Assorted Prose (11 page)

3. Which brings up the delicate matter of punning, or paronomasia. Each Baltimore journal is restricted by secret covenant to one “
BIRDS SOAR
” every two weeks. Milwaukee, with a stronger team, is permitted twelve instances of “
BRAVES SCALP
” before the All-Star game. “
TIGERS CLAW
” and “
CUBS LICK
” tend to take care of themselves. As for you, San Francisco, the lack of any synonyms for “giant” briefer than “behemoth” and “Brobdingnagian,” together with the long-standing failure of New York’s own writers to figure out exactly what giants
do
(intimidate? stomp?), rather lets you out of the fun. In view of this, and in view of the team’s present surprising record, you may therefore write “
GIANTS A-MAYS.
” But don’t do it more than once a month: moderation in all things, S.F.

January 1959

L
A
R
ÉGIE
A
UTONOME DES
T
RANSPORTS
P
ARISIENS
—The Paris Transit Authority—has very generously given the Museum of Modern Art a battered old entrance gate to the Métro, the French capital’s subway
system. The Museum has no less courteously installed the thing in its garden, and there we went to see it. The gate, of cast iron, and one of many produced from a design by Hector Guimard, an exponent of the curvilinear, vegetative style that was known as Art Nouveau in 1900 and that, curiously, is still known by that name in 1959, has been rooted in concrete near the windowless gray brick tower built by the Museum after its fire. The garden, cold and sere within its high walls, was loud, as it always is, with the strange murmur (Traffic? Air-conditioners? The End of the World?) that so strongly resembles the protest of a sea-shell against your ear. The
objet d’art
we had come to view proved to be an inverted U of scabby green metal fifteen feet high and six strides wide. We stood between its legs and looked up, and received the disconsolate impression we usually receive underneath the brontosaurus in the Museum of Natural History. The metalwork is less foliate than we expected—indeed, there’s not a leafy line in it—and the organic principles informing its contours derive less from branches than from bones. Anticipating the tapering, strenuous grace of arboreal imitation, we found instead the stubborn little knobs and puckers of bones, an impression to which patches of blood-color scumbled through the vile green paint added an explicit grisliness. These were not even clean bones bolted and welded together but dirty bones, the remains of a too hasty feast, partly wrapped in awkward whorls and wrinkles: crushed napkins of iron. These clothlike ridges, especially at the base of the columns, suggested the ascending folds of French cathedral sculpture, but the aspiring eye was led upward not to the serene face of a stone saint but to a brown bulb, a lamp—an ant’s abdomen magnified. This abdomen, this sac of stained glass, was grooved so that it took on, as we gazed upward, the aspect of an inhuman face, eyeless and cruel. The lamp bulb was gone from the opposite upright, as if the one had eaten the other. With tentacles of metal, the two posts reached out and interlocked, and in the center of their embrace was hung a sign that, in the neo-Turkish lettering once used to advertise ice cream in this country, proclaimed “
METROPOLITAIN.
”

We were virtually alone with the gate. A woman wearing a foreign face and a furry coat, pursing her lips with that affectionate vehemence peculiar to Gauls, paused briefly, and a young couple, whom we knew to be French because the backs of their heads looked exactly alike, came and mooned a moment. These persons had clearly arrived at the end of
a pilgrimage such as our own expatriates in Paris might make to see the water cooler in the American Express office. Otherwise, the scene was devoid of human content, and we resorted to asking the statues in the garden their opinions of their new neighbor.

The nearest, Rodin’s lumpy monument to Balzac, replied by staring rigidly at the roof of the Hotel Dorset. “I haven’t seen the gate,” he confessed. “The idiot sculptor hewed my neck with such a heroic roughness that it cannot be turned.”

Lipchitz’s “Figure,” however, could look at nothing else. Words came with difficulty out of his (or her) intricate but regular convolutions. “I am puzzled,” it admitted at last. “Is that really how you spell ‘Metropolitan’?”

Renoir’s “Washerwoman” was, as we had hoped, more amiable and optimistic. “It will be lovely,” she sweetly promised, “in the spring, when it blossoms.”

