The Early Stories

by John Updike

  Jesus returned to Jerusalem, passing through Monaco on the way, to tell his own people of his experiences in the Orient, it is said. It was his younger brother, known in Japanese as Isukiri, who was later crucified, according to the legend.

  No one ever got it quite right, and He Himself ceased trying to understand. Judas (Isukiri) had not been His brother; he had been the troublesomely sensitive disciple, the cloying adorer. Selecting the twelve, Jesus had chosen solid men, to whom a miracle was a way of affecting matter, a species of work. Judas, with his adoration and high hopes and theoretical demands on the Absolute, had attached himself hysterically. The kiss in the garden was typical—all showmanship. Then, the priesthood proving obdurate (and why not? any Messiah at all would put them out of a job), Judas had offered to be crucified instead, as if we were dealing with some Moloch that had a simple body quota to meet. The poor Romans were out of their depth; eventually they hanged Judas, as they generally hanged informers—a straightforward policy of prudence. For Him, there had been nails in the palms, and a crying out, and then dark coolness, a scuffle in which He overheard women’s voices, and a scarlet dawn near the borders of Palestine. For the first days eastward, until the wounds in His feet healed, He was carried in a litter and had a mounted escort, He dimly remembered. Gruff men, officials of some sort.

  Jesus is said to have escaped and come back to Japan after wandering through the wastes of Siberia. The legend has it that he landed at Hachinoe in Aomori, and settled in Herai, whose name, it has been suggested, derives from the Japanese for Hebrew (Heburai). He married and became the father of three daughters, according to the legend.

  Asagao was the oldest, Oigimi the youngest; both married before the age of fifteen, and in them and their children He saw no trace of Himself, only of His wife and the smooth race that had taken Him in, as a pond swallows a stone. Ukifune, the middle daughter, called Dragonfly, was tall like Him, with His wrinkled lids and big-knuckled hands and surges of restlessness and mockery. She never married; her scandals affronted the village until she was found dead in her hut, black-lipped, cold. He would have called her back to life, but her face had been monstrously slashed. Poisoned and disfigured by a lover or the wife of a lover. She left a fatherless male infant, Kaoru. Shared between the households of his aunts, the infant grew to be a man, living always in the village, as a mender of nets and thatching. Conscious of himself only as Japanese, Kaoru grew old, with white hair and warts, and Jesus, now over a hundred, would suddenly, senselessly, weep to see in this venerable grandson—hook-nosed profile bent above a chisel, his forearms as gnarled as grapevines—the very image of old Joseph of Bethlehem, seen upward through the eyes of a child. Things return, form in circles, unravel and reravel, the sage had insisted, crouching with the young traveller on a ledge in the mauve mountains of Etchu, in view of the enamelled sea. Jesus had argued, insisting that there was also a vertical principle in the world, something thrusting, which did not repeat. Now, Himself ancient, He had come to exemplify the sage’s scorned truth. He lived in the village as a healer, and the healed kept coming back to Him, their health unravelled, and again He would lay on His hands, and the devils would flee, and the healed would depart upright and rejoicing; only to unravel again, and at last to die, even as He must. A soft heaviness sweetened His veins; His naps lengthened. As death neared, His birth and travail far ago, in that clamorous desert place, among Rome’s centurions, seemed more and more miraculous: a seed He had left behind, and that had died, engendering a growth perhaps as great as a mustard tree. Or perhaps His incarnation there, those youthful events, were lost in the scuffle of history, dust amid dust. Whatever the case, He never doubted that He was unique, the only son of God. In this, at least, He resembled all men.

  One family in the village says it is descended from Jesus. Many of the children have the star of David sewn on their clothes, and parents sometimes mark the sign of the cross in ink on the foreheads of children to exorcise evil spirits.… An annual “Christ festival,” held on June 10, attracts many visitors.

