Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  Remarks

  on the Occasion of E. B. White’s Receiving the 1971

  National Medal for Literature on December 2, 1971

  A GOOD WRITER is hard to talk about, since he has already, directly or by implication, said everything about himself that should be said. In the case of E. B. White, a consummate literary tact and a powerful capacity for reticence further intimidate the would-be eulogist. And indeed where would eulogy begin? E. B. White’s oeuvre, though not very wide on the shelf, is far-flung in its variety; it is a nation gaily built on scattered islands, and the mind moves retrospectively through it as if sailing in a flirtatious wind. Letters arrive from all points of the compass; peaks glisten in unexpected places; sunny slopes conceal tunnels of anonymity; a graceful giddiness alternates as swiftly as cloud shadows with sombre sense; darkness threatens; and but for the North Star of the writer’s voice, his unflickering tone of truth, we would not know where we are. White’s works range from some of the noblest essays of the century to the most famous cartoon caption of the Thirties, the one that goes,

  “It’s broccoli, dear.”

  “I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.”

  He broke into print as a poet and has most recently triumphed, for the third time, as the author of a novel for children. Along the line he edited and augmented what has become a standard college textbook on English style and usage. He has been associated with The New Yorker for almost all of the magazine’s life, and indeed he has demonstrated mastery of every kind of thing The New Yorker prints, from poetry to fiction to the quips that cap other publications’ typographical errors. But also he wrote the grave and graceful essays of One Man’s Meat for Harper’s Magazine, and Holiday elicited from him his beautiful tribute, This Is New York. Daunted, then, by this body of work so polymorphously expressing concern, wit, and love, I will, as writers tend to when confronted with a subject too big for them, take refuge in the more manageable topic of myself. My life and E. B. White.

  After reading White’s essays in Harper’s throughout World War II, my mother in 1945 bought a farm and moved her family to it. It is one of the few authenticated cases of literature influencing life. White’s adventures in Maine, rather than Thoreau’s recourse to the Concord woods or Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm (a book White reviewed in the last verse review I have seen anywhere), gave my mother the necessary courage to buy eighty rundown acres of Pennsylvania loam and turned me overnight into a rural creature, clad in muddy shoes, a cloak of loneliness, and a clinging aura of apples.

  Oddly, I sought the antidote for my plight in the poison that had produced it, and devoured the work of White, of Thurber, Benchley, Perelman, Sullivan, and all those other names evocative of the urban romance that not so long ago attached to New York City, the innocent longing for sophistication that focussed here. When, infrequently, my parents brought me to New York, I always imagined I would see E. B. White in Grand Central Station. I never did, but the wish in its intensity gouged a distinct memory imprint, delicate as a leaf sedimentized in limestone, of White’s dapper, crinkled-haired, rather heavy-lidded countenance, that I had studied on book flaps and in caricatures, superimposed upon those caramel-colored walls. I still never enter the station without looking for him. For me, he was the city, and I wonder, will anybody ever again love this city, and poeticize it, as he did, when, to quote one of his poems,

  In the days of my youth, in the days of my youth,

  I lay in West Twelfth Street, writhing with Truth.

  I died in Jones Street, dallying with pain,

  And flashed up Sixth Avenue, risen again.

  I did at last meet White, an ocean away, in Oxford. He and his wife Katharine came through the door of our basement flat on Iffley Road. E. B. White himself! It was an experience that had all the qualities of a nightmare, except that it was not unpleasant. He spoke; he actually uttered words, and they were so appropriate, so neutral and natural yet—in that unique way of his—so trim, so well designed to put me at ease, that I have quite forgotten what they were.

