Assorted Prose (12 page)

MRS. D
. (
blushing
): Thank you. My dad always told me I had a good head for books; he wanted me to go on to normal school and be a teacher, but then I met Ralph, and—well, one thing led to another … (
Blushes more deeply
)

BLOUGH:
Ah, yes. Young love, young love. Well, Dorothy—You don’t mind if I call you Dorothy?

MRS. D.:
Sakes, no!

BLOUGH:
We look forward to having you on our show. We know you’re going to be a wonderful contestant.

MRS. D.:
Well, I hope so. It’s a wonderful honor for me. When I think of all those folks back in Elm Corners watching, I’m afraid I’ll get so nervous I won’t be able to make a word come out of my mouth. We all watch, you know, every day, fair weather or foul.

BLOUGH
(
dimpling profusely
): That’s the kind of tribute we value most. Dotty, I know you won’t be nervous; we’re a very close and friendly family on this show. By the way, the capital of Paraguay is Asunción.

MRS. D.:
Eh?

BLOUGH
(
consulting a paper on his desk
): A-s-u-n-c-i-o-n. Asunción. Better practice the Spanish accent in your hotel room tonight.

MRS. D
. (
flustering
): But—But—You think I might be asked that?

BLOUGH
(
his eyes narrowing thoughtfully
): Let’s put it this way, Dot. The odds on your being asked the capital of Paraguay are as good as the odds on your being asked anything else. Do you follow me?

MRS. D.:
I—I—I’m not sure.

BLOUGH
(
looking her right in the eyes—a devastating effect
): I think you do. And—oh, yes—an animal that carries its young in a pouch is a marsupial. M-a-r-s—

MRS. D.:
Yes, I know that. But why are you telling me?

BLOUGH
(
leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling, which is one great fluorescent panel
): Let me try to express myself. I like you, honey. I think you have what it takes.

MRS. D.:
But you mean that all this is a fake—that all those people answering questions are told the answers ahead of time?

BLOUGH:
Come, come, let’s not be
nai-eev
, dear. That’s show biz.

MRS. D.:
But I thought—The whole idea—I mean what made it interesting—

BLOUGH
(
cunningly
): It
is
interesting, isn’t it? I mean it’s a good show. Now, it wouldn’t be a good show if the clucks out there
knew
, but they don’t
know
, so they’re
happy
. Aren’t they?

MRS. D.:
Well, but my daddy always had this sign over his desk—
BLOUGH:
And we don’t want them to be unhappy, do we? We don’t want them, say, to have their own Mrs. D. show up as a dope tomorrow, do we? Listen, Sister, we can lace questions into you you won’t even know what they
mean
. Now, listen to reason. Be a doll.

MRS. D.:
Well, I’ve come all this way—

BLOUGH
(
jubilant
): That’s the girl! You’re on! And when the time comes to take your dive, you’ll take it, won’t you? Huh?

MRS. D
. (
growing fairly cunning herself
): Not this side of three grand I won’t.

BLOUGH
(
standing up, arms spread wide
): Baby! It’s a deal! (
They embrace, and, as the Curtain Falls, the West Declines noticeably
.)

July 1960

A
FTER A WEEK
of attending closely to the news coverage of the Democratic Convention, our chief impression was of the obfuscating, eclipsing, and molesting action of the news coverage itself. In nuclear physics there exists an “uncertainty principle,” which states that beyond a certain threshold atomic phenomena become hopelessly obscured by the interference of the observing process itself. It seemed to us that newsmen, or at least television interviewers, reached a comparable threshold at Los Angeles, and zoomed across it into an ugly chaos where nothing was visible except their own drawn, pale, bleating faces.

