Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  The nearest, Rodin’s lumpy monument to Balzac, replied by staring rigidly at the roof of the Hotel Dorset. “I haven’t seen the gate,” he confessed. “The idiot sculptor hewed my neck with such a heroic roughness that it cannot be turned.”

  Lipchitz’s “Figure,” however, could look at nothing else. Words came with difficulty out of his (or her) intricate but regular convolutions. “I am puzzled,” it admitted at last. “Is that really how you spell ‘Metropolitan’?”

  Renoir’s “Washerwoman” was, as we had hoped, more amiable and optimistic. “It will be lovely,” she sweetly promised, “in the spring, when it blossoms.”

  The Haida Indian totem pole, all fangs and nostrils, offered the most aggressive judgment.

  “I

  T

  ,

  S

  U

  G

  L

  Y,”

  the pole said, with typical totemic unkindness.

  Cancelled

  July 1959

  HERE, with the best will in the world, we go up to the grand opening of the Hudson Celebration Theatre-in-the-Park, on the site of the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink, in Central Park, and it’s cancelled, because of rain.

  “But it’s not raining now,” we protested.

  “The performance is cancelled,” the young man in the box office repeated, staring stonily ahead, waiting for the next in line.

  He had been saying the same words so often that his entire body had grown rigid around the thought of cancellation; his brain had coagulated, causing a fine sweat to break out evenly on his face. The phone rang. He picked it up, listened a moment, said “Cancelled,” and replaced the receiver. He looked up, and saw us still standing there; a spark of anger flicked across his features. “Next,” he said.

  The lady behind us was very short and held on to her ticket as if it were the end of a rope that would pull her to a greater height. “Somebody said tonight’s tickets would be good tomorrow,” she began.

  “That is correct, Madam. Tonight’s performance is cancelled.” He glanced away, to the next in line.

  “But,” the short lady said, and her hat trembled a bit, “tomorrow night my daughter’s coming over from New Jersey.”

  “Do you want a refund?”

  “She’s coming over with my grandchildren, and I don’t see how I can do both.”

  While she was saying this, he looked at the color of her ticket and took two dollar bills and some change from a drawer and passed them toward her, turning his palm upward for the ticket. She held on to her ticket and her thought tightly. “I don’t see how I can come; the papers said the opening was tonight.”

  “The performance is cancelled,” he said.

  We moved away. The circumambient trees, soaked off and on all afternoon by rain, smelled fresh and looked dark in the twilight. The octagonal paving around the rink was spottily damp. The amphitheatre, airily designed by Edward Stone, was a thick ring of red canvas chairs surrounding a circular platform lit by four tall towers of lights. It was gaudy as a circus, without the sawdust sadness. A few lithesome young people, clad in informal, patchy-looking ballet outfits, bounded about on the stage in time to the remote jangle of a piano. The slithering footsteps made a sound infinitely faint in the center of that silent scarlet circle of chairs. We put our elbows on a wall whose concrete was exhaling a delicate damp scent, and watched. The last time we leaned on this wall and watched, there had been skaters down below, gliding, weaving, tottering, tumbling. A priest, we remembered had brought some children, and was himself ravishing on skates, black against the white ice, his arms folded behind him, skimming on one foot, then the other, with the incisive, irresistible grace of a medieval proof. Behind this elegant crow, his childish flock, a muffled bunch of sparrows and chickadees, fluttered along as best they could, extending stumpy wings for balance, chirruping with delight.

  What we saw now was equally fine. A long-throated girl in a snug patchwork of black and gray pirouetted, leapt, and crossed her pale hands on her breast, and bowed her head. Despair? Shy stirrings of love? Without a program, we could not tell. A young man, as the piano rumbled into a masculine octave, pranced up a ramp and extended his arm. The prince? Her lover? Her accuser? Without costumes, they were clothed in mystery. More dancers joined them as the invisible plot thickened under the deepening stars. Their motions, cut off from explicit interpretation, enacted upon the precarious surface of music—the spaces between the lone piano’s notes were sealed with the whisper of their feet—possessed a power beyond beauty, a power existential in the sense that, stripped of the smart paint of art, they shone with the bare, non-committal luminosity of fact. It was as if, walking through the Park, we had come upon people dancing out a personal incident in their lives. The young man, the perhaps prince, balanced on one foot and urged his face forward. An older man, gray-haired and in tights—the director, certainly—posed opposite him in the same position, so that the two of them became reflections in an imperfect mirror. The older man strained forward to lead the younger into greater urgency, to bring him to fill with his body the emotion to the brim. A few curt words, the scene collapsed, and now the girl flew in a great scissoring circle around the rim of the stage, a smile flashing on her twirling face. Happy. She was conveying happiness.

