Assorted Prose by John Updike
Modern Art
April 1964
A SHIFTING DISPLAY of modern art, by anonymous artists, is on view these days in front of the Museum of Modern Art, whose interior is closed for renovations. The show as a whole is marked by the slashing style, inflated scale, and promiscuous receptiveness to accident characteristic of Abstract Expressionism, but the ironic precision of Pop Art and even some neonaturalistic undertones are present as well. The show has been mounted in a deliberately jumbled manner, so that some of the most provocative works are virtually eclipsed, and the complete lack of titles will probably addle museum-goers accustomed to such helpful labels as “Painting No. 4” and “Form No. 5.” The narrow board catwalk the directors have provided permits a steady flow of traffic but does not permit much lingering.
Entering the exhibit from the east side, we were first impressed by a generously scaled arrangement, unpainted and stabilized by no binding agent other than its own weight, of hollow cement blocks in two sizes. The eye, roaming the stately surfaces of this elegantly patterned mass, is enchanted by the subtle variations in texture and occasionally startled by some adventure in the form—a pair of blocks laid diagonally, or even (in one instance) a block impudently stood on end. While the proportions of the pile approximate twice those of a sleeping woman, the organic reference is not pressed; rather, the material itself is permitted to speak, and speak it does—of a mineral universe where a kind of silicate transcendentalism replaces the pious fatuities of Madison Avenue and the Marine Corps Band. We hope the unnamed creator of this lovely piece does not too quickly desert his recalcitrant medium for the more facile pleasures of balsa wood and daubed burlap.
High above this sculpture hangs a truly impressive canvas (if that is the word) of metal and glass, the glass panes decorated with long strips forming the letter “X.” The “X” motif is repeated the length and breadth of the work, and while the canvas is not the sort of thing a collector of Degas pastels would care to hang in his living room, it convincingly carries its metaphor, which we took to be that contemporary existence is all façade. Moving on, we encountered a more intimate work, playful in spirit, though lethal in wit. Of welded metal, it may best be described as a deep trough mounted on four thin legs (suggesting a spavined horse?), the whole drenched in hot tar and issuing (whinnying?) clouds of steam. While one must admire the ingenuity of this Happening transposed into a mock-equine statue, the danger to passersby can only be deplored.
On the other side of the narrow gallery is a long polyptych of wood panels painted a creamy gray and stencilled in white with the repeated slogan “POST NO BILLS.” We assume that the same artist is responsible for the smaller work in red cloth, lettered, again in white, “DANGER.” The difficulty with incorporating legible words into such abstractions is that the literary content overpowers, as it were, the necessarily diffuse and delicate pictorial content. We responded much more warmly to the ductlike forms of extruded aluminum loosely mounted in a scaffold of unpainted but skillfully splintered wood, and to the stairlike arrangements of granite slabs, reminiscent of the earlier Lipchitz. Finally, we would like to single out for praise the very modest construction of yellow-painted metal, orange glass, and black wire; its effect, of potential luminosity, stood out like a signal in the mass of grandiose and dark dreaming surrounding it. In sum, the exhibited works compensate in energy for what they lack in finish.
The Assassination
November 1963
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 potential violence. In these cruel events, democracy seemed caricatured; a gun voted, and a drab Dallas neighborhood was hoisted into history. None of our country’s four slain Presidents were victims of any distinct idea of opposition or hope of gain; they were sacrificed, rather, to the blind tides of criminality and insanity that make civilization precarious. Between Friday and Monday, three men died: a President, a policeman, and a prisoner. May their deaths be symbols, clues to our deep unease, and omens we heed.
December 1963
CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR has the air of a birthday party carried on despite a death in the family; the usual garishness that exhilarates and grates is absent, though not visibly so. In search of the invisible difference, we wandered out onto Fifth Avenue last week, and the first thing we saw was the large American flag on the Bank of New York which, because it was hung at half-mast, was beating itself against the windows and the limestone of the building. The flag was, in the brisk wind of that day, like a hapless tricolor bird trying to roost. All up and down the Avenue, the half-mast flags were gray from rubbing against sooty façades.
We were led to notice, through observing the flags, how Christmas tends to stop at the second story. With a few exceptions (the annual festoon at Lord & Taylor, the pipes and choirboys up at Saks), the wreaths and tinsel give out above the display windows, like sea wrack above the high-tide line. And we noticed, too, how little movement there is this year in the Christmas displays. We did see a papier mâché Santa, gift certificate in hand, revolving his torso in the window of the John B. Stetson Company; he seemed to be doing the hula, or the upper half of the Twist. Except for him, the windows were strangely still.
Oh, we saw cheerful things: two nuns, themselves so immaculately packaged, carrying packages; the so-called Dog Bar at Wallachs (a little marble saucer set low to the pavement) splashing as self-importantly as a Neapolitan fountain; a harried lady doubling back to put a coin in a curbside Santa’s pot. Saks was a glorious grotto, a super-Antarctica of white stalactites and frosty Spanish moss, where even the floorwalkers’ white neckties had a polar primness, like the breasts of penguins. The women shopping were wonderful; this year’s high heels do not jounce the face but wobble the ankles, so that women walking have the tremulous radiance of burning candles as, step by step, they quiver in and out of balance.
