by John Updike
I imagine my lawn torn up, the great golden backhoe trampling my daffodils, my dollars flooding away. Ineffectually, I protest.
The plumber sighs, as poets do, with an eye on the audience. “See, keep on with it like this, you’ll burn out your new pump. It has to work too hard to draw the water. Replace it now, you’ll never have to worry with it again. It’ll outlast your time here.”
My time, his time. His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow. We push out through the bulkhead; a blinding piece of sky slides into place above us, fitted with temporary, timeless clouds. All around us, we are outlasted.
OTHER MODES
(illustration credit p01.1)
The Sea’s Green Sameness
I WRITE THIS on the beach. Let us say, then, that I am a writer on the beach. It was once considered bad manners to admit anything of the sort, just as people walking to and from the bathroom were supposed to be invisible; but this is a rude age. Nothing is hidden. Yet everything is. In a sense a person observed walking to a closed door is less “there” than someone being forcibly imagined to be invisible.
I sit opposite the sea.1 Its receding green surface is marked everywhere by millions of depressions, or nicks, of an uncertain color: much as this page is marked. But this page yields a meaning, however slowly, whereas the marks on the sea are everywhere the same. That is the difference between Art and Nature.
But the marks on the sea move, which is somehow portentous. And large distinctions in tone are perceptible: the purple shadows of clouds from above, of coral reefs from below. The horizon is darker than the middle distance—almost black—and the water near me is tinted with the white of the sand underneath, so that its clear deep-throated green is made delicate, acidulous, artificial. And I seem to see, now and then, running vertically with no regard for perspective, veins of a metallic color; filaments of silver or gold—it is hard to be certain which—waver elusively, but valuably, at an indeterminate distance below the skin of the massive, flat, monotonous volume.
Enough, surely. It is a chronic question, whether to say simply “the sea” and trust to people’s imaginations, or whether to put in the adjectives. I have had only fair luck with people’s imaginations; hence tend to trust adjectives. But are they to be trusted? Are they—words—anything substantial upon which we can rest our weight? The best writers say so. Sometimes I believe it. But the illogic of the belief bothers me: From whence did words gather this intrinsic potency? The source of language, the spring from which all these shadows (tinted, alliterative, shapely, but still shadows) flow, is itself in shadow.
But what, then, am I to do? Here am I, a writer, and there is the sea, a subject. For mathematical purity, let us exclude everything else—the sky, the clouds, the sand on my elbows, the threat of my children coming down the beach to join me. Let us posit a world of two halves: the ego and the external object. I think it is a fair representation of the world, a kind of biform Parliament, where two members sit, and speak for all parties. Tell me what I must do. Or, rather, give me my excuse; for my vote is foreordained, it must be in opposition, and our Parliament will be stalemated until one of us dies.
The incantor of tales about the cave fire was excused by the hungry glitter2 of eyes. Homer swung his tides on this attention. Aeschylus felt excused; Sophocles heroically bluffed out any doubt; with Euripides we definitely arrive at the sudden blankness, the embarrassed slapping of the pockets, the stammer, the flustered prolixity. But then a splendid excuse appeared, it seemed eternally. Dante had it. Milton. Tolstoy, Dickens, Balzac picked its bones. It was a huge creature and still gives some nourishment. Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson wrote for money; it kept them scribbling, but is presently considered a weak excuse. Beauty, said Keats. A trick of optics. Self, said Wordsworth and Goethe. A tautology. Reality, said the Realists, and the Opposition swamped them with pamphlets. I bore you. Even this raises an issue. Is it my duty not to bore you; my excuse, that I do not? This would bring me safely into the cozy hotel of pornographers, dinner guests, and television personalities. But you would be truly amazed, how indignantly I, the peer of the immense sea, reject such shelter. Forgive me; I know you made the offer with warm hearts. To continue my story—Conrad and James offer Groping as an End in Itself, and Proust and Joyce round out the tale with a magnificent display of superb, if somewhat static, effects. I may, in this summation, have left out a few names, which you yourself can supply. The remaining question of interest: Were Proust and Joyce an ending or a beginning? They seemed, from their newness, a beginning, but as time passes does not their continued newness make it clear that they are the opposite, that everything since forms a vacuum in which the surfaces of these old works, that should be cracked and sunken, are preserved like fresh pigment?
