Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  My heart has naturally detested four things (ticks them off):

  the standing of the Apocrypha in the Bible;

  foreigners dwelling in my country, to crowd our native subjects into the corners of the earth;

  alchemized coins;

  tolerations of diverse religions, or of one religion in segregant shapes. He that willingly assents to the last, if he examines his heart by daylight, his conscience will tell him he is either an atheist, or a heretic, or a hypocrite, or at best a captive to some lust. Poly-piety is the greatest impiety in the world.

  The power of all religion and ordinances lies in their purity; their purity in their simplicity. Then are mixtures pernicious. I lived in a city where a Papist preached in one church, a Lutheran in another, a Calvinist in a third; the religion of that place was but motley and meagre; their affections, leopard-like.

  He that is willing to tolerate any religion, or discrepant way of religion, besides his own, unless it be in matters merely indifferent, either doubts of his own or is not sincere in it.

  He that is willing to tolerate any unsound opinion, that his own may also be tolerated, though never so sound, will for a need hang God’s Bible at the devil’s girdle.

  (More indignation, approval from congregation.)

  That state that will give liberty of conscience in matters of religion must give liberty of conscience and conversation in their moral laws, or else the fiddle will be out of tune, and some of the strings crack.

  I take liberty of conscience to be nothing but a freedom from sin and error, and liberty of error nothing but a prison for conscience. Then small will be the kindness of a state to build such prisons for their subjects.

  The Scripture saith, there is nothing makes free but truth. And Truth saith, there is no truth but one. If the states of the world would make it their summoperous care to preserve this one truth in its purity and authority, it would ease them of all other political cares.

  I am sure Satan makes it his grand if not only task to adulterate truth; falsehood is his sole sceptre, whereby he first ruffled, and ever since ruined, the world. Amen.

  NARRATOR (as WARD and congregation file out): Thus ends our second text. Its sternness and harsh piety must be understood against the background of the wilderness, where unity could mean survival, and of the century, when, in the words of Ipswich’s foremost historian, Thomas Franklin Waters:

  WATERS: It was a matter of common belief in England, as well as in the Colonies on this side of the Atlantic, that Satan and his angels were actively engaged in assaulting the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, and disturbing the peace of mankind.

  NARRATOR: The peace of mankind—what was the ordinary life of the Puritans; what was inside the stockade of religious prohibition? Some glimpses of the intimate life of the first settlers are afforded by the records of the courts, whose duty it was to administer the code of regulations ranging from the sale of “strong water” to the wages of craftsmen, from the amount of lace or silk that might be worn by a commoner to the delicate issues of domestic peace. The Reverend Waters tells us:

  WATERS: Mark Quilter was put under ten dollar bonds in 1664 to be “of good behavior toward all persons, but especially his wife.” Daniel Black and his wife were both condemned to be set in stocks, with instructions not to “miscall each other” while in limbo. Mary Bidgood was ordered to England to live with her husband. John Tellison was duly punished for tying his wife to the bedpost with a plow chain to keep her at home. Humphrey Griffin’s difficulty with his mother-in-law led to two prosecutions: she was fined for cursing and reviling her son-in-law, and he for reviling her.

  NARRATOR: The numerous inventories of domestic possessions describe the Puritan home, by our standards a strange mixture of austerity and luxury. Instead of candles, strips of pine, moist with turpentine and pitch, were burned; hence the name, sacred to local golfers, of Candlewood. There were no forks, and plates were often square pieces of wood slightly hollowed. Weapons, however, were in abundance: Matthew Whipple’s hall contained three muskets, three pairs of bandoleers, three swords, a fowling piece, some breast armor, a pike and sword, a halberd, and a rapier. His best feather bed, bolster and nine pillows, weighed one hundred and six pounds. The early Puritans lived in a world of wood and cloth: John Winthrop’s inventory of 1636 included:

  WATERS (reads):

  One mantle of silk with gold lace

  One holland tablecloth some three yards long

  Five child’s blankets whereof one is bare million

  Four aprons of which one is laced

  One dozen holland napkins

  One gown sea green

  Two old petticoats one red one sand collar serge

  One pair leather stockings one muff

  One tapestry coverlet

  One red bays cloak for a woman.

  (Looks up.) Many fair English costumes found place in their chests and strong boxes that came over the seas, and the plain houses and plainer meetinghouse were radiant, on Sabbath days, and high days, with bright colors and fine fabrics.

  NARRATOR: A tender glimpse of the Puritan family is afforded by the valedictory of Sarah Goodhue, who foresaw her own death in the birth of her twins, and wrote to the eight other of her surviving children:

  SARAH GOODHUE: Your father hath been loving, kind, tenderhearted towards you all: and laborious for you all, both for your temporal and spiritual good. You that are grown up, cannot but see how careful your father is when he cometh home from his work, to take the young ones up into his wearied arms; by his loving carriage and care towards those, you may behold, as in a glass, his tender care and love to you every one as you grew up.

