Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Open Spaces

  Foreword to Land of the Commonwealth: A Portrait of the Conserved Landscapes of Massachusetts, an album of photographs by Richard Cheek commissioned and published by the Trustees of Reservations (2000).

  THOSE OF US who have lived in Ipswich know the moment when Argilla Road, heading toward Crane Beach, slips its sheath of roadside houses and trees and the view on the right becomes an immense one of salt marshes and, beyond their grassy extent, sand dunes and the horizon of the ocean. This is open space, the kind that the Trustees of Reservations has been preserving in Massachusetts since 1891. The Trustees’ holdings in Ipswich are especially vast and varied—nearly three thousand acres, including miles of spectacular white sand beach, a number of hills, several sizable islands, and a fifty-nine-room mansion with outbuildings, not to mention, on the other side of town, a nearly one-thousand-acre working farm. The more than eighty properties under the protection of the Trustees of Reservations in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts stretch from the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge on Nantucket to Field Farm in the Berkshires. The view from my present house in Beverly includes Great and Little Misery islands, whose pleasantly unpopulated condition was recently assured by the Trustees of Reservations’ acquisition of the last three acres still in private hands.

  If Massachusetts, one of the longest-settled and most populous of the states, remains one of the most livable, one reason is the formation, over a century ago, of a group of citizens whose public spirit dedicated itself to the acquisition of “bits of scenery” as “public parks” for the growing and crowded masses of greater Boston. The quoted phrases are from the fluent pen of Charles Eliot, the son of Harvard professor (and later president) Charles William Eliot. Young Eliot apprenticed for two years in the Brookline office of Frederick Law Olmsted and then travelled through parts of Europe studying public parks, gardens, and great private estates. At the age of twenty-seven he opened an office in Boston, at the corner of Beacon and Park streets, as a landscape architect. Writing to the periodical Garden and Forest in 1890, he observed that close to the metropolis remained “several bits of scenery which possess uncommon beauty and more than usual refreshing power.” He cited the narrows of the Charles River in Sherborn, which became in 1897 one of the first acquisitions of the Trustees of Reservations, an organization “empowered by the State,” as Eliot proposed, “to hold small and well-distributed parcels of land free of taxes, just as the Public Library holds books and the Art Museum pictures—for the use and enjoyment of the public.” Eliot died at the young age of thirty-seven, but his noble idea flourished, along with his brainchild, the first private statewide organization devoted to the preservation of open spaces—“surviving fragments,” as he wrote, “of the primitive wilderness of New England.”

  Not many of the reserved properties are “primitive wilderness”; they include the Great House at Castle Hill, the Old Manse, Long Hill, as well as a number of other domiciles, gardens, and working farms. But each holding, it could be said, rescues a certain moment of landscape from the predations of unbridled development. Since we are all part of the press of population that would replace wilderness with human habitations, industry, and commerce—the Native Americans cleared fields and erected dwellings, and even the seemingly virgin salt marshes have been trenched and drained—it would seem paradoxical to resist, by means of advanced organization and substantial funds, the triumph of our own species over the surface of the earth. An asphalt parking lot is, in a sense, as natural as a lava spill, and a factory as a honeycomb. The nineteenth-century mills of Lowell have become themselves the objects of preservation efforts, their beauty and splendor revealed as their utility subsides. The first McDonald’s, in Des Plaines, Illinois, is now a piously visited museum. Still, nature without man, or with selective human refinements modestly added to a natural effect, possesses, in Eliot’s phrase, “refreshing power.”

  Nature has its balances, and the human race is not so omnipotent as to avoid the penalties of a persisting imbalance. Deforestation brings floods, overgrazing produces deserts. The Trustees of Reservations was founded in an era that lacked the word “ecology” and that knew far less than our own about the environmental value of lands too wet for houses or crops, or the role that plants’ emission of oxygen plays in our atmosphere. What at first seems waste in nature turns out, often, to be essential. An efficient inefficiency presides above the workings of the planet in its full range of flora and fauna, of water and air and permeable soil. We belong to this lavish dispensation, an animal evolved on the East African grassland, a hunter and harvester among many, accustomed to wide spaces and small tribes. “I love a broad margin to my life,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, and, in his journals, “The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”

  The New England conscience, brought by the Puritans to a rocky, resistant terrain, is prone to a certain parsimony with regard to its natural inheritance. Thoreau’s essay “Walking” begins, “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” Thoreau’s New England had still enough untrammelled spaces in it—Cape Cod, in his day, provided a walk on the wild side and not a mile-long traffic jam on Route 6—for him to feel an opposition between nature and society. One could escape from one into the other. His little Walden wilderness, never as isolated as his great book suggests, is now a heavily used suburban preserve.

