Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  Spatial Remarks

  November 1957

  LAST WEEK we passed several anxious days tending the man in the moon, for whom previously we had never much cared. “The moon,” a third-grade teacher once told us brusquely, “is a stone. A mammoth stone.” That seemed to sum it up. Debunked as a deity, stripped of its authority to cause madness and promote crops, nervously plucking at the tides like an old pensioner perpetually adjusting a blanket, the satellite (to use the word in its primitive sense) was a heavenly deadhead. Yet when we read that the Russians might celebrate their birthday party by splashing a red stain across a breadth of lunar craters, it could have been our own face they were planning to spatter with ink, so great was our indignation, alarm, and shame.

  The rumor seemed plausible enough. The handy phrase “Red Moon” had been bouncing through the headlines for the past month. And any man or bear intent on showing off his muscles will go for the biggest rock he sees. On the night before the day that in Russia would mark the ruby anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, we were in a country house, so the sky was much with us. It had cleared for the first time in November; the moon was brilliant and a hair less than full. The pure and venerable disc, tastefully touched with shadows named by the homely astronomy of a more deferential time Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, Newton, Hell, Beer, and Mare Serenetatis, suddenly seemed precious, like one coin we had saved never to spend. Bidding the moon good night, we wondered in what shape it would rise again—with one cheek meretriciously rouged, or perhaps with the entire head split in two by a festive cobalt bomb or even fragmented into a cloud of triangular asteroids. There was as yet no burlesque, however brutal, of the celestial landscape that seemed beyond the youthful powers of our companion in world leadership.

  Troubled, we woke when it was still dark, and went to the window, to see, through a screen of leafless elm branches, the moon half submerged on the horizon—bloated, cockeyed, and, in the orange dawn, transparent. Lord, we thought, the moon has foundered! Our wife, also awake now, assured us the moon was merely setting in its accustomed manner, and together we watched it sink from view, plunge on its way, poor, blind, dumb thing, to the other side of the earth, where an eclipse and heaven knew what strange assault awaited it. How reluctantly it abandoned the obsolescent safety of the American sky!

  The next night, the mammoth stone returned unharmed—indeed, augmented and completely full. We were grateful. Whether it was the honor of the universe or of our country that had survived a crisis we are as yet too addled by moonbeams to declare.

  September 1959

  TWENTY-TWO MONTHS AGO, we wrote in this space of our deep, primeval fear that Soviet Russia would celebrate the revolution’s fortieth anniversary by splashing red paint on the face of the moon. This threat of heavenly vandalism was in the wind, you may remember, shortly after the first sputnik violated the azure serene of our national vanity. Since that innocent awakening, sublunar space has become as crowded with peculiar missiles as a panel of “Krazy Kat”; the phrases “in orbit” and “launching pad” have entered our advertising slang; the fizzles at Cape Canaveral have blended with the friendly sizzling of breakfast bacon; and the United States government, in all seriousness, has selected seven young fathers from dreamy towns like East Derry, New Hampshire, to colonize the circumambient vacuum. Perhaps television comedians and the backs of Kix boxes have made this whole awesome business too familiar to all of us. At any rate, the Soviet flag has pricked the moon, and we feel no pain.

  March 1963

  SCIENCE takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. No sooner do Russian scientists claim that they have revived two lizards that had been frozen in the Siberian tundra for five thousand years than American scientists announce that there is no life whatever on Venus. In a way, we’re relieved, for there’s so much life in France, Cuba, and the subway these days that it’s a comfort to know there are still a few underdeveloped areas in the universe. But in a way we’re sorry, for the tendrilous, polyoptical Venutian was, along with the wispy, transparent Lunite and the green-skinned, snaggle-toothed, canal-building Martian, a childhood friend. How vivid the populations of other planets once seemed—far more imaginable than the residents of Cambodia or Chicago! The people on Jupiter were terribly squat and slow, because of the intense gravity; when they moved, it was like lava pouring, and when they talked, it was like furnaces grumbling. The inhabitants of Saturn always wore wide-brimmed hats and hoopskirts, whereas the folks on Neptune swam everywhere they went, carrying tridents. Pluto, so remote, cold, and small, seemed the planetary poor relation, and we pitied the cosmic hillbillies who had to live there, clad in rags, drinking cheap sulphates, and trying to warm their shivering limbs in the rays of a sun no bigger than a star. At the opposite end of the system, but somewhat kindredly underprivileged, were the almost Caribbean individuals sweltering out their lazy days on Mercury, which always kept the same side toward the sun, and where everything this side of silicon melted, making machinery impossible and architecture unstable.

