by John Updike
There were smiles on their ruddy faces; they had been waiting for me; they were pleased to have seen me ski so well. In those years I was a fabulous creature, wiry and rapacious, racked by appetites as strange to me now as the motivations of a remote ancestor. I was slender, the result not of exercise but of nervous energy, and my hair was still mostly brown, and like animal fur to the touch, bouncy and soft, not brittle and white and thinning. I wore a ski cap on only the coldest days. Today was not one. It must have been during the Washington’s Birthday weekend (before it was dissolved into Presidents’ Day) or perhaps even the Easter break, because of the strengthening sun; it was picnic weather in the lee of the lodge. But what mountain could it have been? Gunstock and Sunapee don’t have outdoor tables, and Cranmore and Wildcat don’t have run-out slopes the way I remember this one. Could it have been Pleasant Mountain, across the state line in Bridgton, Maine? How could Norma and Genevieve, rivals for my hand, have been there both at once, beaming at me from above the Chardinesque tumble of welcoming food? Perhaps my vivid mental picture derives from the winter before our crise began. Or perhaps we had all patched things up for appearances’ sake, for this holiday outing, one big falsely happy family. Or perhaps memory is more trustworthy than history—Retrospect, your sub-editors might want to check if futons, boom boxes, ripped jeans, chirping video games, and Apple computers were around in 1974–77 or crept into this reminiscence from later years, other eras. Back there somewhere, I had descended the mountain into bliss; this lengthy response to your provocative query seems to have delivered me into darkness. The more I think about the Ford Administration, the more it seems I remember nothing.
* Think: if we were members of a two-dimensional world, creatures pencilled onto a universal paper, how would we conceive of the third dimension? By strained metaphoric conjurations, like these of mine above. If we were dogs, how would we imagine mathematics? Yet there would be a few inklings—the hazy awareness, for instance, that the two paws we usually see are not all the paws we have, and that two and two might make something like four. It is important, for modern man especially, as we reach the limits of physics and astronomy, to be aware that there truly may be phenomena beyond the borders of his ability to make mental pictures—to conceive of the inconceivable as a valid enough category.
† Installed in Philadelphia’s New Theatre in 1816, their first commercial use in America. Their very first use had occurred ten years earlier, when David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, bravely utilized gas to light his home and the street directly in front. Across the water, London first publicly installed gas in 1807, and Paris adopted it for street lighting in 1818.
‡ Even as I write, dear fellow New Hampshire historians, a young lady of our state, exactly Ann Coleman’s last age of twenty-three, one Pamela Smart, a high-school media counsellor, has been indicted and convicted of seducing (with the aid of a videotape of 9½ Weeks, described in Halliwell’s Film Guide as a “Crash course in hot sex for those who wish to major in such studies”) a fifteen-year-old student with the successful aim of getting him and his thuggish pals to murder her husband. She remained impassive during her trial, but in a subsequent hearing, as her late husband’s aggrieved father prolongedly hectored her from the witness stand, she jumped up and in her thrilling young voice exclaimed, “Your Honor, I can’t handle this.” We all saw it on television; one had to love her for it. Her utterance brings me as close as I am apt to get to the truth of Ann Coleman’s conjectured and disputed suicide: Your Honor, she couldn’t handle it.
§ The obituary says “Anne,” but the tombstone has it “Ann.” I have chosen the name writ in stone.
‖ Major John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s Secretary of War, whose marriage, at Jackson’s advice, to Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, a tavern-keeper’s daughter of considerable romantic experience even before her marriage at the age of sixteen to a navy purser whom the infatuated then-Senator Eaton used his influence to keep at sea while he comforted the lonely bride, failed to quiet scandalized Washington tongues, especially those wagging on the distaff side of the Calhoun camp: Buchanan had approached Eaton with the Adams-appointment question before approaching Jackson, and was rather curtly advised by the major to inquire of the general himself. And so he did.
a George Kremer, Congressman from Pennsylvania and Ingham satellite, whose letter to the Columbian Observer of Philadelphia the January after Buchanan’s interview with Jackson claimed that Clay had offered to vote for whoever would give him the State Department; Clay’s challenge to a duel was retracted after it was rumored that Kremer proposed to duel with squirrel rifles. Jackson’s reference here assumes that Kremer’s basis was a conversation with Buchanan describing the epochal interview of December 30th.
b Moore, ed., Works, Vol. II, pp. 378–82.
c Moore, ed., Works, Vol. II, pp. 348–63.
d Moore, ed., Works, Vol. II, pp. 368–9.
e Does it need explaining? A matter of opportunity and romance, let’s say—the romance of the child’s fever, the closed door at the end of the hall, the look of the side yard from what had been our window, motionless in the blue night like a frozen garden of ferns. A sentimental carryover from the faculty party, where we had momentarily seemed again a couple. Don’t ask, Retrospect. At some point history becomes like topography: there is no why to it, only a here and a there.
f I was reminded, possibly, of washing our windows in Hayes with my mother as a child—the running-down ammonia-tinted suds, the squeak of the slowly soggy-becoming cloth, the growing ache in the forearm, the sunny bite in the air, which in northern Vermont can be cool even in August. A child sees no difference between clean and dirty windows, so the ritual was for me, like so much adult behavior, a purely magical act, an ordeal invented to bring me to my mother’s side and under her fond supervision. Through Genevieve’s ideally transparent panes the outdoors seemed to have crept closer, like a beast about to pounce.
g Historians have generally treated this crushed cigar as a sign of great distress: e.g., Nichols has it that the Senators found the President greatly agitated. He stood by the hearth crushing a cigar in his shaking fingers and stammered that the move was against his policy. But Trescot, in the sentence that is the only source for the detail, takes the trouble to say that this untidy practice was a habit with Buchanan. His words are: The President was standing by the mantelpiece crushing up a cigar into pieces in his hand—a habit I have seen him practice often.
The punctuation and emphases for Buchanan’s utterance considerably vary. Trescot’s original, hastily jotted memoir gives it as “My God are calamities (or misfortunes, I forget which) never to come singly. I call God to witness—you gentlemen better than anybody know—that this is not only without but against my orders, it is against my policy.”
Nevins dresses it up considerably: “My God,” wailed [sic] Buchanan, who stood at the mantelpiece crushing a cigar in his hand, “are misfortunes never to come singly? I call God to witness, you, gentlemen, better than anybody, know that this is not only without, but against my orders. It is against my policy.”
h According to Thurlow Weed’s account in the London Observer of February 9, 1862, Stanton’s protest was even more elaborate and allusive:
“That course, Mr. President, ought certainly to be regarded as most liberal towards erring brethren, but while one member of your Cabinet has fraudulent acceptances for millions of dollars afloat, and while the confidential clerk of another—himself in South Carolina teaching rebellioni
Then, in Weed’s spirited reconstruction, Black seconded the offer of resignation, followed by Holt and Dix, who did not join the Cabinet until the middle of the next month—which shows only that these rememberers get carried away, and history is built upon shifting sands.
i An allusion to Bailey (see this page) and Thompson, who was right there, as we can see, and who in any case went to North Carolina, the previous week, leaving on December 17th and back in Washington by the 22nd, when the Indian-bonds
scandalj broke.—has just stolen $900,000 from the Indian Trust Fund, the experiment of ordering Major Anderson back to Fort Moultrie would be dangerous. But if you intend to try it, before it is done I beg that you will accept my resignation.”
j See this page–this page and this page–this page.
k And yet he seems miscast as villain. In the photograph of Buchanan with his Cabinet taken by W. H. Lowdermilk & Co. of Washington, D.C., sometime between the death of Aaron Brown and the resignation of Howell Cobb, Thompson is on the extreme left, blurred, looking stolid and, with his short haircut and clean shave, oddly modern. He was self-made, a poor boy from North Carolina who, Nichols says, in the young and growing state of Mississippi … amassed political power and a fortune. A frontiersman, if we remember that much of the Deep South was frontier, torn open by the rapid spread of cotton—a terrain for entrepreneurs and arrivistes. Romantically, he had fallen in love with a poor girl of fourteen, married her without consummating the marriage, and sent her off to Paris for four years of schooling; she was Kate Thompson, one of the social ornaments of Buchanan’s Washington, a special favorite of the old chief, and the author of lively letters that form an important illumination of the era and administration. When Thompson at last resigned (I go hence to make the destiny of Mississippi my destiny) Buchanan wrote a warm letter saying, No man could have more ably, honestly, & efficiently performed the various & complicated duties of the Interior Department than yourself.… I regret extremely that the troubles of the times have rendered it necessary for us to part. This billet-doux as late in the day as January 11, 1861!
l One hazel, one blue, according to Nichols. He cites no ophthalmological source. It’s hard to believe, but magical to picture. The portrait by Jacob Eichholtz, done when Buchanan was about to go off to Russia, is chromatically inconclusive. The one by George P. A. Healy, in the National Portrait Gallery, shows his eyes as both blue, with a slight cast (strabismus) in the left. Opposite this portrait in The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents the unsigned text parenthetically claims one eye [was] nearsighted, the other farsighted. See Kierkegaard, Journals, December 10, 1837.
m Not, in fairness, that I was entirely oblivious to popular music. It was the Ford era that saw the rise of Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the charts; I know because the tune, with its low, slow, trickling theme of infinite forestallment, became something like our, my and Genevieve’s, romantic anthem, along with The Divine Miss M, a cassette I gave her on our affair’s first Christmas, for its terrific one-two punch of “Do You Want to Dance?” followed by Midler’s ding-dong belting-out of “Chapel of Love.” Going to get ma-a-arried …
n James Buchanan, who served from 1857–1861, is said to have had the neatest handwriting of any President. This encomium from Facts and Fun About the Presidents, by George Sullivan, illustrated by George Roper (New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1987). The same valuable source informs us that Three American Presidents were left-handed: James Garfield, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford. Since 1987, the voters have added a fourth.
o Derived, of course, from that callous passage in Emerson’s essay “Experience” which states, I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts.… A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.
p In a letter of October 21, 1865, he replied to a correspondent, a Mr. Faulkner, who had supposed that the former President might admit, in retrospect, some mistakes, I must say that you are mistaken. I pursued a settled, consistent line of policy from the beginning to the end; & on reviewing my past conduct, I do not recollect a single measure which I should desire to recall, even if this were in my power. Under this conviction I have enjoyed a tranquil & cheerful mind, notwithstanding the abuse I have received.
Brief Bibliography
Auchampaugh, Philip Gerald, James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession (Lancaster, Pa., 1926).
———, “James Buchanan, the Bachelor of the White House: An Inquiry on the Subject of Feminine Influence in the Life of Our Fifteenth President,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, XX, no. 3, January 1939, 154–166, and no. 4, April 1939, 218–234.
Buchanan, James, Works, collected and edited by John Bassett Moore, in twelve volumes (New York, 1908–11).
Catton, Bruce, The Coming Fury (New York, 1961).
Craven, Avery, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2nd ed. 1957).
Crawford, Col. Samuel W., The History of the Fall of Fort Sumpter (New York, 1887).
Curtis, George Ticknor, Life of James Buchanan, in two volumes (New York, 1883).
Furnas, J. C., The Americans: A Social History of the United States 1587–1914 (New York, 1969).
Gay, Peter, Education of the Senses, vol. I, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York, 1984).
Klein, Philip Shriver, “James Buchanan and Ann Coleman,” Lancaster County Historical Society, LIX (1955), 1–20.
———, President James Buchanan (University Park, Pa., 1962).
Lestz, Gerald S., Historic Heart of Lancaster (Lancaster, Pa., 1962).
Nevins, Allan, The Emergence of Lincoln, in two volumes (New York, 1950).
Nichols, Roy, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948).
Trescot, William Henry, Narrative, edited by Gaillard Hunt, American Historical Review, XIII, no. 3 (April 1908), 528–56.
Updike, John, Buchanan Dying (New York, 1974).
Books by John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)
PLAY MEMOIRS
Buchanan Dying (1974) Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)
JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration