Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  Throughout, keep your eyes travelling rapidly around the rim of the cup.

  (3) The saucer is held by your right hand, the “executor.” Your left hand, the “guardian angel,” cruises in the air inches away. A napkin—the “landing field”—has been previously spread on your right knee. Now softly constrict. By this I mean, with one impulse, bring your forearms in toward your sides, bend your spine forward, bow your head, and touch your knees. Without any thought on your part, this syndrome of actions will lead the cup and saucer to descend along a parabolic line whose equation on Cartesian coördinates is 2x = y2. At x = 0, the tea will be on your knee. Your left hand will have automatically joined the right under the saucer and as automatically glided away. You will find that your thighs have become firm flat surfaces. For the first time since your index fingertip touched the icy edge of china, you may smile.

  II. The Cooling Pause

  (1) The key to this phase—in point of time the longest of the three—is immobility. Only the fingers, eyelids, and tongue move at all. Resolutely maintain your bent position over the cup. Think of yourself as “mothering” the beverage. Let your stillness be placid, vegetal, and Olympian, rather than rigid, electric, and Byzantine. Be diffident and amiable in conversation. Some of my fellow pros advise beginners not to speak at all, but such total exclusion is apt to be in itself unsettling. However, do avoid anecdotes requiring much facial or other animation, and arguments whose logical structure must be indicated by any action of the hands, whether in drawing diagrams in the air or ticking off points on the fingers.

  (2) Resist the temptation, once the saucer appears secure, of straightening up in the chair (or, worse, sofa), thereby placing a long diagonal hypotenuse between your nose and the cup. Any hauteur is felt throughout the body. Dignity of bearing is no substitute for muscular control. An obsequious, attentive hunch will not be thought rude as long as you are able to raise your eyes to your hostess fitfully. Indeed, the distention of the eyebrows needed to glimpse her lends to many people an arch charm of mien they otherwise would lack.

  (3) Rotate the broad part of the spoon—not the handle—in the liquid. Do not splash. Do not toy with the fascinating ripples individual droplets make. Do not attempt to return liquid from the saucer to the cup. Be still.

  III. Consummation

  “My goodness,” I can hear many readers asking, “will we never get a taste of the brew?”

  “Yes, you will” is my answer—“especially if you have followed my advice up to now.” The reason I have outlined the procedure so meticulously is this: having come thus far without a blunder, you feel “clean” and possess the crispness to go on. Success succeeds. If I am wrong, see the chapter titled “There’s Many a Slip.”

  (1) Steam has ceased to arise from the liquid and you are certain it is cool enough to drink. Restore the spoon to the saucer, pinning it with the left thumb. Look around and make sure no one is about to jostle you, either in fun or by accident. The physical action of bringing food to the mouth is so ancient, so fundamental to Man, that a detailed description would be mere padding. The one ticklish procedure that remains is the Separation of Cup and Saucer.

  (2) The two possible extremes—leaving the saucer on the knee or bringing it with the cup all the way to the chin—are too contemptible to denounce, though I have seen both done. In fact, the problem is self-solving if, contrary to instinct, you pick up the saucer with the left hand, gripping the cup handle with the right. They begin the ascent together, but the inequality of their strengths soon tells; in the powerful yet delicate grasp of the right hand, the cup completes its flight to the lips, while the left hand weakly halts at the level of the sternum, where the saucer, braced against your necktie, acts as a tacit bib.

  (3) Be conscious that, as you consume the beverage, the weight of the cup diminishes; otherwise the right hand may snap it clear over your shoulder. Never hang on to an empty cup. Get rid of it. In replacing the unit on the table or tray presumably provided, a jaunty clatter need not be avoided, if it can be induced without force. When your hands are at last free, sigh and say, “That was delicious,” or “I needed that.”

  Congratulations. You have just drunk from a cup.

  Appendix: Helpful Hints

  1. Don’t be tense.

  2. Don’t be “loose.”

  3. Think of yourself not as an assembly of hinged joints inflexibly connected by rods of calcium but as a plastic, pliant animal, capable of warmth, wit, and aspiration.

  4. Think of the cup-and-saucer complex, from the instant it is received into your hands to the instant it leaves, as a charge delivered to your care and toward which you feel the maternal emotions mentioned above (II.1). Imagine yourself “crooning” to it, recognizing hereditary resemblances to your own face in its face, etc.