The essence of a news gatherer, like the essence of a window, is transparence. But the window on the convention that the television networks let into our living room was so badly besmirched by the shoulders, smirks, rudeness, and cynicism of the reporters that the actual proceedings were glimpsed fitfully, through momentary—and, indeed, reluctant—intermittances of news
gratia
news. We were asked to witness the apotheosis of the newsman as his own hero. Television, unlike anything that has gone before it, puts him in front of the camera. Nothing was clearer, in the wavery image piped into our poor old set, than the broadcasting apparatus itself. The men who used this apparatus, growing increasingly conscious through five days that their own presences were on the television screen and as big as anybody else’s, became increasingly clownish, aggressive, sarcastic, and self-important. The harassment of the politicians reached an obscene pitch. Senator Kennedy, trying to hack his way
through the jungle of thrusting mikes and brazen importunities that grew up in the corridors of his hotel, was physically pushed into a panicked anger that for a moment marred even his extraordinary composure. Senator Jackson, to name one of the lesser fry, not only was compelled to produce the magic words “I don’t know” a dozen times running but was persistently teased, by an especially pert microphonist, about his facial expression. With the disappointed candidates, the game seemed to be to goad them into sobbing. As for delegation chairmen, several of them were reduced to open-mouthed, staring silence by the forwardness of their tormentors, each of whom wore little electronic wings that presumably made him as exempt as an angel from mundane considerations like courtesy. These interviews, which were countless, not only looked ugly and were devoid of factual content but had the additional disagreeable effect of forcing good men to lie. Under the barrage of gouging inquiry, many of the political leaders retreated from the well-worn ground of politic discretion and took up positions that were plainly false. This was especially noticeable in the protestations of innocence and ignorance that surrounded the jockeying for the Vice-Presidential nomination.

Furthermore, the whole show was mangled by a policy of ad-lib interruption that allowed the bored and disconsolate ringmasters to break into any speech they considered dull with hot tips, chitchat, or yet another scabrous interview. It was as if a telecast of a baseball game were to be patched out, in the quiet innings, with shots of beneath-the-stands scuffling and film clips of last fall’s pro-football season. We submit that a person who wants baseball wants all the innings, and that a person who wants a convention wants the convention in all its quaint tedium, right down to the last soybean statistic, evocation of natural grandeur, and tribute to Southern womanhood.

July 1960

T
HE OTHER DAY
, we went over to Bryant Park and sat down, on the steps in front of the statue of William Cullen Bryant. The steps, though
this was early evening, were warm. Behind us Bryant, in bronze robes, slumped on a bronze throne; he looked like a very wise and dignified man who has been draped in yards of curtain material and then wetted down with a fire hose. A quadrangle of maples enclosed our lower vision. On our right, through the trees, peeped the peppermint-aqua of Stern’s awnings, saying “
COOL COOL COOL.
” Higher, on the sides of the old-fashioned skyscrapers that rim the Avenue of the Americas here, signs spoke loudly of far-off places. “A
CAPULCO
One airline all the way A
ERONAVES DE
M
EXICO
.” “M
ILLER
H
IGH
L
IFE
Brewed
Only
in Milwaukee.” “A
MBASSADOR
World’s Lightest Scotch.” Sombreros, tortillas, the Braves, bonnie braes, and bagpipes jumbled together in our mind. By shifting our vision slightly, west by southwest, we treated ourself to a delightful antique jumble of high architecture. Granite gingerbread, pseudo-cathedrals, tessellated brickwork, grilled windows, that Babylonian wall decoration native to the thirties—all these dear ghosts, so thoroughly exorcised by Mies van der Rohe and the glass marvels of the new Park Avenue, still reign untroubled above the southwest corner of Bryant Park. Only the tips of the trees, at this hour, displayed any sunshine; it raked their tops like an ethereal hedge clipper. In the canyon of Forty-first Street—a trough open all the way to Jersey—golden-white, on top of that blue-white, and, topmost, blue, an ebbing blue, were the sky’s colors. Behind a few of the windows a desultory secretary could be seen tidying up the final carbons of the day, and the first neon lights were glowing weak red.

