Picked-Up Pieces (original) (raw)
The first of John Updike’s more than eight hundred contributions to The New Yorker was a comic poem titled “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” which appeared in the issue of August 14, 1954. A short story (“Friends from Philadelphia”) appeared two months later; his first book review, of an anthology of parodies, was published in 1961. The following are selections—fiction and poetry, unless otherwise noted—from his half century of writing for this magazine.
From “Dentistry and Doubt”
Burton’s heart beat like a wasp in a jar as the dentist moved across the room, did unseeable things by the sink, and returned with a full hypodermic. A drop of fluid, by some miracle of adhesion, clung trembling to the needle’s tip. Burton opened his mouth while the dentist’s back was still turned. When at last the man pivoted, his instrument tilting up, a tension beneath his mustache indicated surprise and perhaps amusement at finding things in such readiness. “Open a little wider, please,” he said. “Thank you.” The needle moved closer. It was under Burton’s nose and out of focus. “Now, this might hurt a little.” What a kind thing to say! The sharp prick and the consequent slow, filling ache drove Burton’s eyes up, and he saw the tops of the bare willow trees, the frightened white sky, and the black birds. As he watched, one bird joined another on the topmost twig, and then a third joined these two and the twig became radically crescent, and all three birds flapped off to where his eyes could not follow them.
“There,” the dentist sighed, in a zephyr of candy and cloves.
—October 29, 1955
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From “The Happiest I’ve Been”
Red dawn light touched the clouds above the black slate roofs as, with a few other cars, we drove through Alton. The moon-sized clock of a beer billboard said ten after six. Olinger was deathly still. The air brightened as we moved along the highway; the glowing wall of my home hung above the woods as we rounded the long curve by the Mennonite dairy. With a .22 I could have had a pane of my parents’ bedroom window, and they were dreaming I was in Indiana. My grandfather would be up, stamping around in the kitchen for my grandmother to make him breakfast, or outside walking to see if any ice had formed on the brook. For an instant I genuinely feared he might hail me from the peak of the barn roof. Then trees interceded and we were safe in a landscape where no one cared.
At the entrance to the Turnpike Neil did a strange thing; he stopped the car and had me take the wheel. He had never trusted me to drive his father’s car before; he had believed my not knowing where the crankshaft or fuel pump was handicapped my competence to steer. But now he was quite complacent. He hunched under an old mackinaw and leaned his head against the metal of the window frame and soon was asleep. We crossed the Susquehanna on a long smooth bridge below Harrisburg, then began climbing toward the Alleghenies. In the mountains there was snow, a dry dusting like sand that waved back and forth on the road surface. Farther along, there had been a fresh fall that night, about two inches, and the plows had not yet cleared all the lanes. I was passing a Sunoco truck on a high curve when without warning the scraped section gave out and I realized I might skid into the fence, if not over the edge. The radio was singing “Carpets of clover, I’ll lay right at your feet,” and the speedometer said 81. Nothing happened; the car stayed firm in the snow, and Neil slept through the danger, his face turned skyward and his breath struggling in his nose. It was the first time I heard a contemporary of mine snore.
When we came into tunnel country, the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip; many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the 10 A.M. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.
—January 3, 1959
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From “Flight”
At the age of seventeen I was poorly dressed and funny-looking, and went around thinking about myself in the third person. “Allen Dow strode down the street and home.” “Allen Dow smiled a thin sardonic smile.” Consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant and shy. Years before, when I was eleven or twelve, just on the brink of ceasing to be a little boy, my mother and I, one Sunday afternoon—my father was busy, or asleep—hiked up to the top of Shale Hill, a child’s mountain that formed one side of the valley that held our town. There the town lay under us, Olinger, perhaps a thousand homes, the best and biggest of them climbing Shale Hill toward us, and beyond them the blocks of brick houses, one- and two-family, the homes of my friends, sloping down to the pale thread of Buchanan Pike, which strung together the high school, the tennis courts, the movie theatre, the town’s few stores and gasoline stations, the elementary school, the Lutheran church. On the other side lay more homes, including our own, a tiny white patch placed just where the land began to rise toward the opposite mountain, Cedar Top. There were rims and rims of hills beyond Cedar Top, and looking south we could see the pike dissolving in other towns and turning out of sight amid the patches of green and brown farmland, and it seemed the entire county was lying exposed under a thin veil of haze. I was old enough to feel embarrassment at standing there alone with my mother, beside a wind-stunted spruce tree, on a long spine of shale. Suddenly she dug her fingers into the hair on my head and announced, “There we all are, and there we’ll all be forever.” She hesitated before the word “forever,” and hesitated again before adding, “Except you, Allen. You’re going to fly.” A few birds were hung far out over the valley, at the level of our eyes, and in her impulsive way she had just plucked the image from them, but it felt like the clue I had been waiting all my childhood for. My most secret self had been made to respond, and I was intensely embarrassed, and irritably ducked my head out from under her melodramatic hand.
—August 22, 1959
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From “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” a sports piece
For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy. . . .
The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, [Jack] Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his hat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.
Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. [Jackie] Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
—October 22, 1960
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Cosmic Gall
Every second, hundreds of billions of these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth! —From “An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,” by M. A. Ruderman and A. H. Rosenfeld, in American Scientist.
Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed—you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.
—December 17, 1960
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Telephone Poles
They have been with us a long time.
They will outlast the elms.
Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
In his search for game,
Run through them. They blend along small-town streets
Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
Our eyes, washing clean of belief,
Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such
Barnacles as compose
These weathered encrustations of electrical debris—
Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,
Could stun us to stone.
Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughened a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces.
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,
Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By being never green.
—January 21, 1961
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From “Lifeguard”
On the back rest of my lifeguard’s chair is painted a cross—true, a red cross, signifying bandages, splints, spirits of ammonia, and sunburn unguents. Never-theless, it comforts me. Each morning, mounting into my chair, my athletic and youthfully fuzzy toes expertly gripping the slats that make a ladder, it is as if I am climbing into an immense, rigid, loosely fitting vestment.