How tired I am! All my intricate maneuvers, my loudly applauded and widely reprinted perorations, my passionate lobbying—all my stratagems are exhausted. I am near death. And the Opposition seems as young as ever. You see, he never exerts himself. The clerks—all the quick clerks have gone over to his side; I am left with but a few ancient men, hanging on for the pension, the prizes—elicit his answers to prepared questionnaires, which he gives very reluctantly, with much coaxing. He never gets up on his feet and says a word the gallery can hear. Yet more and more his influence spreads among them. Oh, they still muster a few handclaps for my most gallant efforts, bent and breathless as I am; but it is his power they respect. Out with this metaphor—take away these congressional trappings! There. I still have some power of my own. His silence can still be twisted to my advantage.
I am writing this in the sun, which is difficult; perhaps here is a clue. You cannot write in the sun, or in perfect health. I must make myself sick with cigarettes before I can perform. Some writers use alcohol. Some read copiously. Some are gifted with infirmities. Health, sanity, and sunshine have deserted us. Even the clergy, as we labor to save them, despise us. Sitting on this beach, I wonder if I am one of those large, sluggish crabs whom the operator of the Time Machine discovers at the extreme limit of the earth’s senility scraping across a beach, stiffly waving their tentacles at a red and distended sun. Perhaps I am the last writer in the world. Perhaps, coming from a backward region of the country, to which news travels slowly, I arrived in the capital a moment before the gates were locked forever. Perhaps all of us latter-day writers are like the priests that the peasantry continued to supply to the Church long after the aristocracy acknowledged that the jig was up.
For I look at the sea, my topic, and it seems null. No longer am I permitted to conceive charming legends about how it came to be salt, for this is known. Its chemistry, its weight, its depth, its age, its myriad creatures so disturbingly evocative of our own mortality—what is not known of these things, will be known. The veins of silver (or gold) in it are all mapped and will be mined tomorrow. This leaves, you say, its essence, its ens. Yes, but what, really, can we hope for in this line, after Plato, after Aquinas, after Einstein? Have not their brave fancies already gone the way of Poseidon?
Yet, surprisingly, I do have something new to contribute to human knowledge of the sea. It has just come to me. A revelation. If you lie down, put your head in the sand, and close one eye, the sea loses its third dimension and becomes a wall. The black rim of the perfectly smooth top seems as close to me as the pale, foaming bottom. A curious sideways tugging in the center of the wall, a freedom of motion inexplicable in a wall whose outlines are so inflexibly fixed, makes the vision strange. But it does not lead me to imagine that the wall is a fragile cloth that an assault by me would pierce. No, my fists and forehead are too sore for me to entertain such an illusion. However, I do feel—and feel, as it were, from the outside, as if I were being beckoned—that if I were to run quickly to it, and press my naked chest against its vibrating perpendicular surface, and strain my body against it from my head to my toes, I should feel upon my beating heart the answer of another heart beating. I sit up, excited, foul with sand, and open b
oth eyes, and the ocean withdraws again into its distance. Yet I hear in the sigh of its surf encouragement from the other side of the apparent wall—sullen, muffled encouragement, the best it can do, trapped as it is also—encouragement for me to repeat the attempt, to rush forward in my mind again and again.
I have reverted, in my art (which I gaily admit I have not mastered3), to the first enchanters, who expected their nets of words to capture the weather, to induce the trees to bear and the clouds to weep, and to drag down advice from the stars. I expect less. I do not expect the waves to obey my wand or support my weight. My modesty, perhaps, damns me. All I hope for is that once into my carefully spun web of words the thing itself, das Ding an sich, will break: make an entry and an account of itself. Not cast its vote with mine, and issue a unanimous decree: I have no hope of this. Not declare its intentions; these are no mystery. I can observe. It intends to do away with me. The session already lasts into the late afternoon. I wish the opposition to yield only on the point of its identity. What is it? Its breadth, its glitter, its greenness and sameness balk me. What is it? If I knew, I could say.