But a sombre undercurrent persisted. Cartier’s wore her strands of dull-gold tinsel like an old woman wearing a mourning shawl. The beards of the Santa Clauses along the street looked transparently false—shiny, ill-fitted appendages of nylon. In the ol
We walked across the street to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It alone, on all the festive Avenue, seemed totally convinced. We had never so closely observed the central doors, which are usually open or obscured by darkness. The six bronze figures on them we had assumed to be iconographically standard, indistinguishably Biblical. This was not so, and for those as inexcusably unobservant as we are, we will list them, left to right, top to bottom. On the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in full-relief figures about a yard high, are St. Joseph, Patron of the Church; St. Patrick, Patron of This Church; St. Isaac Jogues, Martyr and First Priest in New York; St. Frances X. Cabrini, Mother of the Immigrant; Ven. Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks; and Mother Elizabeth Seton, Daughter of New York. The Lily of the Mohawks, with her stoic face, her Indian headband, and her Christian cross, seemed peculiarly relevant to the gently forlorn metropolitan flux around us. We do not often enough, perhaps, think of ourselves as successors of the Indians—subsequent tenants, as it were, of a continuing mystery. We went inside the cathedral. A Mass was in progress, and it was well attended. At side altars, banks of candles glowed and wavered like crowds of female shoppers. At the front altar, the priest, the back of his white chasuble shining, seemed the lone passenger on a splendid, house-shaped boat afloat before our eyes. Bells rang. People knelt. Again bells rang. The kneelers rose; the noise of their rising merged with the shuffle and scrape of footsteps around us, in the rear of the cathedral.
Outside on the street, Christmas did seem to have solidified. Cool sunlight was falling unruffled through the wind, and, looking at the crowds, we realized what the difference is this year. People are not determined to be jolly; they do not feel obligated to smile. From the sudden death of our young President, Americans may in time date a great physiognomic discovery: a human face may refuse, or fail, to smile and still be human.
T. S. Eliot
January 1965
THE DEATH of T. S. Eliot deprives the English-speaking world not of a literary master—he exists in his work and will continue to exist—but of a cultural presence that united two literatures and extended the venerable tradition of the presiding poet-critic into the present time. He was our Dryden, our Coleridge, our Arnold; and as long as he was alive our literature seemed in some sense restrained from the apocalyptic formlessness and obscenity that it seeks. Eliot’s peculiar authority derived from his own participation in this century’s despair; he was a veteran of anarchy who elected to rule, a great conservative containing a thorough radical. What was most peculiar about his authority, perhaps, was how generally it was acknowledged, considering the modesty, in both tone and bulk, of his production. He was like Valéry in the weight his silences borrowed from the penetration of his utterances. Of the many makers of modern literature, he was the most penetrating, and it is this gift of penetration that makes his poems so strangely unforgettable and his critical judgments, beneath their circumspection, so shockingly right. He had (an optional virtue for writers) an inability to write other than the truth—we mean, of course, the truth as he felt it—so that even the pallor and whimsey of the later plays are rendered supportable by a final earnestness. As a poet, he belongs not with the great verbal impresarios, like Shakespeare and Joyce, but with those great who, like Donne and Wordsworth, arrive in one’s imagination somewhat hobbled by an awkward honesty. Like Valéry, Eliot won, for his austerity and precision, that intensity of respect which passes into love. Unlike Valéry, he won it from a people, the English, who customarily reward genial copiousness. If, in the atmosphere of public veneration that attended his old age, in the hundreds of American classrooms where his passionate and enigmatic lines were dutifully charted, there was something stale and falsely official, Eliot’s sly gray image evaded incrimination. In trying to frame that image, we see it triangulated by three poets whom he had considered well. We mention, for metrical power, Milton. For impeccability, Marvell. And, for paternal elusiveness, Edward Lear.
* This remains our policy. In 1959 the United States proposed a treaty, accepted by twelve nations, which would preserve Antarctica as a territory of scientific research free from national claims. Though several nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, have established year-round bases, Antarctica remains the most amicable of continents. Russo-American amicability has a long history here: Captain Nathaniel Palmer’s claim to be its discoverer (in November, 1820, he sighted a strange coastline still named the Palmer Peninsula) was obligingly reinforced by von Bellingshausen, who habitually referred to the land mass as “Palmer’s Land.” Since 1956, scientific exploration, besides collecting much meteorological data, has discovered several striking mountain ranges and unexpected warm patches. The thesis that the continent is divided, beneath the bridging ice, by a strait between the Ross and Weddell seas has been advanced and generally rejected. Admiral Richard Byrd, whose lifelong devotion to the antarctic spanned the eras of individual heroism and of massive mechanized assault, died in 1957.
1 Below, in smaller type, you may have “Twirls 3– (4–, 5–) Hitter.” Two-hitters are “spun.” For a one-hitter, write “Robbed of No-hitter.”
‡ A poetic fiction, unsteadily maintained, is that the writer of “Talk of the Town” lives in Manhattan. In many cases, of course, he does.
§ Even as I wrote this, Pop Art and the Frug were kicking in the womb of Culture.
‖ Harold Rosenberg, who a few weeks later, in his review of this show, took testy exception to the enthusiastic paragraph in which his nameless colleague on Talk of the Town “babbled of green fields.”
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
FENWAY PARK, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, 1960, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Words-worthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’ last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. “WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams’ retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal
I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17–4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, “You maaaade me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it.…”
The affair between Boston and Ted Williams was no mere summer romance; it was a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It fell into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.
First, there was the by now legendary epoch1 when the young bridegroom came out of the West and announced “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ” The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams’ public relations.2 The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams’ case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren’t there. Seeking a perfectionist’s vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap3 to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters4