Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Great Men. The British seem to prefer, in leaders, rogues or men with a streak of the rogue. Henry VIII, Charles II, Nelson, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill. If a rogue is unattainable, the next best thing is a nonentity. An earnest, clever man like Harold Wilson is universally distrusted.

  Class Warfare. The only phenomenon in the United States comparable to the catting, at an English party, between an arriviste working-class intellectual and a swinging duchess is the banter, at a Manhattan conclave, between a liberated Negro and a liberalized lady of Southern birth. The hostile tension of sexual attraction. Maxim of human behavior: we want to fuck what we fear. The primordial drive toward cross-fertilization.

  All those “pleases” and “thank you’s,” which the fresh visitor mistakes for elaborate courtesy, in fact prove, like the chirps of birds, to be warnings establishing territoriality. Those fierce fences and high brick walls, sometimes enclosing scarcely a square yard of cement. The passion for separation and class distinction leads to absurdities: a fourpenny post it costs money to delay, an A classification at the cinema that compels parents to accompany their children to puerile films.

  The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

  The beheading of Charles I, the repeal of the Corn Laws: the only times an idea has entered English politics. A king easier to restore than foreign markets.

  America is a land whose center is nowhere; England one whose center is everywhere. In America every town has its Chamber of Commerce; here every shire has been the site of a poem.

  Christianity has been disposed of by giving the clergy a social status, a part in the pageant. After Trollope’s novels, there can be no apocalypse. An odd number of steeples with their tips cut off, like daggers made safe for children to play with.

  Americans love England. For every tulip that comes up in Hyde Park, a tourist lands at Heathrow. I have not spoken to one American resident in London, not counting my eight-year-old daughter, who wouldn’t like to stay. And there are thousands, thousands of those mysterious men “in oil,” with their haircuts transparently cleaving to their skulls, with their expensively dressed wives, whose very good legs and taut figures are disappointingly capped by tan, hard, rather cross faces. (What do we do to our women, I ask myself, that is so brutalizing? What happens to our magnificent teen-age girls, with their clothes allowances, their fuzzy sweaters, their convertibles and batons and “steadies,” to give them as adults such a bitter, pushy narrowness and voices from which all melody has been squeezed?) America is uncomfortable now. On the continent fascism or anarchy reigns. Here things are civilized, cheap, pretty, educational, clean, green. Here the police and the poor are polite. The bully of the seven seas is in danger of becoming a nation of gigolos and tour guides. In the newspapers, imbalance of trade and impending bankruptcy; in the restaurants, girls dressed like houris and men with nugget cuff-links.

  Living in Regent’s Park. During a candle-lit dinner there comes a moment when one does not know whether a lion in the zoo, or the stomach of one’s table partner, has just growled.

  Notes to a Poem

  (for The New Statesman)

  MINORITY REPORT

  My beloved land, 1

  here I sit in London 2

  overlooking Regent’s Park 3

  overlooking my new Citroën

  both green, 4

  exiled by success of sorts. 5

  I listen to Mozart 6

  in my English suit and weep, 7

  remembering a Swedish film. 8

  But it is you, 9

  really you I think of: 10

  your nothing streetcorners 11

  your ugly eateries 12

  your dear barbarities 13

  and vacant lots 14

  (Br’er Rabbit demonstrated: 15

  freedom is made of brambles). 16

  They say over here you are choking 17

  to death on your cities and slaves, 18

  but they have never smelled dry grass, 19

  smoked Kools in a drugstore, 20

  or pronounced a flat “a,” an honest “r.” 21

  Don’t read your reviews, 22

  AMERICA: 23

  you are the only land. 24

  Line 2. At 59, Cumberland Terrace, N.W.1, where I can no longer be found. In a sense I never was found there. For nine months in England I felt like a balloon on too long a tether.

  Lines 6–8. The Mozart would be Piano Concerto No. 21, in C Major, and the Swedish film, of course, Elvira Madigan. The English suit is by Cyril A. Castle, 42 Conduit Street.