  5. The angle made by the forearms should never exceed 110 degrees or fall below 72 degrees, assuming the room is at less than body temperature. If it is not, you need my companion work, “The Elements of Sipping Through a Straw.”

  ON THE SIDEWALK

  (After Reading, At Long Last, “On The Road,” by Jack Kerouac)

  I WAS just thinking around in my sad backyard, looking at those little drab careless starshaped clumps of crabgrass and beautiful chunks of some old bicycle crying out without words of the American Noon and half a newspaper with an ad about a lotion for people with dry skins and dry souls, when my mother opened our frantic banging screendoor and shouted, “Gogi Himmelman’s here.” She might have shouted the Archangel Gabriel was here, or Captain Easy or Baron Charlus in Proust’s great book: Gogi Himmelman of the tattered old greenasgrass knickers and wild teeth and the vastiest, most vortical, most insatiable wonderfilled eyes I have ever known. “Let’s go, Lee,” he sang out, and I could see he looked sadder than ever, his nose all rubbed raw by a cheap handkerchief and a dreary Bandaid unravelling off his thumb. “I know the WAY!” That was Gogi’s inimitable unintellectual method of putting it that he was on fire with the esoteric paradoxical Tao and there was no holding him when he was in that mood. I said, “I’m going, Mom,” and she said, “O.K.” and when I looked back at her hesitant in the pearly mystical UnitedStateshome light I felt absolutely sad, thinking of all the times she had vacuumed the same carpets.

  His scooter was out front, the selfsame, the nonpareil, with its paint scabbing off intricately and its scratchedon dirty words and its nuts and bolts chattering with fear, and I got my tricycle out of the garage, and he was off, his left foot kicking with that same insuperable energy or even better. I said, “Hey wait,” and wondered if I could keep up and probably couldn’t have if my beltbuckle hadn’t got involved with his rear fender. This was IT. We scuttered down our drive and right over Mrs. Cacciatore’s rock garden with the tiny castles made out of plaster that always made me sad when I looked at them alone. With Gogi it was different; he just kept right on going, his foot kicking with that delirious thirty​revolutions​a​second frenzy, right over the top of the biggest, a Blenheim six feet tall at the turrets; and suddenly I saw it the way he saw it, embracing everything with his unfluctuating generosity, imbecile saint of our fudging age, a mad desperado in our Twentieth Century Northern Hemisphere Nirvana deserts.

  We rattled on down through her iris bed and broke into the wide shimmering pavement. “Contemplate those holy hydrants,” he shouted back at me through the wind. “Get a load of those petulant operable latches; catch the magic of those pickets standing up proud and sequential like the arguments in Immanuel Kant; boom, boom, bitty-boom BOOM!” and it was true.

  “What happens when we’re dead?” I asked.

  “The infinite never-to-be-defiled subtlety of the late Big Sid Catlett on the hushed trap drums,” he continued, mad with his own dreams, imitating the whisks, “Swish, swish, swishy-swish SWOOSH!”

  The sun was breaking over the tops of Mr. Linderman’s privet hedge, little rows of leaves set in there delicate and justso like mints in a Howard Johnson’s roadside eatery. Mitzi Legg
ett came out of the house, and Gogi stopped the scooter, and put his hands on her. “The virginal starchblue fabric; printed with stylized kittens and puppies,” Gogi explained in his curiously beseechingly transcendent accents. “The searing incredible innocence! Oh! Oh! Oh!” His eyes poured water down his face like broken blisters.

  “Take me along,” Mitzi said openly to me, right with Gogi there and hearing every word, alive to every meaning, his nervous essence making his freckles tremble like a field of Iowa windblown nochaff barley.

  “I want to,” I told her, and tried to, but I couldn’t, not there. I didn’t have the stomach for it. She pretended to care. She was a lovely beauty. I felt my spokes snap under me; Gogi was going again, his eyes tightshut in ecstasy, his foot kicking so the hole in his shoesole showed every time, a tiny chronic rent in the iridescent miasmal veil that Intrinsic Mind tries to hide behind.

