When I read yesterday that the prolific American writer John Updike had died, I didn’t feel particularly moved. Martin Amis’s obituary in the Guardian ended with the observation: ‘This is a very cold day for literature.’ Well, Philistine that I am, I haven’t actually read any Updike, so I wouldn’t really know if it was a cold day, a cool day or any other sort of day. Perhaps when I have finished working my way through Dostoyevsky I ought to remedy this and see what all the fuss is about.
But today I was deeply saddened to hear that the great singer-songwriter John Martyn has died. He was one of the great musicians who didn’t really give a toss about playing the game and instead just kept on writing and recording beautiful songs. 
Why the difference in response when I heard of his demise only a day after that of Updike?
Much to my horror, I was in someone else’s office this afternoon when I read the news on the BBC website and nobody there had heard of him. Far be it from me to suggest they are cultural pygmies, but… well… they are.
The first time I heard John Martyn play live was in the mid-1980s at the Colston Hall in Bristol. The sound failed and, drunk as a skunk, Martyn struggled to keep a decent show on the road while attempts were being made to fix the problem. He tried (unsuccessfully) to tell jokes. He even tried singing songs from musicals. It was embarrassing and annoying – especially as I had paid good money when I had very little good money to spend.
But there was a rare honesty to his songs and he had a wonderful ability to make the guitar sing. Many people don’t realise that they know his songs because they have only heard them played by other artists: Sweet Little Mystery and Head and Heart are two of his most famous. Over four decades he managed to put into words and music the deepest experiences of a human being exploring the beauty of the world and love and loss at the same time as wrestling with the demons of drugs and alcohol. Out of the struggle came a rare beauty and an integrity that reads in his lyrics like the guileless openness of a child. Complex and inconsistent, he wrote and sang and played of life as it is – not as we think it ought to be.
I have thought for years that it is always the poets and musicians who tell the truth about the world and enable us to keep alive the hope of redemption amid the intricacies of life. It brings us back to Leonard Cohen’s ‘broken and holy hallelujah’. Like the poets of the Old Testament, who (as Walter Brueggemann put it) ‘kept alive the language of home’, it is the raw honesty of these guys that breaks through the polished conventions of ‘life’ and allows light to shine through the cracks of their brokenness into the worlds we inhabit. They articulate in word and sound what some of us struggle to formulate.
Anyway, it is a sad day and a great loss. And I am going to listen to Solid Air (1973) this evening while I read.
January 30, 2009 at 7:01 am
John Updike’s passing is sad, but he left a ton of awesome work. “Immortality is nontransferrable” he said appropriately.
January 30, 2009 at 10:22 am
Hallo Bishop Nick,
John Updike wrote a very interesting Essay about the Gospels… Perhaps you should read this beside reading Dostojewski or after finishing Dostojewski. It’s “hot” literature for theologians.
By the way, I am shure that Updike would like to hear the songs of John Martyn very much.
Matthias
January 30, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Updike also wrote ‘ A Month of Sundays” about a place where naughty vicars are sent to be sorted out and which I found very insightful at its conclusion.