Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  “Carol’s your last name?”

  “Ann, meet Bob, Joseph, Jack, and Lester the Fester. Ann.”

  “No, no. We’re asking you out for the evening.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “That’s O.K. They’re roommates.”

  “In Scranton?”

  “Don’t they dig coal in Scranton?”

  “Oh, your father’s a coal miner.”

  “Hello, this is Audie Murphy.”

  “Good old New York.”

  “You know anybody from the Philippines?”

  “This is the most honest girl at the table. You hear what she just said?”

  “Two girls from Vietnam! Please stand up, girls.” (Voice raised in mock-ceremonial manner.)

  “We are gratified to have with us two girls from the free state of Vietnam.”

  “We have a car.”

  “I’m singing my way into your heart.”

  “Come with us now to the Biltmore.” (Girlish laughter.)

  “Ambassador, boy.”

  “This is the Biltmore, dope.”

  “We have a car parked in Kinney’s parking lot.”

  Suddenly the boys, as if harking to an ultrasonic whistle, left, marching out in single file, their stride jouncy. The girls (there seemed to be three now) made superior little noises with their tongues and teeth. The following voices are all female.

  “No, I didn’t like him at all.”

  “He was très peculiar.”

  “I like the one who sat here.”

  “This one had only one side of his collar buttoned, did you notice?”

  “No, I wasn’t embarrassed. I’ve got very hardened, believe you me.”

  “I thought Tony was nice?”

  “I used to get so embarrassed.”

  The three girls stood up, fastened capes around the chaste white collars of their dresses, became women, and were heard no more.

  Our Own Baedeker

  March 1956

  IN ANTARCTICA, everything turns left. Snow swirls to the left; seals, penguins, and skua gulls pivot to the left; the sun moves around the horizon right to left; and lost men making a determined effort to bear right find they have made a perfect left circle. Sunlight vibrating between white snow and white clouds creates a white darkness, in which landmarks and shadows disappear. A companion three feet away may vanish, and moments later rematerialize. On the other hand, whales and ships appear inverted in the sky. The sun may appear to rise and set five times in a day. Mountains actually over the horizon seem to loom close at hand. Minor irregularities in the ice tower like steeples. All these illusions are created by a combination of the oblique solar rays, the refraction and reflection of light among strata of warm and cold air, and the appalling lucidity of a dust-free, nearly vaporless atmosphere. In unclouded sunshine, the eye can follow an observation balloon for sixteen miles of its ascent into an inky-purple sky. Sudden veils of intense blueness fall over the world and in a few minutes are mysteriously lifted. When the sun is low, the sky appears green. Men exhale, in their crystallized breath, iridescent rainbows. Weather rainbows are white. The wind-driven snow charges men’s noses and fingertips with static electricity, which is given off as a phantom luminescence.

  For centuries, the continent itself was a phantom. From the time men first recognized that the earth was spherical, a great land mass in the south was imagined. In 1539, Emperor Charles V, of the Holy Roman Empire, appointed Pedro Sancho de Hoz governor of an area shown on maps of the period as stretching from the tip of South America across the pole to China. European scholars equated southerliness with fecundating warmth. Alexander Dalrymple, an eighteenth-century hydrographer for England’s East India Company, predicted that the human population of the unknown continent would be found to exceed fifty million. In 1768, Lieutenant James Cook was sent by the British on a secret mission to locate the southern land mass and “to observe the genius, temper, disposition, and number of the natives and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them.” Cook was unable to penetrate the ice pack, and concluded that if a continent lay beyond it, it was uninhabitable and inhospitable. How true! Antarctica more nearly resembles Mars than the earth we live on. It has no trees, no rivers, no land animals except a few degenerate insects, no vegetation other than some doughty moss and lichen, and no political or economic significance, though it may have some any day now. Permanent bases are being established by scientists of many of the nations involved in the antarctic aspect of the International Geophysical Year 1957–58. Russia thus far has not pressed the claims that the offshore explorations of Czar Alexander I’s Admiral von Bellingshausen might justify. In 1948, though, the Kremlin ominously resurrected and published his report. Hitler once dropped thousands of swastika-stamped darts into a mammoth stretch of ice, named it New Swabia, and left it at that. Britain, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Argentina profess to own wedges of the pie. The United States has recognized no claims. Our antarctic policy, reportedly due for an overhaul, was established by Secretary of State Hughes in 1924, when he asserted that the sine qua non of territorial rights is permanent settlement.*

