Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Tiny Epidendrosaurus boasted a hugely elongated third finger that served, presumably, a clinging, arboreal lifestyle, like that of today’s aye-aye, a lemur that possesses the same curious trait. With the membrane they support, the elongated digits of bats and pterosaurs enable flight, and perhaps Epidendrosaurus was taking a skittery first step in that direction. But what do we make of such apparently inutile extremes of morphology as the elaborate skull frills of ceratopsians like Styracosaurus or the horizontally protruding front teeth of Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a Late Cretaceous oddity recently uncovered in Madagascar by excavators who named the beast after Mark Knopfler, the guitarist and singer of the group Dire Straits, their favorite music to dig by?

  Masiakasaurus is an oddity, all right, its mouth bristling with those slightly hooked, forward-poking teeth; but, then, odd too are an elephant’s trunk and tusks, and an elk’s antler rack, and a peacock’s tail. A difficulty with dinosaurs is that we can’t see them in action and tame them, as it were, with visual (and auditory and olfactory) witness. How weird might a human body look to them? That thin and featherless skin, that dish-flat face, that flaccid erectitude, those feeble, clawless five digits at the end of each limb, that ghastly utter lack of a tail—ugh. Whatever did this creature do to earn its place in the sun, a well-armored, nicely specialized dino might ask.

  Dinosaurs dominated the planet’s land surface from some two hundred million years ago until their abrupt disappearance, 135 million years later. The vast span of time boggles the human mind, which took its present, Homo sapiens form less than two hundred thousand years ago and began to leave written records and organize cities less than ten thousand years in the past. When the first dinosaurs—small, lightweight, bipedal, and carnivorous—appeared in the Triassic, the first of three periods in the Mesozoic geologic era, the earth held one giant continent, Pangaea; during their Jurassic heyday, Pangaea split into two parts, Laurasia and Gondwana; and by the Late Cretaceous the continents had something like their present shapes, though all were reduced in size by the higher seas, and India was still an island heading for a Himalaya-producing crash with Asia. The world was becoming the one we know: the Andes and the Rockies were rising; flowering plants had appeared, and with them, bees. The Mesozoic climate, generally, was warmer than today’s, and wetter, generating lush growths of ferns and cycads and forests of evergreens, ginkgoes, and tree ferns close to the poles; plant-eating dinosaurs grew huge, and carnivorous predators kept pace. It was a planetary summertime, and the living was easy.

  Not that easy: throughout their long day on earth, there was an intensification of boniness and spikiness, as if the struggle for survival became grimmer. And yet the defensive or attacking advantage of skull frills and back plates is not self-evident. The solid domed skull of Pachycephalosaurus, the largest of the bone-headed dinosaurs, seems made for butting, but for butting what? The skull would do little good against a big predator like Tyrannosaurus rex, which had the whole rest of Pachycephalosaurus’s unprotected body to bite down on. Butting matches amid males of the same species were unlikely, since the bone, though ten inches thick, was not shock-absorbent. The skulls of some pachycephalosaurs, moreover, were flat and thin, and some tall and ridged—bad designs for contact sport. Maybe they were just used for discreet pushing. Or to make a daunting impression.

  An even more impractical design shaped the skull of the pachycephalosaurid Dracorex hogwartsia—an intricate sunburst of spiky horns and knobs, without a dome. Only one such skull has been unearthed; it is on display, with the playful name derived from Harry Potter’s school of witchcraft and wizardry, in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Duck-billed Parasaurolophus walkeri, another Late Cretaceous plant-eater, sported a spectacular pipelike structure, sweeping back from its skull, that was once theorized to act as a snorkel in swimming; but the tubular crest had no hole for gathering air. It may have served as a trumpeting noisemaker, for herd communication, or supported a bright flap of skin beguiling to a parasaurolophus of the opposite gender. Sexual success and herd acceptance perpetuate genes as much as combative prowess and food-gathering ability.