Again, in each of my roles I sit attentively perched on the edge of an immensity. That the sea, with its multiform and mysterious hosts, its savage and senseless rages, no longer comfortably serves as a divine metaphor indicates how severely humanism has corrupted the apples of our creed. We seek God now in flowers and good deeds, and the immensities of blue that surround the little scabs of land upon which we draw our lives to their unsatisfactory conclusions are suffused by science with vacuous horror. I myself can hardly bear the thought of stars, or begin to count the mortalities of coral. But from my chair the sea, slightly distended by my higher perspective, seems a misty old gentleman stretched at his ease in an immense armchair which has for arms the arms of this bay and for an antimacassar the freshly laundered sky. Sailboats float on his surface like idle and unrelated but benevolent thoughts. The soughing of the surf is the rhythmic lifting of his ripple-stitched vest as he breathes. Consider. We enter the sea with a shock; our skin and blood shout in protest. But, that instant, that leap, past, what do we find? Ecstasy and buoyance. Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.
—June 17, 1961
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From “Pigeon Feathers”
He dug the hole, in a spot where there were no strawberry plants, before he studied the pigeons. He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog’s hair; for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant, open earth he dropped one broadly banded in shades of slate blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over with rhythmic patches of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, yet with a salmon glaze at the throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.
—August 19, 1961
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From a critical essay on parody
Passionately creative spirits use parody, rather roughly; and if the tool snaps in their hands, what of it? The “Aeneid” is a parody of sorts and is most admirable where it is least Homeric, and we may be grateful that the parodic vestiges in “Madame Bovary” (e.g., the descriptions of Emma’s girlhood reading) are all but dissolved by Flaubert’s sympathetic immersion in his heroine. Some novels might be fairly described as ruined parodies. The little dolls whittled in fun escape the author’s derision and take on life. “Joseph Andrews” and “Northanger Abbey” are examples; “Don Quixote” is the towering instance. Cervantes’ masterpiece lives not because it succeeds as parody but because it immensely fails.
—September 16, 1961
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From a critical essay on Muriel Spark
Detachment is the genius of her fiction. We are lifted above her characters, and though they are reduced in size and cryptically foreshortened, they are all seen at once, and their busy interactions are as plain and pleasing as a solved puzzle. The use by a serious author of fun-house plots, full of trapdoors, abrupt apparitions, and smartly clicking secret panels, may strike American readers as incongruous. We are accustomed to honest autobiographical shapelessness. Ishmael and Huck Finn are alike adrift on vessels whose course they cannot control, through waters whose depths are revealed with a shudder. We remain somewhat aghast at a world that has never been tamed, by either a consecrated social order or an exhaustive natural theology. Our novels tend to be about education rather than products of it; they are soul-searching rather than worldly-wise. English fiction, for all the social and philosophical earthquakes since Chaucer, continues to aspire, with the serenity of a treatise, to a certain dispassionate elevation above the human scene. Hence its greater gaiety and ease of contrivance, its (on the whole) superior finish, and its flattering air of speaking to the reader who, himself presumably educated, may be spared the obvious. But in the last analysis human experience is mired in a solipsism to which America’s strenuous confessional exercises are faithful, and authors who rise above the accidents of autobiography are at the mercy of the accidents of knowledgeability.
—September 30, 1961
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Earthworm
We pattern our Heaven
on bright butterflies,
but it must be that even
in earth Heaven lies.
The worm we uproot
in turning a spade
returns, careful brute,
to the peace he has made.
God blesses him; he
gives praise with his toil,
lends comfort to me,
and aërates the soil.
—May 12, 1962
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From Notes and Comment
These new skyscrapers do not aspire to scrape the sky; at the point of exhaustion, where the old skyscrapers used to taper, gather their dwindling energy, and lunge upward with a heart-stopping spire, these glass boxes suffer the intense architectural embarrassment of having to house the air-conditioning apparatus, and the ascent of windows ends in an awkward piece of slatted veiling. A pity, perhaps, but well suited to an age of anticlimax. Glassy-eyed from contemplation of these buildings made entirely of windows, we walked west feeling oddly empty, as if we had dined on a meal of doughnut holes.
—October 13, 1962
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From “In Football Season”
Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold and lie heavy as the perfume of a flower shop on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.
—November 10, 1962
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From The Talk of the Town (“Faces”)
It occurred to us that there is one feature of the Manhattan landscape that we have never analytically described: the faces. So we went out and examined them. The first thing that struck us was how many, many there are. They occur, with rare exceptions, in a narrow belt of space between four and six feet above the pavement. A few glimmer darklingly from windows at an elevation higher than this, and once in a great while, usually late at night, a face may be seen on the pavement itself, but by and large the faces, with surprising conformity, restrict their ebb and flow, advance and withdrawal, as well as their more intricate cross- and counter-movements, to the narrow lateral area described above. Here they hover, like a dense pink cumulus, in a dogged flux as remarkable for its variety as for its nagging persistence.
—November 17, 1962
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From “On the Way to School”
I closed my eyes and relaxed into my warm groove. The blankets my body had heated became soft chains dragging me down; my mouth held a stale ambrosia lulling me to sleep again. The lemon-yellow wallpaper, whose small dark medallions peered out from the pattern with faces like frowning cats, remained printed, negatively in red, on my eyelids. The dream I had been dreaming returned to me. Penny and I had been beside a tree. The top buttons of her blouse were undone, pearl buttons, undone as they had been weeks ago, before Christmas vacation, in the dark Buick in the school parking lot, the heater ticking by our knees. But this was broad day, in a woods of slim trees pierced by light. A blue jay, vivid in every feather, hung in the air motionless, like a hummingbird, but his wings stiffly at his sides, his eye alert like a bead of black glass. When he moved, it was like a stuffed bird being twitched on a string; but he was definitely alive.
“Peter, time to get u-up!”
Her wrist in my lap, I was stroking the inside of her forearm. Stroking and stroking with a patience drawn thinner and thinner. Her silk sleeve was pushed up from the green-veined skin. The rest of the class seemed gathered about us in the woods, watching; though there was no sense of faces. She leaned forward, my Penny, my little dumb, worried Penny. Suddenly, thickly, I loved her. A wonderful honey gathered in my groin. Her flecked green irises were perfect circles with worry; an inner bit of her lower lip, glimmering with moisture, glittered nervously. The pores of her nose showed. She was unnaturally still; something was going wrong.
Sap was flowing from my extremities toward the fork of my body; I seemed delicately distended in the midst of several processes. When from downstairs a loud bumble came crashing, signalling that my father was going to look at the kitchen clock, I wanted to cry, No, wait—
“Hey, Cassie, tell the kid it’s seven-seventeen. I left a whole mess of papers to correct, I got to be there at eight.”