  Rain and disease are practically strangers to the antarctic. The air is sterilized by ultraviolet rays, which are present in enormous quantities. Penguins, tough birds in other ways, have no resistance to germs. Expeditions never catch cold until they return to civilization. In a sense, the continent lacks even time. In 1947, members of Byrd’s expedition visited the hut of the English explorer Scott. In thirty-five years, nothing had changed. The London magazine on the table could have been printed the day before. There was no rot in the timbers, no rust on the nail-heads, no soot on the windowsills. Outside, a sledge dog that had frozen while standing up still stood there and looked alive. Explorers have no qualms about eating food that was cached decades previously. Admiral Byrd, the world’s leading Antarcticophile, has suggested that the land might be used as a refrigerator for the world’s food surpluses. Books could also be stored there, out of geopolitical harm’s way and in an air where even the tabloids would not yellow. Were it not for the lung-scorching effect of sub-zero temperatures, this highest and driest of continents would make an excellent tuberculosis sanatorium. Antarctica is a plateau. Its mean altitude is six thousand feet—twice that of Asia, its tallest competitor. Its land area equals that of Australia and the United States combined. The seas surrounding it are not only the roughest but the richest in the world, with a greater weight of diatoms and plankton than tropical waters have. The land probably contains all the baser metals. Its resources of coal are judged to be the largest in the world—a geological puzzle, since there is no reason to assume that the south-polar region was ever warm enough for luxuriant vegetation. The most prominent thesis, supported by glacier scratches and the wide-ranging fossils of the primitive fern Glossopteris, posits Gondwanaland—a vast continent in the southern hemisphere two hundred million years ago, when the flat, swampy earth supported gigantic tree ferns, abundant mosses, and the earliest vertebrates. According to the “continental drift” theory, this mass of land shifted around a good bit, the surface of the earth being as loose as a puppy’s skin, and eventually fragmented into the pieces now called Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica—the last a once tropical realm brought to rest at the bottom of the world and buried in ice.

  Ice—of two sorts, white (compressed snow) and blue-green (frozen water)—is what Antarctica has lots of. Ten quadrillion tons, say, plus a few billion created by the lack of centrifugal force near the poles. A man weighs almost a pound more at the South Pole than he does at the equator. Glaciers, sliding on water melted by the pressure of their own weight, flow away from the pole, squeeze through notches in the rim of mountain ranges, and extend themselves over the sea in the form of ice shelves. The largest shelf, the Ross, has the area of France. Chips as big as Manhattan crack off the shelves. These icebergs are carved by wind and waves into the shapes of p
alaces, cathedrals, pagodas, men, and angels before dissolving in temperate waters. In 1927, one was measured and found to be a hundred miles square—the size of two Connecticuts. The snow precipitation does not equal the ice lost in the form of bergs, so a recession of the icecap is believed to be taking place. Were it to melt completely, seeds held in suspension millions of years might germinate. Strange viruses and bacteria could be unleashed on the world. New York City would be under three hundred feet of water. This is not likely to happen in our time.

  Postal Complaints

  October 1956

  UP TO NOW, nobody has breathed a word in defense of the dip pens Postmaster General Summerfield is ousting from post offices across the nation, and if we don’t speak up the pens will go out thinking they didn’t have a friend in the world. (Nobody said much when the mailboxes were made as garish as beer advertisements, or when the noble series of Presidential profiles on our postage stamps gave way to an ill-engraved gallery of lifeless mugs, but let it pass, let it pass.) We liked the old pens; the ink flowed from the nibs dark and luminous, the faint scratching was an agreeable accompaniment to composition, the cork holder felt airy and suave between the fingers, and even the most abject handwriting took on an angular distinction. We are thinking especially of the square-tipped nib, though the bowl-shaped, too, induced more real penmanship than any flow-forever, jet-styled pen. True, some post-office pens were splayed, split, and encrusted, and some wells dry, but seeing a herd of scrawny cattle we do not curse the suffering animals. Few people are fit to tend a cow, and fewer are competent to hold a pen. To seize, to press, to frown and crush was for many the exercise of their certificated literacy.

