Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Martin Kaplan ’71, between earning his summa in molecular biology and serving as head of every undergraduate organization but the YAF, has done a brave deed; he has descended into the dank abyss of the archives and clambered back with a staggering amount of Pooniana. Not only did he cull the back issues, he spelunked past slippery stalagmites of compacted Common Books into unthinkable caves of ancient correspondence, and even panned the memoirs of old grads for germane nuggets. The result is a beautiful and scholarly labor of love. Mr. Kaplan has drawn heavily on the parodies, which makes for something of a social history as well as a private album. He has given generous helpings of the cartoons and light verse, wherein the jejune can shine, and skimped mercifully on the prose. Here is nostalgia enough for anyone who has ever gone dizzy down the Narthex stairs, and laughter enough for any general reader. May the next ninety-seven years yield as happy a century’s harvest.

  To Soundings in Satanism, a collection of essays assembled by F. J. Sheed (Sheed and Ward, 1972)

  MOST OF THE CONTRIBUTORS to this volume are Catholic or European or both; an American Protestant feels an understandable diffidence at leading such a parade, as it confidently marches from the mustering ground of Biblical exegesis into the weird marshes of possession, exorcism, and witchcraft and onward to the familiar firm terrain of psychopathology and literary criticism. To be honest, most of us Americans who out of reasons quixotic and sentimental and inertial persist in playing disciple to Calvin and Luther and Henry VIII have trouble enough conceiving of a deity, without dabbling at diabolism. Can evil be a personal, dynamic principle? The suggestion seems clownish; instinctively we reject it. If we must have a supernatural, at the price of intellectual scandal, at least let it be a minimal supernatural, clean, monotonous, hygienic, featureless—just a little supernatural, as the unwed mother said of her baby. There is no doubt a primitive resonance in the notion of God battling, across the surface of the universe, with a malevolent near-equal. But can we morally tolerate the God who would permit such an opponent to arise, who would arm him with death and pain, who would allow suffering Mankind to become one huge Job, teased and tested in heavenly play? Alas, we have become, in our Protestantism, more virtuous than the myths that taught us virtue; we judge them barbaric. We resist the bloody legalities of the Redemption; we face Judgment Day, in our hearts, much as young radicals face the mundane courts—convinced that acquittal is the one just verdict. We judge our Judge; and we magnanimously grant our Creator His existence by a “leap” of our own wills, incidentally reducing His “ancient foe” to the dimensions of a bad comic strip.

  Yet these grand ghosts did not arise from a vacuum; they grow (and if pruned back will sprout again) from the deep exigencies and paradoxes of the human condition. We know that we live, and know that we will die. We love the creation that upholds us and sense that it is good, yet pain and plague and destruction are everywhere. It is not my province to discuss the shadowy Old Testament Satan so well evoked by Father Valensin; nor the demons swarming through all cultures, touched upon by M. Bazin in his essay on art; nor the disturbing boundary area where sexual hysteria and Christ’s ministry of healing and the (to a Protestant) incredible rite of exorcism intertwine. I would, timidly, in my capacity as feeble believer and worse scholar, open the question of the devil as metaphysical possibility, if not necessity. For the assertion “God exists” is a drastic one that imposes upon the universe a structure; given this main beam, subordinate beams and joists, if reason and logic are anything, must follow. But let a true theologian speak. Karl Barth somewhere, coping with the massive—nay, central—theological problem of evil, speaks of God “turning His back” upon a section of the cosmos. Unable to locate this frightening metaphor, I found instead, in Church Dogmatics, a systematic portrait of “nothingness,” which I here abridge:

  Only God and His creature really and properly are. But nothingness is neither God nor His creature.… But it would be foolhardy to rush to the conclusion that it is therefore nothing, i.e., that it does not exist. God takes it into account. He is concerned with it. He strives against it, resists and overcomes it.… Nothingness is that which God does not will. It lives only by the fact that it is that which God does not will. But it does live by this fact. For not only what God wills, but what He does not will, is potent, and must have a real correspondence.… The character of nothingness derives from its ontic peculiarity. It is evil. What God positively wills and performs in the opus proprium of His election, of His creation, of His preservation and overruling rule of the creature revealed in the history of His covenant with man, is His grace.… What God does not will and therefore negates and rejects, what can thus be only the object of His opus alienum, of His jealousy, wrath and judgment, is a being that refuses and resists and therefore lacks His grace. This being which is alien and adverse to grace and therefore without it, is that of nothingness. This negation of His grace is chaos, the world which He did not choose or will, which He could not and did not create, but which, as He created the actual world, He passed over and set aside, marking and excluding it.… And this is evil in the Christian sense, namely, what is alien and adverse to grace, and therefore without it. In this sense nothingness is really privation, the attempt to defraud God of His honour and right and at the same time to rob the creature of its salvation and right. For it is God’s honour and right to be gracious, and this is what nothingness contests.… In this capacity it does not confront either God or the creature neutrally. It is not merely a third factor. It opposes both as an enemy, offending God and threatening His creature. From above as well as below, it is the impossible and intolerable. By reason of this character, whether in the form of sin, evil, or death, it is inexplicable as a natural process or condition.… It “is” only as the disorder at which this counter-offensive is aimed, only as the non-essence which it judges, only as the enemy of God and His creation. We thus affirm that it is necessary to dismiss as non-Christian all those conceptions in which its character as evil is openly or secretly, directly or indirectly, conjured away, and its reality is in some way regarded or grouped with that of God and His creature.