  A consequence of that awesome visit was employment of sorts; while working on West 43rd Street, I would see White in the halls and what struck me in his walk, in the encouraging memos he once or twice sent me, and in the editorial notes that in lucky weeks headed up the magazine, was how much more fun he had in him than us younger residents of those halls. Not loud or obvious fun, but contained, inturning fun, shaped like a mainspring. I dealt mainly with Mrs. White, I want to add, and what a fine warm mentor she was!—a formidable woman, an editor of the magazine before White was a contributor, gifted with that terrible clear vision some women have—the difference between a good story and a bad one loomed like a canyon in her vision—yet not burdened by it, rather, rejoicing in it, and modest and humorous in her firmness, so that she makes her appearances in White’s accounts as a comic heroine, a good sport helping him dispose of their surplus eggs by hurling them against the barn wall.

  After I quit my job and the city, my encounters with White became purely those of a reader—a reader to myself, and a reader aloud, to my children. When I asked my ten-year-old girl if I could say today that Charlotte’s Web was her favorite book, she said, “No, tell them Stuart Little is.”

  Eulogy is disarmed. White has figured in my life the way an author should figure, coming at me from different directions with a nudge, a reminder, a good example. I am not alone in feeling grateful, or he would not be winning this prize. For three generations he has reinforced our hopeful sense that the kingdom of letters is a fiefdom of the kingdom of man. He writes as one among us, not above us, a man pulling his mortal weight while keeping a level head and now and then letting loose with a song.

  A Citation

  Composed for the Awarding of the 1968 National Book Award for Fiction to The Eighth Day,

  by Thornton Wilder§

  THROUGH THE LENS of a turn-of-the-century murder mystery, Mr. Wilder surveys a world that is both vanished and coming to birth; in a clean gay prose sharp with aphoristic wit and the sense and scent of Midwestern America and Andean Chile, he takes us on a chase of Providence and delivers us, exhilarated and edified, into the care of an ambiguous conclusion.

  An Unpublished Book Note

  THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, by Norman Mailer. 288 pp. New American Library, 1968.

  A fascinating, if hysterically high-flown, account of the October 1967 protest march on the Pentagon, by one of its participants. Mailer’s lust for self-display has cast off whatever tenuous trammels have hitherto restrained it, and his description of his deplorably drunken speechifying on Friday night, and his headachy jockeying for literary position with Robert Lowell during the next day’s march, are fearlessly frank, and funny indeed. Less funny, but the best narrative stretch in the book, is his account of arrest and the twenty-four hours soberingly spent in jail, before being handed an unexpectedly severe sentence. His sociological/historical analysis of the forces behind the protest goes from the farcical to the brilliant; he proposes no measuring tool but his own hyperbolic sensibility. The Vietnam involvement becomes unremitting Reichian melodrama, where any flash of color will do for an insight, and any aesthetic irritation serves the most sweeping diagnostic purposes. The book’s strength—until the vilely written last pages, a post-midnight collapse into bathos—is this finagling author’s capacity for awe, for giving his enemies his avid attention, and giving events, in this era of humorless propaganda, a decent, sensual complexity. A good rush job.

  An Interesting Emendation

  in the Text of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow

  TOWARD THE END of the Atlantic Monthly’s two-part serialization of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the hero, calling upon his dying nephew, Dr. Elya Gruner, in the hospital, sits in the waiting room next to Gruner’s daughter Angela, and thinks,

  There was no odor of Arabian musk, her favorite perfume. Instead her female effluence was very strong today, a salt odor, something from inside the woman. Elya’s b
itter words had had their effect on Sammler. He could not look at her eyes without thinking of her father’s words, imagining her in bed, and—a worse fancy—the white of semen on her mouth. But these were, curiously, images nearly devoid of prejudice. Or very nearly. One must change one’s outlook. The past perhaps exaggerated the seriousness of these things.

  In the hardcover edition (Viking, 1970), the entire episode has been rewritten, with a freedom and renewed inspiration that speak well for Bellow’s venturesome, perfectionistic art—though the changes are not all inarguably for the better. The sentences equivalent for those above read:

  Sitting near her, Sammler could not smell the usual Arabian musk. Instead her female effluence was very strong, a salt odor, similar to tears or tidewater, something from within the woman. Elya’s words had taken effect strongly—his “Too much sex.” Even the white lipstick suggested perversion. But this was curiously without prejudice. Sammler felt no prejudice about perversion, about sexual matters. Nothing. It was too late in the day for that.

