Assorted Prose (9 page)

Rain and disease are practically strangers to the antarctic. The air is sterilized by ultraviolet rays, which are present in enormous quantities. Penguins, tough birds in other ways, have no resistance to germs. Expeditions never catch cold until they return to civilization. In a sense, the continent lacks even time. In 1947, members of Byrd’s expedition visited the hut of the English explorer Scott. In thirty-five years, nothing had changed. The London magazine on the table could have been printed the day before. There was no rot in the timbers, no rust on the nail-heads, no soot on the windowsills. Outside, a sledge dog that had frozen while standing up still stood there and looked alive. Explorers have no qualms about eating food that was cached decades previously. Admiral Byrd, the world’s leading Antarcticophile, has suggested that the land might be used as a refrigerator for the world’s food surpluses. Books could also be stored there, out of geopolitical harm’s way and in an air where even the tabloids would not yellow. Were it not for the lung-scorching effect of sub-zero temperatures, this highest and driest of continents would make an excellent tuberculosis sanatorium. Antarctica is a plateau. Its mean altitude is six thousand feet—twice that of Asia, its tallest competitor. Its land area equals that of Australia and the United States combined. The seas surrounding it are not only the roughest but the richest in the world, with a greater weight of diatoms and plankton than tropical waters have. The land probably contains all the baser metals. Its resources of coal are judged to be the largest in the world—a geological puzzle, since there is no reason to assume that the south-polar region was ever warm enough for luxuriant vegetation. The most prominent thesis, supported by glacier scratches and the wide-ranging fossils of the primitive fern Glossopteris, posits Gondwanaland—a vast continent in the southern hemisphere two hundred million years ago, when the flat, swampy earth supported gigantic tree ferns, abundant mosses, and the earliest vertebrates. According to the “continental drift” theory, this mass of land shifted around a good bit, the surface of the earth being
as loose as a puppy’s skin, and eventually fragmented into the pieces now called Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica—the last a once tropical realm brought to rest at the bottom of the world and buried in ice.

Ice—of two sorts, white (compressed snow) and blue-green (frozen water)—is what Antarctica has lots of. Ten quadrillion tons, say, plus a few billion created by the lack of centrifugal force near the poles. A man weighs almost a pound more at the South Pole than he does at the equator. Glaciers, sliding on water melted by the pressure of their own weight, flow away from the pole, squeeze through notches in the rim of mountain ranges, and extend themselves over the sea in the form of ice shelves. The largest shelf, the Ross, has the area of France. Chips as big as Manhattan crack off the shelves. These icebergs are carved by wind and waves into the shapes of palaces, cathedrals, pagodas, men, and angels before dissolving in temperate waters. In 1927, one was measured and found to be a hundred miles square—the size of two Connecticuts. The snow precipitation does not equal the ice lost in the form of bergs, so a recession of the icecap is believed to be taking place. Were it to melt completely, seeds held in suspension millions of years might germinate. Strange viruses and bacteria could be unleashed on the world. New York City would be under three hundred feet of water. This is not likely to happen in our time.

October 1956

U
P TO NOW
, nobody has breathed a word in defense of the dip pens Postmaster General Summerfield is ousting from post offices across the nation, and if we don’t speak up the pens will go out thinking they didn’t have a friend in the world. (Nobody said much when the mailboxes were made as garish as beer advertisements, or when the noble series of Presidential profiles on our postage stamps gave way to an ill-engraved gallery of lifeless mugs, but let it pass, let it pass.) We liked the old pens; the ink flowed from the nibs dark and luminous, the faint scratching was
an agreeable accompaniment to composition, the cork holder felt airy and suave between the fingers, and even the most abject handwriting took on an angular distinction. We are thinking especially of the square-tipped nib, though the bowl-shaped, too, induced more real penmanship than any flow-forever, jet-styled pen. True, some post-office pens were splayed, split, and encrusted, and some wells dry, but seeing a herd of scrawny cattle we do not curse the suffering animals. Few people are fit to tend a cow, and fewer are competent to hold a pen. To seize, to press, to frown and crush was for many the exercise of their certificated literacy.