  Line 12. Is this fair? Many are ugly from the outside (see Nabokov, V., Lolita, on roadside restaurants) but inside have a certain appropriateness and comfort. Though America’s “better” restaurants are stuffy and pappy compared to those you can find on almost any side-street on the Continent, our casual food—the hurried hamburger, the presto pastrami—is unsurpassed. At a formative stage of my life, at the age when young Frenchmen are being seduced by their governesses and young Englishmen by their headmasters, I was compelled to spend hours of every day in a homely luncheonette next to a small post office. There was nothing ugly about it except the griddle and the politics, possibly, of the proprietor. But then being economically dependent upon a crowd of teen-agers would bring out the reactionary in anyone. I have never been happier than in those idle hours mixed of cigarette smoke, pinball clatter, schoolgirl odors, hot dogs, and the recorded voices of Doris Day and Frankie Laine. Come to think of it, there was one period, many months long, when Petrillo had called all the musicians out on strike and the jukebox was supplied with strange recordings of humming voices and scab oddball instruments like the banjo and the sweet potato. But I ramble.

  Line 14. Common in the land of my childhood. There was one beside our house, and others dotted all over the town. They were not parks, of course; they lacked daffodil beds and small mumbling men with turf edgers, but they made their own gift of space and freedom. Nobody owned them. Not even the Queen. Those vacant lots where the thistles waxed tall and we played fungo and kick-the-can were scraps of surviving Indian land, nowhereland. Compare parks: Hyde Park is a piece of royal domain graciously released to the commonweal, Central Park a wilderness of rape, torture, drug-induced trance, and savage whoops.

  Lines 15–16. Br’er Rabbit is a native folk hero like Till Eulenspiegel in Scandinavia and Ra in Egypt. The reference is to his escape from Br’er Fox and other enemies; he said, Do anything you want to me, but don’t, please don’t, throw me into the briar patch. So they did. It was where he wanted to be. He had immigrated.

  Line 17. “over here”—in fact the English press seemed to me to be sufficiently fair and wise in scrutinizing its alarming trans-Atlantic offspring. The poet, perhaps, is expressing an irritation with the new style of American self-criticism, a kind of Calvinism that assumes all those who hold power are damned, that nothing is relative, that rhetoric is truth, that destruction is action, and that a holiday has been declared wherein we are all excused from learning our lessons. Goodness, effectiveness, and love live among particulars; hate feeds on sweeping categories.

  Line 21. Doesn’t really do justice to the American accent. It is something, that accent, that happens between the throat and the heart, and has to do with bourbon, or heat, or talking to farm animals, or Jacobean pronunciation. Hearing across a London hotel lobby a silver-haired Texas businessman growl “My friend” to the fastidiously recoiling desk clerk, or eavesdropping on a bus while a pair of elderly female compatriots cackle and giggle together in their strange bubbling twang, or listening to a young American talk in that soft, rather cautious drawl (a drawl just as the American walk is, compared to the British strut, a prowl), I see those breezy big kitchens, and the lawns burnt brown by August, and the twirling sprinklers and fainting skies, and wonder at the cracked tender terrible c
onfident emptiness of it all, and wonder how it happened so quickly, in two or three centuries, and think that we are the last new race, and that we are all inside the bus now, and there is nothing to do but ride out together the billion or so years before the sun swamps the planet.

  Line 22. Advice I have often given myself.

  *No sentence in this set of aging impressions seems farther away than this one now, when all Western governments are of glum economists.

  AMOR VINCIT OMNIA AD NAUSEAM

  (After Awakening from Bruno’s Dream, by Iris Murdoch, and Falling into the Nursery)

  “Hey diddle—?”

  “Diddle.”

  “You’re thinking about God again.”

