Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  Depending on how long you made your welcome last, you probably noticed when the two Does get to laughing throatily together Mary looks a little anxious, her eyes shuttling from one to another and her teeth nibbling her lower lip. We always thought that maybe if Mary did something different with her mouth, but I guess the truth is her face is one of those clean wide-browed ones that all along the line—childhood, adolescence, young womanhood, and now what they call for politeness maturity—just miss being pretty. Most of us have known little Mary ever since her first Sunday school dress. Her maiden name was Smith, like yours. Maybe she’s a relation. In which case you’ll probably be as concerned as the rest of us with her happiness. Not to imply it doesn’t suit her to a “T,” to have John’s fond sister Jane living with them.

  Well at any rate you’d know best since you’ve been in the house most recently. John is all right without being the friendliest. Let’s you and I meet sometime and talk it out. Since you don’t know your way around yet, I suggest some place in downtown Anywhere.

  See you then,

  Ralph Jones

  JUNE 4, 19—

  “HANK”—

  Sorry you saw fit to skip our appointment. I waited it must have been three hours, but I guess in vain, which doesn’t matter to me, who loves nothing more than to sit idle for a stretch in the middle of a day. No hard feelings, no doubt you’re keeping pretty busy with the Does.

  Would it suit you better in front of the First Peoples Bank some noon? So you won’t have any excuse this time, in front of the First Peoples Bank with the big cardboard check for $6.98 made payable to Anyone U. Wish and signed O. U. R. Depositor.

  There’s an interesting story behind that. Without knowing, you might think it was Mr. Depositor, but then Olive always was mannish, so you aren’t too far off. Her place on the south edge of town was a farm when she was a little girl and when her father died so young, she was left with the land. Selling it off, piece by piece, offended her memory of her Dad (not that he had ever had a kind word for her when he was living—always wanted a boy) and it seemed the only way she could make it up to him was to become more like him, using his expressions of speech, getting his old furniture down from the attic and sitting in it, wearing plain clothes, and eventually just using her initials. Erasing her sex, as it were. But don’t go saying I said she’s a fool. Every acre she sold, she got hard money for—some think she loves a dollar more than is healthy. That $6.98 to her wasn’t what a nickel would be to you or me. To me, at any rate. Maybe you’re another of those whose sending our mean national income spiralling up, causing inflation. (joke).

  Anyway you can bet that $6.98 meant a lot to Anyone Wish. He just can’t hold a steady job, though he has an uncanny way with the mechanical aspect of things. Ever since a kid he’s been willfull. “Short, shortsighted, and short-tempered” is what they say of him. He does these odd jobs when he isn’t sick, or sleeping—we often wonder if there’s a difference, though to be fair, as a youngster, he was puny. The $6.98 must represent something he fixed around the old Depositor house. God knows it’s been falling down for years. It’s almost disrespectful to her deceased father, the way Olive has let the upkeep of that place go hang.

  That’s one reason why she might have written him that check. There’s some local speculation about that. It doesn’t seem natural, for a woman to coop herself up thirty years and never take a fancy to a man, even a sorry little scrap of rag like Mrs. Wish’s youngest boy.

  In strict confidence,

  “Ralph”

  P.S. See you soon. I’ll be wearing an everyday suit and have regular features.

  JUNE 7, 19—

  SMITH:

  Let’s be on the level with each other. Your snippy postcard about waiting by the bank rings about as true as a zinc penny. Saying that everybody you saw looked alike is almost an insult, which better not get around town, which it won’t, thanks to my good offices. I don’t suppose you’d say that Jane J. Doe looks like everybody else. Or is it Mary you’re chasing? Reports differ. You live your own life, but it isn’t smart (not to mention the ethics of it, I’ll leave that to Parson Brown, not that he’s any saint) to cross me now, when there’s a storm brewing and you’ll need every friend you can rummage up.

