Assorted Prose Read online

  Assorted Prose is a work of nonfiction.

  2012 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition

  Copyright © 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1965.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines and publishers, who first printed the pieces specified: THE NEW YORKER: Eight of the ten “Parodies”; all of “First Person Plural”; “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”; “Outing” and “Mea Culpa”; and nine of the seventeen “Reviews.” THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town,” “My Uncle’s Death,” and “Eclipse.” THE NEW REPUBLIC: “Poetry from Downtroddendom,” “Snow from a Dead Sky,” “No Use Talking,” and “Grandmaster Nabokov.” THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: “Franny and Zooey” and “Credos and Curios.” THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR: “Honest Horn” (under the title “The Classics of Realism”). CONTACT: “What Is a Rhyme?” AUDIENCE: “Why Robert Frost Should Receive the Nobel Prize.” DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY: “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” from Five Boyhoods, edited by Martin Levin. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY: “A Foreword for Young Readers,” Introduction to The Young King and Other Fairy Tales, by Oscar Wilde.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Updike, John.

  Assorted prose / John Updike

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64583-2

  I. Title.

  PS3541.P47 A6 1965

  818′.54—dc22 65013460

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: © Knauer/Johnston/Getty Images

  v3.1_r1

  FOREWORD

  IN THE TEN YEARS that I have written for a living, I have published a certain amount of non-fictional prose; this book collects all of it that I thought anyone might like to reread. Several baseball fans have asked me to put the “Williams article” in permanent form. My wife’s aunt once expressed a fondness for a paragraph of mine on Grandma Moses. Another woman declared herself peculiarly moved by “The Unread Book Route.” Otherwise, these pieces have been assembled here on my own initiative, as one more attempt to freeze the flux of life into the icy permanence of print.

  Concerning the first section: I wish that there had been enough parodies and humorous sketches to make a book of their own. My first literary idols were Thurber and Benchley and Gibbs; these few feuilletons are what remains of my ambition to emulate them. They were written between 1956 and 1961, when I was young at heart. I leave it to the percipient reader to deduce, where appropriate, that Eisenhower was still President and that Robert Frost was still alive.

  From August of 1955 to March of 1957 The New Yorker paid me to gad about, to interview tertiary celebrities, to peek into armories, and to write accounts of my mild adventures for its insatiable department “The Talk of the Town.” Who, after all, could that indefatigably fascinated, perpetually peripatetic “we” be but a collection of dazzled farm-boys? When New York ceased to support my fantasies, I quit the job and the city, though from time to time since, revisiting, I have made contributions to “Talk,” as well as intermittent editorial “Notes and Comment.” In sifting through the yellowing batch of my anonymous offerings, I have eliminated all those that, by mention of brand names, might give comfort to any public-relations outfit and tried to retain those paragraphs with some flavor, touch, or lyric glimpse of the city in them. The long “fact” pieces on pigeons and Antarctica I kept because they represent some honest research work. “Old and Precious,” besides being typical of the “visit” pieces I did by the dozen, supplied some crockery to a poorhouse fair of my own. The editorial comments seem a kind of collaboration between my own voice and a voice more confident than mine—more assured of the liberal verities, more serenely facetious.

  “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” was a five days’ labor of love executed and published in October 1960. For many years, especially since moving to greater Boston, I had been drawing sustenance and cheer from Williams’ presence on the horizon, and I went to his last game with the open heart of a fan. The events there compelled me to become a reporter. Without much altering the text, I have added, as footnotes,* some additional information not then available to me.

  The fourth section contains six items that at the least have as common denominator a first-person narrator. The first and longest was composed at the invitation of Mr. Martin Levin, for a collection of seven boyhood accounts, one to a decade; the number of boyhoods dropped to five, but a book did appear, published by Doubleday, and quickly disappear. Howard Lindsay, Harry Golden, Walt Kelly, and William K. Zinsser were the other boys. Though there are some tenderly turned passages, my reminiscence in general, I fear, has the undercooked quality of prose written to order, under insufficient personal pressure. The next two pieces, about uncles, are really short stories that took so long to get into print that they lost their place in line and must lodge forever here. The publicational history of the “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” is especially devious. Written, rejected, and set aside in 1956, it was revived and revised eight years later for a Saturday Evening Post “Special New York Issue” and, shortly thereafter, for reasons that a trip to Russia did not clear up, was reprinted, abridged, in the June 21, 1964, number of Pravda. The other three accounts do not claim to be untrue. The eclipse occurred on July 20, 1963.

  Of the books reviewed, some (the Sillitoe, the Aiken, the Agee, the Hughes) sought me out while others (the Salinger, the Spark, the Nabokov) were sought out by me. The Barth article, like the Williams piece, was written in acknowledgment of a debt, for Barth’s theology, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life). The theory of rhyme set forth in “Rhyming Max” is possibly totally wrong-headed; though on rereading it I was, curiously persuaded anew. Mr. Warner Berthoff, a professorial friend, suggested to me on a postcard that pronounced meter and rhyme are dancelike; and perhaps there is a rigidity which is not comic, the rigidity of ecstasy, of rite. But rhyme, I would say, with our present expectations of language, aspires to this intensity vainly. On the other hand, my expressed doubts about de Rougemont’s theories of Occidental love have faded in importance for me. His overriding thesis seems increasingly beautiful and pertinent; corroborating quotations leap to my eyes wherever I read:

  Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love.