  Having endured utopian visions of Bauhausian “machines for living” and towering apartment blocks where greenery is kept like a lapdog and all neighborhood scale is lost, we can see that some protected aboriginal nature is essential for social health. The town of Ipswich, for instance, benefits as a whole—acquires a communal panache—for the presence within it of upland, beaches, dunes, and marshes kept relatively pristine. Charles Eliot’s perception that spaces uncluttered by human enterprise feed our spiritual and physical well-being was not unique; such a perception lay at the heart of Romantic poetry and was extended by ecstatics like John Muir, who chose for the motto of the Wilderness Society Thoreau’s remark “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Muir provided the theological paraphrase “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.”

  The Trustees of Reservations, without much rhetoric but with much patient study and quiet generosity, has acquired and maintains for our commonwealth more than eighty tracts of land, large and small, beautifully portrayed herein by the photographs of Richard Cheek. Nature’s gifts have been seconded by the gifts of human benefactors and workers committed to the vision of a planet shared among all its life forms, an Eden under human stewardship.

  Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer

  Written, at the invitation of editor Laurence Sheehan, for A Commonwealth of Golfers, 1903–2003, the sumptuous centennial publication of the Massachusetts Golf Association (2002).

  I THINK OF MYSELF as a Pennsylvania native and a New York writer, but 100 percent a Massachusetts golfer, never touching a club until, at the age of twenty-five, I became resident in the Bay State. An aunt of my wife’s put a driver into my hands on her side lawn in Wellesley, and complimented me on my swing at a phantom ball, and thus sent me haring, for over forty years now, after my unfulfilled golf potential.

  It was in Wellesley, the bards of golf history tell us, that golf took root in the commonwealth. A Miss Florence Boit (who can be seen in the Museum of Fine Arts, in the celebrated John Singer Sargent portrait of the four Boit sisters) had played the game in Pau, France, and in 1892 she brought some clubs and balls back to the home of her uncle, Arthur B. Hunnewell. To demonstrate the purpose of these curious implements the athletic lass proceeded to lay out a seven-hole course on her uncle’s land and that of some neighbors. Among the astonished audience of her exhibition play was one Laurence Curtis, of Boston, who, ere the year was out, persuaded The
Country Club in Brookline to devote some of its turf to golf. So, without young Florence Boit and her bons temps at Pau, there might have been no course at The Country Club, and hence no venue wherein Francis Ouimet would beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the U.S. Open in 1913, and Julius Boros would vanquish Arnold Palmer and Jacky Cupit at the U.S. Open in 1963, and Curtis Strange would hold off Nick Faldo at yet another U.S. Open, in 1988—and thus Massachusetts golf would have missed out on three of its great moments. Likewise, if that aunt-in-law hadn’t played golf, I would have spent a lot more summer afternoons working in the yard or answering my mail.

  I had moved, as it happened, to the North Shore, where the virus imported by Miss Boit was festering within a year or two, causing primitive layouts to spring up on the land of the Essex Country Club, in Manchester; the Appleton Farm, in Ipswich; the Moraine Farm, on Wenham Lake; and Prides Crossing, in Beverly. The Myopia Hunt Club, in Hamilton, against the better judgment of the red-coated fox chasers, had nine holes by 1894; the club hosted the first of its four U.S. Opens in 1898 and the last in 1908.

