Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  But, it will be said, must there not be some content to these books, some message? I suppose that, along with my selfless delight in the play of creativity, there was some selfish wish to express myself, to impose my reality upon others. The saga of my mother and father, the unique tone and color of my native region of Pennsylvania—these were the subject matter of my first books. Then, slowly grasped and formulated, certain scenes of my adopted New England and certain truths, surprising to myself if to no one else, concerning adulthood, family life, and American society. Always, to begin to write, I needed the sensation that I was about to reveal what had never yet been quite revealed—not by Sinclair Lewis or Faulkner or my adroit companions on the pages of The New Yorker. Always I have been drawn to dusty and seldom-visited corners—my one effort at historical fiction chose an obscure President, James Buchanan, sneered at in his lifetime and since his death nearly lost in the shadow of his successor, Abraham Lincoln. My one effort at a novel of global realities dealt with a part of the world, the African Sahel, quite remote from the consciousness of most Americans, though with its repeated famines growing less so. Such, at least, has been my notion of the novelist’s duty to society—to publicize the otherwise obscure, and to throw a complex light, from many angles, upon issues that tend to be badly lit, from the right or left, with half the matter left in shadow. Our furtive yet not quite extinguished religious impulses and needs also, I suppose, fall into this category, of human “news” rare enough to be delightfully and flexibly packaged in the form of printed fictions.

  A REMINISCENCE, entitled “I Was a Teen-Age Library User,” written for Bookends, the journal of the Friends of the Reading-Berks Public Libraries.

  Reading—the Pennsylvania city, not the activity—seemed a considerable distance from Shillington in the 1940s; you boarded a trolley car in front of Ibach’s Drug Store and for twenty minutes jerked and swayed down Lancaster Avenue through Kenhorst and the Eighteenth Ward, up over the Bingaman Street Bridge, along Fourth Street. If you wanted to get off north of Penn on Fifth Street, you bucked one-way traffic for a block of Washington Street, with much honking of automobile horns and clanging of the trolley bell. If you were going to the public library, you could get off at Franklin and walk a block to where the stately building, one of sainted Andrew Carnegie’s benefactions, was located along Fifth, with Schofer’s sweet-smelling bakery on one side and the Elks on the other. The Elks had a bronze elk in their front yard. As a boy I was fascinated by the little sharp points that had been placed on the metal animal’s back; the purpose was to prevent bad boys from sitting on the statue, but for a long time I thought they might be part of an elk’s anatomy.

  Inside the library, there was a whispering quiet and walls of books. The great central space now occupied by a big box of central shelves was empty, and to my young eyes the ceiling seemed infinitely far away, and the balconies cosmically mysterious. My mother was a keen reader and my early trips there were at her side. An attempt was made to enroll me in the children’s library downstairs, but I found children’s books depressing, with their webby illustrations of historical costumes and crumbling castles, and by the age of twelve, I think, I was allowed to have my own adult card, and to check out whatever books I wanted. Miss Ruth, who had been (I later discovered) a high-school classmate of Wallace Stevens, was the head librarian, and very kind. I used to check out stacks, and she never blinked.

  Stacks of what? P. G. Wodehouse is the author that comes first to mind: the library owned close to all of the master’s titles, around fifty of them at that time, and they all struck me as hilarious and enchanting. They admitted me to a privileged green world of English men’s clubs, London bachelor flats, country weekends, golf courses, roadsters, flappers, and many other upper-crust appurtenances fabulous to think of in wartime Berks County. A real reader, reading to escape his own life thoroughly, tends to have runs on authors; besides Wodehouse, I pretty well ploughed through Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh, whose mystery novels stood in long orderly rows on the library shelves. Books cost two dollars then, and must have cost libraries rather less, and in pinched times seemed in abundant supply. The libraries and the railroad stations were the monumental structures that a citizen of Roosevelt’s America was most apt to enter, and the era of television and the airplane has yet to construct with a comparable dignity. The movies and the radio were offering their own styles of popular entertainment without seizing, as does television for its addicts, all the day, every day. Department stores like Whitner’s and Pomeroy’s and many corner drugstores ran their own rental libraries—the cellophane-wrapped books available for (can it be?) as little as two cents a day. The public-library books had shed their jackets and in many cases had worn out their covers, and the sturdy look of a book that had been redone at the bindery was so pleasing to me that, in my late teens, I had some collected pages of my own composition professionally bound, for some modest charge like five dollars.

