by John Updike
MR. EX-RESIDENT
(Assuming, Unlikely Though It Seems at First Blush, That Harry S. Truman, Author of “Mr. Citizen,” Also Wrote Adam’s Memoirs)
A LARGE NUMBER of people have expressed curiosity as to how Eve and I like residing out of Eden. The answer is very simple. We like it fine.
I began as a farm boy, so the thorns and thistles of the “outer world” are not news to me. We thoroughly enjoyed our years in Eden, but now that they are over we find many things to enjoy elsewhere. Pleasant as it was, Eden always had the disadvantage for me personally of being a little too lush and orderly. As the saying goes, I like some grit to my mash.
So many contradictory accounts of what happened have been published that I think the time has come to set the record straight. Now that my grandson Enoch has builded a city of the same name, I know there is a firm watertight place where the records can be kept. I think it is very important, whether or not it causes embarrassment in Heaven, for the First Man to set down in his own words his side of the story so that the generations succeeding him in this world can understand their present condition and why things are the way they are.
When the matter first came up of eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, I consulted with Eve and with the serpent and their consensus seemed to be that it could do no harm and might do a lot of good. It is easy to identify mistakes in hindsight, but at the time this was the best available information I could get, and it was my responsibility to act upon it. And I did.
The following day, God came to me and asked, “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”
I thought this was a curious question, since if He were omniscient as supposed He must have already known that I certainly had. But I have never had any trouble keeping the reins on my temper. With the utmost patience and courtesy I explained the situation.
When I was done, He simply told me, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” I felt lucky at that, since what He said to Eve and the serpent was far worse.
We wasted no time getting out, once the circumstances had become definite. I expected no fanfare, so it was one of the deeply moving experiences of my life to see all the cherubim waving goodbye with their flaming swords. I had not in any way asked them to do this. It was a truly spontaneous demonstration.
Two things need to be cleared up, for the reason that there has been a lot of improper and inaccurate speculation written concerning them.
The first is this. At no time, then or since, have Eve and I exchanged recriminations. She was produced from my rib and I have never for a moment wanted my rib back. In my opinion, she did a wonderful job raising Cain and Abel in an environment that was necessarily unsettled and far from ideal. If the boys did not turn out exactly the way we had hoped, this is no excuse for the disproportionate publicity that has surrounded their quarrel. It is of course a tribute to the office of First Man that everything that happens within his family circle attracts widespread comment.
Secondly, a lot of well-meaning—I will give them the benefit of the doubt—souls have expected us to resent how the serpent has insinuated himself into the good graces of subsequent administrations and is in fact enjoying a good deal of present prosperity. This shows they have no knowledge of the nature of the cosmos. It is the essence of the system that the serpent, having served his term with us, should seek “greener pastures.” While I cannot feel that his advice was always in the best interests of my family, he was by his own lights successful and must be admired for it. History has been created by just this type of personality.
I have been called, among many other things, an optimist.
I do not think of myself as a optimist or a pessimist but as a normal human individual blessed with 100% excellent physical health since the day of my creation. At the time, a certain number of angels whom I do not wish to name doubted my ability to serve as First Man. I showed them that they were wrong. It is my sincere belief that any healthy man, placed in that position, could have done the job.
Though there is a lot wrong with the state of the world as we know it, I think entirely too much is made of the Fall. Eden just could not have accommodated all the men and women who now enjoy the blessings, qualified though they are in some instances, of earthly life. I lived in Eden many years and I flatter myself that I know more about its dimensions than most of the theological journals I make it my habit to read. These are written by good men, but their morbid preoccupation with Original Sin rubs me the wrong way, though I don’t mind in the least whatever they say about me. I have no regrets. And I recommend that you have none either.
First Person Plural
Central Park
March 1956
ON THE AFTERNOON of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday’s snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park. There we saw:
Great black rocks emerging from the melting drifts, their craggy skins glistening like the backs of resurrected brontosaurs.
A pigeon on the half-frozen pond strutting to the edge of the ice and looking a duck in the face.
A policeman getting his shoe wet testing the ice.
Three elderly relatives trying to coax a little boy to accompany his father on a sled ride down a short but steep slope. After much balking, the boy did, and, sure enough, the sled tipped over and the father got his collar full of snow. Everybody laughed except the boy, who sniffled.
Four boys in black leather jackets throwing snowballs at each other. (The snow was ideally soggy, and packed hard with one squeeze.)
Seven men without hats.
Twelve snowmen, none of them intact.
Two men listening to the radio in a car parked outside the Zoo; Mel Allen was broadcasting the Yanks–Cardinals game from St. Petersburg.
A tahr (Hemitragus jemlaicus) pleasantly squinting in the sunlight.
An aoudad absently pawing the mud and chewing.
A yak with its back turned.
Empty cages labelled “Coati,” “Orang-outang,” “Ocelot.”
A father saying to his little boy, who was annoyed almost to tears by the inactivity of the seals, “Father [Father Seal, we assumed] is very tired; he worked hard all day.”