The pens, like modern poetry and Dean Acheson, were abused in a tone of impregnable smugness. We once overheard, in a Vermont post office, a woman rest the case for democracy on their wretchedness. “Compare these pens with the bank’s,” she instructed the child with her. “The Post Office is a state-run monopoly; you take what it gives you. The banks operate in a competitive system, and have to please their customers.” The bank, as will happen in Vermont, was right across the street, and we found there the ball-point instruments usual in local temples of deposit, insultingly chained to their tuberous sockets. We hope the child’s conversion to the free way of life did not hinge on this lesson alone. Ball-point pens began as a vulgar novelty for subaqueous scribes. The industry’s publicists have shown great vigor, and thanks to them ink may become as quaint a liquid to the next generation as kerosene is to this, but their product still unrolls a pale, dull line, whose total lack of the thin-and-thick elements that quicken calligraphy is not redeemed by an erratic splotchiness.

Perhaps the inverse ratio between beauty and efficiency is rigid and not to be bucked. The candle was a graceful, ardent, and numinous method of illumination, but fluorescent tubes in gawky casings are no doubt easier, in the optometrical sense, on the eyes. We consent to hideous brightness. However, it seems that Progress, in order to maintain the appearance of itself, must sacrifice to the dumb god Era its own best fruits. The roll-top desk was the most functional desk ever devised; Functionalism swept it away. The customary resident of that desk, the dip pen with metal nib, retained the eloquence of the goose quill and saved the geese. When Summerfield moved, the geese stood idly by.

March 1958

P
OSTMASTER
G
ENERAL
S
UMMERFIELD
is that rare combination, a man of ideas and a man of action. No sooner did he conceive of red-white-and-blue mailboxes than they twinkled from every street corner. One minute he learned that dogs bite postmen; the next, he was hurling thunderbolts of excommunication at impenitent owners. Congress dared balk at budget time last spring; Summerfield declared Saturday a legal holiday. And, with a divine imperiousness, he stamped his own Christmas cards with four-cent stamps. In view of this dynamic record, we have no hope that he will be frustrated in his scheme to impose two billion dollars’ worth of improvement upon post offices across the nation. We mourn, nevertheless. It used to be that in any town from Bangor to Fresno the heartsick stranger could find honesty, industry, piety, and free reading matter in two places: the post office and the public library. Since Andrew Carnegie couldn’t be everywhere, in many hamlets the post office was the sole repository of our traditions. It rises before the imagination now: the village post office, with its quaint grilled windows, its ink-stained floors, its hideous orange writing shelf, its curiously nibbled blotters, its “wanted” posters for Dillinger and Aaron Burr, and its twin letter slots dividing the world into two great halves, “Local” and “Out of Town.” Framed by the window marked “Postal Savings” (another of Summerfield’s victims, along with the nib pen), the postmaster himself is seen—his shirtsleeves secured by elastics, his glasses hung on the tip of his nose—alternately dispensing gossip and stamped envelopes. Beside him stands his wife, a pencil in her hair, weighing packages. Some are enormous; she forces a grin as she lifts them. Over by the wall, next to the radiator, the town idler lingers, pretending to fill out money-order blanks. Uncle Sam gesticulates from the bulletin board; a W.P.A. mural, executed with Assyrian dignity, fades above the transom. The laughter of the sorting clerks filters in from the back room.… The vision fades.

Instead, we see a cinder-block cube, painted indigo, scarlet, and ivory. Within, a loudspeaker murmurs cocktail music as shoppers promenade along clearly marked lanes, between pyramids of sanitarily wrapped Defense Bonds, postcards, and stamps. A sign proclaims, “5¢
STAMP SPECIAL—
1,000
FOR
$49.98.” Another importunes, “
SEND A PACKAGE TO BRITAIN FOR JUST
20¢
DOWN.
” At the door sits a young man in white,
hammering a cash register; $2,000,000,000.00 is the sum he has just rung up.

March 1957

U
P AT THE
T
HIRTEENTH
A
NNUAL
N
ATIONAL
A
NTIQUES
S
HOW
, held in the not undingy basement of Madison Square Garden, we saw more old and precious things than you could shake a stick at. For that matter, a person shaking a stick in among all those Staffordshire inkwells, Baccarat chandeliers, hurricane lamps, crystal
bobêches
, Japanese
netsukes, doré
bronze candelabra, Zuñi necklaces, Bohemian tankards, vellum music sheets, bisque clocks, Basque jugs, and specimens of dragware, cream-ware, queen’s ware, stoneware, pearlware, and colored, cut, blown, pressed, and authentic milk glass would doubtless be removed from the premises—quite properly, too. All the booths—and they were legion—were numbered. We paused by F-15, distinguished by a huge green metal cow, a hideous brittle pillar about the size of an umbrella stand, and an 1807 sampler upon which a childish artisan had inscribed, “May I with equal art engrave each gentle Virtue on my heart and as Life wears away may I grow wiser and better each Day. The Ways of Wisdom are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.” Anxious to set off on the pleasant ways of wisdom, we asked F-15’s proprietor, a tall, elegantly turned-out gentleman, what the cow was. “A weather vane,” he said, in a tone of who-doesn’t-know-that.