  Dinosaurs have always presented adaptive puzzles. How did huge herbivores like Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Diplodocus get enough daily food into their tiny mouths to fill their cavernous guts? Of the two familiar dinosaurs whose life-and-death struggle was memorably animated in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (though in fact they never met in the corridors of time, failing to overlap by fully seventy-five million years), T. rex had puzzlingly tiny arms and Stegosaurus carried on its back a double row of huge bony plates negligible as defensive armor and problematic as heat controls. Not that biological features need to be efficient to be carried along. Some Darwinian purists don’t even like the word “adaptive,” as carrying a taint of implied teleology, of purposeful self-improvement; all that is certain is that dinosaur skeletons demonstrate the viability, for a time, of certain dimensions and conformations. Yet even Darwin, on the last page of The Origin of Species, in summing up his theory as “Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms,” lets fall a shadow of value judgment with the “less-improved.”

  In what sense are living forms improvements over the dinosaurs? All life forms, even such long-lasting ones as blue-green algae and horseshoe crabs and crocodiles, will eventually flunk some test posed by environmental conditions and meet extinction. One can safely say that no dinosaur was as intelligent as Homo sapiens, or even as chimpanzees. And none that is known, not even a heavyweight champion like Argentinosaurus, was as big as a blue whale. One can believe that none was as beautiful in swift motion as a cheetah or an antelope, or as impressive to our mammalian aesthetic sense as a tiger. But beyond this it is hard to talk of improvement, especially since for all its fine qualities Homo sapiens is befouling the environment like no fauna before it.

  The dinosaurs in their long reign filled every niche several times over, and the smallest of them—the little light-boned theropods scuttling for their lives underfoot—grew feathers and became birds, still singing and dipping all around us. It is an amazing end to an amazing evolutionary story—Deinonychus into dove. Other surprises certainly lurk within the still-unfolding saga of the dinosaurs. In Inner Mongolia, so recently that the bones were revealed to the world just this past spring, a giant birdlike dinosaur, Gigantoraptor, has been discovered. It clearly belongs among the oviraptorosaurs of the Late Cretaceous—ninety-pound weaklings with toothless beaks—but weighed in at one and a half tons and could have peered into a second-story window. While many of its fellow-theropods—for example, six-foot, large-eyed, big-brained Troödon—were evolving toward nimbleness and intelligence, Gigantoraptor opted for brute size. But what did it eat, with its enormous toothless beak? Did its claw-tipped arms bear feathers, as did those of smaller oviraptorosaurs?

  The new specimens that emerge as tangles of bones embedded in sedimentary rock are island peaks of a submerged continent where evolutionary currents surged back and forth. Our telescoped perspective gives an impression of a violent struggle as anatomical ploys, some of them seemingly grotesque, were desperately tried and eventually discarded. The dinosaurs as a group saw myriad extinctions, and the final extinction, at the end of the Mesozoic, looks to have been the work of an asteroid. They continue to live in the awareness of their human successors on the throne of earthly dominance. They fascinate children as well as paleontologists. My second son, I well remember, collected the plastic dinosaur miniatures that came in cereal boxes, and communed with them in his room. He loved them—their amiable grotesquerie, their guileless enormity, their unassuming small brains. They were eventual losers, in a game of survival our own species is still playing, but new varieties keep emerging from the rocks underfoot to amuse and amaze us.

  1Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

  2“Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited and translated by Paul Arthur
Schilpp (Library of Living Philosophers, 1949).

  3“The Religiousness of Science,” in The World As I See It, by Albert Einstein, edited and translated by Alan Harris (Bodley Head, 1935).

  THE COMMONWEALTH

  Harvard Square in the Fifties

  Written for Harvard Square, an illustrated history by Mo Lotman (2009). The UT was the University Theatre (1926–61), a nineteen-hundred-seat movie house that, as late as the middle Fifties, had velvet drapes, a gilded proscenium, usherettes, and a double bill of first-run films every night.