  NARRATOR: But the supreme poet of Puritan domesticity, and the first considerable poet of America, was of course Anne Bradstreet. Born the daughter of Thomas Dudley in 1612, and raised in the mansion of the Earl of Lincolnshire, she was married at the age of sixteen to Simon Bradstreet, and came with the Great Migration of 1630 to New England.

  ANNE BRADSTREET: I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But, after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined the church at Boston.

  NARRATOR: With her husband and father she moved to the new settlement of Ipswich; here, in the intellectual company of Ward and Nathaniel Rogers, the Denisons and the Saltonstalls, her muse quickened to an astounding productivity. In the eight or nine years of her residency in Ipswich, Ipswich was the most aristocratic and cultured of the Massachusetts communities. When the Bradstreets moved to a North Andover farmstead, her muse languished, though she was only thirty.

  ANNE BRADSTREET:

      The world no longer let me love.

      My hope and treasure lie above.

  NARRATOR: Her long poems, pious and scholarly, in the manner of Du Bartas and Spenser, won her the proud title of The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America. But it is her occasional lyrics, based upon her domestic life, that still live. She addresses her poems as if they were her children:

  ANNE BRADSTREET:

      My rambling brat (in print) should mother call;

      I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

      Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;

      Yet being mine own, at length affection would

      Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

      I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

      And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.

      I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

      Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

      In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

      But nought save homespun cloth in th’ house I find.

  NARRATOR: And she speaks of her children as if they are her poems. To her husband, in case she dies in childbirth:

  ANNE BRADSTREET:

      If any worth or vi
rtue were in me,

      Let that live freshly in thy memory;

      And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,

      Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.

      And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains,

      Look to my little babes, my dear remains.

      And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,

      These O protect from stepdame’s injury.

      And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,

      With some sad sighs honor my absent hearse;

      And kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake,

      Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.

  NARRATOR: It is in the poems to her husband that Anne Bradstreet most closely approaches greatness, as, surprisingly, a passionate celebrant of love, of married love. “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” was considered too personal to be made public during her lifetime; it appeared six years after her death in 1672, in a collection entitled Several Poems Compiled by a Gentlewoman in New-England. It is the third of our texts. Listen to the ardor that breathes through these sturdy couplets; feel how the wife and mother lifts these conventional celestial conceits into the grandeur of honest emotion—and believe that the Puritans were alive, as we are alive.

  ANNE BRADSTREET:

      My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life—nay more,

      My joy, my magazine of earthly store,

      If two be one, as surely thou and I,

      How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?

      So many steps head from the heart to sever,

      If but a neck, soon should we be together.

      I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black,

      My Sun is gone so far in’s zodiac,

      Whom whilst I ’joyed, nor storms nor frost I felt,

      His warmth such fridged colds did cause to melt.

      My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn;

      Return; return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn;

      In this dead time, alas, what can I more

      Than view those fruits which through thy heart I bore?

      Which sweet contentment yield me for a space,

      True living pictures of their father’s face.

      O strange effect! now thou art southward gone,

      I weary grow the tedious day so long;

      But when thou northward to me shalt return,

      I wish my Sun may never set, but burn

      Within the Cancer of my glowing breast,

      The welcome house of him, my dearest guest.

      Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence,

      Till nature’s sad decree shall call thee hence;

      Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,

      I here, thou there, yet both but on

  NARRATOR: Winthrop, Nathaniel Ward, and Anne Bradstreet had all left Ipswich by 1645. But the life of intellectual distinction and adventure to which they contributed here established a tone that lingered for generations. In 1687 the town meeting of Ipswich, led by Samuel Appleton and the Reverend John Wise, refused to comply with a tax that—quote—“doth infringe their Liberty as Free born English subjects of his Majesty.” Though the town leaders were jailed, and compliance was enforced, the principles of self-government had been proudly asserted. Five years later, in 1692, Ipswich alone among the important towns of Essex County resisted the witchcraft delirium that swept outwards from Salem.

  Winthrop legally purchased this land, though for a modest sum, and wisely administered the settlement. Ward’s legal code, based upon the more liberal aspects of English common law, held the seeds of a toleration and pluralism he would have detested. Anne Bradstreet, though condemned to the hard life of a pioneer woman, yet found space here in which her female spirit could flower and bear poetic fruit special to America. Our texts illustrate the nobler elements of the Puritan heritage—a faith in the law, a passion for the things of the mind, a habit of independence. Without exaggeration, it might be said that the Puritan flame, taking hold in the New World, burned brightest at Ipswich.

  Lovell Thompson, 1902–1986

  Read at the memorial service in King’s Chapel, Boston, on January 2, 1987.

