that might more disturb than settle your average twenty-handicapper. Unity and harmony are the goals of Shivas’ instruction; imagine the ball and the “sweet spot” on the club as one, he says. Further, see and feel “the club and ball as one unbroken field.” Further still, “sometimes a path appears in your mind’s eye for the ball to follow: let it blend with your body.” Murphy recalls a moment on Burningbush when all his senses joined: “For the moment … the world was a single field of music, joy, and light.” Shivas has the ultimate word: “Aye ane fiedle [always one field] afore ye e’re swung.”

  This religious bias, which would break down the opposition between game and player, between striker and thing struck, between man and landscape, comes as alien to the Occidental followers of aggressive Yahweh and tragic Jesus. This Occidental, for one, remains suspicious of a cosmic philosophy that so easily devolves into golf instruction. Murphy, drawing upon Shivas’ supposed journals, has little trouble expanding the first part of his book, the golf part, into the comprehensive mysteries of the second. Because of the lightness of the golf ball (one and a half ounces), Shivas is led to conclude that the world, too, is feather-light, “an earthy nothingness.” It is also “an icon of Man the Multiple Amphibian, a smaller, waffled version of the crystal ball, a mirror for the inner body; it is a lodestone, an old stone to polarize your psyche with.” Its whiteness suggests (hello, Melville) the terror of the hueless void; its flight serves as “reminder of our hunting history and our future powers of astral flight.” The hole is another mystery, linked to nostrils and other significant bodily apertures; Jean-Paul Sartre is called in to testify (from Being and Nothingness): “A good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places, in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude.” Not all such symbol-spinning is vapid, but it does border on the facile and the fanciful—less mysticism than mystchief. And it reduces, in practice, all this talk about luminous bodies and manifesting planes, about hamartia and darshan, about Agni the Primal Fire and the Net of Jewels, to something like witchcraft. The victory of Jack Fleck over Ben Hogan in the 1955 Open, for instance, is explained to have been Fleck’s appropriation of Hogan’s “inner body,” and Murphy relates that while watching a baseball game he and his neighbors in the stands set up a “psychic firestorm” that permanently injured the opposing pitcher’s arm. Even if it works, is black magic what we need now? “ ’Tis a thin line,” Shivas himself says, “ ’tween the madness of God and the madness of the Devil.”

  The Western spirit longs for a peaceable creed that would flatter the flesh instead of mortifying it, that would blur away the painful mind-body split and ease the agonies of egoism. But these wisdoms imported from the Orient have a disturbing way of melting into physical therapy—of a harmless, deep-breathing, sweet-swinging sort—and trivial spookiness. In regard to traditional Christian problems like the existence of evil and the paradoxes of ethical action, Golf in the Kingdom says little. During the raucous symposium that follows his round of golf with Shivas, Murphy claims, there was a “lively discussion of shanking and the problem of evil,” but we never hear it. Murphy/Shivas does offer, for the length of a page, ethical distinctions between “Mind-at-Large” and “Higher Self”; it is good to know the latter before you drown in the former. LSD is distinguished from disciplined contemplation, moral entropy from nirvana. “Ye need a solid place to swing from,” Shivas says, which is half of the truth; you also need a spot to aim at. Shiv
as would be a complete prophet if the world were a golf course and life a game. In a game, purposes and means are indisputably ordained; in golf, rules regulate the most minute points of etiquette and equipment. A golf wherein some players were using tennis rackets and hockey pucks, some were teeing off backward from the green to the tee, and some thought the object of the game was to spear other players with the flagsticks—such a contest might produce a philosophy we could carry everywhere. As it is, analogies should be very tenderly extended outward from an island that, like golf, has been created as an artificial haven from real problems. Even within the analogy, Murphy is limited by his natural happiness at the game; for a description of the infernal misery possible within golf, read George Plimpton’s The Bogey Man, especially the terrifying chapter wherein Plimpton practices with four golf balls on a tinselly, night-lit par-three course in the desert, each ball diabolically possessed of individual bad habits.

  Yet there is much wit and good will in Golf in the Kingdom. “We are spread wide as we play, then brought to a tiny place” beautifully describes both golf and life. And why not make the world more of a golf course, where our acts would take validity from within, and we would replace our divots in apology for each blow, and joy would attach to the leisurely walking, the in-between times? There is a goodness in the experience of golf that may well be, as Mr. Murphy would have it, a pitha, “a place where something breaks into our workaday world and bothers us forevermore with the hints it gives.”

  Golf in the Kingdom put me in mind of another curious devotional work, William Price Fox’s Doctor Golf, published in 1963 and long out of print. Doctor Golf, a fanatic even quainter and keener than Shivas Irons, runs a thirty-nine-member golf sanctuary in Arkansas called Eagle-Ho, refers to “young Hagen,” advocates caddie-flogging, sells by mail order a clanking, cumbersome line of golf paraphernalia, and conducts a large correspondence. When one correspondent writes, “I am in my 65th year and I have been seized by golf like a mouse in the claws of a golden eagle,” Doctor Golf congratulates him: