Higher Gossip

by John Updike

  David pretended not to have heard him. He quickly put his paper bag down, with the apple uneaten, and stood up and said, “Think we can get a game of quoits in?” His heart was racing. The entire vacant space here, behind the factory, cut diagonally in two by shadow, felt gathered and focused behind him with a certain pressure, as if the small of his back were blocking the tip of a funnel.

  There were two pair of quoits stakes, and both were taken right now, by quartets of men in gray pants and khaki shirts or bib overalls stained and smeared but nowhere near as dirty as David’s own dungarees, filthy with dried mud especially around the fly, where he leaned against the trough to change the caps. The clinks of the quoits mixed with eager laughter and yells from the men, and he saw there would not be any free stakes till the end of the break. He had found to his surprise that compared with Eddie and the other boys he was good at quoits, with his country background. He sat down again on the bench, and looked in his paper bag to see if his mother had by any chance put in a cookie he had missed.

  Eddie hadn’t moved, just sat and smoked. There was a lemon-colored crumb on the edge of his lip, where he couldn’t feel it. He asked, “What do you want to be in life, Davey?”

  “Oh …” He couldn’t think, through the pounding blood of his embarrassment at Eddie’s earlier question. “Something stupid. Something where you sit at a desk in New York.”

  “New York’s a great town. Not like this town, dead. There’s a helluva lot to do in New York.”

  “How often’ve you been there?”

  It was a tactless, cruel question, it turned out. Eddie’s pale color reddened a little. “Once or twice. Penn Station, I couldn’t believe it. And the Empire State Building right up the street. And Times Square, all that action. You ever been up that way, Davey?”

  He didn’t want to hurt Eddie’s feelings by saying how often. “A couple times. My parents took me. I have an aunt lives near there.”

  “Yeah, and what kind of places they take you to? Yankee Stadium? Polo Grounds? Madison Square Garden?”

  “I don’t know, museums,” David said.

  “That a fact? Museums? Your folks must be pretty swell to go to mu-seums.”

  “No, it’s just where my aunt likes to takes us. They’re free or pretty near, I guess.”

  Eddie wormed into the idea. “The best things in life are free,” he said. “Isn’t that what they say? The best things in life are free.” There was a suggestion of a tune, the second time, that made his voice croak and pathetically high. “You know what they mean by that, don’t you?”

  “No. By what?”

  “By the best things in life are free.” Eddie’s hand reappeared on the knee of David’s filthy-orange dungarees, but with a smoking cigarette between two of the fingers, which made it less dangerous, somehow. “You know what they mean by the best things, don’t you?”

  “Air,” David offered. “Sunshine.” There was now a pressure making his ears ring, and he kept his head bowed, his eyes on his crusty fly, to relieve the pressure.

  Eddie laughed in his ear, lightly, with the friendly dried-up delicacy he had, like that of a little old man already, the kind you see shuffling around train stations.

  “Naa. They don’t mean that. You got to let me show you sometime what they mean.”

  “O.K.,” David said, to say something, to get out of this. He wasn’t ready for this, this pressure. He was feeling “cooked.” The scabby green door back into the factory, at the low corner of the building as it loomed in its numbing largeness, beyond a blue scattering of cinders to keep the weeds down, seemed reachable only through a tunnel in the transparent air, a tunnel back to the safety of the metal stairs with their waffle pattern, the flickering bluish lights of his floor, his long dirty patient machine waiting for him to bring it to life with the big lever that tied it into the overhead power.

  “Davey.”

  The voice was close and husky and yet far away, from outside the imagined tunnel.

  “Was you ever blowed?”

  This time when David stood, he accidentally knocked the cigarette from Eddie’s hand. “Sorry,” he said. The other boy looked up, only mildly surprised and hurt. David discarded Eddie’s pale face like a wrapper, forever. He walked rapidly away. The quoits were being clinked into a stack by four men who were finished with their game, but to David’s relief there wasn’t time to play now, and he wasn’t going to be here tomorrow.

  FIVE POEMS

  Basium XVI

  from the Latin of Johannes Secundus (1511–1536)

  You star more seductive than silvery Latona

  and lovelier than Venus’ golden glow—

      give me a hundred kisses,

      give me as many kisses

  as Lesbia granted her insatiable poet,

  as many as are the erotic enticements,

      the little Cupids, that tease your dear lips

      and infuse your cheeks with rose;

  as many as the lives and deaths that your eyes hold,

  as the hopes, as the tears, as the joys

      unsleeping obsession sends,

      as many as the sighs of lovers.

  Give me as many kisses as the arrows

  that the dire winged god has planted in my heart

      and as many as still stand

      collected in his gilded quiver.

  Then to these delectations add,

  with husky-sweet sibilant whispers and quips,

      laughter, not without friendliness,

      and friendliness, not without nibbling:

  in such a way as do Chaonian doves,

  trembling and murmuring, rub bill on bill

      while the first warm winds of spring

      begin to melt hard winter.

  Love, let your mind go blank. Your eyes aswim

  and rolling unseeing, relax against my cheek,

      in my arms, your proud blood drained,

      and beg me to sustain you.

  Then I lace my arms around you, you,

  your cold breast pressed against my warm one,

      and give you back your life again

      with a long, inflaming kiss,

  until my spirit, floundering in turn,

  is lost in that small wet mouth of yours.

      Then, sinking within your arms, I beg

      you to gather me up, into you.

  And you lace your arms about me, me,

    your warm breast caressing my cold one,

                and give me back my life again

                with a long sweet dewy breath.

    So: let us seize, light of mine, our life

    in its flowering time. For soon infirm old age

                brings all its pathetic cares,

                and illnesses, and death.

  Head of a Girl, at the Met

      Vermeer’s girl in your turban and pearl:

  I saw you once in The Hague, some sixteen years ago,

  and now in New York as part of this visiting show.

      You haven’t changed, you famous girl,

      your lower lip as moist and thoughtful

  as the painter’s touch could render it, your eyes

  resting sideways on mine, their gaze weighted by

      that fullness of a woman’s eyeball.

      I, I have changed a great deal:

  hair brown then now gray, heart fresh as red paint

  veined now by the crackling of too many days

      hung in the harsh sun of the real.

      You will outlive me, artful girl,

  and with averted head will rest your moment’s glance

/>   on centuries of devotees (barring mischance),

      the light in your eyes like the light on your pearl.

  Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital

  They try to make the places cheerful where

  we face our deaths, while sipping

  a too-hot paper cup of coffee drawn

  from a pseudo-silver urn. At round white tables

  while the floor-to-ceiling windows admit

  sunshine, fresh grass, some rhododendrons, and

  the statue of a naked mother nursing—

  O life! Life! We didn’t love you enough

  even when you were in our arms, humid

  and breathing “I love you!”—the doctors

  and patients, hard to distinguish, mingle

  bright words with the droning monologue

  of a cell-phone addict fearful she won’t be heard

  above the clamor of her evil cells.

  An Hour Without Color

  An hour without color before snow

  a tinge of brown in the oak leaf

  a hint of green in the pine: “gray”

  is too much to say of what’s left

  the sea dissolved into white sky

  the woods a matted mass webbed with shreds

  of last week’s faded storm; then

  it is snowing, it is now, I see

  the particles making a grain across things

  half visible half not, sifting

  the light from the scene like a thief

  who steals what we slowly realize

  we can do without, are better off without:

  the colors of things afflicting our eyes

  Not Cancelled Yet

  Some honorary day

  if I play my remaining cards right

  I might be a postage stamp

  but I won’t be there to lick me

  and licking was what I liked,

  in tasty anticipation of

  the long dark slither out of the mailbox,

  from box to pouch to hand

  to bag to box to slot to hand

  again: that box is best

  whose lid slams open as well as shut,

  admitting a parcel of daylight,

  the green top of a tree,

  and a flickering of fingers, letting go.

  Book Chat

  HUMOR IN FICTION

  Given on July 1, 1970, in Seoul, South Korea, as part of a weeklong conference, “Humor in Literature East and West,” sponsored by International PEN.

  THE TITLE OF THIS TALK has been assigned to me; and, though I confess I find it congenial, I confess also that I can hardly imagine a language less international than that of written humor. For humor, written or otherwise, operates in the nuancé margins of experience and communication; not only is a pun lost in translation from one language to another, but also lost is the rhythm, the slang, and the penumbra of verbal allusion. The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in parenthetically discussing the failure of Shakespeare’s humor to amuse him, ventured the surprising thought that “humor … is an oral genre, a sudden spark in conversation, not a written thing.” And, if we reflect upon those occasions when we laugh, we perceive how delicate and complex are the forces giving rise to our reaction, how close to pathos or banality these forces verge, and how difficult it is to describe, later, what, in the heat of conversation or, it may be, in the forward surge of reading, seemed so funny.

  The phenomenon of humor, or laughter, has not failed to attract theorists. Henri Bergson located the comic essence in an “encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic.” Twins, for example, are humorous because duplication of individuals hints at a mechanical intervention in the species; a man slipping upon a banana peel is comic in that he behaves like a machine, rigidly perpetuating his motion without the foresight and allowances proper to vitality. By Bergson’s theory, the comic incident is a misapplication of momentum and the comic character is a monomaniac, which well enough describes the heroes of French farce but does not encompass such a nimble and many-faced comic hero as Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

  Confusingly, just as weeping can express joy as well as sorrow, laughter arises from states of mind that appear not merely various but even opposite: laughter can announce scorn and contempt, but may also be applause. Our laughter at Falstaff, for instance, has much applause and admiration in it, as well as a feeling of superiority, and in literary humor especially there is a necessary ingredient of the genial. Within a comic work we are relaxed in a world of essential safety, where the dangers of death and destruction have been exchanged for mock penalties, for semblances of defeat and punishment that are erased by the next comic scene. The comic character, whether a cat in an animated cartoon or the hero of a classic like Don Quixote, is rubbery; he bounces back, and suffers no scars. Contrast the brittle, stony characters of Greek tragedy, who, under the forgiving and mounting pressure of fate’s engines, irrevocably shatter.

  Sigmund Freud, a few years after Bergson’s treatise on laughter and his own epochal work on the interpretation of dreams, attempted to extend the methods of his dream analysis into the analysis of jokes. His book Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious explains jokes and examples of verbal wit, and, by extension, all instances of the comic, in terms of a difference in physical expenditures; the characteristic joke sets up an instant of bewilderment, and laughter follows in the recognition that a kind of sense has been made, but different from what we expected. As Kant said, the comic is “an expectation that has turned to nothing.” Certainly jokes, like dreams, do function in a realm liberated from the laws of logic and logical consequence, and there is melancholy profundity in Freud’s tentative suggestion that humor, the art of the comic, is an adult attempt to recover “the lost laughter of childhood.”

  And what might be this original laughter, the laughter of childhood? A recent popular but not uninformative book called, a little provocatively, The Naked Ape, discusses, from a zoologist’s point of view, the origin of laughter. Desmond Morris first notes that crying is present from birth but laughter does not appear until the third or fourth month of life. It arises in circumstances like these: The mother, holding the child in her lap, pretends to let him drop or does something else startling. The infant’s instinctive crying reaction is cancelled by the recognition that he is safe, that the mother is with him, and this cry merges with the parental-recognition gurgle that by this time is part of his vocabulary. In this manner, laughter is born. Many of the games parents instinctively play with infants, for instance—the tossing and clutching, the chasing and tickling—are in fact a systematic daring and scaring, a widening of the circle of safety in which the child feels privileged to laugh. A hundred and fifty years ago, William Hazlitt wrote this on the theory of laughter:

  If we hold a mask before our face, and approach a child with this disguise on, it will at first, from the oddity and incongruity of the appearance, be inclined to laugh; if we go nearer to it, steadily, and without saying a word, it will begin to be alarmed, and be half-inclined to cry: if we suddenly take off the mask, it will recover from its fears, and burst out a-laughing; but if, instead of presenting the old well-known countenance, we have concealed a satyr’s head or some frightful caricature behind the first mask, the suddenness of the change will not in this case be a source of merriment to it, but will convert its surprise into an agony of consternation, and will make it scream out for help.…

  The mere suddenness of the transition, the mere baulking our expectations, and turning them abruptly into another channel, seems to give additional liveliness and gaiety to the animal spirits; but the instant the change is not only sudden, but threatens serious consequences, or calls up the shape of danger, terror supersedes our disposition to mirth, and laughter gives place to tears.

  Laughter, then, can be construed as a signal of danger passed or dismissed. It occurs within an arena, whether the arms of a mother or the covers of a novel, where the customary threats of life have bee
n suspended. Dreams, jokes, play, and aesthetic pleasures alike mark a truce with the destructive forces of life. The oldest laugh may be the crow of triumph a warrior emits when his enemy is at his feet. We giggle when we are nervous; we scream hilariously when, in the old silent pictures, the comedian totters on the parapet of a skyscraper. The margin of glee in our scream is the knowledge that, being a comedian, he will not fall. The clown, the fool, is traditionally exempt from laws and taboos. Yet his activities, and our laughter, take their point from the backdrop of gravity, of necessary prohibition and actual danger. In literature, comic adventure is woven from the same threads as tragedy and pathos; we laugh within the remittance from seriousness that the artist has momentarily won for us.

  This said by way of preface, I would like to read aloud a few passages of “humor in fiction.” Let us begin with perhaps the most famous comic episode in Western literature, an incident that has given the English language a phrase, “tilting at windmills.” Rather early in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the deluded gentleman and his faithful squire Sancho Panza are riding along the plain:

  As they were thus discoursing, they discover’d some thirty or forty Wind-mills, that are in that Plain; and as soon as the Knight had spy’d them, Fortune, cry’d he, directs our Affairs better than we our selves could have wish’d: Look yonder, Friend Sancho, there are at least thirty outrageous Giants, whom I intend to encounter; and having depriv’d them of Life, we will begin to enrich our selves with their Spoils: For they are lawful Prize; and the Extirpation of that cursed Brood will be an acceptable Service to Heaven. What Giants? quoth Sancho Pança. Those whom thou see’st yonder, answer’d Don Quixote, with their long-extended Arms; some of that detested Race have Arms of so immense a Size, that sometimes they reach two Leagues in Length. Pray look better, Sir, quoth Sancho; those things yonder are no Giants, but Wind-mills, and the Arms you fancy, are their Sails, which being whirl’d about by the Wind, make the Mill go. ’Tis a Sign, cry’d Don Quixote, thou art but little acquainted with Adventures! I tell thee, they are Giants; and therefore, if thou art afraid, go aside and say thy Prayers, for I am resolv’d to engage in a dreadful unequal Combat against them all. This said, he clapp’d Spurs to his Horse Rozinante, without giving Ear to his Squire Sancho, who bawl’d out to him, and assur’d him, that they were Wind-mills, and no Giants. But he was so fully possess’d with a strong Conceit of the contrary, that he did not so much as hear his Squire’s Outcry, nor was he sensible of what they were, although he was already very near them: Far from that, Stand, Cowards, cry’d he as loud as he could; stand your Ground, ignoble Creatures, and fly not basely from a single Knight, who dares encounter you all. At the same Time the Wind rising, the Mill-sails began to move, which, when Don Quixote spy’d, Base Miscreants, cry’d he, though you move more Arms than the Giant Briareus, you shall pay for your Arrogance. He most devoutly recommended himself to his Lady Dulcinea, imploring her Assistance in this perilous Adventure; and so covering himself with his Shield, and couching his Lance, he rush’d with Rozinante’s utmost Speed upon the first Wind-mill he could come at, and running his Lance into the Sail, the Wind whirl’d it about with such Swiftness, that the Rapidity of the Motion presently broke the Lance into Shivers, and hurl’d away both Knight and Horse along with it, till down he fell rolling a good Way off in the Field. Sancho Pança ran as fast as his Ass could drive to help his Master, whom he found lying, and not able to stir, such a Blow he and Rozinante had receiv’d. Mercy o’me! cry’d Sancho, did not I give your Worship fair Warning? Did not I tell you they were Wind-mills, and that no Body could think otherwise, unless he had also Wind-mills in his Head? Peace, Friend Sancho, reply’d Don Quixote: There is nothing so subject to the Inconstancy of Fortune as War. I am verily persuaded that cursed Necromancer Freston, who carry’d away my Study and my Books, has transform’d these Giants into Wind-mills, to deprive me of the Honour of the Victory, such is his inveterate Malice against me: But in the End, all his pernicious Wiles and Stratagems shall prove ineffectual against the prevailing Edge of my Sword. Amen, say I, reply’d Sancho; and so heaving him up again upon his Legs once more, the Knight mounted poor Rozinante, that was half Shoulder-slipp’d with his Fall.