The Carpentered Hen Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1982 by John Updike.

  Copyright Renewed 1982 by John Updike.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Of the fifty-five poems in this book, thirty-eight, plus E, J, M, and Q of “A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects,” appeared originally in The New Yorker.

  Among the other poems, “The One-Year-Old” was first published in The Ladies’ Home Journal, “A Wooden Darning Egg” in Harper’s Magazine, “A Modest Mound of Bones” and “Ode III.ii: Horace” in Commonweal, “The Population of Argentina” in The Harvard Lampoon, and “Recitative for Sorely Tested Products” (under the title “Recitative for Punished Products”) in Punch.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Updike, John.

  The carpentered hen and other tame creatures.

  I. Title.

  PS3571.P4C3 1982 811′.54 81-48133

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96195-2 AACR2

  v3.1

  To Mary

  When she [Philosophy] saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words to my lamenting, she was stirred a while; her eyes flashed fiercely, and said she, “Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man? Never do they support those in sorrow by any healing remedies, but rather do ever foster the sorrow by poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto.”

  —BOETHIUS, DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  FOREWORD TO THE 1982 EDITION

  DUET, WITH MUFFLED BRAKE DRUMS

  EX-BASKETBALL PLAYER

  PLAYER PIANO

  SHIPBORED

  AN ODE

  THE CLAN

  WHY THE TELEPHONE WIRES DIP AND THE POLES ARE CRACKED AND CROOKED

  THE POPULATION OF ARGENTINA

  EVEN EGRETS ERR

  SCENIC

  RECITATIVE FOR SORELY TESTED PRODUCTS

  CAPACITY

  V. B. NIMBLE, V. B. QUICK

  TUNE, IN AMERICAN TYPE

  LAMENT, FOR COCOA

  SONG OF THE OPEN FIREPLACE

  MARCH: A BIRTHDAY POEM

  POETESS

  POOEM

  AN IMAGINABLE CONFERENCE

  SUNFLOWER

  THE STORY OF MY LIFE

  THE NEWLYWEDS

  HUMANITIES COURSE

  ENGLISH TRAIN COMPARTMENT

  TIME’S FOOL

  PHILOLOGICAL

  CLOUD SHADOWS

  A MODEST MOUND OF BONES

  TO AN USHERETTE

  SUNGLASSES

  YOUTH’S PROGRESS

  DILEMMA IN THE DELTA

  A WOODEN DARNING EGG

  MR. HIGH-MIND

  THE ONE-YEAR-OLD

  SUPERMAN

  PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, THE MADISON AVENUE HICK

  IN MEMORIAM

  LITTLE POEMS

  TSOKADZE O ALTITUDO

  PLANTING A MAILBOX

  TAO IN THE YANKEE STADIUM BLEACHERS

  DUE RESPECT

  TAX-FREE ENCOUNTER

  ROOM 28

  THE SENSUALIST

  MOUNTAIN IMPASSE

  SNAPSHOTS

  A BITTER LIFE

  A RACK OF PAPERBACKS

  GLASSES

  POPULAR REVIVALS, 1956

  ODE III . ii : HORACE

  A CHEERFUL ALPHABET OF PLEASANT OBJECTS

  A Note About the Author

  Books by John Updike

  FOREWORD TO THE 1982 EDITION

  This my first book yet had a long foreground of verse written since my early teens in imitation of Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley, Arthur Guiterman, Richard Armour, Robert Service, E. B. White, and others; the magical progression from frisson to words and thence from words to print first seemed feasible, to me, as a matter of stanzas and rhyme, and more poems than the number collected here were published in such available display cases as the Shillington High School Chatterbox, The Harvard Lampoon, and Jerry Kobrin’s hospitable column in the Reading (Pa.) Eagle. So when, in the June of my graduation from college, The New Yorker accepted “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” a long campaign bore fruit and an old dream came true. This was in 1954. In the following three years—spent in Moretown, Vermont; Plowville, Pennsylvania; Oxford, England; New York City; and finally Ipswich, Massachusetts—I ruthlessly exploited with my offerings the editorial breach I had made, and The New Yorker, perhaps bemused by the apparition of so eager a young practitioner of the dying art of light verse, accepted enough to make me feel that I had become a professional writer.

  The oldest poem in The Carpentered Hen is, if memory serves, “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked,” written in high school, under the influence of science fiction. “The Population of Argentina” is one of many composed at Harvard, though not one of the three included in Max Shulman’s Guided Tour of Campus Humor (Hanover House, 1955). The translation of the Horatian ode was done in my senior year for a competition, which it did not win; but years later Garry Wills, then a classics scholar, chose it for his anthology Roman Culture (Braziller, 1966). The latest poems here are “Planting a Mailbox,” penned in observation of a rural rite performed soon after my hopeful move to a small New England town, and “A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects,” written one letter per day while I lay on the sands of Crane’s Beach in the summer of 1957. The infant son the alphabet was dedicated to now is twenty-five; twenty-four years have passed since Harper & Row, then Harper & Brothers, brought out The Carpentered Hen in a pretty mint-green jacket, and twenty-three years since my first novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf, who now, as a present to me on my fiftieth birthday, issues this new edition of my slim and no doubt expendable fledgling volume. Thank you, Alfred. Thank you, all, from the Chatterbox on.

  Light verse did not need to exist as long as its qualities of playfulness and formality and mundane perception were present in the high verse of Donne and Marvell, Dryden and Pope. Even Blake, in such quatrains as those of “Infant Sorrow” and “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau,” had the trick of it. But with the onset of Romanticism an alternative convention emerged in the society verses of W. M. Praed (Don Juan’s tune minus Byron’s bass) and became mixed, in Carroll and Lear and Calverley, with parody of Victorian solemnities. Calverley, the most exquisite of these, had a pedantic, Horatian streak also present, some generations and an ocean removed, in that American promulgator of the deft art Franklin P. Adams. Light verse as practiced by F.P.A. and Guiterman, and then by White and McGinley and Morris Bishop, can now be seen as a form of Georgian poetry; the modernism of Eliot and Auden and Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens leaves no space where wit can strike its own separate music.

  Polishing my post-adolescent jingles, I took small notice of these historical trends. But I did notice, around the time of John Kennedy’s assassination, that the market for comic, topical rhymes was slowly drying up, and my inspiration docilely dried up with it. Light verse makes up the bulk of this collection and exactly half of my next, Telephone Poles (1963); the fraction in Midpoint (1969) and Tossing and Turning (1977) is progressively smaller. I write no light verse now. Yet the aesthetic bliss of generating such lines as “My stick fingers click with
a snicker” or “Superphosphate-fed foods feed me” or “thusiastically, and thus” is as keen as any I have experienced, and this week of preparing The Carpentered Hen for its new venture forth—changing a few words, readjusting the order slightly—has been one of peaceful communion with an estimable former self. Of course, in my early twenties I attempted not only light verse. The second poem here, and the second accepted by The New Yorker, is “serious” and has enjoyed a healthy anthology life, though its second stanza now reads strangely to students.* The lines welcoming my first child to the month of March (in fact she arrived late, on April Fools’ Day, the joke being on me) and those describing the inside of an English train compartment and Room 28 of the National Portrait Gallery seek to express what perhaps flickers at the edge of the light verse as well—the forebodings of a shy soul freshly embarked upon the uncharted ocean of adult life. “The blue above is mostly blue. / The blue below and I are, too.”

  Those lines were written in anticipation of the sea voyage that would take me and my pregnant young wife to England. Many of these poems were written there, of the oddities around me in a land whose details seemed lifted, page after page, from the illustrations to books of my childhood, and of an America that when glimpsed through the telescope of an overseas Life also seemed quaint. England, where Belloc and Stevenson wrote their Cautionary Tales and Child’s Garden of Verses—models of the light mode—and where the present poet laureate is the supreme neo-Georgian Sir John Betjeman, indulges sheer versifying more freely than our no-nonsense republic, and this collection (titled in its British edition Hoping for a Hoopoe) is colored for me by a green English something that tinged as well my few years in gray Manhattan.

  Like any art, light verse aspires to maximum density and an appearance of inevitability. On the other hand any ordering of language by means of meter and rhyme and their ghosts partakes of that “encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic” which Bergson defined as the essence of the comic. There is a lightness to all poetry, it being so drastic a distillation, and an echo of the primitive chant raised against the darkness. Light verse’s hyper-ordering of language through alliteration, rhyme, and pun is a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word not entirely lacking in Promethean resonance. High spirits are what Nature endows us with, that we may survive her crushing flux long enough to propagate. It will brighten my second half-century to have these old evidences of my own high spirits still in print.

  J.U.

  * * *

  * That is, they have never seen glass-headed pumps, or gas stations with a medley of brands of gasoline, or the word ESSO. Other unredeemably obsolete references include: the first-wave trade names invoked in “A Rack of Paperbacks”; the forty-eight states and innocent patriotism of “Quilt” in the “Cheerful Alphabet”; and, in “Popular Revivals, 1956,” the reference to the motion picture The Last Hunt, which starred Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger.