  It was true. She had been. The cat had been thinking about the fiddle. She had been looking at him. He had a long stringy neck and a plump brown resinous hollow body. His voice had vibrato. She had been his mistress for four years. It had been ecstatic but not extremely. She was a small-boned calico with high tender ears and a broad subdivided brow and a moist nose and an abrasive triangular tongue the color of faded drapes. She had been attracted by his voice. They had met at a benefit concert being given for churchmice. A bow had scraped him and he had sung. The cat had gone up afterwards and had rubbed herself against him and in her whiskers, so decisively parallel, he had recognized something kindred. He had sung to her of Viennese woods and she had related to him tales of her previous lovers. There had been a succession of toms behind the Bromley gasworks. They had had terrible voices. They had clawed her. They had bitten. As the palms of a religious come to be indented by stigmata so the image slowly formed itself upon her mind of a hairless toothless lover, fragile and lean. He would have resonance. He would be powerless to pounce. Her telling the fiddle all this in those days had pleased and flattered them both. That had been in those days. These were these days. All day she took a small abrasive pleasure in licking the calico fur of her chest with her triangular tongue while he failed to sing but instead leaned in the corner and almost hummed. She looked at him, his shape, his texture, his state of tension. One of her toms had been made into a tennis racquet. Perhaps that had been the attraction. She thought, I need a larger fate, warmer, kinder, yet more perilous in its dimensions, coarsely infinite yet mottled like me. Her vertically slit eyes, hoarding depths of amber, dilated at a shadow from her barnyard days as a kitten in the straw in Surrey. Something large had often been above her. Something smelling of milk. It had mooed.

  The cow was in love with the moon. Throughout the first three quarters she had wept solidly, streams and streams. The moon had become full. Tears poured down her muzzle in an invincible tide.

  “You are seeking,” said the full moon, “to purify yourself by giving rein to impossibility.”

  “Oh, God—I can’t—I don’t—”

  “Go on.”

  “When I first saw you, you were new—a sort of weak bent splinter of a sort of nibbled thing. How loathsome, thought I. I think even then I was protecting myself from the truth. I believe even then I deeply knew you were cheese. You began to grow. Mare Serenitatis showed, and one bluish blind mad eye, and the side of your lopsided leprous smile. At first I loved you in spite of your leprosity. Then I loved it because it was part of you. Then I loved the leprosity itself, and you because you were the vehicle whereby it was boldly imposed upon the cold night sky. I have never known pain so ungainsayable. I beg you, What—?”

  “Jump.”

  “Jump?”

  “Jump.”

  “Jump—”

  “JUMP!”

  “Imagine the moon,” advised a little dog who had been eavesdropping, “as only slightly higher than the Albert Memorial. Or consider the Albert Hall. It is round and deep and vast and many-entranced, like a woman’s love. Oppositely, the Memorial is phallic. Between them there is only the Kensington Road.”

  The cow was jumping. Splendidly. Galaxies concentrically counter-vaulted. Sphere upon diamantine sphere chimed the diatonic music that mesmerized Jerusalem the Golden. Time and space were fooled at their own game. Ab ovo, lactogalactic. He was near, Him, ashy, awful, barren, lunar, luminous, Him. He was Him. They grazed. The hint of a ghost of a breath of a touch. The cow was descending. The cow was reëntering Earth’s orbit. The atmosphere sizzled. The cat’s eyes dilated as the shadow gathered. She felt the ponderous loved thing close and warm above her.

  “Is it to be—?”

  “Can’t stop. Gravity.”

  “Oh—how right!” Black ecstasy flattened the cat. Her ego was, if not eliminated, expanded beyond the bounds of dissatisfaction. She was ever so utterly content. The little dog laughed to see such sport.

  The fiddle cleared his long narrow throat. “Er—when you laughed like that—I, er, twanged. Strange to say, I love you insanely.”

  “Too bad,” said the little dog. “I love the cow. This fact was asleep in me until I saw her jump. Christ, what an august uncanny leap that was!” He was a beagleish dog. A history of bitches had lengthened his ears and bloodied his eyes. His forepaws however had an engaging outward twist. He yapped amorously at the cow. She stepped backward into the fiddle. Her glossy hoof fragmented the ruddy wood.

