Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  Various quotations occur to me as I wonder about Anguilla’s chances for independent survival. One of the Englishmen attached to the Parliamentary mission referred to the Anguillans as “the poor dears,” and another, as we lay on the beach, in answer to my question as to what St. Kitts was like, answered, with a wave that included the immaculate beach and the turqoise sea, “ ’Bout like this. A bloody ’ole.” Then there is a quote from Postlethwayt’s 18th-century Dictionary of Commerce that says, “Every man being a kind of sovereign in his own family … no other government there is in Anguilla.” And a sentence by Aldous Huxley: “The worst enemy of life, freedom, and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.” Our taxi-driver, whose name is Charlie Gumbs and who has sent his two sons to college, again gestures at the telephone poles as he drives us back to the airport. “We’re waiting for them to grow branches to hang the wires from.” We pass the three other earthmovers, bright yellow and motionless, that were lengthening the airstrip before the revolution. “Men from St. Kitts bring them in, have to run them themselves; Anguilla men put sixty-foot masts on boats in the water, but they don’t know how to run bulldozers.” He turns and grins, apparently oblivious of the fact that these machines are derelict and that the two back at the hotel are out of repair again. “Well, now we show them Anguilla men know how to run bulldozers.”

  P.S.

  September 1974

  A YEAR AND A MONTH after the visit to Anguilla that prompted my letter, banner headlines announced to me in London that Great Britain had invaded little Anguilla: early in the morning of March 19, 1969, two frigates landed three hundred fifteen Red Devil paratroopers, forty Marines, and forty-nine London policemen, in response to a supposed insult delivered to William Whitlock, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, by an unruly Anguillan mob six days before. This Lilliputian exercise of gunboat diplomacy (the Anguillans, foreseeing the invasion, had buried all their guns, and not one person was injured) attracted derisive world attention and terminated Anguilla’s claim to being “one of the most obscure islands in the Caribbean.” Also terminated were whatever proprietary feelings I had had for her. The full Anguilla story is told, thoroughly but all too facetiously, by Donald E. Westlake, in his Under an English Heaven (Doubleday, 1972). The uneasy interim condition prevailing in early 1968 persisted through the year, while various raffish Americans infiltrated advice into Ronald Webster’s ear and the young Anguillans of the “Defence Force” that had replaced the St. Kittian policemen grew to resemble licensed hoodlums. Our friend Tony Lee, Mr. Westlake feels, proved too airy-fairy for his responsibilities as Our Man on Anguilla, and failed as the Commissioner installed by the invasion forces. Certainly he looked very tired the last time we saw him, on page 13 of the March 23, 1969, London Sunday Times, beside the wrap-up headline, “BRUTE FARCE AND IGNORANCE.” The British press, generally anti-Vietnam, was stridently unsympathetic with their own government’s interventionism. “This ‘wag the flag and flog the wog’ farce,” the Evening News termed it, and the Times drew the conclusion that “a British Government is still capable of replaying Suez not as tragedy but as farce.”

  Farce or no, reinstatement to the status of an English colony was just what the Anguillans wanted, and under subsequent Commissioners the Royal Engineers busied themselves, according to Westlake, “building schools, paving roads, starting an electrification program, studying the water table, and generally tidying up the effects of the previous three hundred years of neglect.” The last of them left, to kudos from the Beacon, on September 14, 1971, leaving a better island than they found, a de facto colony still technically part of the paper federation of St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla. Anguilla has dropped from the news these last years, nor have we returned to compare her with the lost world of 1960 remembered in this poem:

  The boy who came at night

  to light the Tilly lamps

  (they hissed, too bright;

  he always looked frightened)

  in the morning dragged his bait pail

  through the beryl seawater

  sauntering barelegged

  without once looking down.

  The night Rebecca’s—

  she lived beneath us—

  sailor lover returned from sea

  and beat her for hours,

  it was as hard to sleep as the time

  she tied a rooster

  inside an oil drum.