  IN 1950, Harvard Square and the nearby business blocks were, to this homesick freshman, a sore—in the dictionary sense of “extreme, very great”—relief from the pressures within the Yard of learning and social adaptation. I would gaze from the windows of the Union toward the gas station pinched in the acute corner of Mass. Avenue and Harvard Street as if at a vanished paradise, where my vanished small-town self would pump free air into his bicycle tires and watch the rickety family car being greasily repaired. On Sunday mornings I would give myself the treat of sleeping through the bells from Memorial Chapel and then walking in the opposite direction from the Union to the drugstore next to the UT; there I would dip into my modest allowance to the extent of a cup of coffee and a cinnamon doughnut at the counter, whose marble top seemed continuous with the marble countertops at home. The helpful maps in Mo Lotman’s priceless assemblage of photographs tell me that this haven from Latin and calculus was called Daley’s Pharmacy. There was an even more intimate escape hatch where Mass. Avenue curved into Boylston Street, just up from the Wursthaus, whose exiguous triangular interior shape accommodated only a few hot-dog addicts at a time; this was, I am reminded, the Tasty Sandwich Shop. Furtively I sought out places that seemed to me anonymous and exempt from Harvard charm. Later, as I matured enough to join the Lampoon and acquire a Radcliffe girlfriend—feats achieved, I now realize, against considerable odds—she and I nurtured our romance at tables in Albiani’s, the Hayes-Bickford’s, and Cronin’s, with always the guilty thrill that I wasn’t back in my monk’s cell studying the humanities. We huddled in the darkness of the single-screen UT, and descended into the damp chill of the Red Line, whose shrieking cars would take us to Boston. The commercial surround of Harvard Square—the ugliest spot, William Dean Howells called it, on the planet—saved me from the academic vapors, as it saves the university from preciosity. For all my four years there, I remained grateful that this colonial and neo-colonial palace of higher learning had pitched itself in a down-to-earth, if not downright grubby, American city.

  Ipswich in the Seventies

  Published, as “The Dilemma of Ipswich,” in the Ford Motor Company’s Ford Times (September 1972), and reprinted, as a pretty little pea-green pamphlet sewn with yellow thread, by Aloe Editions under the happier title A Good Place (1973).

  WHEN I FIRST SAW IPSWICH, I had been married about three hours, was twenty-one years old, and didn’t much care where I was. One of my newly acquired father-in-law’s parishioners had lent us a little house behind an apple orchard. My bride and I bicycled to the beach, shopped in the A & P, played croquet on a tiny lawn, bit the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and left. A few years later, seeking escape from Manhattan, I remembered not so much the Ipswich beach, which is splendid and famous, as the something comfortingly raggle-taggle about Market Street, where the grocery store had offered oranges beneath an awning and the five-and-ten had possessed the deep-aisled navelike cool of a Woolworth’s from my boyhood. It felt like a town with space, where you could make your own space. We moved, impulsively, tentatively, and fifteen years later still live here, still on honeymoon.

  Happily, the town is rather hard to get to. U.S. 1, in its haste to reach New Hampshire, barrels through the shaggy outskirts, and Route 1A from the south, coming through North Beverly, Wenham, and Hamilton, acts as a natural barrier, choked as it is with addled-access shopping malls and some of the pokiest blue-haired drivers in the East. On its northern flank, Ipswich is guarded by Rowley, a hamlet with an oddly Midwestern air of desolation, and by Linebrook Road, a tortuous lane that some dastardly planners project as a superhighway. Ipswich was first approached from the sea, by a distinguished party of settlers led by John Winthrop, Jr., in 1633, and the site thrived for a while as a port; but, as no less an authority than Captain John Smith had predicted, the Ipswich River sleepily silted it over. The clipper ships of the China trade went elsewhere. Population ebbed in the nineteenth century, and a unique number of pre-1725 houses escaped the destruction that goes with thriving in America.

  “Yet,” as a local friend recently insisted to me, “this was never a hick town.” The first generation of citizens, including not only young Winthrop but future Governors Dudley and Bradstreet and the misogynistic legalist Nathaniel Ward and the colony’s first poet, Bradstreet’s wife, Anne, gave Ipswich a good self-image from which it never recovered. It bills itself, on Chamber of Commerce billboards (on the basis of a not very glorious scuffle between some selectmen and Governor Andros in 1687), as “The Birthplace of American Independence” and notes with pride that, alone of the major towns of Essex County, it never hanged a witch. Never a hick town, always with just enough industry—lace, farming, hosiery, clamming, electronics—to sustain an independent population, Ipswich at present stands to be eaten by the megalopolitan monster of expanding Boston. Its surviving farms and empty spaces, its casual heritage of historicity and charm, its mini-city perkiness, are all delicious, and what developers from outside are not allowed to do, local developers will. Our town is no longer hard enough to get to.