Inside Bryant Park it was quiet. Cars swished and cursed, an airplane muttered, a child cried, but it was, on the whole, quiet. No zoos, no Shakespeare, no banjo-playing beatniks here. The people who come to this park, we decided, are the quiet people—lovers, thinkers, newspaper readers, derelicts, the retired, the out-of-work, the sleep-it-offs, and the dying. We looked at our fellows in the park; they were, we estimated, about four-fifths male, one-third colored, and two-thirds solitary, with a median age of fifty-one. In front of us, on the steps, a girl with chestnut hair that she could have sat on arrived, carrying books. This wonderful hair was done up in a long pony-tail, and she sat not on it but on a newspaper that her companion spread on the steps for her. She arranged herself and her books with a touching care. She moved not with the jerky, spiked walk of a secretary but with the languid calm of a student, on sandals of soft leather and thonged thought.

No, the secretary kind of girl was nowhere in the park, or was just passing through, like her counterpart the businessman. The businessmen, always in pairs and always talking, in creased suits of a cunning summer weave, strode by on the flagstones, on their way to somewhere else. We admired them, these children of the morning, these creators, but they did not admire us in turn. We were, we residents of Bryant Park, a quiet, uneasy, twilight lot. Those of us who could not find seats stood or wandered in foreboding little circles, facing in different directions and often looking up, as if a catastrophe—our own mortality or something vaguer—were faintly screaming toward us from beyond the tops of the maples. For some of us, catastrophe had already come: a young man with bright-carrot hair lay stretched out face down on a bench; a child kept crying; an old man in clothes too big for him stared blindly with alcohol-gutted eyes at the scuttling pigeons.

It abruptly occurred to us that we were near the center of the world. Within a few blocks of us, Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street made their celebrated intersection. Times Square hoisted its gritty emblems, the greatest public library in the world reared its wisdom, the densest shopping area in the country offered its wares, and, in a show window two blocks away, the crown jewels of England in all their splendor were assembled to advertise one more airline. Where but here, in Bryant Park, was the bull’s-eye of our city? As surely as if we were in the Forum of 160, on the Ile de la Cité in 1260, or in Piccadilly Circus in 1860, we sat, now, in 1960, in the center of Western civilization. Not quite; we sat to one side of the middle of the steps. To our right, in the exact middle, was a weary old man in a dusty blue sweater sitting on a tabloid, chewing a cigar, and blinking like Tiresias.

August 1960

J
OHN
P. M
ARQUAND
wrote many good books and one for which we cannot be grateful enough.
The Late George Apley
is many things. It is a sentimental
novel that fully satisfies the expectations aroused in us when we approach a professional product. It is the finest extended parody composed in modern America, the stately, cloying, and somewhat melodious prose of Mr. Willing, “Boston’s Dean of Letters,” being so surely wedded to its subject that it can be overlooked as a continuous invention of high literary irony. It is a detailed valentine to a city, Boston, and an admirably wrought fictional monument to the nation’s Protestant elite. Once Marquand had made, with a satire no less ferocious for being urbane, the point that the Apleys are not better than other men, he went on, more remarkably, to suggest that they are no worse. At the end of a life bounded on the south by Providence and on the north by Portland, a life laborious and timid, smug and mean, George Apley sits down and writes his son a farewell letter in which snobbery, generosity, pomposity, and courage ecstatically merge. And when, having settled the last formality of his own funeral, he writes, “During the last week I have been working on several plans to rid the attic of those gray squirrels, I think now the only thing to do is to keep watch near the limb of the elm tree and to shoot them as they enter by that hole under the gutter,” centuries are stripped away, the woodsman at the marrow of the Brahmin stands revealed, and we can all go about our business with refined hearts.

We ourself met Mr. Marquand twice, both times briefly. He was, perhaps, an author who aspired to earthly dignity rather than unearthly glory. Dignity he had achieved, and he wore it well, but he was the creator of the “Marquand hero,” and not this hero himself. His evenly rosy complexion seemed distinctly French, and his remarks, delivered to a stranger among the diffident courtesies of a cocktail party, had a flattering precision and pertinence. The second time we saw him was five days before he died. He seemed in excellent health. It was the week of the Democratic Convention, and he surprised us (for we had understood that he was a Republican) by announcing his intention to vote for Senator Kennedy and by contributing, as his share of the talk (he contributed no more than his share; he still had, impressive in an honored, elderly man, the writer’s habit of listening), a personal anecdote about the nominee’s grandfather, whom he called Honey Fitz.