  The woman across the road,

  pregnant by an annual visit,

  cursed ungratefully, tossing rocks

  at her weeping children.

  The radio on her windowsill

  played hymns from Antigua all day.

  And the black children in blue

  trotted down the white-dust road

  to learn cricket and Victorian history,

  and the princesses

  balancing water drawn

  from the faucet by our porch

  held their heads at an insolent angle.

  The constellations

  that evaded our naming.

  The blind man. The drunk.

  The albino,

  his fat lips blistered by the sun.

  The beaches empty of any hotel.

  Dear island of such poor beauty,

  meekly waiting to rebel.

  FOUR INTRODUCTIONS

  To Pens and Needles, a collection of literary caricatures by David Levine (Gambit, 1969)

  IN 1963, when the newly founded New York Review of Books began to publish the drawings of David Levine, the art of caricature in America was quiescent; the theatrical cartoons of Al Frueh in The New Yorker had ceased, Al Hirschfeld had become primarily a decorator of advertisements, and William Auerbach-Levy, the most artful of them all, had rounded off his career with an elegant album entitled—a question he had too often heard—Is That Me? These men had followed the linear tradition of Ralph Barton and Max Beerbohm; economy was the soul of their wit, and their mood, as they reduced the features of this or that celebrity to a cunning black-and-white design, partook of the genial mood of showbiz.

  Levine, instead, flung himself in a fury of crosshatching upon his subjects. His style looked past Beerbohm to the three-dimensional grotesques of Daumier and Tenniel. No weary pucker or complacent bulge of physiognomy could slip through the supple net of his penstrokes, and every corner of the face—that vulnerable patch between the eyebrows, the unseemly area behind the chin, the mute folds of the ears—was brought into a focus whose keenness transcended the mild demands of “humor.” On the gray expanses of the NYRB pages his etched homunculi seemed astoundingly there; one wanted to pick them up and put them on the shelf. Now, in the form of this book, one can.

  Our selection concentrates upon literary figures. Drawn in fortnightly installments to illustrate topical book reviews, the gallery of modern authors approaches completeness. Mann and Borges are missing, and one wonders what Levine would do with Salinger’s sad handsomeness or Kierkegaard’s bent beauty. But how good it is to know that Gide has no top to his head, and that Truman Capote has no chin, resting, like Baudelaire, within his bow tie like an egg in an egg cup. Levine is not so much an observer as a visionary. Working principally from photographs, he evolves a concept, a monstrous breathing idea. His grasp of this idea deepens with time; of the two versions of Malraux in this volume, the one is a caricature and the other is a caricature of a caricature. Of the three Becketts, the smallest and earliest has the innocence of wit; it puns the man and buzzard. This simile is absorbed and heightened in the alarming metaphor of the profile, with its drastically eroded cheek, its delirious pinpoint eye, its incredible chopping-knife of an ear. And the lava contours and volcanic turtle-neck of the third drawing seem gouged from chaos and quite intimidate any thought of satire. Levine’s evolving style reinvents the gargoyle, that antidote to the angel and necessary adjunct to a complete humanism. All we humans, beneath the faces that would proclaim for each
a separate individuality, share the worse-than-simian weirdness of thinking reeds. Mankind is a riddle it takes the Gothic style to pose.

  Since Levine, as clairvoyant, has liberated himself from the physical presence of the subject, the living and the dead are the same to him, and with uncanny authority he conveys, out of fudged old portraits and stylized prints, the essence of the immortals. Take Browning’s wonderfully astute, plump, and conceited left hand; or Ben Franklin’s cherry-nosed, finger-snapping display of pragmatic pep; or Casanova’s evidently numbing virility. The artist discovers a surprising dandyish sneer on the time-softened face of John Milton, and elicits from the noseless bust of Catullus, at the farthest rim of Caricature’s reach, the agonized satyr’s howl that resounds through imperial Rome. One looks forward to, yet rather dreads, Levine’s inevitable cartoon of Jesus.

