by John Updike
What is it that enables us, in some few instances, to touch the walls of alien sensibility and inimical self-interest which surround us, and to discover a panel which yields to our faint pressure? The difference must be the intuition, backed by friendly evidences, that the other likes us. Not many did like Buchanan. In his public life he elicited little warmth of friendship, Roy Nichols—freely given to ad hominem assertion—tells us. One looks almost in vain among his legion of correspondents for any who used informal address. Vice President William R. King, who died in 1853, was almost the last of the few who wrote him as “Dear Buchanan.” In the year prior to his speech on the Calhoun resolutions, according to Klein, Senator W. R. King had ribbed him during the early spring about neglecting his usual affairs from “the anxieties of love.” King was somehow amused by the country lawyer with his big pale dishevelled head tilted as if by the pull of a scar of an old neck wound, an old emotional bafflement; King presumably liked not least in the other the affection Buchanan awarded the men and women of the South, as possessing the opposite of that clangorous appetitive quality which had wounded him in his hardware merchant of a father, in the iron-forging Colemans, in the politicians of New England and New York, who were tools of the manufacturing interests. There were two broad currents in the national enterprise, agriculture and manufacture, which for a time flowed side by side, as for a stretch do, African explorers report, the White and Blue Niles. Like Lancaster County, the South changed slowly, its rolling black-soiled tracts dozing within the sun-soaked haze of a stable agrarianism. When Buchanan looked at King, he saw safety and civility, he saw life, a flutter of an invitation to live, to enjoy, to laugh, to gossip, to arrive at sound and pure conclusions. He saw Dr. John King, the Presbyterian pastor at Mercersburg who took young Jamie into his counsel, and William Lowndes, the representative from South Carolina whose legalistic thoroughness and personal moderation served as a model for the novice Congressman of 1821.
“They love the Union,” he asserted aloud, of these sober and reflecting men of the South, “but if its blessings cannot be enjoyed but in constant fear of their own destruction, necessity will compel them to abandon it. Such is now the southern feeling. The Union is now in danger, and I wish to proclaim the fact.” As if to soothe the gasp his assertion provoked in his audience, particularly in the feminine gallery, he announced, in prophetic echo of the critics of his own Presidency when it would come, “The brave man looks danger in the face, and vanquishes it; whilst the coward closes his eyes at its approach, and is overwhelmed. The Union,” he told his roommate’s staring face directly, as if foreseeing the day when even sober and reflecting men of the South might stand as his enemy, “is as dear to me as my heart’s blood. I would,” he ringingly avowed, “peril life, character, and every earthly hope, to maintain it.”
Coitus is the model of all passion: it pursues a curve of rise and fall, and nothing will sustain it on the highest level forever. The tone of Buchanan’s speech became less elevated, less heartfelt, more didactic and ominous. “And,” he asked, “if the Union should be dissolved upon the question of slavery, what will be the consequences?” He answered himself: “An entire non-intercourse between its different parts, mutual jealousies, and implacable wars. The hopes of the friends of liberty, in every clime, would be blasted; and despotism might regain her empire over the world. I might present in detail the evils which would flow from disunion, but I forbear. I shall not further lift the curtain. The scene will be too painful.”
And what, at the moment, might be done to forestall unbearably painful scenes? First of all, he proposed, the select committee might offer to the Senate a resolution affirming what the Constitution already grants, the right of slavery to exist in any state where it is recognized by law. Not even the Abolitionists denied this principle, which had been solemnly announced by the first Congress, and is most clearly the doctrine of the Constitution. “This, then,” Buchanan stated, “is not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men, but it is a question of constitutional law.” A second resolution, he proclaimed, might assert that slaves like any other sort of property can be transferred from state to state. And a third might insist that slavery be maintained and not abolished in the District of Columbia, ceded to the Union by two slaveholding states whose good faith would be betrayed if abolition were “to convert this very cession into the means of injuring and destroying their peace and security.”
This language was rather far for a Northern politician, even a doughface like Buchanan, to go; the risk was his love offering. But King had turned his impassive, almost Seminole profile again, to murmur with his fellow Alabaman Senator Clay, a lesser Clay than the Great Pacificator from Kentucky—Clay the Whig, the anti-Jackson, with much of Jackson’s mad mulishness and more brains and eloquence yet with not enough of the people in his belly. Buchanan, still on his feet, conjuring up the select committee and its projected resolutions (“Let the resolutions be framed in a most conciliatory spirit, and let them be clothed in language which shall shock the opinions of no Senator”), felt himself in the position of a man who, having mounted to the heights of ecstasy with his mistress, and performed heroic feats in the lists of the bedroom, finds her still with unsatisfied needs, and practical expectations, and what seems an inhuman indifference to his own delicate situation. King had ceased to listen. His hatchet face was buried in his close colleague’s attending ear. “The Middle and North States are the field upon which this great battle must be fought,” Buchanan concluded, his voice hoarse and exhausted. “I fear not, I doubt not, the result, if Senators from the South, where the people are already united, would but consent to adopt the counsels of those who must bear the brunt of the contest.” Thus he ended, as many do, by begging mercy of those whom he had dared to love.
In composing this segment of my never-to-be-completed opus, somewhere in the centennial-year struggle of Ford versus Carter, I had intended to model Buchanan’s love for King upon mine for Genevieve, but in truth my one-night stand with Mrs. Arthrop kept intruding—that supernatural quality her face had at first blush, not only its high albedo (cf. the glow of King’s planter’s forehead) but the something immaterial attached, a ghostly tag declaring that she would “put out.” Of course I entertained no such carnal notions of old Buck and Colonel King; nineteenth-century men, my belief was, loved one another with no more physicality than that of the companiable gourmanderie described by Melville in his “Paradise of Bachelors.” What I sought to convey in the out-of-focus chamber as seen through Buchanan’s mismatched eyes was the way in which the apparition of the beloved pulls an entire scene into life—like a sun in the sky, or like, perhaps, a live prey in the web. I remember, conversely, a party at which Genevieve’s absence made a great sensible hole.
It was during the composition of the preceding scene, let me add for the benefit of my fellow historians, that I was cripplingly struck by the hopelessness, in an era when history has turned away from tales of kings to the common heroes of everyday life, the merchant and the peasant buried deep in the records of manor-house and guild-hall, and in this ever self-reforming New World nation to the rescue from obscurity of the women and slaves patriarchal historians had hitherto consigned to the shadowy margins of their establishment-prone accountings—the hopelessness, I repeat, of sympathetically animating the fussy, cagey discriminations of a pro-Southern strict constitutionalist whose timorous legalisms were all to be swept away by a bloodbath and Lincoln’s larger, less scrupulous perceptions of the rights and duties of the high office to which he succeeded. American slavery not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men? In this utterance alone Buchanan forfeits the sympathy of all but the most perversely patient of historians, one who would try to comprehend deeds and opinions within the gloom behind the scenery, the dusty flats and rigging, the intricate weights and counterweights, rather than by the simplifying stagelight of retrospect. Present-day students, adolescents thrust from the jingling nursery of
television into the bewildering forest of texts, have no patience with their ancestors and little interest in the erratic half-steps whereby a people effects moral change and whereby well-intentioned men of substance might seek amid agitation and a long stasis of contending equal interests the path of least general harm. Buchanan’s own contemporaries, north and south, cried him down as a traitor. In his last decade his circle of warmth, of human approval, dwindled to a close few—a few Cabinet loyalists, Harriet Lane, Miss Hetty, Hiram Swarr, some servants at Wheatland. The analogies that come to mind, forgive me, are Jesus and Hitler. But, you say, we all come to our Gethsemane, our last bunker. Buchanan’s, I say, came in full view, within history, or almost within it, and coincided with national policy. Never mind: my effort of, if not rehabilitation, reanimation, loomed as too much for me, for my poor powers, which were diffused by personal concerns, in the era of Gerald Ford’s administration.
The party at which Genevieve was conspicuously absent but which I had to attend was the President’s faculty party, given early each fall, when New England puts its best foot forward, a ruddy brilliance of foliage like the iridescence of a bubble about to burst. I have already mentioned [this page] the President’s resplendent purple muu-muu, one of the many flamboyant costumes in which she boldly sought to assert her vast corpulence as a kind of beauty, and also her lilac-tinged crown of inflexible upsweep; I have not mentioned her minuscule husband, a dark-suited satellite of hers, one almost wants to write “parasite,” whose inherited fortune and, considering his cretinous small face, surprisingly clever telephonic manipulation of securities had enabled her to pursue a triumphant though modestly remunerated progress up the ladder of educational administration. She had come to us from a deanship at a California football power located in one of those valleys fed by stolen Colorado water and worked by illegal Mexican immigrants. The languid cynics of our faculty called her the Pep Organizer. Not old, just further advanced in the decade of life wherein I would soon [see this page, this page] find myself, she still affected the broad clattering bangles and mobile earrings of the Sixties, bedecking herself as if her big body were a year-round Christmas tree. Yet she could be a stern mama, with a West Coast high-tech management style. Like Ford in his Presidency, she had subdued the carnival spirit. She had whipped money out of the parents and the husbands of alumnae, turned Wayward back from ivied insolvency, and spoke winningly of making us a four-year co-ed institution, with presumably a football team fund-raisers could rally around. There was no excusing oneself from her back-to-school party. I had to go, and Brent Mueller had to go, and both the Wadleighs and even my unorganization-minded Queen of Disorder, as a part-time teacher in the art department, had to. But Genevieve, the care of her two little girls precluding even the most tenuous faculty connection when they came here five years ago, was not invited, and was too separated from Brent to be escorted. There were drinks, hors d’oeuvres served by doe-eyed scholarship students, background music tinkled forth by Ben Wadleigh’s latest keyboard protégé, forced laughter, friendly faces, but no Genevieve. No life, no spirit, no point to the gathering. No bull’s-eye beauty. No expectancy, no suspense. No sense of oneself as a towering sexual presence—Alf the Amorous, hero of one of the sagas that are sung the world over of lovers. Alf and Iseult, with their bed-sword and carbonated potion; Alf and Cleopatra, with the world well lost between them; Alf and Juliet, featuring the fadeout kicker of their double suicide. I felt guilty at Genevieve’s absence, as though I were excluding her. As though, at some deep and (before Freud) inexpressible level, I were participating in her murder, or that of the child—our toddling love—that we had engendered, in these now more than two years of romance. To suppress the presence of her absence I drank more than usual.
The party. Oh, I could sketch a few of the faculty in attendance, having so jollily limned our Madame President, who drifted back and forth like a bright solid square cloud in her dress the color of the edge of the rainbow, as tan from her August at their cottage on Squam Lake as a Hawaiian queen greeting the missionaries, but you know, dear colleagues of the NNEAAH, how invariably academic narratives, like Hollywood novels, are populated by gargoyles, to show the writer’s indignant superiority. So I will spare you our German professor’s snaggly yellow teeth and crinkly eyes the bluish gray of crazed glass, and the elderly body that his vanity kept as trim as a youth’s through a fanatic regimen of bicycling, squash, and jogging; and his Jewish wife’s pockmarked flat cheeks and soulful ursine eyes and aggrieved honk of a Bronx accent; and the head of the chemistry department’s bald head fringed by a gray duckling’s down combed upward as if electrified by a fit of terror; and the washed-out beauty of his wife’s face as she flinched at the sound of his booming deaf-man’s voice; and our tieless young mathematician with his asexual leathery leer that hinted of wholly abstract satisfactions; and our gleaming token, our professor of black studies, from Cincinnati, with a radio-quality elocution that could click into an unintelligible jive-talk when he felt hostile; and his elegant Antiguan wife, with skin the color of cocoa butter and teeth as white as coconut meat when she smiled; and our glum squat professor of physics, a drinker but never drunk, so sobering was the effect of his consignment to a scientific backwater like Wayward College; our contrastingly tall, pained professor of biology, pained by his bad back, his spine canted forward by a lifetime at the microscope; and their young and frisky tennis-playing second wives, one-time students who had weathered scandals to be the mothers of second families, their faces starry with the fine creases of actinic damage and flecks of flaking sunburn; not to mention our hippy lady economist, one of the few, a real catch, her body in its snug wool dress sweetly wearing what D. H. Lawrence called (referring to Constance Chatterley) a certain fluent, down-slipping grace but her face rendered eerie and alarming by myopia-correcting eyeglasses as thick as bottle bottoms; our pioneering professor of film studies, pale as a spectre, moving in startling optical jerks as if carelessly spliced; jejune boy deans groomed for PR in their studiously baggy Ivy League tweeds; stolid female athletic coaches with butch haircuts and wary, puffy stares amid the chatter; and all the others—associates, assistants, upwards of sixty of us to provide for the education of our six hundred young women. A hard core of twenty were my intimate colleagues and friends, co-survivors of a hundred midnights together, of a thousand mornings entering, egged on by coffee, our parallel cages of long-haired lionesses. More than colleagues, they were my life’s witnesses, tracers of my pilgrim’s progress, cannibal devourers of my vital flesh transmuted into gossip, as I of theirs. They knew I had been holed up two years in Adams and my academic burrow in Harrison Hall; they knew Norma, they knew Genevieve, they knew Brent the crackerjack deconstructor. With them, here, I had nothing to explain; I had merely to put on gray slacks, a button-down shirt, a narrow necktie, and a navy-blue blazer, and come.
Talk, we must have talked. Of what? There must have been something, or sixty things—a topic for each mouth. The roar of party conversation hangs in my memory like a surge of music I cannot hum, like a fog that kept me, one summer day, from finding my way into Hampton harbor. A little research reveals possible topics. The death of Mao Tse-tung on September 9th. The stunning defeat, in Sweden on September 19th, of Olof Palme, the first time the Socialists had lost in forty years; the great rightist rollback had begun, and Palme would eventually fall to an assassin’s bullet. Or perhaps we talked sports: on September 12th, another Swede lost, Borg to Conners, and Evert beat Goolagong for the U.S. Open title—an American sweep. It was a great month for Americans: a Soviet pilot defected with an advanced MiG-25, and Christo completed his two-million-dollar, twenty-four-mile Running Fence environmental-artwork in California, and our Space Shuttle was unveiled in the same state, which also enacted, on September 13th, the nation’s first right-to-die law. That summer, the Democrats chose Carter and Mondale, Viking I had landed on Mars, the Israelis had rescued over a hundred hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, Bruce Jenner won the decathlon
at the Montreal Olympic Games, and Renee Richards won his/her first tennis match playing as a female. I cannot hear any of this in the rumble of the party, though it all would have been fodder for our swelling hilarity; what I hear instead is a certain mid-Seventies disappointment that the sky had not fallen, that we as a nation, a faculty, a circle of aging adults were obliged to plod on. We had worn love beads and smoked dope, we had danced nude and shat on the flag, we had bombed Hanoi and landed on the moon, and still the sky remained unimpressed. History turned another page, the Union limped on, the dead were plowed under, the illegitimate babies were suckled and given the names of wild-flowers and Buddhist religious states, the bad LSD trips were being paid for by the rich parents who covered the bills from the mental institutions. Young American men and women, sons and daughters of corporation lawyers, had sinned against the Holy Ghost and got up the next morning to take a piss and look in the mirror, to see if there was a difference. There didn’t seem to be. Everything was out of the closet, every tabu broken, and still God kept His back turned, refusing to set limits. A President had been shot, a war had been lost, our empire had been deemed evil, our heavenly favored-nation status had been revoked, the air had been let out of our parade balloon, and still we bumped on, as we had in 1865, with wandering steps and slow, as out of Eden we took our solitary way. Of course, we had bitten the apple of defeat before—e.g., in 1812–14, up to Jackson’s delusory footnote of a victory at New Orleans—but living history is no older than a living man’s memory, and none of us under forty remembered the poster-plain despair of the Depression, when not just rebellious youngsters but out-of-work workingmen believed that the system was the enemy and Communism might save us. A fellow historian called ours a culture of narcissism. When Father leaves the room the mirrors on the wall begin to stare. The Ford era was a time of post-apocalyptic let-down, of terrifying permissiveness.