  Now they tell us this is all fancy. Venus, far from being a tropical paradise beneath its mantle of perpetual clouds, is a baking limbo of eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Though there is still hope that a bit of moss enlivens Mars, the planets have, in effect, been given a clean slate. They are innocent of life, and the earth, which is so guilty of it, can feel a little safer, and a little lonelier.

  August 1964

  WE LOOKED FORWARD with avidity to the pictures of the moon sent back by Ranger VII, but now that they are in Life, between Lyndon Johnson and the Vanderbilts, we confess ourself disappointed. What did we expect? Not, really, a gridwork of streets and the tops of little bald horned heads. But some message, some brief scrawl from God, a legible graffito on that invitingly blank and conspicuous surface. Instead, we got the same old pockmarks and smears we’d known were there all along: a riddled, wrinkled old celestial hide spattered with craters idiotically round and arbitrarily disposed. From four hundred and eighty miles away, the moon still has a semblance of terrain and wears a kind of face. At two hundred and thirty-five miles, the ridges and splotches are smoothing into a milky, speckled blandness. At eighty-five miles, the blandness is growing tasty, and the curdled circularity of the holes begins to remind us of—yes, the closer we get to the moon, the more it looks like cheese, presumably green.

  Dinosaur Egg

  April 1958

  EASTER WEEK made us think of (a) eggs and (b) how old we are getting, which two preoccupations naturally led us to a concern with the oldest egg in New York—a dinosaur egg a hundred and twenty million years old. This egg rests in that catch-all of the ages, the Museum of Natural History, whose Curator of Fossil Reptiles and Amphibians, Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, told us, “We acquired it in a trade with a little museum in southern France—Aix-en-Provence. They found quite a few of these eggs not far from the surface near the mouth of the Rhone. Harvard University has another. Dinosaurs made nests and deposited eggs in them, much as alligators and crocodiles do today. For some reason, these didn’t hatch. In time, they cracked, and the goo—the albumen and yolk—ran out, and mineral-bearing water and sand flowed in and solidified into rock.”

  A woman with harried hair and anxious eyes burst into the office where we were talking and exclaimed, “Dr. Colbert, there’s a man from Guatemala waiting downstairs with some strange bones he wants you to look at!”

  Dr. Colbert’s shell, unlike the egg’s, didn’t crack; he calmed the lady and said to us, “While this egg is the oldest in the city, far older ones have been found. Our egg is Jurassic—that is, in the vicinity of a hundred million years old. The oldest existing vertebrate eggs were dug up in Texas and date from Permian times—about twice as long ago. They are at Harvard. We have some eggs from Mongolia that are Cretaceous. A few bits of what may be embryonic bone can be glimpsed in them. These are smaller than the Jurassic egg, and so are the Permian eggs. We don’t know what creature laid the Permian eggs; our Jurassic egg is pre
tty certainly from a sauropod dinosaur that was about forty feet long. The egg is twice the size of an ostrich egg, which, of course, is small in relation to the size of the parent. That’s how reptiles are; they lay many smallish eggs. Our egg is about as big as they come.”

  We thanked Dr. Colbert and went downstairs to look at this wonder. The egg sat alone in a glass case, thousands of miles and millions of years from Mother. She was pictured, in white ink, above her egg; she looked like a tadpole evenly mounted on four lumpy legs resembling an elephant’s. Her head was a mere cursory termination of a long and rather lovely neck. The expression in her eye was faint but earnest; she was probably not very bright, but good. Beneath the picture was written “Hypselosaurus priscus.” The egg was mostly a smooth yellowish-gray stone, much wider than it was high, like a partly deflated volley ball. The stone was cracked and chipped yet clearly ovoid. To sections of the surface clung curving flakes of the shell, its texture delicately stippled, its color a blackened but still fairly lambent reddish-brown. The shell was less than an eighth of an inch thick; its fragments adhered to the rock with a gentle, even tender convexity.