1. The Caribbean—hence its idyllic aspect.
2. Why were they hungry? Is there a narrative appetite as instinctive as the sexual? Why would Nature put it there? But, then, why does Nature do half the things she does?
3. As who has? Is not the Muse a mermaid whose slippery-scaled body pops from our arms the moment we try to tighten our embrace?
The Slump
THEY SAY REFLEXES, the coach says reflexes, even the papers now are saying reflexes, but I don’t think it’s the reflexes so much—last night, as a gag to cheer me up, the wife walks into the bedroom wearing one of the kids’ rubber gorilla masks and I was under the bed in six-tenths of a second, she had the stopwatch on me. It’s that I can’t see the ball the way I used to. It used to come floating up with all seven continents showing, and the pitcher’s thumbprint, and a grass smooch or two, and the Spalding guarantee in ten-point sans-serif, and—whop!—I could feel the sweet wood with the bat still cocked. Now, I don’t know, there’s like a cloud around it, a sort of spiral vagueness, maybe the Van Allen belt, or maybe I lift my eye in the last second, planning how I’ll round second base, or worrying which I do first, tip my cap or slap the third-base coach’s hand. You can’t see a blind spot, Kierkegaard says, but in there now, between when the ball leaves the bleacher background—all those colored shirts—and when I hear it smack safe and sound into the catcher’s mitt, there’s somehow just nothing, where there used to be a lot, everything in fact, because they’re not keeping me around for my fielding, and already I see the afternoon tabloid has me down as trade bait.
The flutters don’t come when they used to. It used to be, I’d back the convertible out of the garage and watch the electric eye put the door down again and head out to the stadium, and at about the bridge turnoff I’d ease off grooving with the radio rock, and then on the lot there’d be the kids waiting to get a look and that would start the big butterflies, and when the attendant would take my car I’d want to shout Stop, thief! and, walking down that long cement corridor, I’d fantasize like I was going to the electric chair and the locker room was some dream after death, and I’d wonder why the suit fit, and how these really immortal guys, that I recognized from the bubble-gum cards I used to collect, knew my name. They knew me. And I’d go out and the stadium mumble would scoop at me and the grass seemed too precious to walk on, like emeralds, and by the time I got into the cage I couldn’t remember if I batted left or right.
Now, hell, I move over the bridge singing along with the radio, and brush through the kids at just the right speed, not so fast I knock any of them down, and the attendant knows his Labor Day tip is coming, and we wink, and in the batting cage I own the place, and take my cuts, and pop five or six into the bullpen as easy as dropping dimes down a sewer grate. But when the scoreboard lights up, and I take those two steps up from the dugout, the biggest two steps in a ballplayer’s life, and kneel in the circle, giving the crowd the old hawk profile, where once the flutters would ease off, now they dig down and begin.
They say I’m not hungry, but I still feel hungry, only now it’s a kind of panic hungry, and that’s not the right kind. Ever watch one of your little kids try to catch a ball? He gets so excited with the idea he’s going to catch it he shuts his eyes. That’s me now. I walk up to the plate, having come all this way—a lot of hotels, a lot of shagging—and my eyes feel shut. And I stand up there trying to push my eyeballs through my eyelids, and my retinas register maybe a little green, and the black patch of some nuns in far left field. That’s panic hungry.
Kierkegaard called it dread. It queers the works. My wife comes at me without the gorilla mask and when in the old days whop!, now she slides by with a hurt expression and a flicker of gray above her temple. I go out and ride the power mower and I’ve already done it so often the lawn is brown. The kids get me out of bed for a little fungo and it scares me to see them trying, busting their lungs, all that shagging ahead of them. In Florida—we used to love it in Florida, the smell of citrus and marlin, the flat pink sections where the old people drift around smiling with transistor-radio plugs in their ears—we lie on the beach after a workout and the sun seems a high fly I’m going to lose and the waves keep coming like they’ve been doing for a billion years, up to the plate, up to the plate. Kierkegaard probably has the clue, somewhere in there, but I picked up Concluding Unscientific Postscript the other day and I couldn’t see the print, that is, I could see the lines, but there wasn’t anything on them, like the rows of deep seats in the shade of the second deck on a Thursday afternoon, just a single ice-cream vendor sitting there, nobody around to sell to, a speck of white in all that shade, old Søren Sock himself, keeping his goods cool.
