Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Coitus is the model of all passion: it pursues a curve of rise and fall, and nothing will sustain it on the highest level forever. The tone of Buchanan’s speech became less elevated, less heartfelt, more didactic and ominous. “And,” he asked, “if the Union should be dissolved upon the question of slavery, what will be the consequences?” He answered himself: “An entire non-intercourse between its different parts, mutual jealousies, and implacable wars. The hopes of the friends of liberty, in every clime, would be blasted; and despotism might regain her empire over the world. I might present in detail the evils which would flow from disunion, but I forbear. I shall not further lift the curtain. The scene will be too painful.”

And what, at the moment, might be done to forestall unbearably painful scenes? First of all, he proposed, the select committee might offer to the Senate a resolution affirming what the Constitution already grants, the right of slavery to exist in any state where it is recognized by law. Not even the Abolitionists denied this principle, which had been solemnly announced by the first Congress, and is most clearly the doctrine of the Constitution. “This, then,” Buchanan stated, “is not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men, but it is a question of constitutional law.” A second resolution, he proclaimed, might assert that slaves like any other sort of property can be transferred from state to state. And a third might insist that slavery be maintained and not abolished in the District of Columbia, ceded to the Union by two slaveholding states whose good faith would be betrayed if abolition were “to convert this very cession into the means of injuring and destroying their peace and security.”

This language was rather far for a Northern politician, even a doughface like Buchanan, to go; the risk was his love offering. But King had turned his impassive, almost Seminole profile again, to murmur with his fellow Alabaman Senator Clay, a lesser Clay than the Great Pacificator from Kentucky — Clay the Whig, the anti-Jackson, with much of Jackson’s mad mulishness and more brains and eloquence yet with not enough of the people in his belly. Buchanan, still on his feet, conjuring up the select committee and its projected resolutions (“Let the resolutions be framed in a most conciliatory spirit, and let them be clothed in language which shall shock the opinions of no Senator”), felt himself in the position of a man who, having mounted to the heights of ecstasy with his mistress, and performed heroic feats in the lists of the bedroom, finds her still with unsatisfied needs, and practical expectations, and what seems an inhuman indifference to his own delicate situation. King had ceased to listen. His hatchet face was buried in his close colleague’s attending ear. “The Middle and North States are the field upon which this great battle must be fought,” Buchanan concluded, his voice hoarse and exhausted. “I fear not, I doubt not, the result, if Senators from the South, where the people are already united, would but consent to adopt the counsels of those who must bear the brunt of the contest.” Thus he ended, as many do, by begging mercy of those whom he had dared to love.

In composing this segment of my never-to-be-completed opus, somewhere in the centennial-year struggle of Ford versus Carter, I had intended to model Buchanan’s love for King upon mine for Genevieve, but in truth my one-night stand with Mrs. Arthrop kept intruding — that supernatural quality her face had at first blush, not only its high albedo (cf. the glow of King’s planter’s forehead) but the something immaterial attached, a ghostly tag declaring that she would “put out.” Of course I entertained no such carnal notions of old Buck and Colonel King; nineteenth-century men, my belief was, loved one another with no more physicality than that of the companiable gourmanderie described by Melville in his “Paradise of Bachelors.” What I sought to convey in the out-of-focus chamber as seen through Buchanan’s mismatched eyes was the way in which the apparition of the beloved pulls an entire scene into life — like a sun in the sky, or like, perhaps, a live prey in the web. I remember, conversely, a party at which Genevieve’s absence made a great sensible hole.

