Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Hemingway of course did not invent the world, nor pain, mutilation, and death. In his earlier work his harsh obsessions seem honorable and necessary; an entire generation of American men learned to speak in the accents of Hemingway’s stoicism. But here, the tension of art has been snapped and the line between sensitive vision and psychopathy has been crossed. The “sea-chase story” is in many ways excellent, but it has the falsity of the episode in Hemingway’s real life upon which it was based. In the early days of World War II, he persuaded his friends in the Havana Embassy to let him equip his private fishing launch the Pilar as a Q-boat, with bazookas, grenades, bombs, and machine guns. His dream was to lure a Nazi submarine close enough to toss a bomb down the hatch. He staffed the Pilar with cronies and, fruitlessly, but displaying much real courage and stamina, cruised the Cuban coast. Everything in “At Sea” is true, except the encounter with Germans and the imperatives of the mission, which was not demanded from above but invented and propelled from within. Such bravery is not grace under pressure but pressure forced in the hope of inducing Grace.

  And even love becomes a species of cruelty, which divides women into whores and bitches on the one hand and on the other a single icy-perfect adored. Some reviewers have complained that the first wife is unreal: to me she has that hard reality of a movie star (which in the book she is), a star on the screen, with “the magic rolling line of the hair that was the same silvery ripe-wheat color as always.” But it is an easy transition from the image of this beloved and lost woman, this enforcer of proud loneliness, to the cool gray pistols Hudson sleeps with:

  “How long have you been my girl?” he said to the pistol. “Don’t answer,” he said to the pistol. “Lie there good and I will see you kill something better than land crabs when the time comes.”

  Love and death: fused complements in Hemingway’s universe. Yet he never formulated the laws that bind them, never dared depart from the knightly code and poser’s armor he forged against the towering impressions of suffering received at his father’s side in the Michigan woods.

  “Is dying hard, Daddy?”

  “No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

  … In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

  Sure of certain things, he never achieved the step away from himself, of irony and appraisal. He wanted to; he tried; this book opens in a mood of tonic breadth and humor, and closes with a beatific vision of Hudson dying and beloved:

  “I think I understand, Willie,” he said.

  “Oh shit,” Willie said. “You never understand anybody that loves you.”

  The new generations, my impression is, want to abolish both war and love, not love as a physical act but love as a religion, a creed to help us suffer better. The sacred necessity of suffering no longer seems sacred or necessary, and Hemingway speaks across the Sixties as strangely as a medieval saint; I suspect few readers younger than myself could believe, from this sad broken testament, how we did love Hemingway and, pity feeling impudent, love him still.

  And Yet Again Wonderful

  BULLET PARK, by John Cheever. 245 pp. Knopf, 1969.

  In the coining of images and incidents, John Cheever has no peer among contemporary American fiction writers. His short stories dance, skid, twirl, and soar on the strength of his abundant invention; his novels tend to fly apart under its impact. His first, The Wapshot Chronicle, was unified by a pervading nostalgia and a magnificent old man’s journal; his second, The Wapshot Scandal, amounted to a debris of brilliant short stories. Bullet Park, his third, holds together but just barely, by the thinnest of threads. It begins with an evocation of Bullet Park, a more ominously named version of the suburban essence Cheever used to call Shady Hill:

  The stranger might observe that the place seems very quiet; they seem to have come inland from the sounds of wilderness—gulls, trains, cries of pain and love, creaking things, hammerings, gunfire—not even a child practices the piano in this precinct of disinfected acoustics.

  At church one Sunday, Eliot Nailles, our hero, meets Paul Hammer, our other hero. Not unnaturally, they, and we, are roused to foreboding by the coincidence of their names, but for the bulk of the book they merely glimpse one another; their fates intertwine only at the end.