  The little children in their Easter clothes, emerging goggle-eyed from under the horrors of the adjacent Tyrannosaur Hall, tended to pause by the egg.

  “There’s an egg!” a mite cried.

  “I wanted you to see this,” a schoolteacher told her brood. “It’s shaped funny,” a little boy complained.

  Most of the onlookers rushed up to the case, gazed a long moment, and walked away silently. Nearby were Iguanodon footprints a yard square; bones the size of boulders littered the wall. Comparatively, the egg was a pebble. The emotions of its viewers seemed to be, in sequence, expectation, surprise, readjustment, a certain ineffable content and pleasure, and, lastly, disappointment.

  A man and his son, dressed in matching lumberjack shirts, came up. “There’s the dinosaur egg,” the father said, with a pride almost paternal.

  The boy, plump and saucy, stared and said, “It doesn’t look like a dinosaur egg to me.”

  “That’s what they look like,” said the father.

  Upright Carpentry

  May 1958

  WE RECENTLY had a carpenter build a few things in our house in the country. It’s an old house, leaning away from the wind a little; its floors sag gently, like an old mattress. The carpenter turned his back on our tilting walls and took his vertical from a plumb line and his horizontal from a bubble level, and then went to work by the light of these absolutes. Fitting his planks into place took a lot of those long, irregular, oblique cuts with a ripsaw that break an amateur’s heart. The bookcase and kitchen counter and cabinet he left behind stand perfectly up-and-down in a cockeyed house. Their rectitude is chastening. For minutes at a stretch, we study them, wondering if perhaps it isn’t, after all, the wall that is true and the bookcase that leans. Eventually, we suppose, everything will settle into the comfortably crooked, but it will take years, barring earthquakes, and in the meantime we are annoyed at being made to live with impossible standards.

  Crush vs. Whip

  June 1958

  APPARENTLY, the St. Louis Cardinals are much more friable than they used to be, for a paper in San Francisco recently ran the headline “GIANTS CRUSH CARDINALS, 3–1.” Now, we don’t want to suggest that our city’s eldest franchise has got in with a group of orange squeezers who don’t know real pulverization when they see it. There’s been too much of such carping already. When a boy leaves home, a mother’s duty is to hold her tongue, we always say. While voices around us cried that the West Coast was, variously, a vile limbo, an obscure religious sect, a figment of Walter O’Malley’s fevered imagination, and a tar pit of busherism certain to fossilize whatever it enveloped, we kept mum. As a reward to ourself for restraint, therefore, we will offer some advice about the science or art of baseball-headline verbs. These we have seen evolve from a simple matter of “WIN” and “LOSE” into a structure of periphrasis as complex as heraldry in feudalism’s decadence. New York City, now a quaint port known principally for her historical monuments, once boasted three—we swear it, three—baseball teams and a dozen daily newspapers. The lore accumulated here should be passed on to headline writers in all the fresh, brash towns likely to be visited as the major leagues, driven by a dark fatality, continue their migration toward Asia.

  The correct verb, San Francisco, is “WHIP.” Notice the vigor, force, and scorn obtained, quite without hyperbole. This table may prove helpful:

  3–1—WHIP

  3–2—SHADE

  2–1—EDGE

  1–0 – (Pitcher’s name) BLANKS1

  Turning back and working upward, we come to 4–2, known professionally as “the golden mean,” or “absolute zero.” The score is uniquely characterless. The bland terms “BEAT” and “DEFEAT” are called in from the bullpen (meaning an area in which pitchers not actually in the game may “warm up”). However, 4–1 gets the coveted verb “VANQUISH.” Rule: Any three-run margin, provided the winning total does not exceed ten, may be described as a vanquishing. If, however, the margin is a mere two runs and the losing total is five or more, “OUTSLUG” is considered very tasty. You will notice, S.F., the trend called Mounting Polysyllabism, which culminates, at the altitude of double digits, in that trio of Latin-root rhymers, “ANNIHILATE,”

  “OBLITERATE,” and “HUMILIATE.” E.g., “A’S ANNIHILATE O’S, 13–2.”