  The Does aren’t too popular around here. John is more than a bit “uppity” and there is an opinion that he gets far too much publicity for the size of his hatband, with the rest of us being called in for just an occasional insurance ad or “SatevPost” cover. What’s so average about the name Doe anyway? And we aren’t too happy about the way he’s treated little Mary Smith either. But you pick your own friends, and if I’m not among them O.K., but let’s not play the hypocrite Henry. You better see me promptly—your true ally in spite of all—because the rumor is they’re going to change the postal zones again and in that case you’ll never be able to find me, by mail or otherwise.

  Olive Depositor looked at me funny the other day along Shady Lane, down by the Golden Mean Drug Store. I don’t suppose you’ve been breathing a word to her. Oh no Henry. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth as they say.

  You’re playing a cagey game, all right, and if you can pull it off, more power to you. Otherwise, I recommend you pack your cardboard suitcase and leave Anywhere and go back to Elsewhere, where you came from. We have twenty Henry Smiths in town already, and one more or less won’t make much, I mean no difference.

  With your best interests at heart,

  R.C.J.

  WHAT IS A RHYME?*

  (T. S. Eliot, with Customary Equanimity, Confronts Mother Goose)

  I DO NOT KNOW whether all childhoods are painful. My own, or that drastically edited set of snapshots which is all that remains to me of my own, did (or does) not seem especially so. There is, for example, a beard, attached to one of my grandmother’s brothers and perhaps more spade-shaped than not, the contemplation of which seldom failed to inspire me as a child with an indeterminate ‘enthusiasm’; any attempt on my part further to particularize this emotion would no more serve my present purpose than an attempt by Shakespeare to acquaint his Elizabethan audience with the details of Othello’s fascinating travels as thoroughly as Desdemona had been acquainted with them would have served his dramatic, and different, purpose. It is enough, I think, to be aware that such ‘enthusiasm’ somewhere exists. To allay the suspicion that by invoking the shade of my great-uncle’s beard and whatever attendant ectoplasm, inops inhumataque, its wake includes, I have so far abused your hospitality as to appoint you my partners in the type of séance that is best conducted, if at all, in the privacy of one’s flat, it should at the outset be made clear that as I understand the question, ‘What is a rhyme?’ (and the most zealous attempt to provide answers is necessarily stopped short, like Virgil at the rim of Paradise, at the limits of one’s comprehension of what has been asked), it is to an extent inseparable from another: ‘What is a child?’ I as well wish to affirm that it is not part of my purpose to inspect all dictionary senses of the word ‘rhyme,’ or to decide for once and all if ‘fade’ rhymes with ‘said’ or ‘said’ with ‘hedge.’ The vexing issue of genres we shall also skirt. It shall be assumed that a riddle, however ingenious, is not a ‘rhyme,’ and neither is an epic, even one which jingles—as does, to my ear, The Curse of Kehama.

  When we read such lines as

  Diddlty, diddlty, dumpty,

  The cat ran up the plum tree,1

  we must inquire of ourselves not only ‘What is our response?’ but also ‘Is it right to respond in such a way?’ For the responses of a child are not those of a mature person. You will readily perceive that I have presupposed something which more properly might be phrased as yet another question: ‘Were “rhymes” in fact composed for “children”?’ Here we discover, with mixed apprehension and delight, that we have placed at least the forepart of one foot into the bustling and comforting realm of textual scholarship, whose inhabitants produce a highly valuable form of literary baggage which I have previous
ly determined, however, to make this trip without. For our purpose I believe it is sufficient to say that if ‘rhymes’ are not intended for ‘children,’ they appear to be failures, whose only interest for the adult can lie in somewhat morbid concern with how far such efforts are situated beyond the pale of those canons of judgment which—by their subversion as well as in their advocacy—have shaped the European, that is to say, the Christian, tradition.