  My own obscure golfing career, however, developed, in the 1950s and 1960s, far from these storied private venues, on a number of public courses in the area. Each had its distinctions. Candlewood Golf Course, on Essex Road in Ipswich, was a converted farm, and the farmer’s widow, kindly Mrs. Whipple, took your fees (less than a dollar, can it be?) in a roadside cottage, distinguished, if my faltering memory serves, by a soft-drink cooler as murmurous as a mountain stream and a large photograph of Dr. Cary Middlecoff’s swing as captured by stroboscopic camera. The Candlewood layout was on the flattish, shortish side, but a sufficient challenge to my novice skills; my majestic beginner’s slice posed a considerable threat to the motorists on the roads passing to the right of the first and ninth fairways. There were two long holes, then two short ones, and a fifth which asked that you walk back to a tee framed by apple trees and hit a blind drive which, if errant, could threaten players on the sixth tee and fairway. At the center of the course a number of fairways came together on a knoll of desolate bareness, all its grass and mayflowers worn to dust by the intersection of many wheels and dragging cleats. From this lunar knoll, the highest point on the course, there was a 360-degree battle panorama of loping pre-adolescents, white-haired retirees, and off-duty clammers as they struggled to move the ball along circuits of the hard-used little layout. My older son, at the age of ten, would play Candlewood all of a summer day, working in as many as fifty-four holes.

  A mile farther down Essex Road, in the hamlet of Essex, where clipper-ship building had, within a century, given way to the fried-seafood business, the Cape Ann links offered nine holes of greater length and less harrowing contiguity than Candlewood, with some exhilarating views of marsh and sea. The seventh hole, a longish par-3, asked that you hit across a stretch of mudflat; more than once, at icy high tide, we took off our shoes and socks to reach the hole and, on a parallel causeway to the eighth fairway, to wade back. Beside the green of the ninth hole one was rewarded with a handshake from the owner, who proprietorially basked in one of the few golf carts available. It was a Depression-era course of minimal amenity and maximum intimacy; the owner’s son drove the gang mowers, the daughter-in-law sold the Cokes and second-hand balls, and the aging holder of the course record (Frank Brady, 62) often acted as starter. Weekends saw long waits on the first tee. Greenheads, an insatiable fly bred in marshes, were a seasonal torment. You teed off on broken tees pried into the interstices of rubber mats. There were soggy patches and parched stretches on the fairways at the same time of the year. But the sea air and short-sleeved bonhomie were hard to beat. It was on this modest par-70 that I had my best round ever: a 38 on the first nine was topped by a par-35 on the second (the same nine), making a marvellous 73. My opponents refused to pay their debts, I had played so far above my head.

  And other courses beckoned, a bit inland: Ould Newbury, with its aggravatingly elevated greens and pleasantly elevated screened clubhouse veranda; the Rowley Country Club, constructed as a lark by a retired Peabody contractor, its fairways newly seeded and its third hole an imposing watery dogleg; New Meadows, where the buzz of traffic along Route 1 mixed with that of the Topsfield mosquitoes. Some public courses boasted eighteen holes: Wenham, whose linkslike back nine throbbed to the passage of B & M commuter trains; Lynnfield’s Colonial, where Canada geese and their spoor were superabundant and Red Sox players could occasionally be spotted, treading lightly; Boxford’s Far Corner, its precipitous fairways on one witnessed occasion the scene of a spectacular roller-coaster ride, the rubber-tired golf cart doing slow wheelies on the wet grass all the way down to the eleventh green, while its duo of passengers, my playing partners, yelped.

  It was a happy and varied world, public golf, but an increasingly crowded one, as televised tournaments gave the sport glamour, and the population of eastern Massachusetts grew, and a prospering economy freed ever more wage slaves to the joys of recreation. My old companions in driving miles to make a hard-won Publinx tee time slowly faded away, and my dying battery was recharged by membership in a private club. I came to know the privileged, curried terrains of Myopia and Essex, of Peabody’s Salem and Salem’s Kernwood, of Brookline’s Country Club and Newton’s Brae Burn and Wellesley’s Wellesley. Gradually I acquired a country-club manner, an ease with chits and caddie tips, and an expectation of lush green spaces populated by discreetly scattered golfers, of three- or even four-level tees and carts equipped with grass-seed ladles that make replacing divots a faux pas, of clubhouses whose walls shone like those of Byzantine churches with gold-lettered walnut plaques proclaiming tournament results from bygone ages and with silvered clubs and balls of intense historic interest, and of pro shops stocked as densely as a flower shop with fanned bouquets of high-tech multi-metal clubs, of locker rooms scaled like the Baths of Caracalla, and of dining facilities that made upstairs at the Ritz look like a pizza parlor. However hard I endeavor to blend in, in costume and manner, my golf, I fear, has betrayed me, remaining ragged and unmannerly—public-course golf, formed in the school of hard knocks. Never mind; onward I go, spring, summer, and fall, in pursuit of that vision glimpsed in Wellesley nearly half a century ago.