  The entire long paragraph containing this passage has been strenuously, anxiously revised; the second version is choppier. Details of Angela’s costume (large gold earrings, a miniskirt) have been rearranged, her idol-like immobility has been charged with a certain choked anger, Elya’s words are specified. Most interestingly, the vivid “white of semen on her mouth” has been softened to “white lipstick” suggesting “perversion.” Why? It is as if Bellow were embarrassed by his own revulsion, and backed away from it, in the same motion as his elderly, fastidious hero moves from being “nearly devoid of prejudice” on the matter to feeling absolutely “no prejudice about perversion, about sexual matters.”

  Yet what people put into their mouths does interest us, as it interested the Biblical Jews. Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy ragefully marvels at the goyim, “these imbecilic eaters of the execrable”:

  Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not contaminate our humanity thus. Let them (if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or shmutzig or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like.… They will eat anything, anything they can get their big goy hands on! And the terrifying corollary, they will do anything as well. Deer eat what deer eat, and Jews eat what Jews eat, but not these goyim. Crawling animals, wallowing animals, leaping and angelic animals—it makes no difference to them— …

  In the next paragraph, he confesses to sucking on a lobster claw and the same night, an hour later, aiming his erect penis at a shikse on a Public Service bus. This at age fifteen; a few years later, Portnoy makes closer but still mostly spiritual contact with one of these legendary “shikses Who Will Do Anything,” a Catholic Gentile, Bubbles Girardi, who has blown a friend (“And does she suck on it, or does she blow on it, or somehow is it that she does both? Oh, God, Ba-ba-lu, did you shoot in her mouth? Oh my God! And did she swallow it right down, or spit it out, or get mad—tell me! what did she do with your hot come!”), and, more than a few years (he is now thirty-two) later, Portnoy finds the real McCoy in the West Virginia hillbilly (the quintessential Protestant Gentile) nicknamed (“let them eat ape-meat”) The Monkey—“What a find, I thought, she takes it right down to the root! What a mouth I have fallen into!” Their romance begins with his inspired offer to “eat your pussy, baby” at their first meeting and ends with her complaint that “you care more about the niggers in Harlem that you don’t even know, than you do about me, who’s been sucking you off for a solid year!” The characters are not unimpressed with their own orality:

  A Jewish man, who cared about the welfare of the poor of the City of New York, was eating her pussy! Someone who had appeared on educational TV was shooting off into her mouth!

  Nor does all this delightful uncleanness go unpunished: Portnoy, after a triadic bout with The Monkey and an Italian whore, throws up, and the undiscriminating Bubbles Girardi is killed while consorting with Negroes:

  There’s a case of cause and effect that confirms my ideas about human consequence! Bad enough, rotten enough, and you get your cock-sucking head blown off by boogies. Now that’s the way the world’s supposed to be run!

  Bellow is comparatively disingenuous: in the revised paragraph, he quotes Elya as blaming Angela for simply “too much sex,” whereas what Elya had really said earlier, which her eyes recall to Sammler, is: “You see a woman who has done it in too many ways with too many men. By now she probably doesn’t know the name of the man between her legs. And she looks.… Her eyes—she has fucked-out eyes.” Too many ways: not quantity but the posture is crucial; Elya fears she is around the corner “Frenching an orderly,” and her brother Wallace tells Sammler that “she let that twerp in Mexico ball her fore and aft in front of Wharton, with who-knows-what-else thrown in free by her.” Sammler’s moral dignity at times seems to consist solely of suffering witness to the sexuality of this woman “who was also something good to eat,” who nevertheless had once studied Hebrew.