  I loved the peace and patience of the library. Now, amazingly, some libraries have music in the background, and permit animated conversations; but silence was a sacred rule then, and one could hear with the distinctness of forest sounds at night a newspaper page being turned, or the drinking fountain by the front door being operated. A young man is perforce a somewhat distrusted creature, full of noisy tendencies and inconvenient impulses, and what I remember of the library is its acceptingness of me—tiny Miss Ruth’s friendly smile, the walls of books waiting to be opened, the august long tables with their mellow green-shaded lamps glowing. When I went away to college, I discovered that the Reading Public Library functioned surprisingly well as a research center, and I was able to do at least one college paper (on Héloïse and Abélard) with the resources upstairs in the mysterious balconies, where the more scholarly books were stashed, unruffled by the greedy hands of collegiate competition.

  Aside from my beloved mystery writers and humorists (have I mentioned Thurber and Benchley, and the Mr. Tutt stories of Arthur Train?) I did now and then stab randomly toward higher culture: Eliot’s Waste Land and Wells’s Time Machine and Shaw’s Back to Methuselah are three books that I pondered at those glowing tables, along with Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, James Cain’s Serenade, and something by Irving Shulman about New York teen-age gangs—all of them offering a stimulating glimpse into the strange realities of sex. It saddens me to hear of books being pulled from library shelves for their alleged lubricity or radicalism or racism; surely the great thing about books as instruments of education is that one reads no more than one is ready to understand. One is always free to stop and read a book of a different quality or an opposed opinion. A book doesn’t trap a reader, it is there to be taken or left. I remain grateful to the Reading Public Library and its personnel for the freedom given me in those formative years, when we, generally speaking, become lifelong readers or not. A kind of heaven opened up for me there. As a writer, I imagine my books’ ideal destination to be the shelves of a place like the Reading Public Library, where they can be picked up without prejudice, by a reader as innocent as I was, and read for their own sake, as ways out of reality and back into it.

  MY CONTRIBUTION to a photo-essay feature in the Knoxville magazine Special Report, involving essays of two hundred and fifty words “in which”—as the editor put it—“different writers from around the United States describe a region of that nation—or an element of that region—that’s especially close to their hearts.” I chose Harvard Yard.

  My seventeenth summer, it must have been, when my parents and I drove from Pennsylvania to New England to look at Harvard College. My father got lost in the middle of Boston, and when he asked another driver how to get out, the man said it was too complicated to explain. Instead, he led us, in his own car, through the maze of one-way streets and pointed us up Storrow Drive toward Cambridge. We parked next to Harvard Yard, beyond the Square, and wandered into what would become, and remains, the center of New England for
me. The quadrangles, linked by gravelly walks and framed by buildings the oldest of which were colonial brick, seemed outdoor rooms, half open to the sky. Healthy elms arched overhead in 1949, and the vogue of sunbathing did not then litter the grass with supine flesh. Chastity, seclusion, venerability was the effect, salted by something open and light and cheerful. The old place was alive. I was to live in Hollis Hall, a brick, black-floored dormitory little changed since Henry David Thoreau had roomed there. I was to walk, every morning, noon, and evening, across the Yard to the Freshman Union for my meals, past the gray bulk of University Hall and its statue of our youthful founder, along the base of Widener Library’s mountainous steps, past Richardsonian Sever Hall and neoclassical Emerson and modernist Lamont, up a little slope now regularized by the underground Pusey Library. A free-ranging variety unified by a tonic Puritan aura: that was to be my New England, and still is. Its bricks, its spires, its snows, its lacy late springs and fiery long autumns are still mine, all steeped in a sacred atmosphere of books.

  A REMINISCENCE for the Harvard Gazette, on the occasion of my thirtieth reunion in June of 1984.