Most of the cafeteria’s out-of-doors tables occupied.
A pretty girl in black pants falling on them at the Wollman Memorial Rink.
“BILL & DORIS” carved on a tree. “REX & RITA” written in the snow.
Two old men playing, and six supervising, a checkers game.
The Michael Friedsam Foundation Merry-Go-Round, nearly empty of children but overflowing with calliope music.
A man on a bench near the carrousel reading, through sunglasses, a book on economics.
Crews of shinglers repairing the roof of the Tavern-on-the-Green.
A woman dropping a camera she was trying to load, the film unrolling in the slush and exposing itself.
A little colored boy in aviator goggles rubbing his ears and saying, “He really hurt me.” “No, he didn’t,” his nursemaid told him.
The green head of Giuseppe Mazzini staring across the white softball field, unblinking, though the sun was in its eyes.
Water murmuring down walks and rocks and steps. A grown man trying to block one rivulet with snow.
Things like brown sticks nosing through a plot of cleared soil.
A tire track in a piece of mud far removed from where any automobiles could be.
Footprints around a KEEP OFF sign.
Two pigeons feeding each other.
Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.
A plump old man saying “Chick, chick” and feeding peanuts to squirrels.
Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.
Many birds calling to each other about how little the
Ramble has changed.
One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.
An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore.
No Dodo
November 1955
LATELY, we’ve been pondering the pigeons in Bryant Park. It seemed to us that they showed a decided preference for the paving, and trod the grass gingerly and seldom. Only once did we see one roost in a tree. It was an awkward, touching performance, like that of a man tying the bow of an apron behind him. Why should the common pigeon be embarrassed in the presence of vegetation? Because, research showed, he is a descendant of the blue rock dove. Columba livia is a native of the cliffs and rocky islands of western Europe and northern Africa, with subspecies ranging from the Canary Islands to India and Japan. The American branch stems from some of the English colonists’ domestic pigeons, who flew the coop, went wild, shed their fancy shapes (the shapes of domestic pigeons can be very fancy), reverted to the parent type, and headed for the cities. Pigeons, or doves, have never made much of a distinction between natural and man-made crannies. Song of Solomon 2:14 apostrophizes “my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs.” Homer speaks of “Messe’s towers for silver doves renowned,” and Juvenal describes “the tiled roof where the gentle pigeons leave their eggs.” Tibullus asks, “Why need I tell how the sacred white pigeon flutters unmolested about the numerous cities of Syrian Palestine?” No other bird has been as widely revered. Disturbing their nests in the Mosque of Doves, Istanbul, is blasphemy. In 1925, the Bombay Stock Exchange was closed and riots were threatened because two European boys had ignorantly killed some street pigeons. Kama, the Hindu god of love (a minor deity), is sometimes depicted riding a dove. In Christian iconography, the dove represents the Holy Ghost. And, of course, there’s Noah. The Arabian version of the Deluge contains a pretty touch. When the dove returned to the ark the second time, its feet were stained with red mud. Noah, realizing that this meant the waters were receding, prayed that the messenger’s feet might remain that color. They have. There is a Filipino legend that, of all birds, only the dove understands the human tongue.
Pigeons have been the most faithful of man’s feathered friends. Records of the bird’s domestication extend back to the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, around 3000 B.C. Homing pigeons have been used as messengers through the centuries from Cyrus the Great, of Persia, to yesterday’s bootleggers. How they home is still something of a mystery. Keen eyes and a good memory just don’t quite explain it, and neither do theories about magnetic or electro-magnetic control, sensitivity to light rays, the effect of air currents on the nasal passages or the semicircular canals, or “celestial orientation.” Ancient Romans and medieval monks bred pigeons. Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Victoria were fanciers. The hobby is conjectured to be of Indian or Persian origin, and the results are so elaborate that it took Darwin ninety-eight pages to prove that jacobins, satinettes, barbs (the ideal barb’s head resembles a spool), turbits, dragoons, fantails (when the fantail strikes his favorite pose, he can’t see over his chest), visors, pouters (the pouter looks like a tennis ball stuffed into a glove), long-faced tumblers, inside tumblers (the inside, or parlor, tumbler is prized for his inability to fly a few feet without taking a backwards somersault), priests, nuns, monks, archangels, etc., etc., were all artificial variations of one bird. The difference noticeable in the markings of street pigeons is a vestige of their earlier domestication. Because their feather-color patterns provide an external record of hereditary influences, and because they are docile and hardy, pigeons are a favorite laboratory animal of modern geneticists.