  The first half of the novel tells Nailles’s story: he is, as male suburbanites go, uxorious and cheerful, but his seventeen-year-old son Tony in a spell of despair takes to his bed, inaccessible to mother, father, and psychiatrist. At last a Negro guru from the town’s little ghetto coaxes him, with repetitions of the magic word “Love,” back into the American Way of Life. The second half of Bullet Park shows Hammer, a wealthy bastard (literally), being chased from hotel to hotel in both hemispheres by a melancholy-inducing cafard; his temporary occupation of a yellow room where he feels at peace leads to his marriage to a wood-nymph who, once wed, becomes a bitch (figuratively). In the end, Hammer goes mad, decides to crucify Tony, kidnaps the boy, and is overtaken in that Episcopalian church by Nailles armed with a power saw—events almost redeemed from implausibility by the bravura speed of their telling.

  The book’s broad streak of the fantastic has been deplored by some critics—the same critics, I suspect, who readily grant emancipation from the probable to younger, overtly “experimental” novelists like John Hawkes and James Purdy. A more serious weakness lies in the similarity of the two heroes; though intended, perhaps, to be contrasting polarities of the American psyche, Hammer and Nailles are in fact much alike—decent hard-drinking hommes moyens sensuels oppressed by a shapeless smog of anxiety. Tony is headed the same way, and the author, in the askew irony of his upbeat conclusion, with its quartet of “wonderfuls,”† seems to be shrugging off his own cafard. The tender, twinkling prose has an undercurrent of distraction and impatience.

  Bullet Park succeeds, I think, as a slowly revolving mobile of marvellously poeticized moments—the portrait of the hungover party couple the Wickwires as they struggle to rise on Monday morning; Hammer’s mother’s detection of symphonies in the roar of various airplane motors; Nailles’s wife’s visit to an off-off-Broadway play and her subsequent haunting by a nude actor, “his thick pubic brush from which hung, like a discouraged and unwatered flower, his principal member.” America’s urban hell presses hard upon the suburbia that was meant to be paradise. Cheever maintains his loyalty to the middling and the decent, but speaks increasingly in the accents of a visionary.

  Talk of a Tired Town

  THE LONG-WINDED LADY: Notes from The New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan. 237 pp. Morrow, 1969.

  The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” department, a space set aside when Ross founded the magazine as a smart-aleck local, survives as a vacuum maintained in case someone has something to say.‡ When, a dozen years ago, I served on the large team that labored to fill each week this frontal void (a task that White and Thurber had performed with the aid of a few legmen), the problem was to perpetuate a cozy tone about a city that had ceased to seem cozy. We were, we “Talk of the Town” reporters, a sallow crew-cut brigade fresh from Cornell or Harvard, sent forth into the mirthless gray canyons to attend a mechanical promotional exhibit or p.r.-pushed pseudo-event, battering out upon our return six or seven yellow pages of rough copy to be honed into eight hundred gay, excited, factually flawless words by veteran martyrs like John McCarten and Brendan Gill. Some of us did not even live in the city, but had already established families and golf memberships in Bronxville or Rye, and even those who, like myself, did live in Manhattan had their hearts set on the green pastures of Fiction and the absentee ownership of Literary Glory. We were not avid to extract from the Eisenhowered, sullen if not apocalyptic metropolis of those years the enchantment of the Baghdad-on-the-Subway celebrated by O. Henry, by Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Millay, by Dorothy Parker and Benchley and Woollcott—whose chairs were still warm in the Algonquin lobby. It is to Maeve Brennan’s credit that she, with
the device of her letters from “the long-winded lady,” has helped put New York back into The New Yorker, and has written about the city of the Sixties with both honesty and affection.