  I had a lot to learn when I came to Harvard, which was fortunate, since Harvard had a lot to teach. College reminiscences tend to focus on friendship and foolery and the anxious bliss of being young; and there was that for me, too. But I loved, strange to say, taking courses—the pre-semester shopping in the crimson-bound catalogue, its aisles bulging with goodies from Applied Mechanics to Zoology, and then the concoction of the schedule, with due avoidance of any class meeting before ten, and then the attendance, the sedate amusement of going to an antiquated lecture hall, its every desk pitted with the initials of the departed, and being entertained for an hour with a stream of things one hadn’t known before.

  Of the thirty-two half-courses that made up my requisite sixteen credits, every one was a more or less delightful revelation, beginning with the person of the instructor. These men (not one class I took, it just now occurs to me, was taught by a woman) seemed heroic to the point of comedy, having devoted their lives to erudition. Math 1a and 1b (Introduction to Calculus, under a straw-haired section man whose name I have forgotten but whose innocently proud way of swooping an inscrutable equation onto the blackboard I still can picture) cured me of my freshman notions of being a math major; I turned to English, and concentrated earnestly.

  Francis Magoun, raptly chanting the guttural language of his cherished Anglo-Saxons, his arms jutting out in imitation of clashing broadswords; Hyder Rollins, white-haired and dapper, with a beautifully unreconstructed Southern accent, calmly reducing the Romanticism of Byron, Keats, and Shelley to a matter of variorum editions; Walter Jackson Bate, bringing the noble agony of Sam Johnson to startling life at the lectern; Douglas Bush, with his bald bowed head and squeezed voice and amiable dry wit, leading us doggedly through the petrified forests of Spenser and Milton; Kenneth Murdoch, folding his arms just like Jack Benny and allowing with a sigh that the metaphysicals could be tedious—these were some of the giants of the department in those days. Of these only Harry Levin, who taught a course in Joyce, Proust, and Mann as well as one on Shakespeare, offered any sense of access to the world of modern, living letters—it was common undergraduate knowledge that he had written the sole contemporary review of Finnegans Wake that Joyce had much liked. His lectures on Shakespeare, delivered with a slightly tremulous elegance to a huge throng in Emerson Hall, not only opened my eyes to our supreme classic but, with their emphasis on dominant metaphor, to a whole new way of reading. Some of the smaller courses were among the best—Edwin Honig’s quizzical, soft-spoken survey of the modern poets; Robert Chapman’s bouncy seminar on George Bernard Shaw; Kenneth Kempton’s resolutely professional writing course, in which he read aloud to us those magical early stories by Salinger.

  The early Fifties are now considered a politically torpid era, but we did have our excitements, that stirred reactions even within our heavy scholastic wraps—Joe McCarthy (against), Adlai Stevenson (for), the Checkers speech (against), the Korean War (for, as long as somebody else was fighting it). My most vivid civic memory is of holding up a pencil, in short-lived Allston Burr Hall, to signify my readiness to take a simple-minded test that would prove my fitness to be temporarily exempt from the draft. Nobody at the time, to my knowledge, questioned the justice of these procedures, or declined their deferment. It was a dog-eat-dog world, of doing your own thing before it was called that. It was, for us English majors, a literary universe—how we worshipped, and gossipped about, Eliot and Pound and those other textual Titans! Eliot and Frost, Cummings and Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Carl Sandburg all made appearances at Harvard in those four years, and Thornton Wilder and Vladimir Nabokov taught courses. Literature was in. Pop music was Patti Page and Perry Como, the movies were Doris Day and John Wayne, and youth culture was something that happened, if anywhere, at summer camp.

  We wore gray coats and narrow little neckties, like apprentice deacons, or would-be section men. Some English majors did in fact become section men and Ph.D.s and then professors, promulgating the great texts to yet younger generations. To me that seemed a frightening prospect; my capacity for other people’s words was limited. I peaked, as a scholar, in my junior year and capped my academic career with a dull thesis and a babbling display of ignorance at my oral examination. Four years was enough Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

  IN ANSWER to Harvard Magazine’s question, “What is your favorite spot in and around Harvard?”