That was it, yes; and in the dream it didn’t even seem strange. She became the tree. I was leaning my face against the tree trunk, certain it was her. The last thing I dreamed was the bark of the tree: the crusty ridges and in the black cracks between them tiny green flecks of lichen. Her. My Lord, it was her: help me. Give her back to me.
“Peter! Are you trying to torment your father?”
“No! I’m up. For heaven’s sake.”
“Well then get up. Get up. I mean it, young man. Now.”
I stretched and my body widened into the cool margins of the bed. The sap ebbed. The touching thing was, in the dream, she had known the change was overtaking her; she had felt her fingers turning to leaves, had wanted to tell me (her irises so round) but had not, had protected me, had gone under to wood without a word. And there was that in Penny, which now the dream made vivid to me, what I had hardly felt before, a sheltering love, young as she was, recent as our touching was, little as I gave her; she would sacrifice for me. And I exulted through my length even as I wondered why. This was a fresh patch of paint in my life.
—January 5, 1963
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From Notes and Comment
It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved; only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who had happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses, temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.
What did it mean? Can we hope for a meaning? “It’s the fashion to hate people in the United States.” This quotation might be from one of a hundred admonitory sermons delivered after President Kennedy’s death. In actuality, it occurs in an interview granted in 1959 to a United Press reporter, Aline Mosby, by a young American defector then living in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. The presumed assassin did not seem to be a violent man. “He was too quiet, too reserved,” his ex-landlord told reporters. “He certainly had the intelligence and he looked like he could be efficient at doing almost anything.” In his room, the police found a map on which was marked the precise path that three bullets in fact took. The mind that might have unlocked this puzzle of perfectly aimed, perfectly aimless murder has been itself forever sealed by murder. The second assassination augmented the first, expanded our sense of floating on a dark sea of potential violence. In these cruel events, democracy seemed caricatured; a gun voted, and a drab Dallas neighborhood was hoisted into history.
—December 7, 1963
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From “Twin Beds in Rome”
Updike on the beach near his house in Essex, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1962
Photographs by Dennis Stock
The Maples embarked again upon Rome, and, in this city of steps, of sliding, unfolding perspectives, of many-windowed surfaces of sepia and rose ochre, of buildings so vast one seemed to be outdoors in them, the couple parted. Not physically—they rarely left each other’s sight. But they had at last been parted. Both knew it. They became with each other, as in the days of courtship, courteous, gay, and quiet. Their marriage let go like an overgrown vine whose half-hidden stem has been slashed in the dawn by an ancient gardener. They walked arm in arm through seemingly solid blocks of buildings that parted, under examination, into widely separated slices of style and time. At one point she turned to him and said, “Darley, I know what was wrong with us. I’m classic, and you’re baroque.” They shopped, and saw, and slept, and ate. Sitting across from her in the last of the restaurants that like oases of linen and wine had sustained these level elegiac days, Richard saw that Joan was happy. Her face, released from the terrible tension of hope, had grown smooth; her gestures had taken on the flirting irony of the young; she was almost ecstatically attentive to everything about her; and her voice, as she bent forward to whisper a remark about a woman and a handsome man at another table, was rapid, as if the very air of her breathing had turned thin and free. She was happy, and, jealous of her happiness, he again grew reluctant to leave her.
—February 8, 1964
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From a critical essay on Max Beerbohm
When all the minority reports are in, the trend of our times is overwhelmingly against formal regularity of even the most modest sort; in the “Cantos,” Pound has passed beyond free verse into a poetry totally arrhythmic. Our mode is realism, “realistic” is synonymous with “prosaic,” and the prose writer’s duty is to suppress not only rhyme but any verbal accident that would mar the textural correspondence to the massive, onflowing impersonality that has supplanted the chiming heavens of the saints. In this situation, light verse, an isolated acolyte, tends the thin flame of formal magic and tempers the inhuman darkness of reality with the comedy of human artifice. Light verse precisely lightens; it lessens the gravity of its subject.
—March 7, 1964
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From a critical essay on Jorge Luis Borges
What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvellous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place. Yet discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision. Though the population of the Library somehow replenishes itself, and “fecal necessities” are provided for, neither food nor fornication is mentioned—and in truth they are not generally seen in libraries. I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum. Literature—that European empire augmented with translations from remote kingdoms—is now the only world capable of housing and sustaining new literature. Is this too curious? Did not Eliot recommend forty years ago, in reviewing “Ulysses,” that new novels be retellings of old myths? Is not the greatest of modern novels, “Remembrance of Things Past,” about the writing of itself? Have not many books already been written from within Homer and the Bible? Did not Cervantes write from within Ariosto and Shakespeare from within Holinshed? Borges, by predilection and by program, carries these inklings toward a logical extreme: the view of books as, in sum, an alternate creation, vast, accessible, highly colored, rich in arcana, possibly sacred. Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life. Certainly the traditional novel as a transparent imitation of human circumstance has “a distracted or tired air.” Ironic and blasphemous as Borges’ hidden message may seem, the texture and method of his creations, though strictly inimitable, answer to a deep need in contemporary literary art—the need to confess the fact of artifice.
—October 30, 1965
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From “Museums and Women”
She was the friend of a friend, and she and I, having had lunch with the mutual friend, bade him goodbye and, both being loose in New York for the afternoon, went to a museum together. It was a new one, recently completed after the plan of a recently dead American wizard. It was shaped like a truncated top and its floor was a continuous spiral around an overweening core of empty vertical space. From the leaning, shining walls immense rectangles of torn and spattered canvas projected on thin arms of bent pipe. Menacing magnifications of textural accidents, they needed to be viewed at a distance greater than the architecture afforded. The floor width was limited by a rather slender and low concrete guard wall that more invited than discouraged a plunge into the cathedralic depths below. Too reverent to scoff and too dizzy to judge, my unexpected companion and I dutifully unwound our way down the exitless ramp, locked in a wizard’s spell. Suddenly, as she lurched backward from one especially explosive painting, her high heels were tricked by the slope, and she fell against me and squeezed my arm. Ferocious gumbos splashed on one side of us; the siren chasm called on the other. She righted herself but did not let go of my arm. Pointing my eyes ahead, inhaling the presence of perfume, feeling like a cliff-climber whose companion has panicked on the sheerest part of the face, I accommodated my arm to her grip and, thus secured, we carefully descended the remainder of the museum. Not until our feet touched the safety of street level were we released. Our bodies separated and did not touch again.
—November 18, 1967
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From “Plumbing”
The old house, the house we left, a mile away, seems relieved to be rid of our furniture. The rooms where we lived, where we staged our meals and ceremonies and self-dramatizations and where some of us went from infancy to adolescence, rooms and stairways so imbued with our daily motions that their irregularities were bred into our bones and could be traversed in the dark, do not seem to mourn, as I had thought they would. The house exults in its sudden size, in the reach of its empty corners. Floor boards long muffled by carpets shine as if freshly varnished. Sun pours unobstructed through the curtainless windows. The house is young again. It, too, had a self, a life, which for a time was eclipsed by our lives; now, before its new owners come to burden it, it is free. Now only moonlight makes the floor creak. When, some mornings, I return, to retrieve a few final oddments—andirons, picture frames—the space of the house greets me with virginal impudence. Opening the front door is like opening the door to the cat who comes in with the morning milk, who mews in passing on his way to the beds still warm with our night’s sleep, his routine so tenuously attached to ours, by a single mew and a shared roof. Our house forgot us in a day.
—February 20, 1971
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From a review of “Fear of Flying,” by Erica Jong
Erica Jong’s first novel, “Fear of Flying,” feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose. Mrs. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, surveying the “shy, shrinking, schizoid” array of women writers in English, asks, “Where was the female Chaucer?,” and the Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this. “Fear of Flying” not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Portnoy’s Complaint”—that of the New York voice on the couch, the smart kid’s lament.
—December 17, 1973
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From “Problems”
- During the night, A, though sleeping with B, dreams of C. C stands at the furthest extremity or (if the image is considered two-dimensionally) the apogee of a curved driveway, perhaps a dream-refraction of the driveway of the house that had once been their shared home. Her figure, though small in the perspective, is vivid, clad in a tomato-red summer dress; her head is thrown back, her hands are on her hips, and her legs have taken a wide, confident stance. She is flaunting herself, perhaps laughing; his impression is of intense female vitality, his emotion is of longing. He awakes troubled. The sleep of B beside him is not disturbed; she rests in the certainty that A loves her. Indeed, he has left C for her, to prove it.
P_ROBLEM_: Which has he more profoundly betrayed, B or C?
—November 3, 1975
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From a critical essay on Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Has any writer ever been as fascinated with noise, with bangs and buzzing and shouts and rattling that fill the world, so that it seems, like the Detroit factory to “Journey” ’s hero Bardamu, a “vast frenzy of noise, which filled you within and all around the inside of your skull and lower down rattled your bowels, and climbed to your eyes in infinite, little, quick unending strokes”? Céline’s style, with its famous three dots replacing all logical punctuation, became a hammering of “little, quick unending strokes,” driven with maniacal monotony toward a single point of deafness, of nothingness, of futility. If cause and effect are discarded, the world has no hinges for disassembly; nothing can be demonstrated save futility. This Céline was inexhaustibly eager to do. His novels, like Beckett’s, are testaments of defiance, gratuitous breakings of silence, a numbed survivor’s snarled testimony to catastrophes that are scarcely distinguishable. Agglutination and dissolution characterize the Célinean event; where a rationale might be perceived, it is suppressed.
—September 13, 1976
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From “Here Come the Maples”
Her hand, in its little cradle of healing apparatus, its warmth unresisting and noncommittal as he held it at her bedside, rested high, nearly at the level of his eyes. On the island, the beds in the log cabin set aside for them were of different heights, and though Joan tried to make them into a double bed, there was a ledge where the mattresses met which either he or she had to cross, amid a discomfort of sheets pulling loose. But the cabin was in the woods and powerful moist scents of pine and fern swept through the screens with the morning chirrup of birds and the evening rustle of animals. There was a rumor there were deer on the island; they crossed the ice in the winter and were trapped when it melted in the spring. Though no one, neither camper nor counsellor, ever saw the deer, the rumor persisted that they were there.
“Maybe you’re not underemployed—maybe you’re just overeducated.”
Why then has no one ever seen a quark? Remembering this sentence as he walked along Charles Street toward his apartment, that no one has ever seen a quark, Richard fished in his pockets for the pamphlet on the forces of nature, and came up instead with a new prescription for painkiller, a copy of his marriage license, and the signed affidavit. Now come . . . The pamphlet had got folded into it. He couldn’t find the sentence, and instead read, The theory that the strong force becomes stronger as the quarks are pulled apart is somewhat speculative; but its complement, the idea that the force gets weaker as the quarks are pushed closer to each other, is better established. Yes, he thought, that had happened. In life there are four forces: love, habit, time, and boredom. Love and habit at short range are immensely powerful, but time, lacking a minus charge, accumulates inexorably, and with its brother boredom levels all. He was dying; that made him cruel. His heart flattened in horror at what he had just done. How could he tell Joan what he had done to their marriage license? The very quarks in the telephone circuits would rebel.
In the forest, there had been a green clearing, an eye of grass, a meadow starred with microcosmic white flowers, and here one dusk the deer had come, the female slightly in advance, the male larger and darker, his rump still in shadow as his mate nosed out the day’s last sun, the silhouettes of both haloed by the same light that gilded the meadow grass. A fleet of blank-faced motorcyclists roared by, a rummy waved to Richard from a laundromat doorway, a girl in a seductive halter gave him a cold eye, the light changed from red to green, and he could not remember if he needed orange juice or bread, doubly annoyed because he could not remember if they had ever really seen the deer, or if he had imagined the memory, conjured it from the longing that it be so.
—October 11, 1976
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From Notes and Comment, on the death of Vladimir Nabokov
What matters now is that the least of his writings offered a bygone sort of delight: a sorcerer’s scintillant dignity made of every sentence a potentially magic occasion. He wanted the reader to share his extraordinary intimations; this generosity gave even his scholarly dissertations and diatribes a certain spaciousness, a giddying other dimension. He lived in the world, and more peripatetically and traumatically than many of us, yet in his art declined to submit to the world; rather, he asked that the world submit to the curious, spotty evidence of its own mimetics, its streaks of insane tenderness, its infinitely ingenious interior markings. Few minds so scientific have deigned to serve the gods of fancy; with his passion for precision and for the complex design, he mounted for display the crudest, most futile lurchings of the human heart—lust, terror, nostalgia. The violence and violent comedy of his novels strike us, in the main, as merely descriptive, the way the violences of geology are. He saw from a higher altitude, from the top of the continents he had had to put behind him.
Though some of his asides sounded arrogant, and even peevish, his life in its actions demonstrated immense resilience and a robust optimism. Few men who have lost so much have complained so little. He brought to America the body of a forty-one-year-old man of genius in his native language, but offered no excuse of exhaustion; the same active mind that entertained his insomnia with the invention of chess puzzles now turned to inventing himself anew, as an American writer. That he succeeded, and taught us new ways to use our language and to experience our milieu, is perhaps less remarkable than his willingness to try, when a hundred college Slavic Languages Departments held shelter against the raging of the strange democratic culture whose uncodified quirks swarmed about him.
—July 18, 1977__
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From “Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author”
Though Henry Bech, the author, in his middle years had all but ceased to write, his books continued, as if ironically, to live, to cast shuddering shadows toward the center of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered. To have once imagined and composed fiction, it seemed, laid him under an indelible curse of unreality. The phone rang in the middle of the night and it was a kid on a beer trip wanting to argue about the ambivalent attitude toward Jewishness expressed (his professor felt) in “Brother Pig.” “Embrace your ethnicity, man,” Bech was advised. He hung up, tried to estimate the hour from the yellowness of the Manhattan night sky, and as the yellow turned to dawn’s pearl gray succumbed to the petulant embrace of interrupted sleep. Next morning, he looked to himself, in the bathroom mirror, like one of those chinless misty visitors from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” His once leonine head, and the frizzing hair expressive of cerebral energy, and the jowls testimonial to companionable bourbon taken in midnight discourse with Philip Rahv were all being whittled by time, its relentless weazening. The phone rang and it was a distant dean, suddenly a buddy, inviting him to become a commencement speaker in Kansas. “Let me be brutally frank,” the dean said in his square-shouldered voice. “The seniors’ committee voted you in unanimously, once Ken Kesey turned us down. Well, there was one girl who had to be talked around. But it turned out she had never read your stuff, just Kate Millett’s condemnation of the rape bits in ‘Travel Light.’ We gave her an old copy of ‘When the Saints,’ and now she’s your staunchest fan. I don’t want to put any unfair pressure on, but you don’t want to break that girl’s heart. Or do you?”
“I do,” Bech solemnly affirmed. But since the dean denied him the passing grade of a laugh, the author had to talk on, digging himself deeper into the bottomless apology his unproductive life had become. He heard himself, unreally, consenting. The date was months away, and nuclear holocaust might intervene.
—August 21, 1978
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From a critical essay on Henry Green
His specific sensitivity to life itself, to the local (cosmically speaking) phenomena of living, carried with it an acute awareness of that which is not life, which threatens it. In “Blindness,” a rabbit is observed “feeding quietly, trembling at being alive,” and John Haye, touching his own scars, finds them “smooth varnished things unlike the clinging life of his skin.” The nervous skin of sensation just this side of darkness is where Green’s writing lives.
—January 1, 1979
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From a critical essay on Herman Melville
At the book’s climax, in a very curious phrase, when Moby Dick smashes the ship of his pursuers with “the solid white buttress of his forehead,” he is seen “vibrating his predestinating head.” Predestinating: the awful absence of God, of the Calvinist God, becomes, in a way, God. Moby Dick represents the utter blank horror of the universe if Godless. Melville has been described as a mystic, but to me he has nothing of mysticism such as might be ascribed to Wordsworth or D. H. Lawrence. Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive.
—May 10, 1982
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From “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” a memoir
Two sensations stood out as peculiarly blissful in my childhood, before I discovered (at the same time as leaving Shillington) masturbation. The first has been alluded to: the awareness of things going by, impinging on my consciousness, and then, all beyond my control, sliding away toward their own destination and destiny. The traffic on Philadelphia Avenue was such; the sound of an engine and tires would swell like a gust of wind, the headlight beam would parabolically wheel about the papered walls of my little room, and then the lights and the sound would die, and that dangerous creature of combustion and momentum would be out of my life. To put myself to sleep, I would picture logs floating down a river and then over a waterfall, out of sight. Mailing letters, flushing a toilet, reading the last set of proofs—all have this sweetness of riddance. The second intimation of deep, cosmic joy, also already hinted at, is really a variation of the first: the sensation of shelter, of being out of the rain, but just out. I would lean close to the chill windowpane to hear the raindrops ticking on the other side; I would huddle under bushes until the rain penetrated; I loved doorways in a shower. On our side porch, it was my humble job, when it rained, to turn the wicker furniture with its seats to the wall, and in these porous woven caves I would crouch, happy almost to tears, as the rain drummed on the porch rail and rattled the grape leaves of the arbor and touched my wicker shelter with a mist like the vain assault of an atomic army. In both species of delightful experience, the reader may notice, the experiencer is motionless, holding his breath as it were, and the things experienced are morally detached from him: there is nothing he can do, or ought to do, about the flow, the tumult. He is irresponsible, safe, and witnessing: the entire body, for these rapt moments, mimics the position of the essential self in its jungle of physiology, its moldering tangle of inheritance and circumstance. Early in his life, the child I once was sensed the guilt in things, inseparable from the pain, the competition: the sparrow dead on the lawn, the flies swatted on the porch, the impervious leer of the bully on the school playground. The burden of activity, of participation, must clearly be shouldered, and had its pleasures. But they were cruel pleasures. There was nothing cruel about crouching in a shelter and letting phenomena slide by: it was ecstasy. The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever. If we keep utterly still, we can suffer no wear and tear, and will never die.
—December 24, 1984
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From “At War with My Skin,” a memoir
Psoriasis keeps you thinking. Strategies of concealment ramify, and self-examination is endless. You are forced to the mirror, again and again; psoriasis compels narcissism, if we suppose a Narcissus who did not like what he saw. In certain lights, your face looks passable; in slightly different lights, not. Shaving mirrors and rearview mirrors in automobiles are merciless, whereas the smoky mirrors in airplane bathrooms are especially flattering and soothing: one’s face looks tawny as a movie star’s. Flying back from the Caribbean, I used to admire my improved looks; years went by before I noticed that I looked equally good, in the lavatory glow, on the flight down. I cannot pass a reflecting surface on the street without glancing in, in hopes that I have somehow changed. Nature and the self, the great moieties of earthly existence, are each cloven in two by an ambivalent, fascinated attention. One hates one’s abnormal, erupting skin but is led into a brooding, solicitous attention toward it. One hates the Nature that has imposed this affliction, but only this same Nature can be appealed to for erasure, for cure. Only Nature can forgive psoriasis; the sufferer in his self-contempt does not grant to other people this power. Perhaps the unease of my first memory has to do with my mother’s presence; I wished to be alone with the air, the sun, the distant noises, the possibility of my hideousness gradually going away.
—September 2, 1985
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From a critical essay on evolution
The non-scientist’s relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know. Giacometti’s wire-thin, eroded figures body forth the new humanism, and Beckett’s minimal monologuists provide its feeble, hopeless voice.
—December 30, 1985
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From a critical essay on William Dean Howells
What if you think that the narrative art derives its value and importance—its ethical status—from its imitation of reality, from its truthfulness to our mundane human condition? Then plot is justifiable only to the extent that reality itself can be said to have a plot, a design: plot becomes a philosophical and, indeed, a theological question. For the Greeks, plot traces the vengeance of the gods, often working their will through human passions. For Christians, plot echoes divine Providence and its ultimate justice. In “My Literary Passions” Howells recalled his youthful reading of Dickens:
While I read him, I was in a world where the right came out best . . . and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life . . . In that world of his, in the ideal world, to which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.
Howells’ fiction, however, reveals little instinctive belief that merit will in fact be crowned with success and that the real world must conform itself to the ideal. Raised rather haphazardly as a Swedenborgian, in an Ohio saturated with Protestant piety, he slowly but thoroughly became an agnostic, and, in his middle life, turned to Tolstoy and socialism in lieu of a supernatural faith. Purposefully, then, and not from any mere aesthetic disdain of flashy effectism, his fiction is formless, and was sensed as such by his contemporaries.
—July 13, 1987
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Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
—May 7, 1990
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From “A Sandstone Farmhouse”
Working his way, after her death, through all the accumulated souvenirs of her life, Joey was fascinated by the college yearbooks that preserved her girlish image above a line or two of verse:
She’s blest with temper, whose unclouded ray
Can make tomorrow cheerful as today.
Group photographs showed his mother as part of the hockey team, the hiking club. With a magnifying glass he studied her unsmiling, competitive face, with her hair in two balls at her ears and a headband over her bangs. Her face seemed slightly larger than the other girls’, a childlike oval broadest at the brow, its defenses relatively unevolved. As he sat there beside the cherry casket crying, his former wives and adult children stealing nervous peeks at him, the young woman ran for the trolley car, her breath catching, her panting mixed with a sighing laughter at herself, and the image was as potent, as fertile, as a classic advertisement, which endlessly taps something deep and needy within us. The image of her running down the street, away from him, trailed like a comet’s tail the maternal enactments of those misty years when he was a child—crayoning with him on the living-room floor, sewing him Halloween costumes in the shape of Disney creatures, having him lift what she called the “skirts” of the bushes in the lawn while she pushed the old reel mower under them—but from her point of view; he seemed to feel from within his mother’s head the situation, herself and this small son, this defenseless gurgling hatched creature, and the tentative motions of her mind and instincts as she, as new to mothering as he was to being a child, explored the terrain between them.
—June 11, 1990
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From “Farrell’s Caddie”
Farrell, prim and reserved by nature, had relatively little to offer of his caddie. He worried about the man’s incessant smoking, and whether at the end of a round he tipped him too much less than what a Japanese golfer would have given. As the week went by, their relationship had become more intuitive. “A 6-iron?” Farrell would now say, and without a word would be handed the club. Once, he had dared decline an offered 6, asked for the 5, and sailed his unusually well-struck shot into the sedge beyond the green. On the greens, where he at first had been bothered by the caddie’s explicit directives, so that he forgot to stroke the ball firmly, he had come to depend upon Sandy’s advice, and would expertly tilt his ear close to the caddie’s mouth and try to envision the curve of the ball into the center of the hole from “an inch an’ a fingernail tae th’ laift.” Farrell began to sink putts. He began to get pars, as the whitecaps flashed on one side of the links and on the other the wine-red electric commuter trains swiftly glided up to Glasgow and back. This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort. On the morning of his last day, having sliced his first drive into the edge of the rough, between a thistle and what appeared to be a child’s weathered tombstone, Farrell bent his ear close to the caddie’s mouth for advice, and heard, “Ye’d be better leavin’ ’er.”
“Beg pardon?” Farrell said, as he had all week, when the glottal, hiccupping accent had become opaque. Today the acoustics were especially bad; a near-gale off the sea was making his rain pants rattle like machine guns, and deformed his eyeballs with air pressure as he tried to squint down. When he could stop seeing double, his lie looked fair—semi-embedded.
“Yer missus,” Sandy clarified, passing over the 8-iron. “Ere it’s tae late, mon. She was never yer type. Tae proper.”
“Shouldn’t this be a wedge?” Farrell asked uncertainly.
“Nay, it’s sittin’ up guid enough,” the caddie said, pressing his foot into the heather behind the ball, so it rose up like ooze out of mud. “Ye kin reach with th’ 8,” he said. “Go fer yer par. Yer fauts er a’ in yer mind; ye tend t’ play defensive.”
—February 25, 1991
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From “Falling Asleep Up North”
Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, or one’s bed partner shifting position on the remarkably noisy sheets. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams’ uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unravelling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. The brain, circling in the cell of wakefulness, panics at the poverty of its domain—these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Life itself, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity, a hellish endless churning, in which one is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on every side the wide world gently, blessedly snores.
—May 6, 1991
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Briefly Noted, “U and I: A True Story,” by Nicholson Baker
“There’s no need to look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Mr. Baker extends the delightful mini-realism of his two short novels “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” into this book-length essay, a close and self-pitiless examination of his relationship with a mental figment derived from a fractional perusal and a few personal glimpses of the author John Updike. The younger writer looks to “Updike” less to learn how to write than to learn how to be a writer; he focusses therefore on the behavioral aspects of his topic’s oeuvre—dedications, prize-acceptance speeches, prefaces to special editions of his novels, even the phrases on copyright pages. Before composing this peculiar hommage, Mr. Baker resolved not to consult the works of its titular co-hero, and his memory, bracketed addenda reveal, usually tricked him. He marvels, for instance, at Updike’s creative use of the word “pool” to signify the head of a dandelion, when the word really employed was the unremarkable “poll,” as in “poll tax” and “to pollard.” Mr. Baker’s own vocabulary glitters on the verge of fireworks: he can be “as tarabiscoté as George Saintsbury or Henry James” while he goes about “impanating”—placing in bread—“doings in linear sentences.” His scrupulous wrestle with the impalpable can be quite comic, but his basic point is serious: out of the books of others we sift a book of our own, wherein we read the lessons we need to hear.
