Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  He was most affronted by the immense mausoleum of a man called Julius Beer. Chinks in its cupola had admitted generations of pigeons; their excrement, feathers, and corpses covered the marble floor. The mosaic murals of pre-Raphaelite angels were clouded with lime. The journalist, when I had satisfied his desire that I look in, put his mouth against the crusty grating and shouted, “Hooh!” Nothing happened. He bellowed louder, “HOOH!” Evidently, the pigeons were supposed to fly out. He squinted into the depths of the befouled and forgotten memorial. “Damn,” he said. “I think they’ve cleaned it up a bit.” He backed off, and his face brightened. “But can you catch that smell, that evil stench? It’s a pigeon Dachau. You ass, Julius, you absolutely silly puffed-up old capitalist ass, you were so full of yourself we don’t even know what you did!” It was true; no identification, not even dates, qualified the high carved name of Julius Beer, the emperor of doveshit.

  The cemetery had been private and fashionable. An outward-spreading cypress, now obscured by deciduous trees that had grown up, was to have been the center of a symmetrical system of vault lanes and individual tombs. One tomb, of a “menagerist,” had a smiling lion carved upon it. Deep in the woods—elm and oak and ailanthus that had taken root, perhaps, at the outset of World War II—a stone angel lifted her weather-blurred face, vague as Anglican theology, toward green leaves. We were far from the urban compactness of Novodyevichi Cemetery. I was impressed by England’s tropical luxuriance; the force so decisively tamed in the parks was here, untended, shattering marble and swallowing crypts whole. Yet I felt that these genteel 19th-century dead, who to judge from the novels about them had loved a country wildness, were not as overthrown as my escort believed. They were merely immersed, much as the living are immersed. A wild sapling grafts onto the spirit no less snugly than a toy tank.

  Both of my escorts—the State Department man tacitly, obliquely; the journalist boisterously, indignantly—disapproved of the dead, implying that they were still alive. A cemetery, which like a golf course bestows the gift of space, also touches us with the excitement, the generalized friction, of a party.

  The Chemin du Puy steeply climbed the hill from Antibes and on the long gradual downslope, before the farmhouse with the sign MÉCHANTS CHIENS, passed a cemetery of bright plaster, where things twirled to discourage birds. Though lonesome, I never dared enter; the dead were speaking French.

  In Mayrhofen, at Christmas, candles glowed and guttered in the snow, before strict upright stones of black marble. The faces of Tyrolean burghers alternated with that of an anguished Jesus. Hier ruhen in Gott, the stones said.

  And in Peredelkino, in the village graveyard where Pasternak is buried, scrolling iron crosses spoke of an Orthodox Russia where burial took place in springtime, and metal echoed the burgeoning shape of the flowers.

  In Prague, the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery were squeezed together like cards, conjuring up a jumble of bodies underneath. Visitors left pebbles on them instead of flowers. Was it an ancient custom, or something forced upon the Jews by Hitler? A kind of chapel here had walls gray with the names, six hundred thousand of them, of Jews whose death-dates were 1943, 1944, 1945. Years whose smoke permanently stained the ceiling of Heaven.

  And the mass graves of the Siege dead near Leningrad, acres of hummocks, like giant bulb beds in winter, marked with stone tablets 1941, 1942, 1943.

  And the Pyramids, and the gaily painted corridors leading into the robbed chambers of Ramses, and the even gayer cells of the nobles, into which light is shuttled by a set of mirrors held by silent brown guides. In Cairo, the necropolis is inhabited by children and beggars, and is a slum.

  The Long Island necropolis seen from an airplane: a pegboard that abruptly yields to the equally regular avenues of the living, each gray rooftop companioned by a green backyard pool, like a wide-awake eye.

  Also from the air, descending I think into Cleveland, I saw a little triangular family cemetery, precious soil spared from the corner of a field, like the book page whose corner I had turned down to mark my place.

  And the stingy clusters of markers, too many of them children, in rocky abandoned places once farmed, like Star Island off Portsmouth, or the mountainsides of Vermont north of Montpelier.