  —Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form

  of Degradation in Erotic Life” (1912)

  Once upon a time there was a little fish who was bird from the waist up and who was madly in love with a little bird who was fish from the waist up. So the fish-bird kept saying to the bird-fish: “Oh, why were we created so that we can never live together? You in the wind and I in the wave. What a pity for both of us!” And the bird-fish would answer: “No, what luck for both of us. This way we’ll always be in love because we’ll always be separated.”

  —Vassilis Vassilikos, “The Well” (1964)

  Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end.

  —T. E. Hulme, epigraph for the poem “Mana Aboda” (c. 1912)

  Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot a
ct without moving toward a phantom. We can love only what we create.

  —Paul Valéry, “A Fond Note on Myth” (1928)

  * In the matter of footnotes: notes added in the preparation of this book publication are indicated by asterisks and allied typographic devices; footnotes originally part of a text (e.g., the Eliot parody) are numbered.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  PARODIES

  The American Man: What of Him?

  Anywhere Is Where You Hang Your Hat

  What Is a Rhyme?

  Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy

  On the Sidewalk

  Why Robert Frost Should Receive the Nobel Prize

  Confessions of a Wild Bore

  The Unread Book Route

  Alphonse Peintre

  Mr. Ex-Resident

  FIRST PERSON PLURAL

  Central Park

  No Dodo

  Voices in the Biltmore

  Our Own Baedeker

  Postal Complaints

  Old and Precious

  Spatial Remarks

  Dinosaur Egg

  Upright Carpentry

  Crush vs. Whip

  Métro Gate

  Cancelled

  Morality Play

  Obfuscating Coverage

  Bryant Park

  John Marquand

  Two Heroes

  Doomsday, Mass.

  Grandma Moses

  Spring Rain

  Eisenhower’s Eloquence

  Mostly Glass

  Three Documents

  Free Bee-hours

  Beer Can

  Modern Art

  The Assassination

  T. S. Eliot

  HUB FANS BID KID ADIEU

  FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

  The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood

  The Lucid Eye in Silver Town

  My Uncle’s Death

  Outing: A Family Anecdote

  Mea Culpa: A Travel Note

  Eclipse

  REVIEWS

  Poetry from Downtroddendom

  Snow from a Dead Sky

  Franny and Zooey

  Credos and Curios

  Beerbohm and Others

  Rhyming Max

  No Use Talking

  Stuffed Fox

  Honest Horn

  Faith in Search of Understanding

  Tillich

  More Love in the Western World

  A Foreword for Young Readers

  Creatures of the Air

  Between a Wedding and a Funeral

  How How It Is Was

  Grandmaster Nabokov

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Parodies

  THE AMERICAN MAN: WHAT OF HIM?

  (An Editorial Left Out of Life’s Special 35¢ Issue: “The American Woman”)

  EVER SINCE the history-dimmed day when Christopher Columbus, a Genoese male, turned his three ships (Niña, Pinta, Santa María) toward the United States, men have also played a significant part in the development of our nation. Lord Baltimore, who founded the colony of Maryland for Roman Catholics driven by political persecution from Europe’s centuries-old shores, was a man. So was Wyatt Earp, who brought Anglo-Saxon common law into a vast area then in the grip of a potpourri of retributive justice, “vigilantism,” and the ancient Code Napoléon. Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth Chief Executive, was male. The list could be extended indefinitely.

  Things were not always easy for the American Man. He came here in his water-weathered ships and did not find broad thruways, “cloud-capped towers,” and a ready-made Free Way of LIFE. No, what he found confronting him in this fabled New Land was, principally, trees. Virgin, deciduous, hundreds of feet taller than he, the trees of the Colonization left their scars on his mental makeup in the form of the high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and divorce that distinguish him from the men of Continental Europe or Australasia. While his brethren of the Old World were dandling perfumed coquettes on their silk-garbed knees, he was forging inward, across the Appalachians to the Great Prairie, where his woods-tested faith, tempered in the forge of Valley Forge and honed on the heights of Montcalm’s Quebec, took on a new austerity and became Evangelical Methodism. The Chevaliers of France didn’t give him pause, nor the wetbacks of Mexico. But he did not emerge on the spray-moistened cliffs of California the same man who sailed from Southampton, Brussels, or Rügen. As Robert Frost says, in his quietly affirmative lines:

  The land was ours before we were the land’s.…

  Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

  Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

  What is it that distinguishes the American Man from his counterparts in other climes; what is it that makes him so special? He is religious. He is quietly affirmative. He is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. He carries his burdens lightly, his blessings responsibly. Unlike the Oriental mandarin, he shaves his upper lip. Nor does he let his fingernails grow. Unlike the men of England, he does not wear gloves. Generally, he is taller than the men of nations (e.g., Nepal, Switzerland) where the average height is, compared to ours, laughable. All over the world, coolies and fakirs are picking themselves up out of the age-old mire and asking, “How can we become like Yanqui men?” Our State Department, cleansed of intellectual southpaws, works night and day on the answer.

  The American Man has his faults, too. He loves speed. Is speed, in every case, desirable, per se? The editors, no strangers to speed themselves, wonder, for “the race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” The American Man tends to swagger—understandably. He enjoys bowling. He spends more money on bowling each year than the entire income of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg since the Hapsburgs. Our critics in India, perhaps with justice, lift their eyebrows at this. But he is big, big—a big man—and he does things in a big way. He smokes too much and laughs too hard. The popcorn alone that he devours every year would outweigh Mont Blanc. He has more insidious shortcomings, too, but space limitations preclude our listing them.

  He can look back over a hundred and eighty years of steady betterment with forward-looking pride. Today, men are active in every walk of LIFE. Politics: Several of our ablest senators are male, and men like John Foster Dulles, Charles Wilson, and Dwight David Eisenhower figure prominently in Washington’s innermost councils. Religion: Reinhold Niebuhr has just this year delivered a sermon. Industry: Men are infiltrating the top levels of management, and already dominate such diverse fields as structural engineering, anthracite development, track and field events, and fire control. The Arts: Individual men like Herman Wouk and Archibald MacLeish have authored works in every way comparable to the best of Willa Cather or Mary Roberts Rinehart, the Queen of American Mystery Fiction.

  The American Man can be proud of his sex. In the home, though still docile, he cunningly gets his way. In the community, he is a model for all young boys, as to what manhood means. In the state, he pays income tax or sales tax, depending. In the nation, he makes up only slightly less than half the population. Perhaps most importantly, he has solved the millennia-old riddle of the sage:

  What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him?

  ANYWHERE IS WHERE YOU HANG YOUR HAT

  —Envelope shown in a subway poster, to illustrate the judicious use of postal-zone numbers.

  MAY 18, 19—

  DEAR MR. SMITH:

  “Howdy.” Guess you think this is peculiar, my writing you this letter when we live in adjacent postal zones, with only the Everyman General Merchandise Store and the All Souls’ Non-Denominational Church and the width of State Street separating us. But what with no mail coming in to Anywhere from the outside (except in December for Santa Claus), John Postmaster, our postmaster, is grateful for whatever jobs we can give him.

  Well, the point is (1) to wel
come you to Anywhere, the only town in the U.S.A. located on both the Continental Divide and the Mason-Dixon Line, and (2) to get acquainted, which is only natural, since between the Joneses and the Smiths most of the local population is accounted for, and we better make the best of it, or there won’t be no peace for anyone. (joke).

  We think of ourselves in these parts as pretty average American. There’s one industry on the east side, Acme Mfg., owned by A. Employer, and some foreign element work there, but by and large the fertile prairie all around keeps us white Protestants going. Since we aren’t located in any state, we’re pretty dependent on federal aid, and as a result the school is poor and the streets full of potholes and like the District of Columbia we can’t vote in national elections, but when you average it out each family has an income of $5,520 and 1.3 children, so we can’t kick. My own guess is you’ll like it fine here. The “Life” photographers come around pretty often so it isn’t as dull as it could be.

  Well I’ve just about filled two sides of my medium-wt. stationery, so I’d better say what I have to say, which is, “Come over sometime and let’s get acquainted.” All of the houses on Main St. are numbered 25, or 1, or 77, or something memorable, so my address won’t help you much, but mine is the big rambling house with the shady old elm out in front and the white picket fence.

  Best & again “welcome”

  Ralph C. Jones

  (Of the ensuing correspondence only the letters received by Smith, a shy, methodical man forever making small bundles of his private papers, have been preserved. We may presume that Smith’s replies were, like his person, colorless.)

  MAY 30, 19—

  DEAR HENRY,

  Rcd. yr. letter and enjoyed same v. much. That was quite a misadventure you had. I should have specified, I guess, that mine was the big rambling house with the old elm and picket fence and the porch swing out front. The people you blundered in on, to hear it from the neighbors, were the Does. Nice folks, pretty typical of what you’ll meet around here, when you’re better accepted. John does “clerical work” for Acme, and his wife Mary used to sell linen goods for the Ajax Dept. Store when she married him. She was far along in her 20s when that luckily happened. He’s a conscientious citizen, always filling out income tax forms and money orders and loan applications to show others how it’s done. They go to about a movie a week and have dinner out once a month. You probably noticed another woman, bony and slow-moving like John, with the throaty Doe laugh. That was his sister Miss Jane J. Being a spinster doesn’t seem to bother her much, I mean very much. She teaches third grade and has Social Security No. 000-00-0000. They let her stay in two tiny rooms over in the west wing.