The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, April 17, 2025

Byblos: In an otherwise gripping essay on Emerson that peels off the fluff of admiration that too easily sticks to the Concord philosopher after shallow readings (Emerson’s essays, he writes, “so exciting in their broad attack and pithy sentences, they end, so often, disconcertingly in air, and fail to leave an imprint of their shape in the mind”), John Updike–a Harvard alum, by the way–nears his conclusion by describing a trip he took to a hospital, to him the exemplification of modern-day America. We’re going along, not yet clear as to why Updike chooses to tell the story of this hospital trip in the middle of a meditation on Emerson, but aware that in his sure hands the payoff will be worth it. Until we hit upon-or are struck by–this sentence, here in its full context: “Though it was autumn, the weather in New England was lingeringly warm, so the crowd summoned to the hospital was lightly dressed, in bright colors, in sandals and jogging shorts. Nubile, merciful nurses and brisk, sage physicians moved in angelic white…” It’s the first detail in the essay where men and women are differentiated. He could not help it. He just could not: the difference had to be sexist. The nurses had to be not only nubile–the first cliche, the first reduction to a sexual object–but “merciful.” Sexism and paternalism. The physicians are not only implicitly male, as if the staff of Massachusetts General in October 1983 could not possibly have had female physicians, but those males are, of course, “brisk” (as nubile nurses, too busy langoring about their boobs and hips this way and that) and sage. It’s a throw-away phrase, seven words in a thick paragraph near the end of a muscular essay richer in insights than some of Emerson’s flightier pages. But the inevitable leer of Updike’s imagery, the moment it’s confronted with a scene where men and women mix, couldn’t help cheapen the passage with what, to Updike, must have seemed just another routine, cleverly titillating description. The only color missing was the candy striper’s, though Updike 20 years earlier had filled in those colors with another brief scene inside a hospital, in “The Morning,” a story about a man musing about his mistress, who happened to be a nurse (not, of course, a doctor. A doctor would have been too much competition for Updike): “He loved her in her uniform, and on the occasions when he had ventured into the hospital for a glimpse of her he felt in the corridors of identically uniformed women as if he were raiding a harem, or a cloister of the lascivious nuns who populate French pornography.” Cliches are the last thing we think about when we think about Updike’s style. But the style masks ideas that are nothing if not cliches, just as when his male hero reads Kierkegaard while his wife “tinkled the supper dishes in our tiny kitchen.” 

—P.T.