  DUET, WITH MUFFLED BRAKE DRUMS

  50 Years Ago Rolls met Royce—a Meeting that made Engineering History

  —advertisement in The New Yorker

  Where gray walks slope through shadows shaped like lace

  Down to dimpleproof ponds, a precious place

  Where birds of porcelain sing as with one voice

  Two gold and velvet notes—there Rolls met Royce.

  “Hallo,” said Rolls. His umber silhouette

  Seemed mounted on a blotter brushed when wet

  To indicate a park. Beyond, a brown

  Line hinted at the profile of The Town.

  And Royce, his teeth and creases straight, his eye

  A perfect match for that well-lacquered sky

  (Has zenith since, or iris, been so pure?),

  Responded, “Pleased to meet you, I am sure.”

  A graceful pause, then Rolls, the taller, spake:

  “Ah—is there anything you’d care to make?

  A day of it? A fourth at bridge? Some tea?”

  Royce murmured, “If your afternoon is free,

  I’d rather, much, make engineering history.”

  EX-BASKETBALL PLAYER

  Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

  Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

  Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

  At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

  Is on the corner facing west, and there,

  Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

  Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—

  Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,

  Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.

  One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes

  An E and O. And one is squat, without

  A head at all—more of a football type.

  Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

  He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46

  He bucketed three hundred ninety points,

  A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

  I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

  In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

  He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,

  Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,

  As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,

  But most of us remember anyway.

  His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.

  It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

  Off work, he hangs around Mae’s luncheonette.

  Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,

  Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.

  Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods

  Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers

  Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

  PLAYER PIANO

  My stick fingers click with a snicker

  As, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;

  Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker

  And pluck from these keys melodies.

  My paper can caper; abandon

  Is broadcast by dint of my din,

  And no man or band has a hand in

  The tones I turn on from within.

  At times I’m a jumble of rumbles,

  At others I’m light like the moon,

  But never my numb plunker fumbles,

  Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.

  SHIPBORED

  That line is the horizon line.

  The blue above it is divine.

  The blue below it is marine.

  Sometimes the blue below is green.

  Sometimes the blue above is gray,

  Betokening a cloudy day.

  Sometimes the blue below is white,

  Foreshadowing a windy night.

  Sometimes a drifting coconut

  Or albatross adds color, but

  The blue above is mostly blue.

  The blue below and I are, too.

  AN ODE

  (Fired into Being by Life’s 48-Star Editorial, “Wanted: An American Novel”)

  STROPHE

  Ours is the most powerful nation in the world. It has had a decade of unparalleled prosperity. Yet it is still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual.…

  ANTISTROPHE

  I’m going to write a novel, hey,

  I’ll write it as per Life:

  I’m going to say, “What a splendid day!”

  And, “How I love my wife!”

  Let heroines be once again

  Pink, languid, soft, and tall,

  For from my pen shall flow forth men

  Heterosexual.

  STROPHE

  Atomic fear or not, the incredible accomplishments of our day are surely the raw stuff of saga.

  ANTISTROPHE

  Raw stuff shall be the stuff of which

  My saga will be made:

  Brown soil, black pitch, th
e lovely rich,

  The noble poor, the raid

  On Harpers Ferry, Bunker Hill,

  Forefathers fairly met,

  The home, the mill, the hearth, the Bill

  Of Rights, et cet., et cet.

  STROPHE

  Nobody wants a Pollyanna literature.

  ANTISTROPHE

  I shan’t play Pollyanna, no,

  I’ll stare facts in the eye:

  Folks come and go, experience woe,

  And, when they’re tired, die.

  Unflinchingly, I plan to write

  A book to comprehend

  Rape, fury, spite, and, burning bright,

  A sunset at The End.

  STROPHE

  In every healthy man there is a wisdom deeper than his conscious mind, reaching beyond memory to the primeval rivers, a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life.

  ANTISTROPHE

  A wise and not unhealthy man,

  I’m telling everyone

  That deeper than the old brainpan

  Primeval rivers run;

  For Life is joy and Time is gay

  And Fortune smiles on those

  Good books that say, at some length, “Yea,”

  And thereby spite the Noes.

  THE CLAN

  Emlyn reads in Dickens’ clothes.

  Tennessee writes fleshy prose;

  William Carlos, bony poems.

  Esther swims in hippodromes.

  Ted likes hits but hates his fans;

  Gluyas draws Americans.

  Vaughan pens music, score on score;

  Soapy sits as governor.

  I trust everybody is

  Thankful for the Williamses.