Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Brent Mueller, as you doubtless know, although he is now a member of S NEAAH, the Southern New England Association of American Historians, has done well at Yale, publishing that short but trenchant deconstruction of Whitman’s and Emerson’s optimism entitled Other People’s Facts, [19] Derived, of course, from that callous passage in Emerson’s essay “Experience” which states, I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts.… A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him . delving up from stray phrases the two Protestant white men’s awareness that American expansionism was fuelled by black slavery, child labor, domestic oppression of women, and government-sponsored swindling and slaughter of Native Americans. They knew all this, the sublime scribblers, and achieved optimism by dint of suppressing it, while dark hints leaked out in Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe. Are things now any different? AIDS, famine, boat people, ghetto hopelessness, children by the millions born to misery. If a man had half a heart, he’d drown. Optimism isn’t a philosophical position; it’s an animal necessity, like defecation. As I sat and read Brent’s book, my vision blurred by envy, it seemed a flip negative of my unwritten own, with a perfect title. Brent wrote his book and Genevieve gave birth to two more children, twin boys. Hearing the news back in Wayward, I wondered if, had we married, such double-barrelled fertilization would have been demanded of me. I had been so anxious and guilty about my own children, and to a lesser extent about hers, that I had never actually considered the possibility of ours .

Ours. Would we have named them Ronald and George after the winners, or George and Fritz after the losers? The idea of pushing a duplex stroller, both sons squalling, through the narrow aisles of the supermarket over on 1A intimidates me. There comes a moment when we cease creating ourselves. I have come to lay my bones among you , Buchanan told the assembled folk of Lancaster upon his return home in March of 1861. What I have done, during a somewhat protracted public life, has passed into history . My attempt to bestow upon Buchanan the award of posterity collapsed when I, having imagined an eagle’s-eye view that would make of his life a single fatal moment, found myself merely writing more history, and without the pre-postmodernist confidence of Nevins and Nichols and Catton, yarn-spinners of the old narrative school. My opus ground to a halt of its own growing weight, all that comparing of subtly disparate secondary versions of the facts, and seeking out of old newspapers and primary documents, and sinking deeper and deeper into an exfoliating quiddity that offers no deliverance from itself, only a final vibrant indeterminacy, infinitely detailed and yet ambiguous — as unsettled, these dead facts, as if alive. Where, really, was the Brooklyn , when the batteries of Morris Island fired on the Star of the West ? Can it be true, as Klein offhandedly asserts, that Stanton had not opened his mouth during the tense meeting of December 29—the one obviously referred to by Weed ? Surely Weed meant the meeting of the 28th, since Floyd had resigned early on the 29th. And could Stanton — he who later contemptuously described these constant meetings debating the President’s course as a fight over a corpse — ever have sat through any meeting without opening his mouth? And can it be true, as Buchanan asserted both during these hectic weeks and afterwards, [20] In a letter of October 21, 1865, he replied to a correspondent, a Mr. Faulkner, who had supposed that the former President might admit, in retrospect, some mistakes, I must say that you are mistaken. I pursued a settled, consistent line of policy from the beginning to the end; & on reviewing my past conduct, I do not recollect a single measure which I should desire to recall, even if this were in my power. Under this conviction I have enjoyed a tranquil & cheerful mind, notwithstanding the abuse I have received . that he was serene, and self-convinced, that he felt no shame and terror as he descended at the head of his nation into the coming abyss of battle and blood?

And can it be, by the same token, true that Genevieve and I made love that left us both gasping, a melding so absolute we thought it expedient to stage a revolution, to overthrow our existing marriages and marry? Little trace of our attempt remains — a false start or two in several lawyers’ files, some love letters lost in an attic or turned to ash, a few displaced calcium molecules in my deteriorating memory cells. Our heaving spirits displace little matter; the past, insofar as it consists of human feelings, mostly vanishes, less enduring than recycled nitrogen.

I have found no place, Retrospect editors, in these memories and impressions for the blameless bliss of settling, in my bachelor bed as midnight crept past, under an L.L. Bean puff and a reading light placed just where I wanted it, into the two propped pillows redolent of the Adams laundromat, with a nice musty old book — the abovementioned [this page] Crawford, for instance, with its chummy long title, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumpter , [ sic , on the spine] Being an Inside History of the Affairs of South Carolina and Washington, 1860–1, and the Conditions and Events in the South Which Brought on the Rebellion , and its line engravings and yellowing letterpressed pages and sturdy marbled boards with corners and spine of red leather. Crawford was a young military surgeon who had been there, at Moultrie and Sumter in late 1860. How innocent, as I read, scribbling on a pad of yellow paper notes whose meaning I would soon forget, facts seemed; how sweet the clear water at the bottom of the well of time!

Another memory of the Ford era that returns to me now concerns the same bed, the same time, but Genevieve is with me. Susan and Laura must have been spending the night with the diabolically patient Brent, or else with a non-teen-age babysitter who could stay past midnight, for we had allowed ourselves the luxury of drowsing and dozing after intercourse. Usually, one or the other of us had to jump up and rush to the next appointment. I can fix the date exactly: Tuesday, October 21, 1975, edging into October 22nd, at around quarter to one. We had fallen asleep, sated and drained by sex and guilt, and were awoken by a tumult on the streets below, of blaring car horns and shouts of drunken jubilation from the throats of men pouring out of the bar whose neon sign fizzled a few doors down from my windows. Carlton Fisk had won the hard-fought, extra-innings sixth game of the World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, by hitting a home run off the left-field foul pole. It was called the Greatest Game Ever Played in the papers next day and Fisk later contributed his account to history: Freddie Lynn was on deck. He was hitting after me that game for some reason. I don’t know why, but he was and I can remember standing in the on-deck circle before the inning started, and you just had a feeling something good was going to happen. And I told Freddie, “Freddie, I’m going to hit one off the wall. Drive me in.” And that was the way it ended . Genevieve and I, locked into our own black-and-white blend of hell and paradise, were far from following baseball that fall, but the hullabaloo below my two windows united us with a celebrating New England at that wee hour. Then, as I recall, she got out of bed, her wonderful white body stamped on my retinas like a pulsating after-image, and dressed herself. Feeling drugged, I dressed, too, and we walked through the litter of broken beer bottles and fallen maple leaves to her car parked over on Federal and she drove alone back across the river. And that was the way it ended . The next day, we lost the seventh game and the series to a broken-bat single, 4–3.