The Haida Indian totem pole, all fangs and nostrils, offered the most aggressive judgment.

the pole said, with typical totemic unkindness.

July 1959

H
ERE
, with the best will in the world, we go up to the grand opening of the Hudson Celebration Theatre-in-the-Park, on the site of the Wollman
Memorial Skating Rink, in Central Park, and it’s cancelled, because of rain.

“But it’s not raining now,” we protested.

“The performance is cancelled,” the young man in the box office repeated, staring stonily ahead, waiting for the next in line.

He had been saying the same words so often that his entire body had grown rigid around the thought of cancellation; his brain had coagulated, causing a fine sweat to break out evenly on his face. The phone rang. He picked it up, listened a moment, said “Cancelled,” and replaced the receiver. He looked up, and saw us still standing there; a spark of anger flicked across his features. “Next,” he said.

The lady behind us was very short and held on to her ticket as if it were the end of a rope that would pull her to a greater height. “Somebody said tonight’s tickets would be good tomorrow,” she began.

“That is correct, Madam. Tonight’s performance is cancelled.” He glanced away, to the next in line.

“But,” the short lady said, and her hat trembled a bit, “tomorrow night my daughter’s coming over from New Jersey.”

“Do you want a refund?”

“She’s coming over with my grandchildren, and I don’t see how I can do both.”

While she was saying this, he looked at the color of her ticket and took two dollar bills and some change from a drawer and passed them toward her, turning his palm upward for the ticket. She held on to her ticket and her thought tightly. “I don’t see how I can come; the papers said the opening was tonight.”

“The performance is cancelled,” he said.

We moved away. The circumambient trees, soaked off and on all afternoon by rain, smelled fresh and looked dark in the twilight. The octagonal paving around the rink was spottily damp. The amphitheatre, airily designed by Edward Stone, was a thick ring of red canvas chairs surrounding a circular platform lit by four tall towers of lights. It was gaudy as a circus, without the sawdust sadness. A few lithesome young people, clad in informal, patchy-looking ballet outfits, bounded about on the stage in time to the remote jangle of a piano. The slithering footsteps made a sound infinitely faint in the center of that silent scarlet circle of chairs. We put our elbows on a wall whose concrete was exhaling a delicate damp scent, and watched. The last time we leaned on this wall and
watched, there had been skaters down below, gliding, weaving, tottering, tumbling. A priest, we remembered had brought some children, and was himself ravishing on skates, black against the white ice, his arms folded behind him, skimming on one foot, then the other, with the incisive, irresistible grace of a medieval proof. Behind this elegant crow, his childish flock, a muffled bunch of sparrows and chickadees, fluttered along as best they could, extending stumpy wings for balance, chirruping with delight.

What we saw now was equally fine. A long-throated girl in a snug patchwork of black and gray pirouetted, leapt, and crossed her pale hands on her breast, and bowed her head. Despair? Shy stirrings of love? Without a program, we could not tell. A young man, as the piano rumbled into a masculine octave, pranced up a ramp and extended his arm. The prince? Her lover? Her accuser? Without costumes, they were clothed in mystery. More dancers joined them as the invisible plot thickened under the deepening stars. Their motions, cut off from explicit interpretation, enacted upon the precarious surface of music—the spaces between the lone piano’s notes were sealed with the whisper of their feet—possessed a power beyond beauty, a power existential in the sense that, stripped of the smart paint of art, they shone with the bare, non-committal luminosity of fact. It was as if, walking through the Park, we had come upon people dancing out a personal incident in their lives. The young man, the perhaps prince, balanced on one foot and urged his face forward. An older man, gray-haired and in tights—the director, certainly—posed opposite him in the same position, so that the two of them became reflections in an imperfect mirror. The older man strained forward to lead the younger into greater urgency, to bring him to fill with his body the emotion to the brim. A few curt words, the scene collapsed, and now the girl flew in a great scissoring circle around the rim of the stage, a smile flashing on her twirling face. Happy. She was conveying happiness.

