Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  The façades of the buildings darkened in tint, the lights within windows seemed not merely to burn but to blaze, and abruptly the rain was upon us again. In the instant before it fell, the air felt full of soft circular motions and a silent cry of “Hurry!” Pedestrians hustled for shelter. The search converted Fifth Avenue into a romantic and primitive setting for adventure. Pelted, we gained the cave of Finchley’s Tudor arcade, with its patio-red floor and plastic orange tree and California sports jackets. The next instant, we ran on into the green glade of the Olivetti entrance, with its typewriter-tipped stalagmite. Finally, we lodged in the narrow but deep shelter of Brentano’s leafy allée of best-sellers, and from there we observed how the rain, a gusty downpour now, had the effect of exquisitely pressing the city down into itself. Everything—taxi roofs, umbrellas, cellophane-skinned hats, even squinting eyebrows—conveyed a sharp impression of shelter. Just as in a Miró painting the ovals and ellipses and lima beans of color sail across the canvas, so the city seemed a mobile conglomerate of dabs of dryness swimming through a fabric of wet. The rain intensified yet one more notch; the Fred F. French Building developed a positively livid stain along its bricks and the scene seemed squeezed so tight that it yielded the essence of granite, the very idea of a city. In a younger century, we might have wept for joy.

  And when the rain stopped at last, a supernaturally well-staged effect was produced in the north. Owing to the arrangement of the slabs of Rockefeller Center, the low, westward-moving sun had laid an exclusive shaft of light upon the face of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Like two elegant conical bottles, the steeples were brimful of a mildly creamy glow. We hastened toward the omen, but by the time we reached the site the sunshine had faded. Yet, looking up through the skeleton globe upheld here by the grimacing Atlas, we saw beyond the metal framework what was, patchy blue and scudding gray, indisputably sky.

  Eisenhower’s Eloquence

  May 1962

  THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY, it occurs to us, is merely a way station en route to the blessed condition of being an ex-President. In office, Herbert Hoover made the nation feel drastically insecure; out of office, he has radiated for thirty years a positively archangelic calm. While Harry Truman was residing in the White House, he gave the impression of being an unnerved riverboat gambler improvising his way through the biggest crap game in Western history; back home in Independence, he gets wiser every year, until in retrospect it seems that we had a combination of von Clausewitz, Macaulay, and Ty Cobb supervising our destinies in that harried era. And now Dwight Eisenhower, who for two terms spoke in long, gray stretches, has become piercingly eloquent. “Only Americans can hurt America,” he told a crowd in Abilene, Kansas, according to the paper we read. Only Americans can hurt America. We are not quite sure how it fits all the facts, but it has a ring to it that sets the patriotic vertebrae in our spine tingling. It’s been a long time since we read a sentence containing the word “America” that made any sense. This sentence seems to us properly proud, taut, mysterious, and true. We propose that it be engraved on a special-issue postage stamp and, in the fullness of time, be allowed to pass into our currency, to keep company with “In God We Trust,” “Annuit Coeptis,” and “This Certificate Is Legal Tender for All Debts Public and Private.”

  Not content with having delivered himself of a motto, Mr. Eisenhower went on to criticize the Twist. He compared it unfavorably with the minuet. So, no doubt, would have Voltaire. But the more we meditate, the more likely it seems that the Twist, along with Abstract Expressionism, is here to stay. Both were a long time evolving (through rock ’n’ roll and Cubism, respectively), and both have attained a rugged, blunt attack that will not yield easily to the next would-be King of the Mountain.§ What is a dance? A dance, we suggest, is a socially performed parable of sexual relations. The minuet, with its intrigue-like shifts of position and its subtle homage to a Clockwork Universe, offered the Age of Reason a contemporary frame for this perennial parable. Cool fingers touch, eyes glance, lids lower, fans tilt and quiver, and all the while the little buckled feet tidily slither and patter through the pattern of a secure rationale. Whereas in the Twist a man and a woman, isolated not only from everybody else but from each other, eyes closed, teeth clenched, perform one monotonous motion to rigorously monotonous music. It is very beautiful. Across the little space between the man and the woman a call goes forth, but the space remains, and they never touch, poignantly acting out the Breakdown of Communications for which our century is celebrated. We live in the Age of Unconsummation, but we cannot be denied our solipsistic ecstasies. It is interesting to us that the Europeans, in taking to the Twist, have endowed it with soft graces and tender intricacies—made of it, in short, a kind of minuet. No, only Americans can understand America. Only Americans can love America.