—May 13, 1991
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From “Playing with Dynamite”
He often felt now, going through the motions of living—shaving, dressing, responding to questions, measuring up to small emergencies—that he was enacting a part in a play at the end of its run, while mentally rehearsing his lines in the next play to be put on. It was repertory theatre, evidently. When he remembered how death had once loomed at him, so vivid and large that it had a distinct smell, like the scent of chalk up close to the schoolroom blackboard, he marvelled, rather patronizingly. When had he ceased to fear death—or, so to say, to grasp it? The moment was as clear in his mind as a black-and-white striped gate at a border crossing: the moment when he first slept with Lorna Kramer.
How inky-black her eyes seemed, amid the snowy whiteness of the sheets! There was snow outside, too, hushing the world in sunstruck brilliance. Meltwater tapped in the aluminum gutters. There had been a feeling of coolness, of freshly laundered sheets, of contacts never before achieved, by fingertips icy with nervousness. He had peeled off her black lace bra—her back arched up from the mattress to give him access to the catches—almost reluctantly, knowing there would be a white flash that would obliterate everything that had existed of his life before. She had smiled encouragingly, timorously. They were in it together. Her teeth were, after all, less than perfect, with protuberant canines that made the bicuspids next to them seem shadowy. Her pupils were contracted to the size of pencil leads by the relentless light; he had never seen anything so clearly as he saw her now, the fine mechanism of her, the specialized flesh of her lips, the trip wires of her hair; he got out of the bed to lower the shade, the sight of her was such a blinding assault.
A dull reddish bird, a female cardinal, was hopping about on the delicately tracked-up snow beneath the bird feeder a story below, pecking at scattered seed. A whole blameless town of roofs and smoking chimneys and snow-drenched trees stretched beyond, under an overturned bowl of blue light that made Fanshawe’s vision wince. He drew the curtain on it and in merciful twilight returned to where Lorna lay still as a stick. He heard his blood striding in his skull, he felt so full of life. Sex or death, you pick your poison. That had been forever ago. She was still younger and spryer than he, but all things were relative. He did not envy those forever-ago people, for whom the world had such a weight of consequence. Like the Titans, they seemed beautiful but sad in their brief heyday, transition figures between chaos and an airier pantheon.
—October 5, 1992
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From “Lost Art,” a memoir
At a certain votive stage, I cut out favorite strips and made little long cardboard books of them, held together with those nail-like brass fasteners whose flat stem splits open, it always occurred to me, like a loose-jointed dancer’s legs. In my passionate doting I cut cartoons out of magazines and pasted them in large scrapbooks, agonizing over which to choose when two were back to back—my first brush with editorial judgment. And of course I copied, copied onto paper and onto slick white cardboard, trying to master each quirk of these miniature universes. Li’l Abner’s hair was always seen with the parting toward the viewer, and Mickey Mouse’s circular ears were never seen on edge, and Downwind, in Zack Mosley’s “Smilin’ Jack,” was always shown with face averted, and Smokey Stover, in Bill Holman’s “Krazy Kat”-ish slapstick, kept saying “Foo” apropos of nothing and drove vehicles that were endlessly shedding their nuts and bolts. God—the heat, the quest, the bliss of it—was in the details. The way the letters of POW! or SHAZAM! overlapped, the qualities of the clouds that indicated explosions or thoughts, the whirling Saturns and stars that accompanied a blow to the head, the variations played upon the talk balloon, that two-dimensional irruption into the panel’s three-dimensional space, invisible to its inhabitants and yet critical to their intercourse—all this had to be studied, imitated, absorbed. The studying occurred mostly on the floor, my head lifted up on my elbows but not very high. When I drew, too, my nose had to be close to the paper, though I was not generally nearsighted. But the entering in required close examination, as though I were physically worming my way into those panels, those lines fat and slender, those energetic zigzags, those shading dots I learned to call Benday.
—December 15, 1997
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From “Christmas Cards,” a memoir
Some elemental, mournful triangle seems sketched: my grandparents, those distant, grave, friendly adjuncts, are absent from the room as I remember it. My parents are above me, the presents shorn of wrapping are around me, the three-rail Lionel tracks are by my knees, the tree with its resiny scent presses close. I have no memory of what I did receive that Christmas—the wooden skis, perhaps, with leather-strap bindings that never held, or a shiny children’s classic that would stay unread. I feel, for a moment, the triangle flip: through the little velvety box of cards I see my parents in their poverty, their useless gentility, their unspoken plight of homelessness, their clinging to each other through such tokens, and through me. I become in my memory their parent, looking down and precociously grieving for them.
—December 22 & 29, 1997
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From “How Was It, Really?”
Increasingly, Ed Franklin had trouble remembering how it had actually been in the broad middle stretch of his life when he was living with his first wife and helping her, however distractedly, raise their children. His second marriage, which had once seemed so shiny and amazing and new, now was as old as his first had been—twenty-two years, exactly—when he had, one ghastly weekend, left it. His second wife, Vanessa, and he lived in a house much too big for them yet so full of souvenirs and fragile inherited treasures that they could not imagine living elsewhere. In their present circle of friends, the main gossip was of health and death, whereas once the telephone wires had buzzed with word of affairs and divorces. His present wife would set down the telephone to announce that Herbie Edgerton’s cancer had come back and appeared to be into his lymph nodes and bones now; thirty years ago, his first wife, Alissa, would hang up and ask him if they were free for drinks and take-out pizza at the Bradleys’ this Saturday. Yes, she would go on, it was such short notice that it would have been rude from anybody but the Bradleys. They were socially voracious, now that psychotherapy had helped them to see that they couldn’t stand each other. Everybody’s mental and marital health, Ed remembered, was frail, so frail that women, meeting, would follow their “How are you?” with “No, how are you really?”
—May 17, 1999
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From “Elsie by Starlight”
From somewhere not too distant there was a hoot, an owl or possibly a signal from a murderous, demented gang that lived here in caves and came out at night. Suppose the car doesn’t start? he thought again. It often didn’t, in rainstorms, or on cold mornings, his father frantic, flooding the engine in his panic, so the wearying starter turned it over, uncatching, cooga cooga. “Did you hear something?” he asked Elsie.