  “Why doesn’t she bend her body a little?” a female voice asked near us along the wall. The wall was crowded with people. Almost uniformly, the people who had not been clever enough to phone ahead had walked over from the box office to watch the rehearsal. Their burning cigarettes hung like an uneven string of small lanterns. Their talk made a harmless complement to the pantomime below. “When I was in the restaurant business, the cops …” The young prince made a mistake with his legs; the music stopped; a gentle laugh ran along the wall; he went back to the far edge of the stage. “… this cop said to me, he said, ‘Boy, this is the greatest; I recommend it,’ he said. He said, ‘For ten years, you know, I had a lot of jobs and I was nuthin’. Nuthin’. Now,’ he said, ‘when I walk down the street, wearing my gun, I’m king. I’m the king,’ he said. I said to myself, ‘This man’s a psychopath. This man is a psychopath.’ ”

  The dancers ceased; there was brief clapping. The lights dimmed into a red tint. The girl, talking to the director, put her hands on her hips and laughed. Everybody along the wall hushed at the laugh. We all held silent, waiting for another. There wasn’t another; she walked away, flat-footed, and the gray pattern that decorates the stage was vivid now that the platform was empty. The crowd that had attended the cancellation was slow to leave. Above the trees, the buildings along Fifth Avenue and Central Park South burned with a great cool wealth of fluorescent tints. The city is lovely from within the Park after dark; it’s a view we don’t see often enough. The crowd lingered, smoking. An out-of-town voice behind us insisted, “No, I loved it. Listen, in the winter I make sacrifices to see this stuff.” The crowd—perhaps three hundred or more—wandered away, east, west, and south, long lines silhouetted under the lamps heavily caged against vandals. We ourselves went back to the path along the pond, where the ducks were sleeping.

  Morality Play

  October 1959

  THE MYSTERIOUS AND AWFUL THING about the television quiz scandals is not that the jaded souls who ran the show were hoaxers but that dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of contestants, almost all of whom must have applied in the simplicity of good faith, were successfully enrolled in the hoax. Now, as we remember the flavor and ethos of that innocent era, the contestants, aside from their freakish passion for Hittite history or skeet-shooting statistics, were meant to be us—you and me and the bright boy next door. This was America answering. This was the mental wealth behind the faces you saw in a walk around the block. The appeal of the programs, with the rising challenge of Soviet brain power as a backdrop, was ultimately patriotic; the contestants were selected to be a cross-section of our nation just as deliberately as the G.I.s in a war movie are. There we bravely sat in our l
iving rooms, sweating it out with this or that Shakespeare-reading poultry farmer or chemistry-minded chorus girl, and there they were on the other side of the blurred little screen, patting (not wiping) their brows with handkerchiefs, biting their tongues as instructed, stammering out rehearsed answers, gasping with relief at the expected cry of congratulation. And we sat there, a nation of suckers, for years. It’s marvellous how long it went on, considering the number of normal Americans who had to be corrupted to keep the cameras whirring. In all this multitude, not one snag, not one audible bleat, not one righteous refusal that made the news. The lid didn’t blow off until, years afterward, a winner, disgruntled because he had not won more, was moved to confess and purge his guilt.

  We are fascinated by the unimaginably tactful and delicate process whereby the housewife next door was transmogrified into a paid cheat. We picture her coming into the studio, a little weary still from yesterday’s long plane trip, a bit flustered by the noise and immensity of the metropolis—Dorothy Dotto, thirty-eight, happily married for nineteen years, the mother of three, a member of the Methodist Church, the Grange, and the Ladies’ Auxiliary. She lives, and has lived all her life, in the town of Elm Corners, somewhere in the Corn Belt; as a child, she won seven consecutive pins for perfect Sunday-school attendance, and she graduated with good grades from a public school where the remarkable truthfulness of George Washington and the durable axioms of Benjamin Franklin were often invoked. Her father, Jesse, who is retired but still alive (bless him), for forty years kept above his desk at the feed mill a sign declaring, “Honesty Is the Best Policy.”

