Assorted Prose by John Updike Read Free Book Online

at a smart cant into the library (E), where they settle, fluffing and cooing, on chair arms, sofa backs, hi-fi speakers, and the space where my wife is supposed to write letters. At first, I believe, they batter their wings against the bookcase, but it is as futile as pigeons trying to roost on the side of the U.N. building, for they meet a sheer wall of Bernard Shaw, Penguin classics, paperbound theology, and other books too odd for the bookcase at D. Once, years ago, a few unread books found a purchase here, and it may be a racial memory of this that drives them into the room; but they find the meadows sere, the once-open range strung with barbed wire, and the rivers polluted with radioactive silt. It is not long before the more enterprising of the unread books are stomping up the stairs, and creeping into our bedroom.
    F is a tiny table that stands beside our bed. I bought it at an auction, having failed to see that it was not a table at all but a stand in which to hold a large flowerpot. Accordingly there is a circular hole in the top, which we have patched with a slim volume of paintings by Paul Klee. The painting on the cover shows a bright pink face with three or four eyes, and it makes an unsteady, wrinkling surface. Now,
A History of Japan to 1334
is a tall, solid book; it needs firm support. The sides of the flowerpot stand are too low;
A History of Japan
keeps being shoved over the edge by
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, by Rebecca West, in one volume, a book so hefty I sprained my latissimus dorsi lifting it in and out of bed. Furthermore, the other unread books, hearing us scuffling around overhead, come pouring up the stairs and jump on the little table—that was never meant to hold anything except a flowerpot in the first place—and keep falling off and jumping again, like shipwreck survivors around the one lifeboat that got free of the rigging. Sometimes a whole dozen squeeze on at once, and then the Klee collapses, and they fall through the circular hole. Their bodies, after a mysterious subaqueous passage, come to surface at G.
    G is a tiny room, once titled “the study,” which I tricked out with shelves to hold papers, stamps, athletic trophies, rubber bands, and similar proofs of my masculinity. Unfortunately, the influx of broken toys, cracked mirrors, defunct light bulbs, cranky children, sewing machines, and other things that puzzled my wife became so great that I was flooded away, and was forced to abandon the shelves, which have become the terraces of the Afterworld of unread books. Here they stand, upright at last, in rigidly packed rows. There is no exit; the unremitting arrival of new immigrants puts them under terrific pressure, and, like the countless microörganisms that dedicated their corpses to our petroleum deposits, like the millions of once-green leaves compressed into the coal fields underlying Wilkes-Barre, they form a rich resource for future ages.

  ALPHONSE PEINTRE
    (An Interview Not Utterly Unlike Those in “The Artist in His Studio,” Text and Photographs by Alexander Liberman)
    T HE SQUALID HUT , near Rouen, whence issue the cryptically dabbled bits of canvas that have soothed five generations of art dealers is approached by an unspeakable dirt road winding among depressingly dusty lime trees and appallingly tawdry livestock. How true it is, I reflected, that artists are slovenly about their environments! So deeply rutted was the road that as I bounced to a stop in front of the master’s residence a stack of
Vogues
, which I had brought as my recommendation to the reputedly inaccessible sage, leaped from the back seat of my convertible and flew into the air like assaulted chickens. Or perhaps they were real chickens; I was amused to discover that several lice-infested fowl had become fatally entangled with the grille of my Mercedes.
    I had been prepared by my Paris friends for the fact that Peintre’s living quarters were not commensurate with the elegance of his