  “Thank you—thank you—” sobbed the fiddle. He had been excessively pampered heretofore. It was bliss to be hurt. “Of course I love you.” He of course meant the cow. She became haughty. Her high hot sides made a mist like fog off the Greenwich Reach. She indicated distinctly that she had consecrated herself to the memory of the cat. Or rather the cat had become the angel of death whose abiding iron presence it is the destiny of all life to worship. What else is love? Nothing else.

  The little dog yowled. “I discover I was confused. It is the moon I adore, for having permitted itself to be so splendidly jumped.” He yowled and yowled.

  The moon beamed. “I love everyone. I shine on just and unjust alike. I give to all the gift of madness. That is my charm. That is my truth.”

  The fiddle lived with his wound for a fortnight, as one would live with the shifting shades and fluorescent evanescences of an unduly prolonged sunset. Then he found he could sing. He had once sung. He was again singing. He sang,

  “A questo seno, deh! vieni, idolo mio,

  Quanti timori, quante lacrime …”

  And the dish ran away with the spoon.

  CEMETERIES

  “PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS must have been very strange,” the tall young State Department man said to me. We were speaking of Russia in the 1930’s; we had just turned from the tomb of Stalin’s wife, a square stone column the height of a woman, capped by a sculptured female head with something touchingly vivid about the nape of the marble neck. Along tight paths we walked among the heavy tombstones of generals, scientists, commissars, engineers. Many bore inset photographs of the departed; a miniature iron tank adorned the tomb of a tank commander famous in World War II. A ballerina’s slippers had been carved on a stone block as if casually set there, creased and warm from use. It was a sunny October Sunday years before Svetlana’s memoirs had clarified the mysterious death of her mother; my escort had been describing to me the rumors of poisoning, of murderous Kremlin concubinage, of intricate betrayals.

  “Even more than usual,” I agreed, and tried to picture men and women rearing children, honoring parents, and seeking each other’s love in a decade like a low-ceilinged subway tunnel where the lights are flickering off and the air is suffocatingly stale. I couldn’t picture it, life continuing, but here was proof, here were the survivors, Soviet citizens honored in death, standing erect, in close order, in the open, enjoying the pale sunshine and late flowers of the day and season. Life-sized, with faces and trinkets, the tombs conveyed a cheerful substantial impression, as if this atheist state, like ancient Egypt, considered death a short and eminently practical voyage. I felt happy here; I am usually happy in cemeteries.

  In Highgate Cemetery—the old, neglected section above the famous monument to Karl Marx—the English journalist asked me about ora
l love. He was short and middle-aged and had cleverly sensed I would like a cemetery. It was again a warm October day. Intensely green overgrowth narrowed the paths and all but smothered the tombs. Some vaults had been burst open by flourishing saplings; there was a kind of mews of tombs, an arcade of green vault doors so rusted and silted shut no Judgment Day, one felt, could ever crack them open, though there were keyholes and doorknobs and numbers and knockers, as on any genteel, if shady, street.

  I discovered I had no opinion on oral love. I ventured that, all other things being equal, I was as much for it as not. In irritation the journalist tucked his notebook away and began to rail at the dead. Their pretensions to immortality enraged him. He rattled at the door of a grenadiers colonel interred in 1903 and invited me, where vandals had smashed a grating, to peer in and see how a burrowing creature, a rat or badger, had penetrated the coffin, adding sawdust to the rubble of bricks and powdered mortar. The pious mottoes—“From strength to strength in the everlasting,” “Love shines yet more brightly above”—abraded against my escort like supercilious assertions at a party where he was socially insecure. And indeed he came, with his cleverness, from a Midlands working-class family, and the tombs represented Victorian gentry. “The fools!” he shouted. “ ‘Honor perisheth never.’ Well, Mr. Nevil Cunninghame-Wright Esq., O.M., M.B.E., it bloody well has!” He kicked at the black drift of rustflakes and leafmold clogging the Cunninghame-Wright portal, and read the next motto. “ ‘Earth’s shadows testify to radiance eternal.’ Oh, my buggering God! Oh, my dear old Eustace Pickering, you poor old sodden mouse-nest of agglutinated bones, how do you like your radiance eternal now?”