  Not that the pieces, as collected here, without most of the italics that gave them on first printing a comic breathlessness, entirely escape the “Talk of the Town’s” way of making too much of too little and of being complacently, exhaustedly flat. She gives us John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s entire credo as chiseled into Rockefeller Center, and the menus of a lot of meals she happens to eat, and the names of everyone present at a New Year’s party at the Adano Restaurant. And the long-winded lady, read in bulk, reveals certain personal eccentricities. She tends to rise at dawn, to read while she eats, to like street music, to liken real streets to stage sets, to plug her favorite restaurants, to be threatened by large people and animals and loud noises—we deduce that she is small. She walks a lot but her range is curiously restricted; she never strays south of the Village, north of the eighties, and rarely east of Madison Avenue. Her favorite region, dismally enough, is the West Forties, those half-demolished blocks of small hotels and cellar restaurants and old coin shops between Fifth and Eighth Avenue; she most frequently strolls on Sixth, which she never calls the Avenue of the Americas.

  Within these limitations she is constantly alert, sharp-eyed as a sparrow for the crumbs of human event, the overheard and the glimpsed and the guessed at, that form the solitary city person’s least expensive amusement. A little boy crying, a bigger boy greeting his father, a young man courting over the telephone, a middle-aged couple enacting their estrangement across a restaurant table, an old lady flipping the pages of a letter from her hotel window as she reads—these vignettes are well realized, and need only a touch of padding and bluff to make them short stories. Miss Brennan does not blink when, surveying the cityscape, she sees drunks and crazy men and prostitutes with “the eyes of satisfied furies or unsatisfied prison wardresses,” costumed in miniskirts “designed to show even more leg than they had.” She is an unfussy but formidable phrase-maker, as in her long poem to the ailanthus (which she never calls the tree of heaven) or in her image of “daylight streaming like cold water” over the curved staircases and papered walls of roofless brownstones. A melancholy picture of New York’s streets accumulates:

  The night view up Sixth Avenue is eerie now that the blocks on the west side of the avenue are half broken down and half gone.

  [Charles] is an attractive street, except that, like all small New York streets, it takes on a dead, menacing air at night, because of the lines and lines of cars that are parked along its sidewalks—cars jammed together, bumper to bumper, stealing all the life and space out of the place.

  Broadway is dying, but the big street still looks much as it has looked for some time now—a garish architectural shambles with cheap shop fronts and a few movie houses.

  At the moment, the dark shadow in New York is cast not by the past but by the future, and too many streets wear a dull air of “What’s the use?”

  Our cities, not too long ago the farm boy’s dream and the place where every girl with a straight nose was advised to find her fortune, have become the national disgrace, the huge proofs of our native greed and haste. Who wants to live in them? The long-winded lady admits, “New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay.” Yet she has lived there, during this slum of a decade, and also testifies, “In fact this is a wonderful city. It is always giving me something to think about.”

  His Own Horn

  THE TRUMPET OF THE SWAN, by E. B. White. 210 pp. Harper & Row, 1970.

  E. B. White’s third novel for children joins the two others on the shelf for classics. While not quite so sprightly as Stuart Little, and less rich in personalities and incident than Charlotte’s Web—that paean to barnyard life by a city humorist turned farmer—The Trumpet of the Swan has superior qualities of its own; it is the most spacious and serene of the three, the one most imbued with the author’s sense of the precious instinctual heritage represented by wild nature. Its story persuasively offers itself to children as a parable of growing, yet does not lack the inimitable tone of the two earlier works—the simplicity that never condescends, the straight and earnest telling that happens upon (rather than veers into) comedy, the “grace and humor and praise of life and the good backbone of succinctness” that Eudora Welty noted nearly twenty years ago, reviewing Charlotte’s Web.