  “You were quite studious. I was impressed that you were studying Hebrew.”

  “Just a front, Uncle. I was a dirty little bitch, really.”

  How dirty, and why dirty, are the nervous questions that lie behind Bellow’s emendation, and much of the novel’s moral discussion. Is sex innocent and fulfilling fun in any position, as contemporary culture would teach us, or is it, as the Judaeo-Christian tradition instructs, a fixed and solemn performance devoted to procreation? Specifically, is the eating of semen a natural kiss, caress, and engulfment of the beloved, or a perverse defilement? Recent American fiction traces a swift secularization of this magical act since the days, scarcely more than a decade ago, when the young author of Rabbit, Run reverently, reluctantly reduced Ruth to her knees and Nabokov, his flamboyant archness making virtue of the necessity for euphemism, had Lolita pronounce “in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler.”

  With what a thrill did one read, in the days when Henry Miller was contraband, such direct and insouciant descriptions as, from Sexus:

  I awakened gradually, dimly conscious that my prick was in Elsie’s mouth.

  I stood up and unbuttoned my fly. In a jiffy [Ida] had it out and in her mouth. Gobble, gobble, like a hungry buzzard. I came in her mouth.

  Suddenly [a nameless switchboard operator] unclasped her hands and with wet fingers she unbuttoned my fly, took my prick out and made a dive for it with her mouth. She went at it like a professional, teasing it, worrying it, fluting her lips, then choking on it. I came off in her mouth; she swallowed it as if it were nectar and ambrosia.

  But, as descriptions of fellatio pass from the literary underground to middle-class fiction, and from the male to the female point of view, the ambrosia takes on another taste. From Lois Gould’s lengthy treatment in Such Good Friends (1970):

  I was down on my knees, struggling with a stuck zipper. Timmy’s fly zipper! On my knees trying to take my medicine like a big girl. See? Same old Julie, washing down the nasty stuff with more nasty stuff. I can take it; I’m supposed to take it.… Okay, but I wasn’t dismissed yet. He wanted me to kneel slightly higher for leverage. (When I was eight I’d talked the pediatrician out of using a tongue depressor to examine my sore throat. “Please, the wood makes me gag—see, I can open wide enough. Ah.” “Very good, but I still need to insert the stick—just for a minute now. There.” “Ahgh!” “See, that wasn’t so bad.” Yes, it was. Yes, it is.) … Time for our medicine now—here it comes. Let’s see it all go down in one big gulp. No, you can’t have water with it; I said you’re a big girl now. Don’t cry. I said don’t cry, or we’ll hold you down on the bed and paint your throat with Argyrol. Whatever happened to painting your throat with Argyrol?

 
Wait—he’s taking it away. All gone. I called up to him, up over the dreary miles of shirtfront, a sterile snowy field with a neatly planted single row of buttons.

  At least the lady protests, if too much. In a novel three years deeper into the Seventies, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the penis in the mouth has lost its power to stand and make the throat ache with indignation; it is just one wan item in a rather tender catalogue:

  His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy—unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time. His muscular thighs. His sunburned knees. His feet.

  With the matter-of-factly noted lingering taste of urine, all mystery has fled. Fellatio has become hardly worth describing. Alan Lelchuk, in his novel of the same year, American Mischief, seeks, like a pornographic film maker (cf. the delicious triadic scene in The Devil in Miss Jones), to stir us with visible sperm and lesbian voracity:

  The climax embarrassed me as much as it thrilled me. With moans and shrieks and body English growing more frenzied, I began finally coming into Gwen’s mouth. But suddenly she maneuvered away so that I was lathering her face with the white sperm. Whereupon Angie, bellowing like a cow in heat, suddenly dove down upon that face and began lapping it up. Incredible. The denseness of appetites was so thick by then, the flow of juices and secretions and passions so rich, that it was like being at a feast of cannibals. I tell you, those girls would have eaten anything, anything!