  Our artist was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, where he still lives. He has been quoted as describing himself as “a painter supported by a hobby—satirical drawings.” As a painter he is representational and has been described, by John Canaday, as “a legitimate anachronism.” In his comic art also he displays somewhat anachronistic qualities. Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a pen ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity (Twiggy inspires a drawing too lovely to omit) as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease.

  To the Czech edition of Of the Farm, translated by Igor Hájek in 1968 and left unpublished in post-Dubcek Czechoslovakia

  AS I REMEMBER, I wrote Of the Farm (the title originally was simply The Farm, but this had a monumentality that seemed bogus to me, which the preposition “Of” suitably reduced; I intended to mean that the book was about the farm, and that the people in it belonged to the farm, were of the earth, earthy, mortal, fallen, and imperfect) in the late summer and early autumn of 1964, in pencilled longhand. Then I embarked on a trip through the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that lasted six weeks; the last night of this tour, and perhaps the most pleasant and unconstrained, was spent in Prague, in the apartment of Mr. Igor Hájek, the brilliant and engaging young man then involved in translating my previous novel The Centaur. Upon returning to the United States, I rewrote and typed Of the Farm, and in due course it was published, enjoying the mild sale and mixed reviews that usually greet my productions. Now, when Eastern Europe presents an aspect more troubled yet more hopeful than four years ago, Mr. Hájek and I both find ourselves in London, and he is translating my novella. And it has amused him to point out to me that I, like Joey Robinson, now possess, if not a new wife, a Citroën station wagon. Of such circling strands are past and present, fact and fiction, woven.

  Of the Farm was my first attempt at book-length fiction after the writing of The Centaur; it was undertaken after a long hesitant interval fruitful of short stories. Like a short story, it has a continuous action, a narrow setting, a small cast. I thought of it as chamber music, containing only four voices—the various ghosts in it do not speak, and the minister’s sermon, you will notice, is delivered in close paraphrase, without the benefit of quotation marks. The voices, like musical instruments, echo each other’s phrases and themes, take turns dominating, embark on brief narrative solos, and recombine in argument or harmony. The underlying thematic transaction, as I conceived it, was the mutual forgiveness of mother and son, the acceptance each of the other’s guilt in taking what they had wanted, to the discomfort, respectively, of the dead father and the divorced wife.

  Threads connect it to The Centaur: the farm is the same, and the father, even to his name, George, seems much the same in both books. Mr. Hájek has directed my attention to a strange phrase, “his humorous prancing whine,” in which the prancing is purely a remnant, like a badly erased pencil line, of the half-horse half-man. In a sense this novella is The Centaur after the centaur has died; the mythical has fled the ethical, and a quartet of scattered survivors grope with their voices toward cohesion. And seek to give each other the stern blessing of freedom mentioned in the epigraph from Sartre.* Let us hope that all nations will in their varying languages seek to bestow this stern blessing upon one another. I am honored at this moment [that is, when the cultural liberalization under Dubcek had just been crushed by Russian tanks] to be translated into Czech.

  To

  The Harvard Lampoon Centennial

  Celebration 1876–1973 a collection of cartoons, verse, parodies, and humor edited by Martin Kaplan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973)