  Mostly Glass

  October 1962

  IT IS NO DISCOVERY of ours that Park Avenue, which just yesterday was a delicacy of dowagers and poodles between two slices of granite gingerbread, is today mostly glass. Thinking, the other afternoon, that we ought to welcome the future to our city, we strolled over to say hello to the massive, glinting architectural newcomers that have suddenly filled the ten or so blocks north of Forty-seventh Street—and discovered that once “Hello” was pronounced, the conversation threatened to end. For perhaps the first thing to say about the new architectural mode is that it leaves one with little to say. It glossily sheds human comment. The old modernism bustled forward, with its squared-off edges and concrete spirals, like a geometrical puppy eager to be praised for its successful burial of obsolete bones. The new buildings on Park Avenue—Nos. 270, 280, 300, 320, 350, 375, 390, 399, 400, and 410, to give them their names—have not so much arrived as seeped through, and they hover on their thin stilts, slightly darker than the sky, like boxy clouds that, the next moment, may shrug and be gone.

  Not that they are transparent. No, they are curiously opaque, considering that they are made of glass. The old skyline, the jagged continuum of rosy-ochre stone, was airier, really; its even ground of tint made the individual buildings appear to have more silhouette than mass. Perhaps the opacity of the glass buildings has to do with their refusal to accept atmosphere, to melt, as it were, into a landscape. For while it is true that they reflect, it is also true that they reflect only each other, like actors at a cocktail party who will speak only to other actors. As we observed the windows of Lever House reflecting, with that warp and shimmer so beloved of our photographic journals, the windows of the First National City Bank Building across the street, and then observed the First National City Bank Building courteously reflecting Lever House, we felt trapped beside a conversation that we would never be invited to enter.

  Grant these new buildings their aloof good looks. The Seagram Building (375) is, of course, the stately Negro of the group, and Lever House (390) very much the fine lady. The Union Carbide Building, down the street (270), has scope; each side of it is a prairie county in acreage. The stainless-steel verticals are shaped like flanged railroad tracks, and to the man looking up they recede through fifty-two stories as the Union Pacific roadbed receded west a century ago, the dark between-window horizontal bands serving perfectly, in the visual pun, as railroad ties. But, these three buildings somewhat excepted, the group makes an insubstantial and disquieting impression. As our lives in this era all hang by threads, so our buildings stand on sticks. The stilt mode, though it has doubtless liberated some space for pedestrians, heightens the general impression of danger fostered by the newspapers, the stock market, and the Russians. It is disconcerting to see, in those buildings under construction, such as the Bankers Trust Building, at Forty-eighth Street, how importantly what looks like wide Scotch Tape figures in the construction, and how the first story seems to be built last, almost as an afterthought—as if the buildings were, like mistletoe, actually rooted in the air. Certainly the occupants of these new buildings must be teased by the fear that if they slam the lobby door too hard, an entire cosmos of glass
and metal webbing will crash down on their heads.

  What we miss, perhaps, is hopefulness. These new skyscrapers do not aspire to scrape the sky; at the point of exhaustion, where the old skyscrapers used to taper, gather their dwindling energy, and lunge upward with a heart-stopping spire, these glass boxes suffer the architectural embarrassment of having to house the air-conditioning apparatus, and slatted veiling snuffs out their ascent. Glassy-eyed from contemplation of these buildings made entirely of windows, we walked west feeling as if we had dined on a meal of doughnut holes.

  Three Documents

  May 1963

  WE HAVE ON OUR DESK three thoroughly assorted documents: (1) an edition, published by Penguin Books, of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion printed in the forty-eight-letter alphabet to whose development and promulgation Shaw willed a major part of his fortune; (2) an account, from the Times, of Gordon Cooper’s press conference concerning his twenty-two-orbit ride in space; (3) an illustrated catalogue, put out by the Museum of Modern Art, of its fifteen-artist exhibit entitled Americans 1963. We have collected these documents in the last week, and have clung to them in the vague yet persistent hope that they are not only individually precious but collectively significant. We feel that somehow, in the translucent corridors of time, a corner has been turned recently. These three bundles we are clutching may well be clues to our own new whereabouts.