  In Marigot, on St. Martin’s, one noon, my wife and I walked a mile to a restaurant that was closed, along the shimmering white road, and came back along the beach to cool our feet, and came to a cemetery that was being nibbled away by the sea. There were no signs of an attempt to halt the gentle erosion; one tombstone was teetering, another had fallen upside down, and fragments of a third were being washed and ground into sand. We went up into the cemetery, and there, amid the French colons and the tessellated patterns suggestive of voodoo and the conch-shell borders and the paper flowers and the real flowers that looked like paper, my wife, starved and weary, sat on a crypt and dried her feet with her bandana and put on her shoes. I took her picture; I have the slide.

  Years before, when we were at college, a girl whose major was biology and whose hobby was fungi used to make me bicycle with her to ancient burying-grounds in Cambridge and Concord. There, on the tipping old Puritan slate tombstones half sunk in the earth and sometimes wearing artfully shaped weatherproof hats of lead, she would show me lichen, in a surprising variety of colors, each round specimen, scarcely thicker than a stain, somehow an individual creature or, rather, two creatures—a fungus living symbiotically with an alga. Whitish, brownish, bluish, the lichens enforced their circles upon the incised, uniquely graceful Puritan lettering and the winged skulls which, as the 17th century softened into the 19th, became mere angels, with human faces. She was, perhaps because she majored in biology, wonderful at sex—talk of oral love!—and the lichen, the winged skulls, the sweaty ache in my calves from bicycling, and her plump cleavage as she bent low for a determined inspection and scraping all merged in a confused lazy anticipation of our return and my reward, her round mouth. Cemeteries, where women make themselves at home, are in one sense dormitories, rows of beds.

  “But the view is so lovely,” my mother said to me. We were standing on the family burial plot, in Pennsylvania. Around us, and sloping down the hill, were the red sandstone markers of planted farmers, named and dated in the innocent rectangular lettering that used to be on patent-medicine labels. My grandfather’s stone, rough-hewn granite with the family name carved in the form of bent branches, did not seem very much like him. My grandmother’s Christian name, cut below his, was longer and, characteristically, dominated while taking the subservient position. Elsewhere on the plot were his parents, and great-aunts and uncles I had met only at spicy-smelling funerals in my remotest childhood. My mother paced off two yards, saying, “Here’s Daddy and me. See how much room is left?”

  “But she”—I didn’t have to name my wife—“has never lived here.” I was again a child at one of those dreaded family gatherings on dark holiday afternoons—awkward and stuffed and suffocating under the constant need for tact. Only in Pennsylvania, among my kin, am I pressured into such difficult dance-steps of evasion and placation. Every buried coffin was a potential hurt feeling. I tried a perky sideways jig, hopefully humorous, and added, “And the children would feel crowded and keep everybody awake.”

  She turned her face and gazed downward at the view—a lush valley, a whitewashed farmhouse, a straggling orchard, and curved sections of the highway leading to the city whose glistening tip, a television relay, could just be glimpsed five ridges in the distance. She had expected my evasion—she could hardly have expected me to pace off my six feet greedily and plant stakes—but had needed to bring me to it, to breast my refusal and the consequence that, upon receiving her and my father, the plot would be closed, would cease to be a working piece of land. Why is it that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself, like Titania calling Peaseblossom and Mustardseed from the air? Why is it that everyone else lacks the sanguine, corporeal, anguished reality of these
farmers, these people of red sandstone? When was Pennsylvania an ocean, to lay down all this gritty rock, that stains your palms pink when you lift it?

  Placatory, I agreed, “The view is lovely.”

  “Think of poor Daddy,” she said, turning away, Mustardseed dismissed. “He has no sense of landscape. He says he wants to be buried under a sidewalk.”

  The cemetery of the town where I live, like many, has climbed a hill, and the newest graves are on the top, arranged along ample smooth roadways of asphalt. Some friends of ours have buried children here. But I had stayed away until it was time to teach my son to ride a bicycle. It is safe; on weekdays few cars visit the fresh graves, with their plastic-potted morning glories and exotic metal badges from veterans’ organizations. The stones are marble, modernly glossy and simple, though I suppose that time will eventually reveal them as another fashion, dated and quaint. Now, the sod is still raw, the sutures of turf are unhealed, the earth still humped, the wreaths scarcely withered. Sometimes we see, my son and I, the strained murmurous breakup of a ceremony, or a woman in mourning emerge from an automobile and kneel, or stand nonplussed, as in a social gap. I remember my grandfather’s funeral, the hurried cross of sand the minister drew on the coffin lid, the whine of the lowering straps, the lengthening, cleanly cut sides of clay, the thought of air, the lack of air forever in the close dark space lined with pink satin, the foreverness, the towering foreverness—it does not bear thinking about, it is too heavy, like my son’s body as he wobbles away from me on his bicycle. “Keep moving,” I shout, the words turning chalky in my mouth, as they tend to do when I seek to give instruction—“the essence of the process is to keep moving!”