  (Church Dogmatics, 3, 3)

  Pantheism on one side, Manichaeanism on the other, clutch at the theologian’s skirts. A potent “nothingness” was unavoidably conjured up by God’s creating something. The existence of something demands the existence of something else. And this same ontic inevitability serves Barth to explain man’s strange capacity, under God, to choose evil.

  Without this possibility of defection or of evil, creation would not be distinct from God and therefore not really His creation. The fact that the creature can fall away from God and perish does not imply any imperfection on the part of creation or the Creator.… A creature freed from the possibility of falling away would not really be living as a creature. It could only be a second God—and as no second God exists, it could only be God Himself.

  Are there not tendencies in our private psychologies that would give these cosmic propositions credence? Is not destructiveness within us as a positive lust, an active hatred? Who does not exult in fires, collapses, the ruin and death of friends? Who has seen a baby sleeping in a crib and not wanted, for an instant of wrath that rises in the throat like vomit, to puncture such innocence? What child is not fascinated by torture and monstrosity? What man can exempt, from his purest sexual passion and most chivalrous love, the itch to defile? What man or woman does not carry within, as tempter and last resort, the thought of suicide? After satisfaction, revulsion. Into the most ample contentment rushes, not an impulse to sing gratitude, but a frightful impatience that would, like Lucifer, overthrow the tyranny of order, however benign. Indeed, the more fortunate our condition, the stronger the lure of negation, of perversity, of refusal. For the more completely order would enclose us, the greater the threat to our precious creaturely freedom, which finds self-assertion in defiance and existence in sin and dreads beyond hell a heaven of automatons forever “freed from the possibility
of falling away.” Thus the devil—to give “nothingness” his name—thrives in proportion, never falls hopelessly behind, is always ready to enrich the rich man with ruin, the wise man with folly, the beautiful woman with degradation, the kind average man with debauches of savagery. The world always topples. A century of progressivism bears the fruit of Hitler; our own supertechnology breeds witches and warlocks from the loins of engineers.

  We resist what is good for us; humanity cannot be imagined doing otherwise and remaining human. Barth’s formulas fit: man is a battlefield, and Satan at best is “behind” one. But what of creation in general? Does a black-and-white opus proprium and opus alienum really satisfy our perception of the universe as a curious explosion, a chaos wherein mathematical balances achieve momentary islands of calm? Man as organism is beset not by “nothingness” but by predators and parasites themselves obeying the Creator’s command to survive and propagate. Disease is a clash of competing vitalities. And what of those shrugs, those earthquakes and floods and mudslides, whereby the Earth demonstrates her utter indifference to her little scum of life? Nature—Nature, whom we love more than our own bodies, from whose face we have extracted a thousand metaphors and affectionate messages—cares nothing for us. Is this the Satanic nothingness? In fact, it has been taken as such; the Christian West, with its myth of the devil, has taken the fight to Nature with a vengeance, has sought out the microbe and dammed the river and poisoned the mosquito in his marsh and gouged the mineral from its hidden vein and invented the machines that now threaten to scrape Nature into the infernal abyss as Lucifer’s angels were scraped from Heaven. Oriental fatalism, which would see death and nothingness as limbs of God, could not have done this. Yet we wonder, as now our human species like some giant strand of bacteria fills every vacuum and re-creates chaos artificially, if this was intended. Or if the essence of our creaturehood is coöperation, with even the devil.

  I do not know. I call myself Christian by defining “a Christian” as “a person willing to profess the Apostles’ Creed.” I am willing, unlike most of my friends—many more moral than myself—to profess it (which does not mean understand it, or fill its every syllable with the breath of sainthood), because I know of no other combination of words that gives such life, that so seeks the crux. The Creed asks us to believe not in Satan but only in the “Hell” into which Christ descends. That Hell, in the sense at least of a profound and desolating absence, exists I do not doubt; the newspapers give us its daily bulletins. And my sense of things, sentimental I fear, is that wherever a church spire is raised, though dismal slums surround it and a single dazed widow kneels under it, this Hell is opposed by a rumor of good news, by an irrational confirmation of the plenitude we feel is our birthright. The instinct that life is good is where natural theology begins. The realization that life is flawed admits the possibility of a Fall, of a cause behind the Fall, of Satan. How seriously we must take this possibility, and under what forms we might imagine it, these “soundings” will elucidate.

  *“Consequently, when, in all honesty, I’ve recognized that man is a being in whom existence precedes essence, that he is a free being who, in various circumstances, can want only his freedom, I have at the same time recognized that I can want only the freedom of others.” [En conséquence, lorsque sur le plan d’authenticité totale, j’ai reconnu que l’homme est un être chez qui l’essence est précédée par l’existence, qu’il est un être libre qui ne peut, dans des circonstances diverses, que vouloir sa liberté, j’ai reconnu en même temps que je ne peux vouloir que la liberté des autres.]

  GOLF

  The First Lunar Invitational

  FIVE SHORT YEARS after Alan Shepard, swinging an improvised 6-iron, took a one-handed poke at a golf ball on the moon, space suits were developed which permitted a nice full shoulder turn and the Vardon overlapping grip. The next year, 1977, the first Semi-Invitational Tournament was scheduled, under the joint sponsorship of NASA, ALCOA, M.I.T., and Bob Hope. An elimination tournament was held under simulated conditions in the Mojave Desert, and the refined field of thirty pros, plus twenty invited celebrities, was lifted from Cape Kennedy on the Monday following the Azalea Open. A maximum of three woods per bag was allowed, mallet-head putters were forbidden, and caddies were expected to double. Two modules, of the “bus” type developed by Lockheed to transport the football teams matched in the previous January’s Crater Classic, cast off from the mother ship Thursday morning, for a tee-off time of 9 a.m. Players grumbled of sleeplessness and the failure of officials to provide for a practice round, but praised the dry, open fairways and evidently relished the absence of wind and water hazards. “We’ll tear this sucker apart,” Lee Trevino’s voice crackled confidently across the vastness of space.

  Robert Trent Jones, working from detailed relief maps of the lunar surface, had designed with the aid of computers in Lacus Somniorum a 42,000-yard layout, threaded among the natural outcroppings and effluvia and the debris left by previous expeditions. The cups were cut and the eighteen cores thus taken shipped back to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston for pulverization, analysis, and adoration. The rules committee pondered the inch or so of ubiquitous dust and suspended the law against grounding your club in a sand trap. But preferred lies were banned. One of the invited amateurs, a Texas oilman playing snugly to a handicap of 23, had brought along a piece of Astroturf to make his own lies preferable. American flags of titanium foil, battery-powered to simulate rippling, vividly signalled the pin placements. The tee markers were pineapples rocketed fresh each day from the private Dole launching pad in Oahu, at not a penny’s cost to the taxpayer.

  The pros quickly adjusted to the extraterrestrial conditions. The dust, for instance, was “fluffy” rather than “gritty” and the ball could be “struck” rather than “stung,” as if from a lie of bedded dandelion polls; though it was hard to put enough “stop” on the ball for the rock-hard “greens” of smooth lunar gneiss. “It’s a chipper’s game up here,” big-hitting George Archer confided to the three hundred million televiewers of the tournament. “It’s like playing in a flour bin,” Miller Barber observed from behind his accustomed sunglasses, and the Earthbound gallery could verify, despite the ragged television transmission, that owing to the tendency of the divots to hang cloudlike in the air the players slowly accumulated bulk, like snowmen.

  Moon play had other peculiarities. Without an atmosphere, balls could not hook or slice, which licensed lashers like Arnold Palmer to overswing with impunity. Drives one mile long became standard by the second day of play. Smartly struck wedge shots, however, had a worrisome tendency to float into orbit; Jack Nicklaus lost two successive approaches to the fourth green this way, taking a humiliating eight on the hole. “It’s a puncher’s game,” said Nicklaus. “Keep the ball low, and don’t gulp oxygen.” A ball lying in shadow, even a mere few inches from the razor-sharp sunlight, had to be played promptly, lest it freeze and shatter when struck. And unexplained concentrations of basalt beneath the crust played magnetic havoc on some fairways; the shortest hole on the course, a 1,000-yard cutie nestled between a lava flow and a three-billion-year-old impact crater—for most pros an easy 8-iron—was birdied only four times the first two days of play.

  Toward the end of the second afternoon, as the frigid lunar dusk was tracing long shadows across the course, Spiro Agnew,* playing in a foursome with Bobby Nichols, Bob Lunn, and Robert McNamara, shanked a difficult spoon shot with such penetrating puissance that, from 900 yards away, it punctured the fuel tank of one lunar module and rendered it inoperable. The P.G.A. ruled from Palm Beach that those who failed to make the 36-hole cut should not only receive no prize money but should be the ones to stay on the moon and perish. Since this included most of the participating amateurs, several government officials demanded another ruling from the C.I.A., which refused, however, to identify itself over public networks. So the P.G.A. ruling appeared to stand. The next day, however, while the active field was playing the eleventh through fourteen
th holes deep in the Taurian Highlands, the disqualified golfers commandeered the operable module and rejoined the mother ship.

  “Easy as sinking a six-inch putt,” comedian Jerry Lewis later confided to newsmen.

  The tournament, interestingly, was played to a conclusion, though the backpack radios did not send sufficiently powerful signals to announce to Earth the winner. The Dole Company continued to rocket pineapples moonward, and the Mount Palomar Observatory reported sighting on Sunday afternoon a crisp hit to the left of the pin by a player who, judging from his restricted backswing, must have been Doug Sanders.