It was during the composition of the preceding scene, let me add for the benefit of my fellow historians, that I was cripplingly struck by the hopelessness, in an era when history has turned away from tales of kings to the common heroes of everyday life, the merchant and the peasant buried deep in the records of manor-house and guild-hall, and in this ever self-reforming New World nation to the rescue from obscurity of the women and slaves patriarchal historians had hitherto consigned to the shadowy margins of their establishment-prone accountings — the hopelessness, I repeat, of sympathetically animating the fussy, cagey discriminations of a pro-Southern strict constitutionalist whose timorous legalisms were all to be swept away by a bloodbath and Lincoln’s larger, less scrupulous perceptions of the rights and duties of the high office to which he succeeded. American slavery not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men ? In this utterance alone Buchanan forfeits the sympathy of all but the most perversely patient of historians, one who would try to comprehend deeds and opinions within the gloom behind the scenery, the dusty flats and rigging, the intricate weights and counterweights, rather than by the simplifying stagelight of retrospect. Present-day students, adolescents thrust from the jingling nursery of television into the bewildering forest of texts, have no patience with their ancestors and little interest in the erratic half-steps whereby a people effects moral change and whereby well-intentioned men of substance might seek amid agitation and a long stasis of contending equal interests the path of least general harm. Buchanan’s own contemporaries, north and south, cried him down as a traitor. In his last decade his circle of warmth, of human approval, dwindled to a close few — a few Cabinet loyalists, Harriet Lane, Miss Hetty, Hiram Swarr, some servants at Wheatland. The analogies that come to mind, forgive me, are Jesus and Hitler. But, you say, we all come to our Gethsemane, our last bunker. Buchanan’s, I say, came in full view, within history, or almost within it, and coincided with national policy. Never mind: my effort of, if not rehabilitation, reanimation, loomed as too much for me, for my poor powers, which were diffused by personal concerns, in the era of Gerald Ford’s administration.

The party at which Genevieve was conspicuously absent but which I had to attend was the President’s faculty party, given early each fall, when New England puts its best foot forward, a ruddy brilliance of foliage like the iridescence of a bubble about to burst. I have already mentioned [this page] the President’s resplendent purple muu-muu, one of the many flamboyant costumes in which she boldly sought to assert her vast corpulence as a kind of beauty, and also her lilac-tinged crown of inflexible upsweep; I have not mentioned her minuscule husband, a dark-suited satellite of hers, one almost wants to write “parasite,” whose inherited fortune and, considering his cretinous small face, surprisingly clever telephonic manipulation of securities had enabled her to pursue a triumphant though modestly remunerated progress up the ladder of educational administration. She had come to us from a deanship at a California football power located in one of those valleys fed by stolen Colorado water and worked by illegal Mexican immigrants. The languid cynics of our faculty called her the Pep Organizer. Not old, just further advanced in the decade of life wherein I would soon [see this page, this page] find myself, she still affected the broad clattering bangles and mobile earrings of the Sixties, bedecking herself as if her big body were a year-round Christmas tree. Yet she could be a stern mama, with a West Coast high-tech management style. Like Ford in his Presidency, she had subdued the carnival spirit. She had whipped money out of the parents and the husbands of alumnae, turned Wayward back from ivied insolvency, and spoke winningly of making us a four-year co-ed institution, with presumably a football team fund-raisers could rally around. There was no excusing oneself from her back-to-school party. I had to go, and Brent Mueller had to go, and both the Wadleighs and even my unorganization-minded Queen of Disorder, as a part-time teacher in the art department, had to. But Genevieve, the care of her two little girls precluding even the most tenuous faculty connection when they came here five years ago, was not invited, and was too separated from Brent to be escorted. There were drinks, hors d’oeuvres served by doe-eyed scholarship students, background music tinkled forth by Ben Wadleigh’s latest keyboard protégé, forced laughter, friendly faces, but no Genevieve. No life, no spirit, no point to the gathering. No bull’s-eye beauty. No expectancy, no suspense. No sense of oneself as a towering sexual presence — Alf the Amorous, hero of one of the sagas that are sung the world over of lovers. Alf and Iseult, with their bed-sword and carbonated potion; Alf and Cleopatra, with the world well lost between them; Alf and Juliet, featuring the fadeout kicker of their double suicide. I felt guilty at Genevieve’s absence, as though I were excluding her. As though, at some deep and (before Freud) inexpressible level, I were participating in her murder, or that of the child — our toddling love — that we had engendered, in these now more than two years of romance. To suppress the presence of her absence I drank more than usual.