  The pens, like modern poetry and Dean Acheson, were abused in a tone of impregnable smugness. We once overheard, in a Vermont post office, a woman rest the case for democracy on their wretchedness. “Compare these pens with the bank’s,” she instructed the child with her. “The Post Office is a state-run monopoly; you take what it gives you. The banks operate in a competitive system, and have to please their customers.” The bank, as will happen in Vermont, was right across the street, and we found there the ball-point instruments usual in local temples of deposit, insultingly chained to their tuberous sockets. We hope the child’s conversion to the free way of life did not hinge on this lesson alone. Ball-point pens began as a vulgar novelty for subaqueous scribes. The industry’s publicists have shown great vigor, and thanks to them ink may become as quaint a liquid to the next generation as kerosene is to this, but their product still unrolls a pale, dull line, whose total lack of the thin-and-thick elements that quicken calligraphy is not redeemed by an erratic splotchiness.

  Perhaps the inverse ratio between beauty and efficiency is rigid and not to be bucked. The candle was a graceful, ardent, and numinous method of illumination, but fluorescent tubes in gawky casings are no doubt easier, in the optometrical sense, on the eyes. We consent to hideous brightness. However, it seems that Progress, in order to maintain the appearance of itself, must sacrifice to the dumb god Era its own best fruits. The roll-top desk was the most functional desk ever devised; Functionalism swept it away. The customary resident of that desk, the dip pen with metal nib, retained the eloquence of the goose quill and saved the geese. When Summerfield moved, the geese stood idly by.

  March 1958

  POSTMASTER GENERAL SUMMERFIELD is that rare combination, a man of ideas and a man of action. No sooner did he conceive of red-white-and-blue mailboxes than they twinkled from every street corner. One minute he learned that dogs bite postmen; the next, he was hurling thunderbolts of excommunication at impenitent owners. Congress dared balk at budget time last spring; Summerfield declared Saturday a legal holiday. And, with a divine imperiousness, he stamped his own Christmas cards with four-cent stamps. In view of this dynamic record, we have no hope that he will be frustrated in his scheme to impose two billion dollars’ worth of improvement upon post offices across the nation. We mourn, nevertheless. It used to be that in any town from Bangor to Fresno the heartsick stranger could find honesty, industry, piety, and free reading matter in two places: the post office and the public library. Since Andrew Carnegie couldn’t be everywhere, in many hamlets the post office was the sole repository of our traditions. It rises before the imagination now: the village post office, with its quaint grilled windows, its ink-stained floors, its hideous orange writing shelf, its curiously nibbled blotters, its “wanted” posters for Dillinger and Aaron Burr, and its twin letter slots dividing the world into two great halves, “Local” and “Out of Town.” Framed by the window marked “Postal Savings” (another of Summerfield’s victims, along with the nib pen), the postmaster himself is seen—his shirtsleeves secured by elastics, his glasses hung on the tip of his nose—alternately dispensing gossip and stamped envelopes. Beside him stands his wife, a pencil in her hair, weighing packages. Some are enormous; she forces a grin as she lifts them. Over by the wall, next to the radiator, the town idler lingers, pretending to fill out money-order blanks. Uncle Sam gesticulates from the bulletin board; a W.P.A. mural, executed with Assyrian dignity, fades above the transom. The laughter of the sorting clerks filters in from the back room.… The vision fades.

  Instead, we see a cinder-block cube, painted indigo, scarlet, and ivory. Within, a loudspeaker murmurs cocktail music as shoppers promenade along clearly marked lanes, between pyramids of sanitarily wrapped Defense Bonds, postcards, and stamps. A sign proclaims, “5¢ STAMP SPECIAL—1,000 FOR $49.98.” Another importunes, “SEND A PACKAGE TO BRITAIN FOR JUST 20¢ DOWN.” At the door sits a young man in white, hammering a cash register; $2,000,000,000.00 is the sum he has just rung up.