  LETTER FROM ANGUILLA

  February 1968

  UNTIL ITS REVOLUTION last summer, Anguilla was one of the most obscure islands in the Caribbean. A long, low coral formation of thirty-four square miles, it seems from the air a cloud shadow, or a shadow image of St. Martin, which lies twelve miles to the south and whose green mountains loom dramatically in the view from Anguilla. Whereas from St. Martin, Anguilla, at its highest elevation scarcely two hundred feet above sea level, can easily be overlooked. It is even obscure who named it “Eel”—the Spaniards, who may have cruised close enough under Columbus to call it Anguila, or the French, who, under Captain René Laudonnière in 1564, definitely called there, en route to Florida from Dominica, and may have bestowed the appellation L’Anguille. Both nations left this modest island to the British to colonize. In 1609, a Captain Harcourt, after touching at Nevis, “disembogued” on the north side of Anguilla, where “I think never Englishmen disembogued before us.” Southey’s history of the West Indies records under the year 1650, “The island of Anguilla, so called from its snake-like form, is said to have been discovered and colonized by the English this year; it was filled with alligators and other noxious animals, but the soil was good for raising tobacco and corn, and the cattle imported multiplied very fast. It was not colonized under any public encouragement; each planter laboured for himself, and the island was frequently plundered by marauders.”

  The lack of external encouragement sounds a constant note in Anguilla’s history. In 1707, Captain Thomas Bolton and nine other survivors of a sunken ship, after thirty-one days adrift in a small boat, were cast up at Long Bay. His journal acknowledges that “the People were very kind to us”—“The Islanders very much bewail’d our Condition, and were ready to fight among themselves, in shewing their Eagerness to welcome us to their Houses”—but complains of their stay that “the worst was, we could not have any News from other Islands; this being an Island of little Trade, and no Shipping.” J. Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America (second edition, 1741) states that in Anguilla people lived “without Government or Religion, having no Minister nor Governor, no Magistrates, no Law, and no Property worth keeping,” and adds that they “live poorly, and we might say miserably, if they were not contented.” In 1825, when Henry Nelson Coleridge visited Anguilla, the people seemed “a good sort of folks, though they have been living for a long time in a curious state of suspended civilization. They acknowledge the English laws, but the climate is said to induce fits of drowsiness on them, during which Justice sleepeth, and Execution tarrieth.” In 1920, Mrs. Katharine Janet Burdon, in A Handbook of St. Kitts-Nevis, wrote, “Strangers are so rarely seen that the last one who visited Anguilla, in 1917, an enterprising and eminent official from a neighbouring British Colony, was taken for a German spy, and greatly to his amusement was followed by the whole police force of the Island until he had presented his credentials to the Magistrate.” And in 1960, when my wife, three children, and I lived for five weeks in Sandy Ground, we had the pleasure of being, for intervals, the entire tourist population of the island. I will not forget an evening spent with Mr. Vincent Lake—one of Anguilla’s leading citizens, the scion of a family whose holdings in island land and cargo-carrying sloops amounted to a fortune—in which I found myself describing to him, as if to a latter-day Miranda, such commonplace wonders of the Western world as four-lane highways and skyscrapers and neon lights. He had never seen them even in a movie. In those days, when Anguilla was a British colony, a lonely generator supplied power to a telephone line serving fourteen users, most of them island officials. There was also a Social Center at the East End, with electric lights and a jukebox. Later that year, in September, the eye of Hurricane Donna passed directly over Anguilla. Miss Selma Buchanan wrote my wife, “Mrs you can only imagin what a time we had that night.… The Carty’s house half is gone and the Cocial Centre at the east end is gone there are only two school standing on island church to flew off every boat sink in the harbour so many big trees fell what a sight to see little Anguilla.” In 1968, returning, we find that the homes destroyed by Donna have been replaced, but the telephone line has not been reactivated.