  Well, that’s not an easy question. My nostalgic heart flutters between the cavelike entrance to Sever Hall, the far recesses of the Fogg library, and the grand space of (as it was called thirty years ago) New Lecture Hall, now abandoned and nailed shut like a South Bronx tenement. Other vanished fond spots: the counter at the Midget Restaurant, up on Mass. Avenue, and the window tables at the Hayes-Bickford cafeteria, once known universally as the Hayes-Bick. But the spot I will name has not vanished, and indeed has only enriched and deepened with the passage of time. I mean the place on the fourth floor of the Widener stacks where everybody, exiting, has to turn around an inconvenient little set of metal shelves and thence with some more strides make his or her way to the door, the brief downward stairs, and the circulation desk. More than once, as an undergraduate, I missed this unmarked turn, and found myself faced with a blank wall or a doctoral candidate dozing like a fluffy owl in his nook.

  How like Harvard, I thought at the time, to set us these incidental intelligence tests. The spot on the floor, where the vast shuffling hordes of stacks traffic must pivot, has in the not very many decades of the library’s existence been worn into a distinct depression; the gentle tread of scholars has visibly troughed the marble. I hope that particular slab is never replaced, though it grow as deep as the similar spot on the stone threshold of the kitchen in Hampton Court, which generations of royal servants, stepping in and out, depressed to the depth of several inches. Here, where the Widener architect might have arranged a more convenient corridor, generations of Harvard students and instructors have all had to change direction in obeisance to the immovable primacy of books and their shelving; here word-weary, knowledge-burdened young men and women have carried each away a few mineral atoms on the soles of their shoes, and thus made their dent in the world of ideas.

  FOREWORD to Jester’s Dozen, a book of twelve youthful poems, with contemporary illustrations by the author, printed in a limited edition by Lord John Press in 1984.

  These twelve poems have been selected from the forty or so that I wrote for the Harvard Lampoon from 1951 to 1954, as an undergraduate member of that organization, which produced a more or less monthly magazine and a more frequent issuance of social frivolity. I also did many cartoons and a number of prose pieces; the drawings now give me pleasure to contemplate, the prose pieces pain, and the poems a guarded sensation in between. Callow though increasingly deft, they show assiduous study of
the previous generation of American light-verse writers. The Lampoon had been founded in 1876 as an imitation of Punch, became in the earlier, roistering decades of this century an imitation of Judge, and by the 1950s was imitating, in format and tone, The New Yorker. Which suited me, since The New Yorker was where I wanted to be and where, a few scant months after the penning of the last, rather valedictory poem in this selection, I did appear, with four light-verse quatrains entitled “Duet, with Muffled Drake Drums.” Though the Lampoon may have lent its affably dishevelled pages to many more talented and sophisticated juvenile spirits than I (George Santayana and Robert Benchley among them), none, I imagine, more eagerly played apprentice in the several categories of “humor” than young JHU, as I then was identified. The reader of this slim souvenir of a happy apprenticeship will find here a parody of Milton, an exercise in the meter of Ogden Nash, an extended mock-ballad in the manner of Phyllis McGinley, a ballade such as Arthur Guiterman and Louis Untermeyer used to write, and a threnody of sorts for a rival-college humor magazine, the Dartmouth Jackolantern—there once was a legion of college humor magazines, and now I believe scarcely any save the Lampoon are left. A pity, since, however modest (and modestly amused) their audiences, these magazines gave their staffs a healthy training in make-up, proof management, and the hard art of being droll. Four poems first printed in the Lampoon—“Poetess,” “The Population of Argentina,” “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles are Cracked and Crooked,” and “Mountain Impasse”—I thought well enough of to include in my first book, the verse collection called The Carpentered Hen. Three others, including the lines on Helen Traubel included in this jester’s dozen, made it into Max Shulman’s Guided Tour of Campus Humor (Hanover House, 1955), my first appearance in a real book. In determining my selection here, I have tried not to embarrass my much younger self but, while keeping the undergraduate flavor, to pick those verses most apt to let a present reader share the pleasure with which they were, ever longer ago, composed. The joy of getting into print is one that, for me at least, never palls, and these poems were part of my first sweet taste of it.