  Old and Precious

  March 1957

  UP AT THE THIRTEENTH ANNUAL NATIONAL ANTIQUES SHOW, held in the not undingy basement of Madison Square Garden, we saw more old and precious things than you could shake a stick at. For that matter, a person shaking a stick in among all those Staffordshire inkwells, Baccarat chandeliers, hurricane lamps, crystal bobêches, Japanese netsukes, doré bronze candelabra, Zuñi necklaces, Bohemian tankards, vellum music sheets, bisque clocks, Basque jugs, and specimens of dragware, cream-ware, queen’s ware, stoneware, pearlware, and colored, cut, blown, pressed, and authentic milk glass would doubtless be removed from the premises—quite properly, too. All the booths—and they were legion—were numbered. We paused by F-15, distinguished by a huge green metal cow, a hideous brittle pillar about the size of an umbrella stand, and an 1807 sampler upon which a childish artisan had inscribed, “May I with equal art engrave each gentle Virtue on my heart and as Life wears away may I grow wiser and better each Day. The Ways of Wisdom are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.” Anxious to set off on the pleasant ways of wisdom, we asked F-15’s proprietor, a tall, elegantly turned-out gentleman, what the cow was. “A weather vane,” he said, in a tone of who-doesn’t-know-that.

  “It looks heavy for the purpose,” we said.

  “On the contrary, it’s light. It’s hollow,” he said, and rapped the creature’s resounding flank, then punched its head. “They always weighted the head, for balance, so it would turn.”

  “Oh. And that?” We indicated the umbrella stand.

  “Hungarian. Made in Budapest. Eighteenth-century.”

  “Uh, what does it do?” we asked.

  “Do? It doesn’t do, it is,” he replied. “It’s a pedestal. Something stood on it. Now, that is a stein.” He pointed at a ponderous mug decorated with drunken trolls doing the Germanic version of the light fantastic in the convex confines of a bas-relief tavern, and waved us off.

  At G-5, we studied a fin-de-siècle painting of a child with elevated eyeballs. The nineteenth century, to judge by the relics recovered from its ruins, had a much keener Innigkeit toward animals than toward human beings. The innocence of the child’s face was so vacuous, so total, that it gave us a queer, embarrassing impression of nudity. In fact (forgive us if we sermonize), the Victorian era was, in its sly way, appallin
gly naked. Gladstone’s minions made lamp bases out of the bodies of young marble girls and covered footstools with cloth the pink of painted skin. Even the vases—florid, nippled, with provocative concavities—are scarcely fit for twentieth-century eyes. Seeking chastity, we turned to the consoling Puritanism of a whalebone swift, which expanded, with mathematical flexibility, at a touch.

  The Carlebach Gallery has established a display of Burmese, Chinese, French, and Hindu chess sets. Rooks were, variously, pagodas, castles, and howdah-heavy elephants. My Sister and I, Stein Specialists, had assembled vessels of wood, china, silver, brass, and opaline, in the shapes of skulls, roosters, monkeys, monks, Bismarck, nuns, foxes, George Washington, slaves, fops, Churchill, and a woman’s bare legs. In one nook were some old maps of the American Northeast, with strange nations like Pensylvania, Nova Jersey, Nova York, and Pars Aouanushionigy squeezed in between the Atlantic and Lake Ontario. In another, the Sons of the American Revolution had arranged George Washington’s sugar-loaf crusher, bleeding knives, fob seal, telescope, dress sword, sextant, and shoe-measuring scale for our edification, along with Martha Washington’s lace needle and formal slippers. She had tiny feet. Speaking of feet, there was the Joseph Burger collection of footwear, which proved that the poorer the wearer, the more sensible the shoe. The Mexican peasant’s leather sandals, the Chinese coolie’s “bird’s-nest” boots, and the Norwegian yeoman’s woven shoes set a norm of comfort and simplicity from which sophistication could only depart, tweaking the toes upward (Turkey and Syria), adding square flaps to the front (Bohemia), piling on width (dunderbludgeons, popular under Henry VIII), adding height (Japanese clogs), and, in a frenzy of civilization, withering the foot itself into a pitiful flipper that could fit into a five-inch envelope of flowered cloth (China).

  Our own feet began to ache. We hastily glanced at a Bible owned, each in his time, by Charles I and Benjamin Franklin; at aboriginal vacuum cleaners, their sucking action created by metal pumps (1905), scissor bellows (1907), and accordion bellows (1911); and at the American Museum of Photography’s array of stereoscopes, crystallotypes, graphascopes, daguerreotypes, melainotypes, ambrotypes, and ferrotypes. On the way out, we experimentally opened what we took to be a fancy toothpick holder. Inside, there was a miniature button-hook for a baby’s shoes. How precious. How old.