“It looks heavy for the purpose,” we said.

“On the contrary, it’s light. It’s hollow,” he said, and rapped the creature’s resounding flank, then punched its head. “They always weighted the head, for balance, so it would turn.”

“Oh. And that?” We indicated the umbrella stand.

“Hungarian. Made in Budapest. Eighteenth-century.”

“Uh, what does it do?” we asked.

“Do? It doesn’t do, it
is
,” he replied. “It’s a pedestal. Something stood on it. Now,
that
is a stein.” He pointed at a ponderous mug decorated
with drunken trolls doing the Germanic version of the light fantastic in the convex confines of a bas-relief tavern, and waved us off.

At G-5, we studied a
fin-de-siècle
painting of a child with elevated eyeballs. The nineteenth century, to judge by the relics recovered from its ruins, had a much keener
Innigkeit
toward animals than toward human beings. The innocence of the child’s face was so vacuous, so total, that it gave us a queer, embarrassing impression of nudity. In fact (forgive us if we sermonize), the Victorian era was, in its sly way, appallingly naked. Gladstone’s minions made lamp bases out of the bodies of young marble girls and covered footstools with cloth the pink of painted skin. Even the vases—florid, nippled, with provocative concavities—are scarcely fit for twentieth-century eyes. Seeking chastity, we turned to the consoling Puritanism of a whalebone swift, which expanded, with mathematical flexibility, at a touch.

The Carlebach Gallery has established a display of Burmese, Chinese, French, and Hindu chess sets. Rooks were, variously, pagodas, castles, and howdah-heavy elephants. My Sister and I, Stein Specialists, had assembled vessels of wood, china, silver, brass, and opaline, in the shapes of skulls, roosters, monkeys, monks, Bismarck, nuns, foxes, George Washington, slaves, fops, Churchill, and a woman’s bare legs. In one nook were some old maps of the American Northeast, with strange nations like Pensylvania, Nova Jersey, Nova York, and Pars Aouanushionigy squeezed in between the Atlantic and Lake Ontario. In another, the Sons of the American Revolution had arranged George Washington’s sugar-loaf crusher, bleeding knives, fob seal, telescope, dress sword, sextant, and shoe-measuring scale for our edification, along with Martha Washington’s lace needle and formal slippers. She had tiny feet. Speaking of feet, there was the Joseph Burger collection of footwear, which proved that the poorer the wearer, the more sensible the shoe. The Mexican peasant’s leather sandals, the Chinese coolie’s “bird’s-nest” boots, and the Norwegian yeoman’s woven shoes set a norm of comfort and simplicity from which sophistication could only depart, tweaking the toes upward (Turkey and Syria), adding square flaps to the front (Bohemia), piling on width (dunderbludgeons, popular under Henry VIII), adding height (Japanese clogs), and, in a frenzy of civilization, withering the foot itself into a pitiful flipper that could fit into a five-inch envelope of flowered cloth (China).

Our own feet began to ache. We hastily glanced at a Bible owned,
each in his time, by Charles I and Benjamin Franklin; at aboriginal vacuum cleaners, their sucking action created by metal pumps (1905), scissor bellows (1907), and accordion bellows (1911); and at the American Museum of Photography’s array of stereoscopes, crystallotypes, graphascopes, daguerreotypes, melainotypes, ambrotypes, and ferrotypes. On the way out, we experimentally opened what we took to be a fancy toothpick holder. Inside, there was a miniature button-hook for a baby’s shoes. How precious. How old.

November 1957

L
AST WEEK
we passed several anxious days tending the man in the moon, for whom previously we had never much cared. “The moon,” a third-grade teacher once told us brusquely, “is a stone. A mammoth stone.” That seemed to sum it up. Debunked as a deity, stripped of its authority to cause madness and promote crops, nervously plucking at the tides like an old pensioner perpetually adjusting a blanket, the satellite (to use the word in its primitive sense) was a heavenly deadhead. Yet when we read that the Russians might celebrate their birthday party by splashing a red stain across a breadth of lunar craters, it could have been our own face they were planning to spatter with ink, so great was our indignation, alarm, and shame.