  I confess that when I come upon lines such as those quoted my reaction is not merely one of disappointment but one of astonishment, that such a couplet has found its way into print, and found its way so often. Nor does it seem that the Mother Goose ‘rhymes’ (that Elizabeth Goose is the actual author of all rhymes is of course as dangerous an assumption as any assumption about, say, the Anacreontea) belong in that species of composition that makes its effect by bulk. Lord Byron and spaghetti are two examples. Read in continuo, ‘rhymes’ produce a baffling impression of ups and downs, heedless spillings, petty chores indifferently performed, and of little maids and naughty boys who though present in large numbers quite fail to achieve any sort of union, carnal or conversational, of which we might approve. This is not to deny that there are pretty2 (though far from transcendent) touches: I offer

  All around the green gravel,

  The grass grows so green,

  where the repetition of ‘green’ invites us to share in the difficulty the poet had in grasping the concept of the color. We should perhaps beware, however, of extending forbearance—Dante’s amore—so indiscriminately that it becomes, by the laws of diffusion, as devoid of true virtue—Virgil’s virtus—as the Deity fitfully visible in the tracts of the Theosophical Societies, or as the eventual universe presented for our consideration by students of thermodynamics. It is our duty, if Western civilization is in any sense to linger on, to differentiate between the excellent, the second-rate, and the fake. These lines do not seem to me to be fake; but they fail to be so, I would suggest, by default. In their presence we experience not even that fear of being hoodwinked which is the least with which verse can enrich our lives: rather, we seem to stand on the edge of a Limbo where

  secondo che per ascoltare,

  non avea pianto mai che di sospiri

  che l’aura eterna facevan tremare.

  Here I wish to make explicit what in the preceding paragraphs I permitted to remain implicit. If we are to consider a rhyme a variety of poetry which appeals to a child, this substantially affects our definition of ‘child.’ And when we suppose a ‘child’ is that which enjoys rhymes, we run the risk of correction by experts. If I may bid you to trespass with me into an area where I myself never venture unless thoroughly disguised as a deferential amateur, I recommend on this point Le Réel et l’imaginaire dans le jeu de l’enfant, by that tireless researcher Jean Château; also Fritz Kunkel’s helpful Jugendcharakterkunde. To resort to terms more suited to our concerns, a child is a creature fated, in time and under Providence, to appreciate Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. But

  All around the green gravel,

  The grass grows so green

  would lead, insofar as it led anywhere, toward the ‘simplistic’ poems of Wordsworth, a very great poet indeed, if ‘great’ means anything at all (which Mr. A. J. Ayer tells us it may not), but one vigorous appreciation of whom, I would suggest, is somewhat peripheral to what seems to me to be (and perhaps here I perform a pratfall while grimly clutching a goat-bladder depleted of wind) human responsibility. Indeed the question is real, whether Wordsworth or John Cleveland has more just claims upon our attention at this moment of history; certainly Cleveland, though the smaller poet, was the larger man. In short, ‘rhymes’ answer less the needs of the child, which are articulate and distinct, than the inchoate needs of the parent who is compelled to purchase ‘books for children.’ The nature of the compulsion and the definition of ‘parent’ are in themselves likely topics for another study, which I hope someone else will pursue. It would be beyond the terms of my programme as announced to suggest anything further than that both are products of the unfortunate fragmentation of sensibility which occurred, as near as we can tell (in leafing through old magazines I have been puzzled to discover that the critic who most firmly fixed the chronology was, apparently, myself), somewhere within the dotage of Andrew Marvell; and that in the one consists the penitential rock borne by the other, who, his gaze welded to his feet, must travel for many years the circuit of barren terraces:

  Cosi a sé e noi buona ramogna

  quell’ombre orando, andavan sotto il pondo,

  simile a quel che tal volta si sogna,

  disparmente angosciate tutte a tondo

  e lasse su per la prima cornice,

  purgando la caligine del mondo.