  The Slump

  They say reflexes, the coach says reflexes, even the papers now are saying reflexes, but I don’t think it’s the reflexes so much—last night, as a gag to cheer me up, the wife walks into the bedroom wearing one of the kids’ rubber gorilla masks and I was under the bed in six-tenths of a second, she had the stopwatch on me. It’s that I can’t see the ball the way I used to. It used to come floating up with all seven continents showing, and the pitcher’s thumbprint, and a grass smooch or two, and the Spalding guarantee in ten-point sans-serif, and—whop!—I could feel the sweet wood with the bat still cocked. Now, I don’t know, there’s like a cloud around it, a sort of spiral vagueness, maybe the Van Allen belt, or maybe I lift my eye in the last second, planning how I’ll round second base, or worrying which I do first, tip my cap or slap the third-base coach’s hand. You can’t see a blind spot, Kierkegaard says, but in there now, between when the ball leaves the bleacher background—all those colored shirts—and when I hear it smack safe and sound into the catcher’s mitt, there’s somehow just nothing, where there used to be a lot, everything in fact, because they’re not keeping me around for my fielding, and already I see the afternoon tabloid has me down as trade bait.

  The flutters don’t come when they used to. It used to be, I’d back the convertible out of the garage and watch the electric eye put the door down again and head out to the stadium, and at about the bridge turnoff I’d ease off grooving with the radio rock, and then on the lot there’d be the kids waiting to get a look and that would start the big butterflies, and when the attendant would take my car I’d want to shout Stop, thief! and, walking down that long cement corridor, I’d fantasize like I was going to the electric chair and the locker room was some dream after death, and I’d wonder why the suit fit, and how these really immortal guys, that I recognized from the bubble-gum cards I used to collect, knew my name. They knew me. And I’d go out and the stadium mumble would scoop at me and the grass seemed too precious to walk on, like emeralds, and by the time I got into the cage I couldn’t remember if I batted left or right.

  Now, hell, I move over the bridge singing along with the radio, and brush through the kids at just the right speed, not so fast I knock any of them down, and the attendant knows his Labor Day tip is coming, and we wink, and in the batting cage I own the place, and take my cuts, and pop five or six into the bullpen as easy as dropping dimes down a sewer grate. But when the scoreboard lights up, and I take those two steps up from the dugout, the biggest two steps in a ballplayer’s life, and kneel in the circle, giving the crowd the old hawk profile, where once the flutters would ease off, now they dig down and begin.

  They say I’m not hungry, but I still feel hungry, only now it’s a kind of panic hungry, and that’s not the right kind. Ever watch one of your little kids try to catch a ball? He gets so excited with the idea he’s going to catch it he shuts his eyes. That’s me now. I walk up to the plate, having come all this way—a lot of hotels, a lot of shagging—and my eyes feel shut. And I stand up there trying to push my eyeballs through my eyelids, and my retinas register maybe a little green, and the black patch of some nuns in far left field. That’s panic hungry.

  Kierkegaard called it dread. It queers the works. My wife comes at me without the gorilla mask and when in the old days whop!, now she slides by with a hurt expression and a flicker of gray above her temple. I go out and ride the power mower and I’ve already done it so often the lawn is brown. The kids get me out of bed for a little fungo and it scares me to see them trying, busting their lungs, all that shagging ahead of them. In Florida—we used to love it in Florida, the smell of citrus and marlin, the flat pink sections where the old people drift around smiling with transistor-radio plugs in their ears—we lie on the beach after a workout and the sun seems a high fly I’m going to lose and the waves keep coming like they’ve been doing for a billion years, up to the plate, up to the plate. Kierkegaard probably has the clue, so
mewhere in there, but I picked up Concluding Unscientific Postscript the other day and I couldn’t see the print, that is, I could see the lines, but there wasn’t anything on them, like the rows of deep seats in the shade of the second deck on a Thursday afternoon, just a single ice-cream vendor sitting there, nobody around to sell to, a speck of white in all that shade, old Søren Sock himself, keeping his goods cool.