  Our heroine meets the show’s producer, dapper, dimpled Leonard Blough (pronounced “Bluff”), who takes her into a little room walled with aluminum and frosted glass:

  BLOUGH (smiling and lifting from her arms a bundle, containing her lunch, that she has been clutching awkwardly): Well, Mrs. Dotto, you did very well on the qualifying tests. Very well indeed.

  MRS. D. (blushing): Thank you. My dad always told me I had a good head for books; he wanted me to go on to normal school and be a teacher, but then I met Ralph, and—well, one thing led to another … (Blushes more deeply)

  BLOUGH: Ah, yes. Young love, young love. Well, Dorothy—You don’t mind if I call you Dorothy?

  MRS. D.: Sakes, no!

  BLOUGH: We look forward to having you on our show. We know you’re going to be a wonderful contestant.

  MRS. D.: Well, I hope so. It’s a wonderful honor for me. When I think of all those folks back in Elm Corners watching, I’m afraid I’ll get so nervous I won’t be able to make a word come out of my mouth. We all watch, you know, every day, fair weather or foul.

  BLOUGH (dimpling profusely): That’s the kind of tribute we value most. Dotty, I know you won’t be nervous; we’re a very close and friendly family on this show. By the way, the capital of Paraguay is Asunción.

  MRS. D.: Eh?

  BLOUGH (consulting a paper on his desk): A-s-u-n-c-i-o-n. Asunción. Better practice the Spanish accent in your hotel room tonight.

  MRS. D. (flustering): But—But—You think I might be asked that?

  BLOUGH (his eyes narrowing thoughtfully): Let’s put it this way, Dot. The odds on your being asked the capital of Paraguay are as good as the odds on your being asked anything else. Do you follow me?

  MRS. D.: I—I—I’m not sure.

  BLOUGH (looking her right in the eyes—a devastating effect): I think you do. And—oh, yes—an animal that carries its young in a pouch is a marsupial. M-a-r-s—

  MRS. D.: Yes, I know that. But why are you telling me?

  BLOUGH (leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling, which is one great fluorescent panel): Let me try to express myself. I like you, honey. I think you have what it takes.

  MRS. D.: But you mean that all this is a fake—that all those people answering questions are told the answers ahead of time?

  BLOUGH: Come, come, let’s not be nai-eev, dear. That’s show biz.

  MRS. D.: But I thought—The whole idea—I mean what made it interesting—

  BLOUGH (cunningly): It is interesting, isn’t it? I mean it’s a good show. Now, it wouldn’t be a good show if the clucks out there knew, but they don’t know, so they’re happy. Aren’t they?

  MRS. D.: Well, but my daddy always had this sign over his desk—BLOUGH: And we don’t want them to be unhappy, do we? We don’t want them, say, to have their own Mrs. D. show up as a dope tomorrow, do we? Listen, Sister, we can lace questions into you you won’t even know what they mean. Now, listen to reason. Be a doll.

  MRS. D.: Well, I’ve come all this way—

  BLOUGH (jubilant): That’s the girl! You’re on! And when the time comes to take your dive, you’ll take it, won’t you? Huh?

  MRS. D. (growing fairly cunning herself): Not this side of three grand I won’t.

  BLOUGH (standing up, arms spread wide): Baby! It’s a deal! (They embrace, and, as the Curtain Falls, the West Declines noticeably.)

  Obfuscating Coverage

  July 1960

  AFTER A WEEK of attending closely to the news coverage of the Democratic Convention, our chief impression was of the obfuscating, eclipsing, and molesting action of the news coverage itself. In nuclear physics there exists an “uncertainty principle,” which states that beyond a certain threshold atomic phenomena become hopelessly obscured by the interference of the observing process itself. It seemed to us that newsmen, or at least television interviewers, reached a comparable threshold at Los Angeles, and zoomed across it into an ugly chaos where nothing was visible except their own drawn, pale, bleating faces.