  I CANNOT IMAGINE anyone meeting Lovell Thompson and not feeling that this was an extraordinary man. He was extraordinary-looking, for one thing, with his intensely blue eyes, his baroque eyebrows, and his noble sea captain’s head. Extraordinary, too, in his soft-spoken courtesy, and his quickness to understand and to be amused, hesitating now and then to wrap his mouth a bit more securely around his pipe stem, and his words around his thought. He brought to everything, it seemed to me, a truly fresh attention, relying not on rote usages and conventional reactions but on a scrupulous thinking-through, like a perfect student of some foreign language for the first time confronted with native speakers, in a native situation. He descended to earthly intercourse from some residence within an ideal state, and those aspects of his life to which I was a witness were characterized by a rigorous caring about quality and a stubborn fidelity to his vision of the best.

  I think, for example, of the beautiful folded guide-maps that Lovell used to produce for the biannual (more or less) recurrences of Ipswich’s Seventeenth Century Day, of which he and his wife, Kay, were founders. Though the event was thoroughly local, the maps in their beauty and professional polish would have graced a metropolitan event a hundred times the scale, and gave everyone connected with the day a sense of being connected with something substantial, something done in fine and affectionate style. On a more personal level, I recall how, when he and I were both householders in Ipswich, and both needing new roofs on our houses, we discussed the choice between asphalt and cedar shingles. As if to convert me to the more historically correct and aesthetically pleasing choice of cedar, he told me that he had looked into the price of both and been assured that the cedar shingles cost only three times as much. That he had, for his own life, fine houses in Louisburg Square and in the rural reaches of Argilla Road did not prevent him from investing not only time and energy but, most impressively, money in the fight to preserve the architectural heritage lodged in Ipswich’s unruly and not always grateful downtown. I had the pleasure of serving with him on the Historical Commission, and the bracing experience, once, of being in the opposition in regard to the construction of a new church building he deemed unworthy. He was, in his obstructionist cause, implacable and resourceful, but I can say that not only I, who had many reasons for affection, but the church people as a group recognized that Lovell was a stubborn foe for selfless reasons—he simply wanted the best for Ipswich. His philosophy comes out in these sentences he once wrote: “In the grand rush down the main road we have lost sight of alternatives—pastoral detours, pleasant rest areas and country towns. The economics of mass production have overwhelmed the variety and frugality that arise from individual local solutions. It is important, then, to preserve the best models from the past.”

  One wonders if such powers of civic caring and discrimination are not dying with such men as this. His civic sense was just one facet of a general aspiration toward the good life, which also showed in his hospitality, in the home environments that he helped to construct, in the books that Gambit Inc. published under his direction, in the genial and undiscouragable spirit that controlled his demeanor. Having worked for forty-two years for Houghton Mifflin, in offices only a few blocks from where we are gathered, he did not retire but instead embarked, at age sixty-seven, on an entrepreneurial gambit. When, in 1977, the exquisite Beacon Street quarters for his publishing house were gutted by fire, he did not, as he might gracefully and und
erstandably have done, give publishing up; he instead relocated at an Ipswich location as choice, in its way, as the uphill part of Beacon Street, and adorned Meetinghouse Green with his special branch of this most civilized of industries. Of all the letters I have received from people in publishing, his were the most witty and thoughtful, and always held at least a phrase of that Thompsonian twinkle, that almost eighteenth-century twist of lucid awareness, of harmless irony. Even his handwriting—I recently found an old letter of his in a book I was consulting—bespoke, in its snub-nibbed, fluent, steady, and legible elegance, the man.

  The book I was consulting was called Fifty Best American Short Stories, in which Lovell has a story, written in 1937. An artistic sensibility surely informed his concerns and the conduct of his life. I am a late witness to that life, to its afternoon and evening, and not a very close witness; but yet close enough to be warmed by a passion and originality that were artistic. Just dinner at Lovell’s Argilla Road house—the friendly way one sneaked along a brick walk, and entered a porch, and then immediately, at a right angle on the left, negotiated another door, and upon being admitted, or admitting oneself, found, again on the left, the party spread out in merry progress, on sofas and chairs in perilous proximity to a roaring fire in a big fireplace, while directly ahead lay the dining table already set and glimmering, and beyond it the porch where memories of summer drinks still lingered—all this felt unique, and kind, and expressive of a man who had made the world within his reach as good as it could be, as graceful and gracious as the world itself permits. His life was long, and he paid the price of a long life in pain and infirmity during his last years, and a price in grief, too, as he thrice became a widower. The three children of his first marriage are here, and their children, and many others who knew Lovell better and longer than I. I am honored to be considered by his family a good enough friend to say these words. Truly, he raised my consciousness, and set a standard for us all, and lived a life whose example of discrimination and caring and intelligent joy we can carry with us.