  At first glance, one’s heart a little falls to see that wash drawings by Edward Frascino have replaced Garth Williams’ finely furry pen-and-ink illustrations, which are wedded to White’s other children’s texts as intimately as Tenniel’s to Alice and Shepard’s to the Pooh books. From the jacket flap we learn that the tale, daring the obvious, tells of a Trumpeter Swan that learns to play the trumpet. More daringly still, he is called Louis. And in the first chapter we meet Sam Beaver, an eleven-year-old boy who, but for the dark touch of Indian about him, is too reminiscent of the many other bland, “interested” boy-heroes of books that bid us crouch behind the tall grass and spy out the wonder in a swan’s nest. Yet soon White’s love of natural detail lifts the prose into felicity, and the father and mother swan begin to talk to each other with a surprising animation, and the reader settles to a joyride through the rolling terrain of the highly unlikely. Louis discovers himself to be mute, an inconvenience during childhood but downright agony during the mating season. Louis’ father, a bombastic old cob, gets him a trumpet, and to pay for it Louis turns professional. How does Louis’ father acquire the trumpet? Why, by diving through the display window of a music store in Billings, Montana, and carrying the instrument off through a hail of shards and buckshot. How does Louis pack his trumpet, and the slate upon which he learns to write, and the lifesaving medal he wins, and the purse of money he makes? All are attached by strings around his neck, flapping and clanking together whenever he flies. How does he carve out his career? First, as a bugler in a boys’ camp; next, as accompanist, swimming one-footed, to the swan-boats in the Boston Public Garden; last, as a night-club performer in Philadelphia, operating out of a pond in the city zoo.

  If the author once winked during this accumulation of preposterous particulars, it would all turn flimsy and come tumbling down. But White never forgets that he is telling about serious matters: the overcoming of a handicap, and the joys of music, and the need for creatures to find a mate, and the survival of a beautiful species of swan. When Louis realizes that he must graduate from the bugle to the trumpet with its three finger-operated valves, he unflinchingly asks Sam Beaver to slit the webbing of his right foot. The boy does, not omitting to point out that henceforth the swan will tend to swim in circles. What other writer, in such a work of fancy, would not have contrived to omit this homely, even repellent, bit of surgery?

  White’s concreteness holds the door open for unpleasantness and also engenders textures of small surprise and delightful rightness. In one chapter Louis spends the night at the Ritz in Boston. He orders a dozen watercress sandwiches for dinner and then puts himself to bed in the bathtub. “Then he turned out the lights, climbed into the tub, curved his long neck around to the right, rested his head on his back, tucked his bill under his wing, and lay there, floating on the water, his head cradled softly in his feathers.” The large bird’s calm and successful attempt to cope with an unfamiliar environment has a benedictory charm. This is how an intelligent swan of good will behaves in a hotel room; it is also how a child feels, and indeed how we all feel, enchanted out of our ordinary selves by rented solitude.

  The world of E. B. White’s children’s books is eminently a reasonable one. Nature serves as a reservoir of common sense. Nobody panics, and catastrophes are taken in stride. When Mr. Brickle, the director of Camp Kookooskoos, is sprayed by a skunk, he does not do the slow or fast burn a meaner comic spirit would c
onjure up; he announces that the camp has been given “a delicious dash of wild perfume” and that “A swim will clear the air.” Similarly, in Stuart Little, when a mouse instead of a baby is born to human parents, they promptly improvise for him a “tiny bed out of four clothespins and a cigarette box.” Not birth nor death is meant to dismay us. When, in Charlotte’s Web, the pig squeals “I don’t want to die!” the spider says, “I can’t stand hysterics,” and eschews hysteria when her own death draws near. Her death-web speech is memorable: “After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies.”

  Near the end of The Trumpet of the Swan, Louis’ father faces death with a grandiloquent soliloquy: “… Man, in his folly, has given me a mortal wound. The red blood flows in a steady trickle from my veins. My strength fails.… Good-bye, life! Good-bye, beautiful world! Good-bye, little lakes in the north! Farewell, springtimes I have known, with their passion and ardor!” The rhetoric is comic, but the tribute is sincere. The Trumpet of the Swan glows with the primal ecstasies of space and flight, of night and day, of nurturing and maturing, of courtship and art. On the last page Louis thinks of “how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music.” How rare that word “lucky” has become! The universe remains chancy, but no one admits to having good luck. We and our children are lucky to have this book.