  * An address delivered before the Fifth Form of the High Wycombe Episcopal Academy in 1952 and subsequently developed for delivery before a polylingual audience in Prague in 1954. It was published in the trimonthly magazine quarto and issued in hard covers under the title The Uses of Assonance.

  1 I have used for this and following quotations the Frederick Warne and Company (London) edition. Neither authoritative nor complete, and furnished with illustrations by Miss Kate Greenaway that invariably afford me a shudder, the book was the nearest to hand.

  2 As to ‘prettiness,’ I can only recommend the reader to conceive of a sunflower seed placed next to Wren’s original designs for the Cathedral of St. Paul.

  DRINKING FROM A CUP MADE CINCHY

  (After Reading Too Many Books on How to Play Golf)

  IN MY TOURS around the nation I am frequently asked, “Have you ever broken a cup?” Of course I have. Don’t let anybody kid you on that score. Everyone who regularly drinks from china, no matter how adept he has become, has had his share of ruined tablecloths and scalded knees. No human being is born with the ability to take liquid from a cup successfully; you can easily prove this by trying to feed a baby. Those of us who have attained some proficiency have done so at the price of long hours of systematic application. Without these long hours our natural grace and poise would never have evolved into skill. I would not say that everyone is endowed equally; I do say that everyone, no matter how clumsy, can reduce his accidents to a minimum that will amaze his wife and friends. He can do this by rigorously adhering to a few simple principles that I have discovered through painful trial-and-error. Had these principles been available in legible form when I was young, my present eminence would have been attained by me years ago.

  I have analyzed drinking from a cup into three three-part stages: (1) Receipt, (2) The Cooling Pause, and (3) Consummation. However, bear in mind that in practice these “compartments” are run together in one fluid, harmonious social action.

  I. Receipt

  (1) Address the cup by sitting erect, your chest at right angles to the extended arm of the cup-offerer, or “hostess.” Even if this person is a spouse or close relative, do not take a relaxed, slouching position, with the frontal plane of your rib cage related obliquely to the cup’s line of approach. Such an attitude, no matter how good-naturedly it is assumed, has the inevitable effect of making one of your arms feel shorter than the other, a hopeless handicap at this crucial juncture, where 30 percent of common errors occur. The reason: both hands should move toward the saucer simultaneously.

  (2) In seizure, first touch, with feathery lightness, the rim of the saucer with the pad of the index finger of the right hand. (Left-handers: read all these sentences backward.) A split-second—perhaps .07—later, the first knuckle of the middle, “big” finger, sliding toward the center of the saucer’s invisible underside, and the tip of the thumb must coördinate in a prehensile “pinching” motion. This motion must occur. The two remaining fingers of the right hand of necessity accompany the big finger, but should not immediately exert pressure, despite their deep-seated instinct to do so. Rather, the wrist is gently supinated. This brings the two passive fingers into contact with the underside of the saucer while at the same time the cup
is drawn in toward the body by a firm, but not angry, forearm.

  Meanwhile, the left hand is not just “taking Sunday off.” Fingers and thumb united in one scooplike unit (an imaginary line drawn through the knuckles should intersect your foot), the left hand hovers, convex without being “balled” into a fist, an inch or two (whichever feels most natural) to the left of the inner left edge of the saucer. What is it doing there? Many beginners, having asked this question and failing to receive an adequate answer, keep their left hands in their pockets and fancy that they are achieving insouciance. They are not. They are just being foolish. The left hand, in its “escort” role, performs many functions. For one thing, its close proximity to the right hand gives that hand confidence and eases its fear. For another, the index and middle fingers are now in a position to swoop over and hush the distressing but frequent phenomenon of “cup chatter,” should it develop. Thirdly, if the spoon, with its eccentric center of gravity, begins to slither from the saucer, the left hand is there to act as a trap. Fourthly, if worse comes to worst and the cup tips, the left hand can rush right in and make the best of a bad situation, whose further ramifications take us into the psychological realm discussed in the chapter “To Err Is Human.”