  I think maybe if I got beaned. That’s probably what the wife is hinting at with the gorilla mask. A change of pace, like the time DiMaggio broke his slump by Topping’s telling him to go to a nightclub and get plastered. I’ve stopped ducking, but the trouble is, if you’re not hitting, they don’t brush you back. On me, they’ve stopped trying for even the corners; they put it right down the pike. I can see it in the pitcher’s evil eye as he takes the sign and rears back, I can hear the catcher snicker, and for a second of reflex there I can see it like it used to be, the continents and trade routes and state boundaries distinct as stitches, and the hickory sweetens in my hands, and I feel the good old sure hunger. Then something happens. It all blurs, the pitch sinks, the light changes, I don’t know. It’s not caring enough, is what it probably is; it’s knowing that none of it—the stadium, the averages—is really there, just you are there, and it’s not enough.

  The Sea’s Green Sameness

  I write this on the beach. Let us say, then, that I am a writer on the beach. It was once considered bad manners to admit anything of the sort, just as people walking to and from the bathroom were supposed to be invisible; but this is a rude age. Nothing is hidden. Yet everything is. In a sense a person observed walking to a closed door is less “there” than someone being forcibly imagined to be invisible.

  I sit opposite the sea.1 Its receding green surface is marked everywhere by millions of depressions, or nicks, of an uncertain color: much as this page is marked. But this page yields a meaning, however slowly, whereas the marks on the sea are everywhere the same. That is the difference between Art and Nature.

  But the marks on the sea move, which is somehow portentous. And large distinctions in tone are perceptible: the purple shadows of clouds from above, of coral reefs from below. The horizon is darker than the middle distance—almost black—and the water near me is tinted with the white of the sand underneath, so that its clear deep-throated green is made delicate, acidulous, artificial. And I seem to see, now and then, running vertically with no regard for perspective, veins of a metallic color; filaments of silver or gold—it is hard to be certain which—waver elusively, but valuably, at an indeterminate distance below the skin of the massive, flat, monotonous volume.

  Enough, surely. It is a chronic question, whether to say simply “the sea” and trust to people’s imaginations, or whether to put in the adjectives. I have had only fair luck with people’s imaginations; hence tend to trust adjectives. But are they to be trusted? Are they—words—anything substantial upon which we can rest our weight? The best writers say so. Sometimes I believe it. But the illogic of the belief bothers me: From whence did words gather this intrinsic potency? The source of language, the spring from which all these shadows (tinted, alliterative, shapely, but still shadows) flow, is itself in shadow.

  But what, then, am I to do? Here am I, a writer, and there is the sea, a subject. For mathematical purity, let us exclude everything else—the sky, the clouds, the sand on my elbows, the threat of my children coming down the beach to join me. Let us posit a world of two halves: the ego and the external object. I think it is a fair representation of the world, a kind of biform Parliament, where two members sit, and speak for all parties. Tell me what I must do. Or, rather, give me my excuse; for my vote is foreordained, it must be in opposition, and our Parliament will be stalemated until one of us dies.

  The incantor of tales about the cave fire was excused by the hungry glitter2 of eyes. Homer swung his tides on this attention. Aeschylus felt excused; Sophocles heroically bluffed out any doubt; with Euripides we definitely arrive at the sudden blankness, the embarrassed slapping of the pockets, the stammer, the flustered prolixity. But then a splendid excuse appeared, it seemed eternally. Dante had it. Milton. Tolstoy, Dickens, Balzac picked its bones. It was a huge creature and still gives some nourishment. Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson wrote for money; it kept them scribbling, but is presently considered a weak excuse. Beauty, said Keats. A trick of optics. Self, said Wordsworth and Goethe. A tautology. Reality, said the Realists, and the Opposition swamped them with pamphlets. I bore you. Even this raises an issue. Is it my duty not to bore you; my excuse, that I do not? This would bring me safely into the cozy hotel of pornographers, dinner guests, and television personalities. But you would be truly amazed, how indignantly I, the peer of the immense sea, reject such shelter. Forgive me; I know you made the offer with warm hearts. To continue my story—Conrad and James offer Groping as an End in Itself, and Proust and Joyce round out the tale with a magnificent display of superb, if somewhat static, effects. I may, in this summation, have left out a few names, which you yourself can supply. The remaining question of interest: Were Proust and Joyce an ending or a beginning? They seemed, from their newness, a beginning, but as time passes does not their continued newness make it clear that they are the opposite, that everything since forms a vacuum in which the surfaces of these old works, that should be cracked and sunken, are preserved like fresh pigment?