  The Shaw document has the quaintness of a bygone era. On the right-hand pages, Androcles and the Lion is printed in conventional roman type; on the left-hand pages, “” appears in the synthetic alphabet, adopted from designs by Mr. Kingsley Read and printed from unique type fonts owned by the Messrs. Stephen Austin & Sons, Ltd. The alphabet is totally invented; its closest roman relative is the long “o” sound, which is called “oak” and is written . All the letters, like runes, have names, rather anticly bestowed—“peep,” “tot,” “thigh,” “bib,” “mime,” “ha-ha,” and the like. There are four classifications—Tall, Deep, Short, and Compound—and the voiced and unvoiced sounds are visually symmetrical; e.g., “p” and “b” are and , “t” and “d” are and , “ch” and “j” are and . Strictly speaking, there are forty letters (ten Tall, ten Deep, and twenty Short), plus eight Compounds, called “are,” “or,” “air,” “err,” “array,” “ear,” “Ian,” and “yew.” It is all very orderly, and we have no reason to doubt the claims, set forth in a spirited introduction by Sir James Pitman, that it affords superior typographical compression, speed in writing, legibility, and phonetic logic. For practiced users of the Shaw alphabet, the ambiguities of spelling and capitalization would vanish. Furthermore, the new letters in mass, resembling a kind of stiff shorthand, or loose columns of hitherto undiscovered Arabic numerals, have an electric elegance. The alphabet is handsome, efficient, and ingenious. It is also unmistakably, serenely, and even cheerfully dead. It does not, except formally, exist. It was conceived by the past for the benefit of a future that has not, and will not, come to be. It is Shaw’s last brain child, which has outlived him just as he outlived the era when intelligent, benevolent men believed that the world could be bloodlessly revolutionized by the decrees of brute sanity. The alphabet, which at first glance looks crazy, is eminently sane, and if some antiseptic miracle were to foist it on the English-speaking world, it might reduce printing space by a third, reading time by half, and writing time by at least eighty per cent. But the alphabet, unlike the cumbersome set of haphazard marks in which this paragraph is printed, does not embody human blood. It lacks the awkward poetry of the evolved. It has not bloomed from the infinite fumblings of anonymous men. It lacks even the urgent practical excuse of shorthand, and, unlike Arabic numerals, it does not replace a hopelessly inappropriate system of notation. Until we all experience emotions phonetically and fulfill our destinies unambiguously, we will continue to make note of ourselves with ambiguous vowels, silent consonants, and hodgepodge transliterations of abandoned tongues. The stubbornness that resists the smooth banalities of utility is righteous and respectful. Honor the dead—including the extravagantly lucid playwright whose alphabetic bequest to the future seems, today, an amiable curiosity, if not a witting irony.

  Gordon Cooper, over a hundred miles above the scorned surface of the earth, saw the smoke from Tibetan villages. Above the Arabian peninsula, he saw a boat going down a river, “creating a wake behind it.” He saw his own neighborhood in Houston, although trees obscured the sight of his own house. On the other hand, Red China, he said, “looks just like it looks on the map.” He slept; he ate fruitcake and brownies; he tucked his thumbs into his harness so his arms would stop floating away. When the time came to bring the spacecraft down, the machinery balked and he brought it down himself, looking out the window at the horizon to keep himself upright.

  Why is it that the details of space flights grow increasingly homely and comforting? When Alan Shepard went zooming into the airless altitude above the Caribbean, we held our breath, horror-struck. When John Glenn girdled the earth three times one morning, his heroism seemed supernal. It remained for Gordon Cooper to domesticate space; his dozing nonchalance has made the void more habitable. We are glad that he came back safely and that on emerging from the capsule (in his words) “I began to get a little dizzy.… After I’d taken a step or two I felt perfectly all right.” We are delighted that the man proved himself a better pilot than his machine. And we are especially happy that, from the ghastly height of the future, he could look down and see the smoke of hearth fires kindled by Tibetan peasants.