  Special cases:

  1. If the home team is on the short end of the score, certain laws of mutation apply. “SHADE” becomes “SQUEAK BY.” For “OUTSLUG,” put “WIN OUT IN SLOPPY CONTEST.” By a judicious exploitation of “BOW,” the home team, while losing, can be given the active position in the sentence and an appearance of graciousness as well.

  2. Many novice banner writers, elevated from the 2-col. obscurity of Class A ball to the black-cap. screamers of the big leagues, fumble the concept of “SWEEP.” It always takes a plural object. Doubleheaders and series can be swept, but not regulation single games. (The minimal “WIN STREAK” is three games long; five makes a “SURGE.”) A team that neither sweeps nor is swept splits. A headline familiar to New Englanders is “SOX SPLIT.”

  3. Which brings up the delicate matter of punning, or paronomasia. Each Baltimore journal is restricted by secret covenant to one “BIRDS SOAR” every two weeks. Milwaukee, with a stronger team, is permitted twelve instances of “BRAVES SCALP” before the All-Star game. “TIGERS CLAW” and “CUBS LICK” tend to take care of themselves. As for you, San Francisco, the lack of any synonyms for “giant” briefer than “behemoth” and “Brobdingnagian,” together with the long-standing failure of New York’s own writers to figure out exactly what giants do (intimidate? stomp?), rather lets you out of the fun. In view of this, and in view of the team’s present surprising record, you may therefore write “GIANTS A-MAYS.” But don’t do it more than once a month: moderation in all things, S.F.

  Métro Gate

  January 1959

  LA RÉGIE AUTONOME DES TRANSPORTS PARISIENS—The Paris Transit Authority—has very generously given the Museum of Modern Art a battered old entrance gate to the Métro, the French capital’s subway system. The Museum has no less courteously installed the thing in its garden, and there we went to see it. The gate, of cast iron, and one of many produced from a design by Hector Guimard, an exponent of the curvilinear, vegetative style that was known as Art Nouveau in 1900 and that, curiously, is still known by that name in 1959, has been rooted in concrete near the windowless gray brick tower built by the Museum after its fire. The garden, cold and sere within its high walls, was loud, as it always is, with the strange murmur (Traffic? Air-conditioners? The End of the World?) that so strongly resembles the protest of a sea-shell against your ear. The objet d’art we had come to view proved to be an inverted U of scabby green metal fifteen feet high and six strides wide. We stood between its legs and looked up, and received the disconsolate impression we usually receive underneath the brontos
aurus in the Museum of Natural History. The metalwork is less foliate than we expected—indeed, there’s not a leafy line in it—and the organic principles informing its contours derive less from branches than from bones. Anticipating the tapering, strenuous grace of arboreal imitation, we found instead the stubborn little knobs and puckers of bones, an impression to which patches of blood-color scumbled through the vile green paint added an explicit grisliness. These were not even clean bones bolted and welded together but dirty bones, the remains of a too hasty feast, partly wrapped in awkward whorls and wrinkles: crushed napkins of iron. These clothlike ridges, especially at the base of the columns, suggested the ascending folds of French cathedral sculpture, but the aspiring eye was led upward not to the serene face of a stone saint but to a brown bulb, a lamp—an ant’s abdomen magnified. This abdomen, this sac of stained glass, was grooved so that it took on, as we gazed upward, the aspect of an inhuman face, eyeless and cruel. The lamp bulb was gone from the opposite upright, as if the one had eaten the other. With tentacles of metal, the two posts reached out and interlocked, and in the center of their embrace was hung a sign that, in the neo-Turkish lettering once used to advertise ice cream in this country, proclaimed “METROPOLITAIN.”

  We were virtually alone with the gate. A woman wearing a foreign face and a furry coat, pursing her lips with that affectionate vehemence peculiar to Gauls, paused briefly, and a young couple, whom we knew to be French because the backs of their heads looked exactly alike, came and mooned a moment. These persons had clearly arrived at the end of a pilgrimage such as our own expatriates in Paris might make to see the water cooler in the American Express office. Otherwise, the scene was devoid of human content, and we resorted to asking the statues in the garden their opinions of their new neighbor.