  How tired I am! All my intricate maneuvers, my loudly applauded and widely reprinted perorations, my passionate lobbying—all my stratagems are exhausted. I am near death. And the Opposition seems as young as ever. You see, he never exerts himself. The clerks—all the quick clerks have gone over to his side; I am left with but a few ancient men, hanging on for the pension, the prizes—elicit his answers to prepared questionnaires, which he gives very reluctantly, with much coaxing. He never gets up on his feet and says a word the gallery can hear. Yet more and more his influence spreads among them. Oh, they still muster a few handclaps for my most gallant efforts, bent and breathless as I am; but it is his power they respect. Out with this metaphor—take away these congressional trappings! There. I still have some power of my own. His silence can still be twisted to my advantage.

  I am writing this in the sun, which is difficult; perhaps here is a clue. You cannot write in the sun, or in perfect health. I must make myself sick with cigarettes before I can perform. Some writers use alcohol. Some read copiously. Some are gifted with infirmities. Health, sanity, and sunshine have deserted us. Even the clergy, as we labor to save them, despise us. Sitting on this beach, I wonder if I am one of those large, sluggish crabs whom the operator of the Time Machine discovers at the extreme limit of the earth’s senility scraping across a beach, stiffly waving their tentacles at a red and distended sun. Perhaps I am the last writer in the world. Perhaps, coming from a backward region of the country, to which news travels slowly, I arrived in the capital a moment before the gates were locked forever. Perhaps all of us latter-day writers are like the priests that the peasantry continued to supply to the Church long after the aristocracy acknowledged that the jig was up.

  For I look at the sea, my topic, and it seems null. No longer am I permitted to conceive charming legends about how it came to be salt, for this is known. Its chemistry, its weight, its depth, its age, its myriad creatures so disturbingly evocative of our own mortality—what is not known of these things, will be known. The veins of silver (or gold) in it are all mapped and will be mined tomorrow. This leaves, you say, its essence, its ens. Yes, but what, really, can we hope for in this line, after Plato, after Aquinas, after Einstein? Have not their brave fancies already gone the way of Poseidon?

  Yet, surprisingly, I do have something new to contribute to human knowledge of the sea. It has just come to me. A revelation. If you lie down, put your head in the sand, and close one eye, the sea loses its third dimension and becomes a wall. The black rim of the perfectly smooth top seems as close to me as the pale, foaming bottom. A curious sideways tugging in the center of the wall,
a freedom of motion inexplicable in a wall whose outlines are so inflexibly fixed, makes the vision strange. But it does not lead me to imagine that the wall is a fragile cloth that an assault by me would pierce. No, my fists and forehead are too sore for me to entertain such an illusion. However, I do feel—and feel, as it were, from the outside, as if I were being beckoned—that if I were to run quickly to it, and press my naked chest against its vibrating perpendicular surface, and strain my body against it from my head to my toes, I should feel upon my beating heart the answer of another heart beating. I sit up, excited, foul with sand, and open both eyes, and the ocean withdraws again into its distance. Yet I hear in the sigh of its surf encouragement from the other side of the apparent wall—sullen, muffled encouragement, the best it can do, trapped as it is also—encouragement for me to repeat the attempt, to rush forward in my mind again and again.