  THERE IT STANDS, in the shadow of Adams House, where Mt. Auburn Street unaccountably branches into Bow, an unaccountable little flatiron building with Amsterdam gables and a face—two round windows that look crosseyed, a red lantern for a nose, and, above the bright bowtie of its door, an exclamatory mouth of which the upper lip is so complex it might be a mustache. A copper hardhat tassled with a cage completes the apparition. This is the Lampoon Building. One’s first impression is of an extravagance, and even in the 1950’s, before the national-parody money shored up the subsiding foundations and restored lustre to the furnishings, this impression was confirmed by entering the tiled, worn, odorous, festooned interior. The gorgeous playful thing was put up, as a civilized prank, by American wealth when it was untaxed and unconscience-stricken; it is a folly and a toy and a bastion, an outcropping, like the brick mass of Harvard itself, of that awful seismic force which has displaced nine-tenths of the world: Wasp Power. The Lampoon is a club and, as do all clubs, feeds on the delicious immensity of the excluded. Robert Lampoon, born Robert Stewart, lucidly advances the doctrine usually left unspoken: college men are the “highest type in the world,” Harvard men are “the best of all,” and Poonsters are “the cream of Harvard men.” And with him we travel to an enchanted realm where young Lord Byrons, garbed as monks and nuns, are served roast pigs on platters and sit each “with a bottle of imported sherry between his knees.” In 1973, sipping our bitter domestic sherry, we feel, even without John Reed and Granville Hicks to remind us, that there is a shadow side to this “Harvard of the chosen few,” the underworld of callow snobbishness and automatic jokes about “Kikeland House,” of arrest-exempt lawlessness and an inherited consensus of the “dull and sated and blind.” To be fair, the same page which reprints this last phrase from John Reed’s reminiscences also shows a Lampoon window dedicated to Reed’s memory; The Lampoon, though a flower of the Establishment, is a twisted flower, stemmed from the Establishment’s wise instinct to grant itself license—license to be idle and (hence) open, license to mock and hence (symbolically) to destroy. Of my uneasy year as President, I remember fondly certain moments of ecstatic, probably revolutionary confusion. Trying to deliver stern speeches about impending deadlines, I was pelted with buttered rolls. A born follower, I found myself leading a bellowed medley of preposterously obscene songs, waving my potent baton, the Presidential jester’s stick donated, as I remember, by the beneficent Sadri Khan. Where is it now? Not stolen, I hope, as was my engraved mug, and my youth.

  The Lampoon is saved from mere sociable fatuity by being also The Lampoon, a magazine. Month after month, through thin seasons and thick, it insists on coming out, even though it contain naught but hastily hustled ads and snippets of past issues scrambled together through a haze of beer and boisterous kibitzing. Along with the anarchic camaraderie of Thursday nights, I cherish those groggy Monday-morning subway rides down to the South Station stop and thence to the emporium (up several flights in a quivering elevator of Art Nouveau tracery) of Best Print, Inc., where a mild, mustached, and unblinking craftsman called Harold (Harold o’Bestprint, he was invariably called in the Common Books) relieved me of my raggedy pasted-up dummy and, unless his lawyer advised him otherwise, turned it into 1,200 (more or less) shiny magazines, with real staples, on real paper—or “stock,” as we learned to term it, lisping resonant professional terms such as “pica” and “ital” and
“halftone” and “mortise” and “bleed.” An undergraduate magazine loses its maturest contributors every June, a fact which, combined with the distracted condition of the average collegiate head, creates a wonderfully ongoing vacuum for those few who want to fill it. Fop though it pretends to be, The Lampoon has apprenticed a sturdy number of professional writers and artists. It was the editorial aspect, presumably, that weighed so heavily on the young Robert Benchley as he wrote to his mother of his election as President, “It will mean a lot of work and a lot of worry and responsibility, for it is a responsible position.” George Santayana, a half-century earlier, even more solemnly felt the invisible pressure of the “forthnightly edition” conjured up in “an atmosphere of respect for holy things,” by young men with “literary tastes, leaning toward the sentimental and nobly moral.” The vocabulary surprises but the reverent tone is right. Raising a smile is a delicate piece of artistic engineering that may well prepare one for higher things. “It’s all in the execution,” we used to say of some particularly lame cartoon idea hatched in a Sanctum gag session. That is to say, there was such a thing as execution; no humor is so broad it cannot be relayed badly or ably. The suppressed Pontoon, for instance (police-confiscated for reprinting Midwestern cartoons of which my favorite showed an ovum surrounded by long-tailed sperm one of whom was saying, “Joe sent me”—a dramatization that would not raise an eyebrow in a high-school contraception class now), contained much wit, where little was needed; Bink Young’s editorial, “Easy, Breezy, You’ll Slide a Mile,” seemed an especial gem, and I was glad to find it in this anthology.