  * * *

  Now, what, in all this rich experience, is distinctly of a Massachusetts character? The Puritan founders of this commonwealth have contributed, it may be, a certain Spartan tang to the sport, a tang less to be tasted in the plush precincts of Connecticut, so much of it suburban to New York City and its grotesque fortunes, or even to the precious courses carved from Rhode Island’s meagre, inlet-nibbled acreage. Massachusetts clubhouses, by and large, rarely are cast in the mock-Tudor, half-timbered style favored in Greenwich, Stamford, and the Hudson Valley, nor are the waiting lists for memberships as elaborately staged or as cruelly prolonged as there; it is easier and quicker to help crew a spaceship to Uranus and back than run the hurdles at, say, Darien’s Wee Burn. On the other hand, Massachusetts golf is not as rugged, or as truncated in the length of its season, as that in the three states of northern New England. Cape Cod can entertain play at any month of the year, and even north of Boston a good season stretches from a muddy start in April to an Indian-summer round in late November. As opposed to Florida golf, that of Massachusetts offers an entertainingly unflat terrain, rich in sidehill lies and blind spots over this or that immediate horizon. Hilly, but, unlike that of Vermont, not showily dependent on mountain views and prodigious feats of bulldozing to achieve a teeing area.

  And, in distinction from Florida or Arizona or Alabama golfers, those of Massachusetts can venture out under the noon sun of most any summer day without suffering heat prostration. The summer is slow to come, with many a Maytime feint, but when it does it is a temperate sweetheart that rarely lacks a cooling breeze and a bearable humidity. No dawn risings to avoid the cruel scorch of midday; no late-afternoon rounds dragging past dinnertime. In Massachusetts one strides or rides cheerfully into the heart of the day, as thr
ough the warm months the scenery rings its changes from blossom time to leaf season, each with its own glories, its height and texture and tint of rough, its qualities of turf underfoot and of cloud overhead. Golf becomes an exhilarating reason to get outdoors and take a long soak in Nature. Insects, except for spring blackflies and August greenheads in some coastal locales, are no problem; nor does an alligator threaten to slither ravenously up from a water hazard, or a rattlesnake to uncoil from behind a red rock, or a scorpion to skitter hissing out of a burrow in a sand trap. Nature has been tamed, but for the wilderness wind that produces wild and wooly golf shots.

  The character of one’s companion Massachusetts golfers deserves to be particularized. They are not the high rollers of Palm Springs or Winged Foot; a dollar a side, or a quarter a skin, is enough to whet a thrifty Yankee’s competitive edge and to bring the excitement of financial concern to a four-foot putt. In keeping with the commonwealth’s Puritan heritage, we (if I may) know that life is a vale of tears, all is vanity, and earthly comfort is not the main issue. Cold days, damp days, nasty days are nevertheless days for golf.

  Having been weaned on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Massachusetts golfers know that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; the inconsistencies of their game do not trouble them so much as philosophically amuse them. Aware, too, that “if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him,” they are loyal to their instinctive, untutored swings, and do not hurry off to seek instant relief in the faddish lessons of the golf pro, who comes from California and winters in Sarasota. The Massachusetts golfer wears his golf as he wears his turtleneck and uncreased corduroys and ten-year-old golf shoes; they may sag and hurt a bit, but they are his own, and “in self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended.” Yet the self-trust is tempered by, as Emerson’s disciple Thoreau put it, knowledge that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and each man is “a parcel of vain strivings.” Vainly striving together on the golf course, Massachusetts golfers evince a puckish stoicism and, usually, an unforced good humor. “Manners,” to quote Emerson once more, “are the happy ways of doing things,” and amid the laconic courtesies of an afternoon foursome one is not permitted to forget that golf is, as well as a competitive ordeal, a form of socialization.