Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  Inside Bryant Park it was quiet. Cars swished and cursed, an airplane muttered, a child cried, but it was, on the whole, quiet. No zoos, no Shakespeare, no banjo-playing beatniks here. The people who come to this park, we decided, are the quiet people—lovers, thinkers, newspaper readers, derelicts, the retired, the out-of-work, the sleep-it-offs, and the dying. We looked at our fellows in the park; they were, we estimated, about four-fifths male, one-third colored, and two-thirds solitary, with a median age of fifty-one. In front of us, on the steps, a girl with chestnut hair that she could have sat on arrived, carrying books. This wonderful hair was done up in a long pony-tail, and she sat not on it but on a newspaper that her companion spread on the steps for her. She arranged herself and her books with a touching care. She moved not with the jerky, spiked walk of a secretary but with the languid calm of a student, on sandals of soft leather and thonged thought.

  No, the secretary kind of girl was nowhere in the park, or was just passing through, like her counterpart the businessman. The businessmen, always in pairs and always talking, in creased suits of a cunning summer weave, strode by on the flagstones, on their way to somewhere else. We admired them, these children of the morning, these creators, but they did not admire us in turn. We were, we residents of Bryant Park, a quiet, uneasy, twilight lot. Those of us who could not find seats stood or wandered in foreboding little circles, facing in different directions and often looking up, as if a catastrophe—our own mortality or something vaguer—were faintly screaming toward us from beyond the tops of the maples. For some of us, catastrophe had already come: a young man with bright-carrot hair lay stretched out face down on a bench; a child kept crying; an old man in clothes too big for him stared blindly with alcohol-gutted eyes at the scuttling pigeons.

  It abruptly occurred to us that we were near the center of the world. Within a few blocks of us, Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street made their celebrated intersection. Times Square hoisted its gritty emblems, the greatest public library in the world reared its wisdom, the densest shopping area in the country offered its wares, and, in a show window two blocks away, the crown jewels of England in all their splendor were assembled to advertise one more airline. Where but here, in Bryant Park, was the bull’s-eye of our city? As surely as if we were in the Forum of 160, on the Ile de la Cité in 1260, or in Piccadilly Circus in 1860, we sat, now, in 1960, in the center of Western civilization. Not quite; we sat to one side of the middle of the steps. To our right, in the exact middle, was a weary old man in a dusty blue sweater sitting on a tabloid, chewing a cigar, and blinking like Tiresias.

  John Marquand

  August 1960

  JOHN P. MARQUAND wrote many good books and one for which we cannot be grateful enough. The Late George Apley is many things. It is a sentimental novel that fully satisfies the expectations aroused in us when we approach a professional product. It is the finest extended parody composed in modern America, the stately, cloying, and somewhat melodious prose of Mr. Willing, “Boston’s Dean of Letters,” being so surely wedded to its subject that it can be overlooked as a continuous invention of high literary irony. It is a detailed valentine to a city, Boston, and an admirably wrought fictional monument to the nation’s Protestant elite. Once Marquand had made, with a satire no less ferocious for being urbane, the point that the Apleys are not better than other men, he went on, more remarkably, to suggest that they are no worse. At the end of a life bounded on the south by Providence and on the north by Portland, a life laborious and timid, smug and mean, George Apley sits down and writes his son a farewell letter in which snobbery, generosity, pomposity, and courage ecstatically merge. And when, having settled the last formality of his own funeral, he writes, “During the last week I have been working on several plans to rid the attic of those gray squirrels, I think now the only thing to do is to keep watch near the limb of the elm tree and to shoot them as they enter by that hole under the gutter,” centuries are stripped away, the woodsman at the marrow of the Brahmin stands revealed, and we can all go about our business with refined hearts.