  The essence of a news gatherer, like the essence of a window, is transparence. But the window on the convention that the television networks let into our living room was so badly besmirched by the shoulders, smirks, rudeness, and cynicism of the reporters that the actual proceedings were glimpsed fitfully, through momentary—and, indeed, reluctant—intermittances of news gratia news. We were asked to witness the apotheosis of the newsman as his own hero. Television, unlike anything that has gone before it, puts him in front of the camera. Nothing was clearer, in the wavery image piped into our poor old set, than the broadcasting apparatus itself. The men who used this apparatus, growing increasingly conscious through five days that their own presences were on the television screen and as big as anybody else’s, became increasingly clownish, aggressive, sarcastic, and self-important. The harassment of the politicians reached an obscene pitch. Senator Kennedy, trying to hack his way through the jungle of thrusting mikes and brazen importunities that grew up in the corridors of his hotel, was physically pushed into a panicked anger that for a moment marred even his extraordinary composure. Senator Jackson, to name one of the lesser fry, not only was compelled to produce the magic words “I don’t know” a dozen times running but was persistently teased, by an especially pert microphonist, about his facial expression. With the disappointed candidates, the game seemed to be to goad them into sobbing. As for delegation chairmen, several of them were reduced to open-mouthed, staring silence by the forwardness of their tormentors, each of whom wore little electronic wings that presumably made him as exempt as an angel from mundane considerations like courtesy. These interviews, which were countless, not only looked ugly and were devoid of factual content but had the additional disagreeable effect of forcing good men to lie. Under the barrage of gouging inquiry, many of the political leaders retreated from the well-worn ground of politic discretion and took up positions that were plainly false. This was especially noticeable in the protestations of innocence and ignorance that surrounded the jockeying for the Vice-Presidential nomination.

  Furthermore, the whole show was mangled by a policy of ad-lib interruption that allowed the bored and disconsolate ringmasters to break into any speech they considered dull with hot tips, chitchat, or yet another scabrous interview. It was as if a telecast of a baseball game were to be patched out, in the quiet innings, with shots of beneath-the-stands scuffling and film
clips of last fall’s pro-football season. We submit that a person who wants baseball wants all the innings, and that a person who wants a convention wants the convention in all its quaint tedium, right down to the last soybean statistic, evocation of natural grandeur, and tribute to Southern womanhood.

  Bryant Park

  July 1960

  THE OTHER DAY, we went over to Bryant Park and sat down, on the steps in front of the statue of William Cullen Bryant. The steps, though this was early evening, were warm. Behind us Bryant, in bronze robes, slumped on a bronze throne; he looked like a very wise and dignified man who has been draped in yards of curtain material and then wetted down with a fire hose. A quadrangle of maples enclosed our lower vision. On our right, through the trees, peeped the peppermint-aqua of Stern’s awnings, saying “COOL COOL COOL.” Higher, on the sides of the old-fashioned skyscrapers that rim the Avenue of the Americas here, signs spoke loudly of far-off places. “ACAPULCO One airline all the way AERONAVES DE MEXICO.” “MILLER HIGH LIFE Brewed Only in Milwaukee.” “AMBASSADOR World’s Lightest Scotch.” Sombreros, tortillas, the Braves, bonnie braes, and bagpipes jumbled together in our mind. By shifting our vision slightly, west by southwest, we treated ourself to a delightful antique jumble of high architecture. Granite gingerbread, pseudo-cathedrals, tessellated brickwork, grilled windows, that Babylonian wall decoration native to the thirties—all these dear ghosts, so thoroughly exorcised by Mies van der Rohe and the glass marvels of the new Park Avenue, still reign untroubled above the southwest corner of Bryant Park. Only the tips of the trees, at this hour, displayed any sunshine; it raked their tops like an ethereal hedge clipper. In the canyon of Forty-first Street—a trough open all the way to Jersey—golden-white, on top of that blue-white, and, topmost, blue, an ebbing blue, were the sky’s colors. Behind a few of the windows a desultory secretary could be seen tidying up the final carbons of the day, and the first neon lights were glowing weak red.