Pigeons are social, somewhat timid, strong, and monogamous. Once mated, they customarily stay so for life. The cock as well as the hen broods the eggs, the hen working all night, the cock relieving her around ten in the morning and mooching off at four in the afternoon. The same schedule applies to the feeding of the young; both sexes secrete “pigeon milk” in their crops. Before coition, at the bonbon stage of courtship, the male feeds a regurgitated substance to the female. Maeterlinck called Columba livia “the most sedentary, most homekeeping, most habit-ridden of bourgeois.” Fire will not budge a brooding pigeon. If a female leaves her nest before an egg has been laid, the male marches behind her, pecking at her head, until she returns or faints. A male will fight to the death defending the sanctity of his hearth. The nests are simple affairs—flat arrangements of twigs, feathers, straw, any old thing. The Museum of Natural History once possessed one made of paper clips; it was found near Wall Street. Are pigeons stupid? It is true that they will inadvertently trample their young to death in the nest; they carry only one twig at a time, whereas the sparrow carries two or three; and a pigeon will make romantic overtures to a bit of broken glass. But, pigeon boosters reply, pigeons have big feet and small fledglings; the sparrow makes a sloppy nest; and what’s wrong with looking in a mirror? Certainly the bird is very eager to survive, unlike his cousin, the passenger pigeon, and his great-uncle once removed, the dodo.
New York City is a good town for pigeons. The health officials of London kill a third of the pigeon population each year. In 1945, Philadelphia started an anti-pigeon campaign, and it trapped twenty-six thousand birds before it admitted that pigeons are irrepressible. In 1930, the superintendent of the State Capitol in Albany poisoned a batch around the building, and the stirred legislators promptly passed the following law: “Pigeons shall not be killed within the limits of any city except for food purposes, or unless sick or injured beyond recovery.” The only major local violation of the statute occurred in 1937, when an unknown fiend, in two sessions (August 10th and November 17th), fed a hundred Broadway pigeons strychnine pellets. The uproar, including a Times editorial entitled “St. Francis Must Weep,” was huge. Building owners wage cold war against pigeons with spikes, prongs, metal netting, and lye-strewn or electrified ledges. The absence of filigrees, cornices, and other nook-rich ornamentation from the newer buildings is partly an anti-nesting device, though the pigeon theory of modern architecture should not be pursued to the exclusion of Frank Lloyd Wright. The bird’s main Manhattan enemy, strange to relate, is the duck hawk, who swoops from bridges and skyscrapers. When Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick suggested that the predators nesting in the steeple of Riverside Church be wiped out, the city’s falcon lovers raised a strenuous outcry. Not quite as strenuous, though, as that which greeted Magistrate Anthony Burke, who in the same month (July, 1936) handed down the opinion that people who feed pigeons are morons. This hit a lot of citizens, for upward of fifty thousand pigeons live in Manhattan on handouts plus garbage. Pigeons cannot vote, and only five are in the phone book—two Edwins, two Georges, and one Pete.
Voices in the Biltmore
April 1956
EVER ON THE LOOKOUT for a feasible means of rejuvenation, we took ourself to the Biltmore Hotel one afternoon during the college Easter vacations. As we had hoped, the cocktail lounge, that pond of perpetual youth, brimmed with high spirits, forced laughter, and expressively exhaled smoke. The room—“room” is a weak word for a volume of space enclosed by Babylonian veils of palms, pillars, and mirrors, and vertically limited by a ceiling with a truly supernal apogee—seemed quite overheated. Every bright, smooth face we saw was flushed. Whether the room was warming the youngsters or the youngsters the room is a conundrum we were too hot to unravel. We watched a forward-looking hat precede the pink face under it across the public view; noticed large numbers of Alexanders and whiskey sours—easy transitions, both, between orange pop and gin; dodged six boys, four of whom were shaking hands and two of whom were carrying tables; savored the overheard fragment “I say he’s an Existentialist. He says he’s a Jesuit”; and scuttled into a nook near a table of burly youths who were bringing a great weight of attention to bear on two pretty girls with slender necks. Their conversation, as we caught it, was only slightly less confused than this transcription, here printed for its value as an American document:
&nb
sp; “Hello. Hello, this is Harry Belafonte.” Laughter. (All voices, unless otherwise specified, are male. We were unable to sort out the four or five boys, who looked exactly alike, though of graduated sizes, like boxes of breakfast food.)
“Man, you’re fantastic.”
“And he said, ‘Are you going to be a host tonight?’ I said, ‘Host tonight?’ and just looked at him.”
“She needed a draft card—always what I wanted.”
“Hello, this is Morey Amsterdam.”
“Let’s go up to Two Hundred and Forty-second Street.”
“Fantastic!”
“I have a car.”
“Stop that.”
(The above interchange we took to be the warmup. Now they began to address the girls directly.)
“Wouldn’t you all [inaudible]?”
“No.” (Female voice.)
“Waiter! Wait-er!”
“Allo. Allo. This is Bridey Murphy.”
“Hey, Les, this is good.”
“What?”
“Your whiskey sour.”
“What’s this?” (Female voice.)
“My name. What’s the matter, you don’t like it?” (Tones gruff with embarrassment.)
“We’re calling for you if we knew where to call for you.”
“No, she’s leaving her boy friend.” (This was the other female voice, one with a titter in every other syllable.)
“Hey, you know where Atlas holds up the world?”
“Maybe.” (Female.)
“Right in front of that statue.”
“There’s going to be fourteen boys and eight girls.”