Seek My Face by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307416599
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-18T23:00:00+00:00

“Dear Kathryn, yes. One didn’t live in sin those days, and we were crazy about each other. He was everything Zack wasn’t, and yet a genius of sorts too, and I—well, who knows what he saw in me? A mother he could fuck, I suppose, classically enough. His actual mother was from Rhode Island, descended from one of the refugees who thought the Massachusetts Puritans were tyrants. They weren’t Quaker but something else—Antinomian, I think they were called, meaning they believed anything goes, or should go. Pearson had been her maiden name. His father, Mr. Holloway, had been English, that was how Guy got his accent, which he could turn on and off, and his feeling for America: he saw us as savages, really, full of vitality and appetite and an outrageous wonderful vulgarity, where my feeling about Americans is that what they are basically is conscientious, conscientious and usually exhausted, with the muggy climate and the work ethic and the expectations those heroic founding fathers saddled us with, though in fact they had rather low opinions of the common man, the founding fathers did. The average American is far less vulgar and bumptious than, say, the English themselves—we have nothing like soccer hooligans, for example. His father, Guy’s, had faded away early. His mother still lived in Rhode Island, in Jamestown, a rickety shingled house on the Bay with a view of a bridge, and one of the things Guy liked about me, maybe one of the main things, was that I could stand up to her. Like me, she was short and feisty—she twittered away with this seductive malice you acquire living in out-of-the-way pretty places, and we got along ‘rippingly,’ Guy would say, his mother and I, when we met, which we tried not to make too often. She saw me as taking him in hand, and assumed he needed it, staying unmarried into his thirties; she imagined his life in New York as nothing but folly and Sodom and Gomorrah, and was such a materialist and snob she was oblivious to the really quite remarkable success he was having. I supplied that omission, too; I told her how I had never seen an artist produce work and make money like her son did. Especially in the ’sixties: it seemed every city in the country over two hundred thousand in population had these new high-rises with blank apartment walls, and they all had to have a Holloway filling the space. The things he painted to make his frightfully clever point about representation and reality—‘This is not a pipe, or is it?’—they just took at face value; the flags and giant Coke bottles and blown-up comic-strip panels were things they knew and loved, American things. I must say—I can tell you this even though he’s still alive, he’s too Alzheimerish to be hurt—that I had my reservations about much of it. Those stencilled alphabet paintings, for example, with B-L-U-E spelled out in the color orange, and S-T-O-P signs

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