I think maybe if I got beaned. That’s probably what the wife is hinting at with the gorilla mask. A change of pace, like the time DiMaggio broke his slump by Topping’s telling him to go to a nightclub and get plastered. I’ve stopped ducking, but the trouble is, if you’re not hitting, they don’t brush you back. On me, they’ve stopped trying for even the corners; they put it right down the pike. I can see it in the pitcher’s evil eye as he takes the sign and rears back, I can hear the catcher snicker, and for a second of reflex there I can see it like it used to be, the continents and trade routes and state boundaries distinct as stitches, and the hickory sweetens in my hands, and I feel the good old sure hunger. Then something happens. It all blurs, the pitch sinks, the light changes, I don’t know. It’s not caring enough, is what it probably is; it’s knowing that none of it—the stadium, the averages—is really there, just you are there, and it’s not enough.
The Pro
I AM on my four-hundred-and-twelfth golf lesson, and my drives still have that pushed little tail, and my irons still take the divot on the wrong side of the ball. My pro is a big gloomy sun-browned man—age about thirty-eight, weight around 195. When he holds a club in his gloved hand and swishes it nervously (the nervousness comes over him after the first twenty minutes of our lesson), he makes it look light as a feather, a straw, a baton. Once I sneaked his 3-wood from his bag, and the head weighed more than a cannonball. “Easy does it, Mr. Wallace,” he says to me. My name is not Wallace, but he smooths his clients toward one generic, acceptable name. I call him Dave.
“Easy does it, Mr. Wallace,” he says. “That ball is not going anywhere by itself, so what’s your hurry?”
“I want to clobber the bastard,” I say. It took me two hundred lessons to attain this pitch of frankness.
“You dipped again,” he tells me, without passion. “That right shoulder of yours dipped, and your knees locked, you were so anxious. Ride those knees, Mr. Wallace.”
“I can’t. I keep thinking about my wrists. I’m afraid I won’t pronate them.”
This is meant to be a joke, but he doesn’t smile. “Ride those knees, Mr. Wallace. Forget your wrists. Look.” He takes my 5-iron into his hands, a
sight so thrilling it knocks the breath out of me. It is like, in the movies we all saw as children (oh, blessed childhood!), the instant when King Kong, or the gigantic Cyclops, lifts the beautiful blonde, who has blessedly fainted, over his head, and she becomes utterly weightless, a thing of sheer air and vision and pathos. I love it, I feel halfsick with pleasure, when he lifts my 5-iron, and want to tell him so, but I can’t. After four hundred and eleven lessons, I still repress.
“The hands can’t help but be right,” he says, “if the knees are right.” He twitches the club, so casually I think he is brushing a bee from the ball’s surface. There is an innocent click; the ball whizzes into the air and rises along a line as straight as the edge of a steel ruler, hangs at its remote apogee for a moment of meditation, and settles like a snowflake twenty yards beyond the shagging caddie.
“Gorgeous, Dave,” I say, with an affectation of camaraderie, though my stomach is a sour churning of adoration and dread.
He says, “A little fat, but that’s the idea. Did you see me grunt and strain?”
“No, Dave.” This is our litany.
“Did you see me jerk my head, or freeze at the top of the backswing, or rock forward on my toes?”
“No, Dave, no.”
“Well then, what’s the problem? Step up and show me how.”
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows. I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. “Smothered it,” I say promptly. After enough lessons, the terminology becomes second nature. The whole process, as I understand it, is essentially one of self-analysis. The pro is merely a catalyst, a random sample, I have read somewhere, from the grab bag of humanity.