  We ourself met Mr. Marquand twice, both times briefly. He was, perhaps, an author who aspired to earthly dignity rather than unearthly glory. Dignity he had achieved, and he wore it well, but he was the creator of the “Marquand hero,” and not this hero himself. His evenly rosy complexion seemed distinctly French, and his remarks, delivered to a stranger among the diffident courtesies of a cocktail party, had a flattering precision and pertinence. The second time we saw him was five days before he died. He seemed in excellent health. It was the week of the Democratic Convention, and he surprised us (for we had understood that he was a Republican) by announcing his intention to vote for Senator Kennedy and by contributing, as his share of the talk (he contributed no more than his share; he still had, impressive in an honored, elderly man, the writer’s habit of listening), a personal anecdote about the nominee’s grandfather, whom he called Honey Fitz.

  Two Heroes

  December 1960

  NEWSPAPER READERS pick up their daily catalogue of villainies partly in the expectation—never completely dulled—of finding heroes, yet when heroes appear, the river of print whisks them past us in such unexpected poses that we scarcely have time to recognize them. Last week, a man and a woman, the Reverend Lloyd A. Foreman and Mrs. James Gabrielle, were glimpsed in the act of escorting their daughters to a New Orleans elementary school. By the time these lines appear, both may have been removed from view by events making their heroism either unnecessary or hopeless, but at this moment there they still are, holding the hands of wide-eyed, white-faced little girls named Pamela and Yolanda, while behind them segregationist banshees scream obscenities and police grimly offer protection.

  We have become familiar, callously familiar, perhaps, with the heroism of the Negro children who each autumn carry the tide of equal rights a little deeper into the South. There has been so much of it, and there is so much more to come. To be a Negro, James Baldwin has recently said, is to be “a fantasy in the mind of the republic.” Living, as we do,‡ a few miles from the most populous and notorious Negro ghetto in the world, threading our life through a multitude of polite and unspoken segregations, we have not earned the right to sympathize fully with those Negro children, to suffer with them. We watch them helplessly from a distance, and, indeed, we are equally helpless in regard to Mr. Foreman and Mrs. Gabrielle; we have no more power than their abusive neighbors to lessen or increase by a step their stubborn walks to and from the William Frantz School.

  Together, the two schools blasphemed by the presence of four small colored girls had a normal enrollment of a thousand pupils. This means, then, close to two thousand parents. Of those two thousand, how many sincerely believe that racial separation is divinely ordained, how many think that it is circumstantially prudent, how many don’t really care, how many think that it is wrong and would like to be brave, we do not know. One way or another, under the harsh and ingenious pressures that a community can apply, all have been chipped away, leaving, for us to see, two people—a Christian minister and an ex-WAC whose husband, she has told reporters, spent three years in a foxhole in New Guinea and wasn’t going to let a mob of women tell him what to do. Out of two thousand, two. Strangely, it seems enough.

  Doomsday, Mass.

  November 1961

  A NEW MOTEL in Danvers, Massachusetts, is to be equipped with an underground shelter large enough to house for six months a community capable of creating the world anew in the event of holocaust. The community is to be composed of (a) the sixty motorists lucky enough to be stopping at the motel on Doomsday, and (b) a group of about fifty persons selected in advance, presumably from the locality. The brave new world, from Cape Town to Nome, will speak with a Danvers twang—a sobering thought. The selected group will include (and we quote from the Boston Herald) “one surgeon, obstetrician, nurse, veterinarian, lawyer, estate planner, social director, machine-gunner, bulldozer operator, teacher, horticulturist, cook, twenty municipal
officers, civil-defense officials, dietician, fisherman, radio operator, carpenter, clergyman, mechanic, plumber, dentist, electrician, chemist, radiologist, and others.” It is an interesting list, especially when compared with the older scheme of having the animals walk in two by two. The order of listing presumably reflects the order of importance, or at least the order in which the professions occurred to the provident motelkeeper as he talked to the newspaperman. The first four professions are medical, as well they might be, since even if everybody gets into the shelter unharmed, six months of scuffling around in the earth is apt to generate a few bruises. The “obstetrician” immediately after “surgeon” is a reassuring touch, implying that not all the scuffling will be aimless. “Lawyer,” next in line behind the veterinarian—who has, the article explains, “a cow, a bull, chickens, and rooster” to supervise—is a bit of a stopper, though, and “estate planner” stopped us completely. The opportunities for litigation at the end of the world would not appear to be great, and the need for estate planning seems at first blush negligible. The wealth of these hundred or so souls when they emerge into a world they have entirely inherited is apt to be considerable, however, and some sound investment counsel, Boston style, will doubtless be welcome. Continuing down the list, we encounter a series of happy pictures: the social director organizing square dances and pinochle tournaments in the shelter; the machine-gunner busily mowing down the interested crowds that have come up from Lynn; and the bulldozer operator, off in a corner with a dummy gearshift, keeping his reflexes sharp for the glad moment when he will be let loose to purify the landscape of all those crunchily empty houses. From a bulldozer’s point of view, the next postwar world will certainly be paradise.

  We envision, in those cozy concrete caverns, the teacher teaching (Readiness, Righteousness, and Radioactivity), the horticulturist tending his meagre salvage of seedlings, and the cook cooking. Indeed, we wonder why the cook wasn’t placed at the top of the list. But those twenty—twenty!—municipal officers, and those civil-defense officials, who would seem to have their responsibilities behind them. Here is some excess fat for someone—the dietician, perhaps—to trim. The remainder of the list, especially the fisherman and the dentist, seems unobjectionable, though we wonder if perhaps, as at Presidential inaugurations, three or four clergymen might not be required for reasons of tact. Certainly the need for tact will be very great, what with that bull running around and those sixty motorists itching to get on with their trips. Their vacations will have long since expired, and possibly their automobile-inspection stickers will have lapsed. Yes, tempers may run short, and for that reason we deferentially suggest that the “others” include a psychologist of conservative cast (non-depth), a sincere, conscientious public-relations man, and conceivably even a writer, who could while away the long cave nights with fabulous tales of the world when men walked upright, in sunshine, only intermittently afraid.

  August 1962

  SIX PERSONS in Boston—three males, three females—were recently asked what they would do if notified that the world was going to end in four days. Why four days instead of the more conventionally apocalyptic three we leave as a mystery forever embedded in the mind of the Boston Herald reporter who asked the question. It is not the question that startles us but the answers. Two of the women said they would go to Bermuda. One woman answered that she would move up the date of her wedding, which is at present scheduled for December 24th. One man, a law-school student, thought he would take his wife on as long a trip as they could manage in so cruelly curtailed a period. “I’d see America first,” he said. So, if these six were a fair cross-section, in the last agony of the United States the highways will be clogged with determined sightseers, the telephone wires jammed with the details of hastily rearranged weddings, and the reservations to Bermuda booked solid.

  The bars may or may not be full. Another man, an electrician, ventured to guess that he’d “either tie one on or spend four days in church.” The law student judiciously estimated, “I don’t think drinking would help much.” Only one of the six, a Waltham homemaker, unqualifiedly plumped for pleasure. “I’d go out and have a ball. I’d be of the eat-drink-and-be-merry school. I’d go back to Bermuda.” The amount of business the churches would do is also uncertain. An insurance agent said, “I guess the best thing to do would be to try to make peace with my Creator.” But then he added, “I don’t think that would take four days.” The second Bermuda-minded woman (“It only takes about two hours to get to Bermuda from here,” she pointed out) supposed she would “spend some time in church and try to be natural.” Being natural was the insurance agent’s keynote. “I think my family and I would stay together and spend the time quietly. Really just go along the way that we always do.”

  All in all, it was a rather reassuring picture these six conjured up, of a hundred and eighty million doomed souls reaching for their car keys, giving the airport a ring, rather shyly veering between the saloon and the cathedral, quietly keeping natural, and—though no one said this—presumably maintaining that indispensable American virtue, a sense of humor. We tried to picture what we would do, and tended to agree with the Brighton schoolteacher who said, “Frankly, if the world was going to end in four days, I’d like to have it be a surprise.”

  Grandma Moses

  December 1961

  THE DEATH of a very old person seems no more natural, no less an untoward incursion, than the death of a young one. Perhaps death seems natural only to Nature herself—and even she may have some doubts. Yet we cannot think of the life, now concluded, of Anna Mary Robertson Moses without cheerfulness. To live one allotted span as a farm wife and the mother of ten children, and then, at the age of seventy-six, to begin another, as an artist, as Grandma Moses, and to extend this second life into twenty-five years of unembarrassed productiveness—such a triumph over the normal course of things offers small cause for mourning. If we do mourn, it is for ourselves; she had become by her hundredth year one of those old people who, as old buildings civilize a city or spindly church spires bind up a landscape, make the world seem safer. Shaw and Brancusi were examples; Churchill and Schweitzer still are. They pay the world the great compliment of being reluctant to leave it, and their reluctance becomes a benediction. Little is said nowadays about the wisdom of age. Perhaps such wisdom is dreaded, for there is melancholy in it. Yet even awkward truths can be gracious and cheering in their expression. Describing her method of painting, Mrs. Moses once said, “I paint from the top down. First the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.”

  Spring Rain

  April 1962

  AS THE SKY is pushed farther and farther away by the stiff-arms of this and that new steel frame, we sometimes wonder if what is reaching us is really weather at all. Whenever we have looked down at the street this spring, the perpetually rain-coated figures have appeared to be marching, jerkily foreshortened and steadfastly downstaring, under a kind of sooty fluorescence bearing little relation to the expansive and variable light of outdoors. The other day, as if at the repeated invitation of all those raincoats, it did rain, and we ventured outdoors ourself; that is to say, we made our way down several corridors and shafts and into a broader corridor called Forty-fourth Street, whose ceiling, if one bothered to look, consisted of that vaguely tonic, vaporish semi-opacity old-fashionedly termed the Firmament. On this day, the Firmament, which showed as a little, ragged strip wedged between the upper edges of the buildings, seemed in a heavy temper. Water was being silently inserted in the slots between the building tops, and a snappy little secondary rain was dripping from marquees, overhead signs, fire escapes, and ledges. On the street itself, whose asphalt had emerged from the blanket of winter as creased and bumpy as a slept-on sheet, the water was conducting with itself an extravagantly complicated debate of ripple and counter-ripple, flow and anti-flow. It looked black but not dirty, and we thought, in that decisive syntactical way we reserve for such occasions, how all w
ater is in passage from purity to purity. Puddles, gutters, sewers are incidental disguises: the casual avatars of perpetually reincarnated cloud droplets; momentary embarrassments, having nothing to do with the ineluctable poise of H2O. Throw her on the street, mix her with candy wrappers, splash her with taxi wheels, she remains a virgin and a lady.

  The breeze caught its breath, the rain slackened, and the crowds that had been clustered in entranceways and under overhangs shattered and scattered like drying pods. We went over to Fifth Avenue; the buildings there, steeped in humidity, seemed to be a kind of print of their own images, a slightly too inky impression of an etching entitled “Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1962.”

  No matter how long we live among rectangular stones, we still listen, in the pauses of a rain, for the sound of birds chirping as they shake themselves. No birds chirped, but the cars and buses squawked in deeper, openly humorous voices, and a trash can and a mailbox broke into conversation. CAST YOUR BALLOT HERE FOR A CLEANER NEW YORK, the trash can said, and MAIL EARLY IN THE DAY IT’S THE BETTER WAY, the mailbox beside it quickly responded. Both seemed to be rejoicing in the knowledge of their own inner snugness—of all the paper, folded or crumpled, addressed or discarded, that they had kept dry through the shower.