  The Boston doctors who came around the turn of the century and summered on the land along the beach road were perhaps the first, after the Indians, to seize this place as a place of visible glory. The marsh, though men and wide-shoed horses no longer harvest its salt hay, is not an idle piece of scenery. It rarely rests, changing its tint every month, playing host to a plague of greenhead flies in August, becoming a Carthage of ice rubble in February. Subtle and abiding, the marriage of earth and ocean that the marsh represents pacifies all the elements, absorbs the tide and releases it, warms the wind, prepares the eyes and spirit for the implacable otherness of the Atlantic—which breaks on Ipswich sands so tamed by the arms of the bay that an infant can dabble in it safely. Nor does Ipswich lack beauty inland; its westernmost point cuts into a freshwater pond as cherished by its pines and cottages as any in New Hampshire, and the Ipswich River before it turns salt flows through miles of state forest. The town has no country club. The one golf course is delightfully public, a cozy 66-par where the young learn the game and the old retire with it. Though sea-bathing north of Cape Cod is a stoic sport even in July, there are few swimming pools. The Ipswich style makes do with what God provides—swim when the tide is high, clam when it is low. Conservationist attitudes run deep and strong. It was an Ipswich summer resident, Dr. William Shurcliff, who led the successful lobbying fight against the SST.

  Yet, in the same style, Ipswich is traditionally careless of itself. Sidewalks exist or do not exist by whim of the individual householder. When we moved here in 1957, an open sewer with the lyrical name of Farley Brook ran through the middle of town; the remarkably belated program of town sewers is still far from complete. After ten years of stalemate, a new high school was voted in by rigging the bylaws, and now a newer one, badly needed, has several times been defeated at the polls. The attempt to create a legal historic district, in the manner of Concord, has been rebuffed by homeowners fearful of having their right to choose a speckled siding or to build a sun porch infringed. Even the dogs in Ipswich enjoy an exceptional freedom; they sleep in the middle of North Main Street and wander through the fenceless back yards like a pack of sacred cows. A leash law was defeated at the last town meeting by a margin of one.

  Market Street is still comfortingly raggle-taggle, but increasingly hard to park on. We moved to a town of not seven thousand; the population is now twelve thousand and growing irresisti
bly. Not that resistance is absent. Plans to construct an atomic-energy plant on the marsh are nipped each time they try to bud; an entrepreneur anxious to build us a Robert Trent Jones golf course, with a few high-rise apartments posed between the sand traps, has been successfully enmeshed in town bickering. But such triumphs of forestallment do not slow the bulldozers clearing half-acre lots for ranch houses, or put money into the hands of a Conservation Commission eager to buy up a green belt.

  Two splendid prominences overlook Ipswich Bay and Plum Island. One, consisting of Castle Hill and Steep Hill, contains only the mansion and accessory buildings built by Richard T. Crane, a Chicago tycoon who early in the century bought up a baronial amount of coastal Ipswich, most of which, including a beach, has passed to the town as a public reservation, a park that becomes more precious (and more vandalized) every year. The other prominence, across the Ipswich River, is Jeffreys Neck, named after Ipswich’s first known white resident, a squatter farmer. The Neck has been freely given over to the perpetrators of summer cottages, so that its silhouette bristles like a cogwheel with rooftops, and even more are being crowded in, with much scraping of land and much importation of plywood and tarpaper. Yet though the view of the Neck is dispiriting, the view from it is still grand, and in the sum of human happiness which accounts for more, the lonely Castle or the crowded Neck? One’s instinct, having arrived at a good place, is to bar the gates, but there are no gates on this permissive and accidental paradise, this is America, and we are all arrivistes, from John Winthrop, Jr., on—all exploiters and developers and spoilers.