  Henry Nelson Coleridge’s 1825 description still serves:

  Anguilla presents a very singular appearance for a West Indian island. A little wall of cliff of some forty feet in height generally rises from the beach, and when you have mounted this, the whole country lies before you, gently sloping inwards in a concave form, and sliding away, as it were, to the south where the land is only just above the level of the sea.… Seven-tenths of the country are entirely uncultivated; in some parts a few coppices, but more commonly a pretty species of myrtle called by the negros maiden-berry, seems to cover the whole soil: the roads are level grassy tracks over which it is most delightful to ride, and the houses and huts of the inhabitants are scattered about in so picturesque a manner that I was put in mind of many similar scenes in Kent and Devonshire. Indeed there were scarcely any of the usual features of West Indian landscape visible; neither of those prominent ones, the lively windmill or the columnar palm, was to be seen, and there was a rusticity, a pastoral character on the face of the land, its roads and its vegetation, which is the exact antipode of large plantations of sugar.

  The roads, at least to the driver of a rented jeep, are now quite undelightful puddings of potholes and coral protrusions, and the scanty crops of cotton and yams and sisal seem to occupy rather less than three-tenths of the soil, and a certain pastel Los Angeles look is creeping into Kent and Devonshire, but the dominant impression, of scattered homes and no windmills, remains to tell the tale: Anguilla was but lightly involved in the sugar economy. Captain Bolton in 1707, over sixty years after cultivation of sugarcane had been introduced into Barbados and the shift from tobacco to sugar had swept the Leeward Islands, found on Anguilla “2 or 300 English” engaged in the planting of tobacco, “which is highly esteem’d.” Anguilla was too rocky and dry for the great mechanized plantations the sugar industry required, and hence was exempted from the full force of the social transformation whereby communities of white planter-proprietors gave way to feudal estates supporting vast slave populations. Anguilla has no equivalent of the slums of St. John’s on Antigua or Basseterre on St. Kitts. As drought, piratical raids, and the abolition of slavery (in 183
4) thinned the ranks of the white settlers, the ungrateful land fell by default to the Negro inhabitants. By 1847, of about twenty sugar estates once under cultivation, only three or four survived. Mrs. Burdon states that as of 1911 the population consisted “almost exclusively of peasant proprietors.” She goes on, “Anguillans are a particularly sturdy, independent, intelligent type, their high character being developed by the hard school of nature in which they live, and by the system of proprietorship which has existed for generations.” The island, she notes, is free of tropical diseases to a unique degree, in part because “the people of Anguilla, differing from the usual habits of the West Indian negro, build their houses some distance apart.”

  So nature, in neglecting Anguilla, has not been entirely unkind; nor has the neglect been total. There is good fishing. There are pockets of fertile soil, and ample pasturage for goats and sheep. Ancient wells supposedly dug by the Caribs provide fresh water for those who do not have private cisterns. The harvest of salt from the large, diked saltponds behind Sandy Ground, a peculiar industry established in the early 1800’s, still goes on, generating an annual burst of employment, mostly for women. The export of Sea Island cotton, a silky, long-fiber variety used in underwear, produced for a time thousands of pounds in annual revenue and financed the construction of the island’s own ginnery—now defunct. And there exists a native tradition of shipbuilding; elegant all-wood hulls, the keel timbers shaped from branched tree trunks, dot the beaches, though work on them proceeds imperceptibly, at about the speed of coral formation. Fundamentally the economy runs by remittance. Anguillan men emigrate to work in the cane fields of Jamaica, or the oil refineries of Curaçao and Aruba, or the hotels and construction crews of St. Thomas. Though the men are gone for years, money returns regularly, and across the island pleasant and sturdy houses of imported cement block slowly rise. There are few tarpaper shacks; there is no begging. Literacy is a relatively high 70 per cent. A young American resident on Anguilla in recent months analyzes last summer’s upheaval as a middle-class revolution—Anguilla’s refusal to join the Socialist revolution being perpetrated in Basseterre by the Labor government of Robert Bradshaw. Bradshaw is the walrus-mustachioed, dictatorial premier of the St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla state to which Britain granted local self-government on February 27, 1967. St. Kitts and Nevis have long been one-crop sugar islands, and the sugar depression has created problems unknown in perennially depressed Anguilla, including a drastic split between the white proprietorial class and the black laborers, and the start of political terrorism. Last August, an unnamed Anguillan was quoted in the Times as saying, “St. Kitts is a millstone around our necks.”