Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike Page A

cuff-links.
    Living in Regent’s Park
. During a candle-lit dinner there comes a moment when one does not know whether a lion in the zoo, or the stomach of one’s table partner, has just growled.
Notes to a Poem

 (for
The New Statesman
)
    MINORITY REPORT
My beloved land,
1
here I sit in London
2
    overlooking Regent’s Park
3
    overlooking my new Citroën
both green,
4
exiled by success of sorts.
5
I listen to Mozart
6
    in my English suit and weep,
7
       remembering a Swedish film.
8
But it is you,
9
    really you I think of:
10
       your nothing streetcorners
11
       your ugly eateries
12
       your dear barbarities
13
       and vacant lots
14
(Br’er Rabbit demonstrated:
15
       freedom is made of brambles).
16
They say over here you are choking
17
    to death on your cities and slaves,
18
       but they have never smelled dry grass,
19
       smoked Kools in a drugstore,
20
       or pronounced a flat “a,” an honest “r.”
21
Don’t read your reviews,
22
    AMERICA:
23
you are the only land.
24
    Line 2
. At 59, Cumberland Terrace, N.W.1, where I can no longer be found. In a sense I never was found there. For nine months in England I felt like a balloon on too long a tether.
    Lines 6–8
. The Mozart would be Piano Concerto No. 21, in C Major, and the Swedish film, of course,
Elvira Madigan
. The English suit is by Cyril A. Castle, 42 Conduit Street.
    Line 12
. Is this fair? Many are ugly from the outside (see Nabokov, V.,
Lolita
, on roadside restaurants) but inside have a certain appropriateness and comfort. Though America’s “better” restaurants are stuffy and pappy compared to those you can find on almost any side-street on the Continent, our casual food—the hurried hamburger, the presto pastrami—is unsurpassed. At a formative stage of my life, at the age when young Frenchmen are being seduced by their governesses and young Englishmen by their headmasters, I was compelled to spend hours of every day in a homely luncheonette next to a small post office. There was nothing ugly about it except the griddle and the politics, possibly, of the proprietor. But then being economically dependent upon a crowd of teen-agers would bring out the reactionary in anyone. I have never been happier than in those idle hours mixed of cigarette smoke, pinball clatter, schoolgirl odors, hot dogs, and the recorded voices of Doris Day and Frankie Laine. Come to think of it, there was one period, many months long, when Petrillo had called all the musicians out on strike and the jukebox was supplied with strange recordings of humming voices and scab oddball instruments like the banjo and the sweet potato. But I ramble.
    Line 14
. Common in the land of my childhood. There was one beside our house, and others dotted all over the town. They were not parks, of course; they lacked daffodil beds and small mumbling men with turf edgers, but they made their own gift of space and freedom. Nobody owned them. Not even the Queen. Those vacant lots where the thistles waxed tall and we played fungo and kick-the-can were scraps of surviving Indian land, nowhereland. Compare parks: Hyde Park is a piece of royal domain graciously released to the commonweal, Central Park a wilderness of rape, torture, drug-induced trance, and savage whoops.
    Lines 15–16
. Br’er Rabbit is a native folk hero like Till Eulenspiegel in Scandinavia and Ra in Egypt. The reference is to his escape from Br’er Fox and other enemies; he said, Do anything you want to me, but don’t, please
don’t
, throw me into the briar patch. So they did. It was where he wanted to be. He had immigrated.
    Line 17
. “over here”—in fact the English press seemed to me to be sufficiently fair and wise in scrutinizing its alarming trans-Atlantic offspring. The poet, perhaps, is expressing an irritation with the new style of American self-criticism, a kind of Calvinism