  Wow! Dr. Fairweather’s house came up on the left, delicious stucco like piecrust in the type of joints that attract truckers, and then the place of the beautiful Mrs. Mertz, with her canny deeprooted husband bringing up glorious heartbreaking tabourets and knickknacks from his workshop in the basement, a betooled woodshavingsmelling fantasy worthy of Bruegel or Hegel or a seagull. Vistas! Old Miss Hooper raced into her yard and made a grab for us, and Gogi Himmelman, the excruciating superbo, shifted to the other foot and laughed in her careworn face. Then the breathless agape green space of the Princeling mansion, with its rich calm and potted Tropic of Cancer plants. Then it was over.

  Gogi and I went limp at the corner under a sign saying ELM STREET with irony because all the elms had been cut down so they wouldn’t get the blight, sad stumps diminishing down the American perspective whisperingly.

  “My spokes are gone,” I told him.

  “Friend—ahem—zip, zip—parting a relative concept—Bergson’s invaluable marvelchocked work—tch, tch.” He stood there, desperately wanting to do the right thing, yet always lacking with an indistinguishable grandeur that petty ability.

  “Go,” I told him. He was already halfway back, a flurrying spark, to where Mitzi waited with irrepressible womanwarmth.

  Well. In landsend despair I stood there stranded. Across the asphalt that was sufficiently semifluid to receive and embalm millions of star-sharp stones and bravely gay candywrappers a drugstore twinkled artificial enticement. But I was not allowed to cross the street. I stood on the gray curb thinking, They said I could cross it when I grew up, but what do they mean grown up? I’m thirty-nine now, and felt sad.

  WHY ROBERT FROST SHOULD RECEIVE THE NOBEL PRIZE

  ONCE PER FORTNIGHT or so a letter comes to this column accusing its author of the sin of “fuddyduddyism.” While such charges, phrased as they usually are in the quasi-literate elisions of what I believe is termed “hip” slang, and signed as they are as often as not by a gluey scrawl in the latest mode of “action painting” (or whatever such dribble is dubbed by its dupes), do not by any means undermine the calm of one who has been steeped since youth in the broadening classics of post-Homeric literature, nevertheless perhaps the charge should be disposed of once and for all before I set forth a proposition which I believe will contribute no little toward world sanity.

  For one thing, I have always been a friend of modern literature, and continue to be. My quarrel with it arises only where it seems to me diffuse and decadent, as in Proust, or obscure and obscene, as in Joyce. I have for thirty years, much against the advice of my more expediency-minded friends, refused to board the bandwagon of T. S. Eliot, with all the aridity of spirit and religious obscurantism it represents, and neither have I embraced the megalomaniacal political systems of two much overrated versifiers, William Yeats and E. Pound. Indeed it is my conviction that there is less sense and fun in all five of these above-mentioned writers than exists on any random page of Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. No, while I am in full sympathy with the mainstream of present-day writing, I by no means subscribe to its eccentric fringe manifestations, and if this makes me a “rogue and petty slave” to the peddlers of the latest symbol-bloated bosh, so—to paraphrase the Latin—be it.

  I confess that I feel most at home amid the lusty wits and wise hoydens of the eighteenth century. There I find human content ad profusio. By Dickens’ time the disease has already started of which Henry James is to be an agonized paralytic victim, and Joseph Conrad another (though some of his descriptions of salt-water are good)—the disease of endlessly pecking like nervous chickens at the wonderful and unified fabric of human experience. The question proper to the narrative artist is not Why do we do things? but What do we do? In asserting that this century has not yet produced another Pamela I am not quarrelling with its modernity; rather I am saying that it is not modern enough. I do not think that one who (as has been my honor to have been) was among the first to hail the talents of Mrs. Buck and Somerset Maugham need have any self-doubts as to being retrograde.

  In sharp contrast to the twitching spectres of what I have heard amusingly described as “era-itis” stands Robert Frost. His craggy snowcapped figure puts me in mind of the splendid quatrain of Karle Wilson Baker:

  And there is healing in old trees,

  Old streets a glamour hold;

  Why may not I, as well as these,

  Grow lovely, growing old?