  The catalogue is a souvenir of a show we saw last week, and greatly enjoyed. “Enjoyed,” surprisingly, is the word, though the art assembled on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, being the work mainly of young artists, presumably should be, if progress means anything, more violent and exacerbating than Abstract Expressionism, which it succeeds. Much of it, certainly, is premeditatedly outrageous—dribbly plaster imitations of hamburgers, sculpture made entirely from old automobile bumpers, imperceptibly tinted canvases of solid black, huge blurred patterns of newspaper ads, exquisitely faithful duplications of billboard lettering, systematic experiments in retinal irritation, wicked three-dimensional satires in wood, plaster, and (at one point) old tennis sneakers. Yet, believe it or not, the show is heartening. Passing through the fifteen rooms, we found grandeur, wit, care, and tenderness—above all, perhaps, tenderness. The man (Jason Seley) who made statues out of car bumpers obviously loved car bumpers; the woman (Chryssa) who fiddled with newspapers and lettering made beautiful things of them, as fond and lyric as any water color of wild flowers you have in your attic. Our impression—to cut short this untoward trespass into the realm of our art critic‖—was of an art that, able at last to relent in its fierce, long battle with pictorial convention, was giving God, God the maker of unmade things, the glory. The world is full of blatant trash—industrial, mental, visual. Perhaps the time has come to give this trash the homage that Nature in all her aspects deserves. At any rate, we left the Museum wondering if, in those translucent corridors where history wanders, a homeward turn hadn’t been taken, and the future hadn’t become, momentarily, the present.

  Free Bee-hours

  October 1963

  THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA’S Agricultural Experimental Station, under the leadership of Mr. Charles D. Owens, has developed a machine that uncaps honeycombs twice as fast as any other honeycomb-uncapper now in use. The news item in the Times so reporting goes on to say, “This could be an aid to the nation’s half million beekeepers who produce well over $200,000,000 pounds [sic] of honey a year. And it could save the nearly 300,000,000,000 domestic bees in the land a lot of time and effort, because the combs can be used over again.” The italics are ours. Who are we (to be precise, who is Charles D. Owens) to be saving bees “a lot of time and effort”? What will the country do with yet another leisure class? Consider it arithmetically. Assume that in the old days the average bee (we are averaging the worker bees, who work all the time, wi
th the drones and queens, who incessantly debauch) spent two hours a day repairing the honeycombs ravaged by the nation’s half-million beekeepers. This seems modest, and it likewise seems modest to guess that the improved honeycomb-uncapper will cut this time in half. So each day we are releasing into the air a total of three hundred billion bee-hours, which amounts in the course of a year to twelve and a half billion bee-years! Now, Mr. Owens and the beekeepers are living in a fool’s paradise if they imagine that the bees are going to utilize that leisure time by improving their humming, or refining their honey, or simply sleeping an hour later. As anyone who knows apian nature could tell them, the bees will spend it watching television, or, worse, going out on golf courses and stinging people. In a few years, the very simile “busy as a bee” will have joined “hot as a firecracker” in obsolescence, and the low-grade honey produced by part-time bees will taste suspiciously like gall.

  Beer Can

  January 1964

  THIS SEEMS TO BE AN ERA of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements. Consider the beer can. It was beautiful—as beautiful as the clothespin, as inevitable as the wine bottle, as dignified and reassuring as the fire hydrant. A tranquil cylinder of delightfully resonant metal, it could be opened in an instant, requiring only the application of a handy gadget freely dispensed by every grocer. Who can forget the small, symmetrical thrill of those two triangular punctures, the dainty pffff, the little crest of suds that foamed eagerly in the exultation of release? Now we are given, instead, a top beetling with an ugly, shmooshaped “tab,” which, after fiercely resisting the tugging, bleeding fingers of the thirsty man, threatens his lips with a dangerous and hideous hole. However, we have discovered a way to thwart Progress, usually so unthwartable. Turn the beer can upside down and open the bottom. The bottom is still the way the top used to be. True, this operation gives the beer an unsettling jolt, and the sight of a consistently inverted beer can might make people edgy, not to say queasy. But the latter difficulty could be eliminated if manufacturers would design cans that looked the same whichever end was up, like playing cards. What we need is Progress with an escape hatch.