“Why doesn’t she bend her body a little?” a female voice asked near us along the wall. The wall was crowded with people. Almost uniformly, the people who had not been clever enough to phone ahead had walked over from the box office to watch the rehearsal. Their burning cigarettes hung like an uneven string of small lanterns. Their talk made a harmless complement to the pantomime below. “When I was in the restaurant business, the cops …” The young prince made a mistake with his legs; the music stopped; a gentle laugh ran along the wall; he went back to the far edge of the stage. “… this cop said to me, he said, ‘Boy, this is the
greatest; I recommend it,’ he said. He said, ‘For ten years, you know, I had a lot of jobs and I was nuthin’. Nuthin’. Now,’ he said, ‘when I walk down the street, wearing my gun, I’m king. I’m the king,’ he said. I said to myself, ‘This man’s a psychopath.
This man is a psychopath.
’ ”

The dancers ceased; there was brief clapping. The lights dimmed into a red tint. The girl, talking to the director, put her hands on her hips and laughed. Everybody along the wall hushed at the laugh. We all held silent, waiting for another. There wasn’t another; she walked away, flat-footed, and the gray pattern that decorates the stage was vivid now that the platform was empty. The crowd that had attended the cancellation was slow to leave. Above the trees, the buildings along Fifth Avenue and Central Park South burned with a great cool wealth of fluorescent tints. The city is lovely from within the Park after dark; it’s a view we don’t see often enough. The crowd lingered, smoking. An out-of-town voice behind us insisted, “No, I loved it. Listen, in the winter I make sacrifices to see this stuff.” The crowd—perhaps three hundred or more—wandered away, east, west, and south, long lines silhouetted under the lamps heavily caged against vandals. We ourselves went back to the path along the pond, where the ducks were sleeping.

October 1959

T
HE MYSTERIOUS AND AWFUL THING
about the television quiz scandals is not that the jaded souls who ran the show were hoaxers but that dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of contestants, almost all of whom must have applied in the simplicity of good faith, were successfully enrolled in the hoax. Now, as we remember the flavor and ethos of that innocent era, the contestants, aside from their freakish passion for Hittite history or skeet-shooting statistics, were meant to be us—you and me and the bright boy next door. This was America answering. This was the mental wealth behind the faces you saw in a walk around the block. The appeal of the programs, with the rising challenge of Soviet brain power as a backdrop, was ultimately patriotic; the contestants were selected to be
a cross-section of our nation just as deliberately as the G.I.s in a war movie are. There we bravely sat in our living rooms, sweating it out with this or that Shakespeare-reading poultry farmer or chemistry-minded chorus girl, and there they were on the other side of the blurred little screen, patting (not wiping) their brows with handkerchiefs, biting their tongues as instructed, stammering out rehearsed answers, gasping with relief at the expected cry of congratulation. And we sat there, a nation of suckers, for years. It’s marvellous how long it went on, considering the number of normal Americans who had to be corrupted to keep the cameras whirring. In all this multitude, not one snag, not one audible bleat, not one righteous refusal that made the news. The lid didn’t blow off until, years afterward, a winner, disgruntled because he had not won more, was moved to confess and purge his guilt.

We are fascinated by the unimaginably tactful and delicate process whereby the housewife next door was transmogrified into a paid cheat. We picture her coming into the studio, a little weary still from yesterday’s long plane trip, a bit flustered by the noise and immensity of the metropolis—Dorothy Dotto, thirty-eight, happily married for nineteen years, the mother of three, a member of the Methodist Church, the Grange, and the Ladies’ Auxiliary. She lives, and has lived all her life, in the town of Elm Corners, somewhere in the Corn Belt; as a child, she won seven consecutive pins for perfect Sunday-school attendance, and she graduated with good grades from a public school where the remarkable truthfulness of George Washington and the durable axioms of Benjamin Franklin were often invoked. Her father, Jesse, who is retired but still alive (bless him), for forty years kept above his desk at the feed mill a sign declaring, “Honesty Is the Best Policy.”

Our heroine meets the show’s producer, dapper, dimpled Leonard Blough (pronounced “Bluff”), who takes her into a little room walled with aluminum and frosted glass:

BLOUGH
(
smiling and lifting from her arms a bundle, containing her lunch, that she has been clutching awkwardly
): Well, Mrs. Dotto, you did very well on the qualifying tests. Very well indeed.