  —lines that Frost himself would doubtless be proud to claim as his own. Frost’s poems do not always rhyme, and in fairness this may be objected to them. But we must balance this defect with larger considerations. His English is always intelligible and rarely contains ill-digested scraps of some fashionable foreign tongue. While there is nothing in his vision as grotesque and ungainly as the God of orthodox theology, yet his poems at their eloquent best provide the vague sense of reassurance which this God at His best provided. Finally, he is thoroughly American; in his works we seem to perceive the humanism of Jonathan Edwards, the pragmatism of Fenimore Cooper, Thoreau’s bile, Whitman’s effluvia, and Hamlin Garland’s choler. Frost as a man combines the tang of wood smoke with the flexible strength of cantilever construction; I can think of no better way for the Nobel Prize Committee to make amends for the carnival of French Existentialists and Mississippi stream-of-consciousness purveyors who have recently degraded this award than to award it to him. It will strike a blow for healthy sanity in literature and in life. I offer this advice to so august a committee with my diffidence considerably bolstered by the knowledge that in this opinion, at least, I have the eminent company of J. Donald Adams, Orville Prescott, Maxwell Geismar, and Henry Seidel Canby, to name but a few.

  CONFESSIONS OF A WILD BORE

  PITY THE POOR BORE. He stands among us as a creature formidable and familiar yet in essence unknowable. We can read of the ten infallible signs whereby he may be recognized and of the seven tested methods whereby he may be rebuffed. Valuable monographs exist upon his dress and diet; the study of his mating habits and migrational routes is well past the speculative stage; and statistical studies abound. One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience. But in all this vast literature (and this is not to disparage the scientists who have selflessly carried forward their research, nor the generous philanthropic foundations that endowed their gleaming laboratories) one grave defect persists: the bore is always described externally, in a tone of distance and distaste. Hence the central question—what makes a few people bores when the rest of us are so fascinating—remains cloaked in mystery. Yet bores, unlike Red Indians, were not here to greet the Pilgrims. They do not, like rabid bats, come up from Mexico. No: the shameful truth, suppressed by both the public press and the spokesmen of our federal government, is that bores are created out of our own number. Each year, a few healthy Americans, whether by alchemy, infection, or unscrupulous recruiting methods among the alumni, are converted into bores. How can this happen? The riddle of borogenesis has defied solution for several reasons
. For one thing, by their very natures bores are the most difficult and unappetizing class of society to interview, and have been shunned where prostitutes, alcoholics, and juvenile delinquents have been (sociologically) embraced. For another, bores have themselves heavily infiltrated the very psychological sciences that should be grappling with the problem! But the chief, and most impressive, obstacle is that bores are oblivious of being such. A mature, fully feathered bore absolutely believes that he is just like anybody else—if anything, cuter; so he has no recollection of becoming one. Hence superstition continues to hold court, and what is actually a disease is still widely regarded as a vice.

  I have been prompted to these reflections by a remarkable document pressed upon me, with a wild, pleading look of apology, by an insufferable person as I was leaving a dinner party he had utterly ruined with his ceaseless prattle. Though it will strike some tastes, no doubt, as too morbid for print, I submit it in the interests of sunlight, reason, and mercy:

  How innocently [the document, written in a fluent hand on several hundred sheets of lawyer’s yellow foolscap, begins] it all began! I noticed a faint, not disagreeable itching in the back of my throat whenever anyone else talked for as long as two or three minutes. I would shake my head vigorously, and think that the sensation would pass, but by the fourth minute the itching became so unbearable that I had to interrupt. At first, my remarks bore a deceptive pertinence to the topics under discussion, and I flatter myself that in those early months no one but my wife, whose canny blue eyes developed a defensive narrowing tic, noticed anything amiss.

  My first total blackout occurred toward the end of August. It had been a very warm August, but that evening a little breeze sprang up off the bay, and my wife and I attended a dinner party with a few of our dearest friends. Never, I thought, had the food been so delicious, the wine so subtle, the ladies so lovely, and the gentlemen so sturdy, acute, and wry. Our conversation on the veranda seemed a veritable dance of ideas, counterthrusts, and graceful laughter. I was dazzled to think that here, in this specific house on the North American continent, Mankind’s tortuous climb toward civilization had at last borne fruit. Imagine, then, my amazement when, in the private closeness of our car, as I hummed a popular air in celebration of a perfect night, my wife turned to me and snapped, “Why did you talk so much? You bored everybody silly.”