Assorted Prose (15 page)

Gordon Cooper, over a hundred miles above the scorned surface of the earth, saw the smoke from Tibetan villages. Above the Arabian peninsula, he saw a boat going down a river, “creating a wake behind it.” He saw his own neighborhood in Houston, although trees obscured the sight of his own house. On the other hand, Red China, he said, “looks just like it looks on the map.” He slept; he ate fruitcake and brownies; he tucked his thumbs into his harness so his arms would stop floating away. When the time came to bring the spacecraft down, the machinery balked and he brought it down himself, looking out the window at the horizon to keep himself upright.

Why is it that the details of space flights grow increasingly homely and comforting? When Alan Shepard went zooming into the airless altitude above the Caribbean, we held our breath, horror-struck. When John Glenn girdled the earth three times one morning, his heroism seemed
supernal. It remained for Gordon Cooper to domesticate space; his dozing nonchalance has made the void more habitable. We are glad that he came back safely and that on emerging from the capsule (in his words) “I began to get a little dizzy.… After I’d taken a step or two I felt perfectly all right.” We are delighted that the man proved himself a better pilot than his machine. And we are especially happy that, from the ghastly height of the future, he could look down and see the smoke of hearth fires kindled by Tibetan peasants.

The catalogue is a souvenir of a show we saw last week, and greatly enjoyed. “Enjoyed,” surprisingly, is the word, though the art assembled on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, being the work mainly of young artists, presumably should be, if progress means anything, more violent and exacerbating than Abstract Expressionism, which it succeeds. Much of it, certainly, is premeditatedly outrageous—dribbly plaster imitations of hamburgers, sculpture made entirely from old automobile bumpers, imperceptibly tinted canvases of solid black, huge blurred patterns of newspaper ads, exquisitely faithful duplications of billboard lettering, systematic experiments in retinal irritation, wicked three-dimensional satires in wood, plaster, and (at one point) old tennis sneakers. Yet, believe it or not, the show is heartening. Passing through the fifteen rooms, we found grandeur, wit, care, and tenderness—above all, perhaps, tenderness. The man (Jason Seley) who made statues out of car bumpers obviously loved car bumpers; the woman (Chryssa) who fiddled with newspapers and lettering made beautiful things of them, as fond and lyric as any water color of wild flowers you have in your attic. Our impression—to cut short this untoward trespass into the realm of our art critic
^‖
—was of an art that, able at last to relent in its fierce, long battle with pictorial convention, was giving God, God the maker of unmade things, the glory. The world is full of blatant trash—industrial, mental, visual. Perhaps the time has come to give this trash the homage that Nature in all her aspects deserves. At any rate, we left the Museum wondering if, in those translucent corridors where history wanders,
a homeward turn hadn’t been taken, and the future hadn’t become, momentarily, the present.

October 1963

T
HE
U
NIVERSITY OF
A
RIZONA’S
Agricultural Experimental Station, under the leadership of Mr. Charles D. Owens, has developed a machine that uncaps honeycombs twice as fast as any other honeycomb-uncapper now in use. The news item in the
Times
so reporting goes on to say, “This could be an aid to the nation’s half million beekeepers who produce well over $200,000,000 pounds [sic] of honey a year.
And it could save the nearly 300,000,000,000 domestic bees in the land a lot of time and effort
, because the combs can be used over again.” The italics are ours. Who are we (to be precise, who is Charles D. Owens) to be saving bees “a lot of time and effort”? What will the country do with yet another leisure class? Consider it arithmetically. Assume that in the old days the average bee (we are averaging the worker bees, who work all the time, with the drones and queens, who incessantly debauch) spent two hours a day repairing the honeycombs ravaged by the nation’s half-million beekeepers. This seems modest, and it likewise seems modest to guess that the improved honeycomb-uncapper will cut this time in half. So each day we are releasing into the air a total of three hundred billion bee-hours, which amounts in the course of a year to twelve and a half billion bee-years! Now, Mr. Owens and the beekeepers are living in a fool’s paradise if they imagine that the bees are going to utilize that leisure time by improving their humming, or refining their honey, or simply sleeping an hour later. As anyone who knows apian nature could tell them, the bees will spend it watching television, or, worse, going out on golf courses and stinging people. In a few years, the very simile “busy as a bee” will have joined “hot as a firecracker” in obsolescence, and the low-grade honey produced by part-time bees will taste suspiciously like gall.

January 1964

T
HIS SEEMS TO BE AN ERA
of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements. Consider the beer can. It was beautiful—as beautiful as the clothespin, as inevitable as the wine bottle, as dignified and reassuring as the fire hydrant. A tranquil cylinder of delightfully resonant metal, it could be opened in an instant, requiring only the application of a handy gadget freely dispensed by every grocer. Who can forget the small, symmetrical thrill of those two triangular punctures, the dainty
pffff
, the little crest of suds that foamed eagerly in the exultation of release? Now we are given, instead, a top beetling with an ugly, shmooshaped “tab,” which, after fiercely resisting the tugging, bleeding fingers of the thirsty man, threatens his lips with a dangerous and hideous hole. However, we have discovered a way to thwart Progress, usually so unthwartable.
Turn the beer can upside down and open the bottom
. The bottom is still the way the top used to be. True, this operation gives the beer an unsettling jolt, and the sight of a consistently inverted beer can might make people edgy, not to say queasy. But the latter difficulty could be eliminated if manufacturers would design cans that looked the same whichever end was up, like playing cards. What we need is Progress with an escape hatch.

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.

November 1963

I
T 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

C
HRISTMAS 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.