She had left her loafers on the gritty floor of the car and had risen up, bare now even to her feet, to kneel on the seat beside him, stroking his face as he tongued her breasts; even in his state of growing terror he marvelled, holding her tight, at the give of a girl’s waist, at the semi-liquid space below the ribs and then, behind, the downy hard plate at the base of the spine and the glassy globes of her buttocks, smooth into the cleavage, all of it unified like the silvery body of a fish, all so simple and true, the simple truth of her, alive in his arms. He heard the distant hoot again. Something rustled near the car tires. She felt his mouth losing interest in her nipple, and began to listen with him. Behind the skin between her breasts, her heart was beating. “I don’t think so,” Elsie answered, her voice losing its movie-screen largeness and becoming small, with a childish quaver.
For reassurance she added, “He says nobody ever comes here except in hunting season.” But she, too, must have seen the cans and wrappers in the headlights, evidence of others. He: her father, the owner, all around them, hating Owen, what he was doing to his daughter, striving in every twig and trunk to eject the two of them. They listened and heard a noise so faint it could have just been saliva rattling in their held breath. Owen’s hands began to move again, gathering her tender taut nakedness closer to him, his fingertips finding a touch of fuzz in the cleavage behind. He wondered how to get his head down to kiss that soft shadow he had glimpsed; it seemed shyer, gauzier than what he had seen in dirty photographs and drawings, the few he had seen. His prick was aching behind his fly, and her hand dropped and, the first time ever, began fumbling at his belt buckle to release it, its imperious pressure, its closeted sour smell.
“That’s Craig, my mockumentarist.”
But he had spooked her, he had spooked them both, and the desire that dominated him, bare-chested though he was, was the desire to escape, to see if the car could start and he could back it up that narrow road without hitting a tree or a deep hole. Her father’s land, and her nakedness in it like a shout: Owen was vulnerable, criminal even—trespassing, and she a minor. He must restore her intact to society. The rustling near the tires became a sudden thrashing, a distinct lunge of the unknown.
“Elsie,” he whispered.
“What?” Perhaps expecting some avowal, some earthy plea.
“Let’s get out of here.”
She hesitated. He heard her heart beat, her breath whistle. “It’s up to you,” she decided in the mannerly voice that she had used with his mother. Then, catching his mood, she whispered, “Yes, let’s.”
—July 5, 2004
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From “My Father’s Tears”
Even my stay-at-home mother, no traveller but a reader, had a connection to the station: it was the only place in the city where you could buy The American Mercury and The Atlantic Monthly. Like the stately Carnegie library two blocks down Franklin Street, it was a place you felt safe inside. It had been built for eternity, when the railroads looked to be with us forever—a four-square granite temple with marble floors, a high ceiling whose gilded coffers glinted through a coating of coal smoke, and tall-backed waiting benches as grave as church pews. The radiators clanked and the walls murmured as if giving back some of the human noise they absorbed, day and night. The newsstand and coffee shop were usually busy, and the waiting room was always warm, as my father and I had discovered on more than one winter night. We had been commuters to the same high school, he as a teacher and I as a student, in secondhand cars that on more than one occasion failed to start, or got stuck in a snowstorm. We would make our way to the station, one place sure to be open.
We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half mile down the tracks warned of my train’s approach, that within a decade passenger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. It stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking space like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for most of the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress was slow, to be razed.
But my father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, that time consumes us—that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. I had taken my life from his, and now I was stealing away with it. The train appeared, the engine, with its shining long connecting rods and high steel wheels, out of all proportion to the little soft bodies it dragged along. I boarded it. My parents looked smaller, foreshortened. We waved sheepishly through the smirched glass. I opened my book—“The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton”—before Alton’s gritty outskirts had fallen away.
At the end of that long day of travel, getting off not at Boston’s South Station but at Back Bay, one stop earlier and closer to Cambridge, I was met by my girlfriend. How swanky that felt, to read Milton all day, the relatively colorless and hard-to-memorize pentameters of “Paradise Regained,” and, in sight of the other undergraduates disembarking, to be met and embraced on the platform by a girl—no, a woman—wearing a gray cloth coat, canvas tennis sneakers, and a ponytail. It must have been spring break, because if Deb was greeting me the vacation had been too short for her to go back and forth to St. Louis, where her home was. Instead, she had been waiting a week for me to return. She tended to underdress in the long New England winter, while I wore the heavy winter coat, with buckled belt and fleecy lining, that my parents had bought me, to my embarrassment, to keep me from catching colds up in New England.
—February 27, 2006
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From a critical essay on late works
Death, one would think, naturally haunts late works; yet perhaps it does not. A negation defies objectification; disappearance has no appearance. Adorno wrote, “Death is imposed on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory.” What does haunt late works is the author’s previous works: he is burdensomely conscious that he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting. “I am tired of my own thoughts and fancies and my own mode of expressing them,” Hawthorne wrote not many months before he died. Turning this way and that in his last creative torment, he kept meeting, with a shudder, his pet modes of imagining, chimeras on the fault line between the imaginary and the actual. Melville, no stranger to self-centered overcomplication, in old age found his way back to an earnest simplicity. Successful late works, shed of “obscuring puppy fat,” tend to have a translucent thinness.
—August 7 & 14, 2006
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From “The Full Glass”
I disliked these country visits, so full, I thought, of unnecessary ceremony. My great-cousin was a dapper chicken farmer who by the time of our last visits had become noticeably shorter than I. He had a clean smell to him, starchy with a touch of liniment, and a closeted mustiness I notice now on my own clothes. With a sort of birdy animation he would faithfully lead me to the spring, down a path of boards slippery with moss from being in the perpetual damp shade of the droopy limbs of a great hemlock there. In my memory, beyond the shadows of the hemlock the spring was always in a ray of sunlight. Spidery water striders walked on its surface, and the dimples around their feet threw interlocking golden-brown rings onto the sandy bottom. A tin dipper rested on one of the large sandstones encircling the spring, and my elderly host would hand it to me, full, with a grin that was all pink gums. He hadn’t kept his front teeth.
I was afraid of bringing a water strider up to my lips. What I did bring up held my nostrils in the dipper’s wobbly circle of reflection. The water was cold, tasting brightly of tin, but not as cold as that which bubbled up in a corner of that small-town garage, the cement floor black with grease and the ceiling obscured by the sliding-door tracks and suspended wood frames holding rubber tires fresh from Akron. The rubber overhead had a smell that cleared your head the way a bite of licorice did, and the virgin treads had the sharp cut of metal type or newly ironed clothes. That icy water held an ingredient that made me, a boy of nine or ten, eager for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another.
—May 26, 2008