I've been reading More Matter, a collection of John Updike's essays and reviews, and enjoying, as I always do, the reach of the late master's mind. This collection contains perceptive pieces on such disparate topics as Eastern Europe, Lana Turner, Irish writers (although in the latter essay, oddly, he gets John McGahern's name wrong, calling him "Thomas" instead: good editing, Knopf), Normans Mailer and Manea, food, drink, travel, and, best of all, art; specifically, that found in the Frick Collection in New York. In evoking the feeling that the visitor to the Frick has of walking through a family's home ( a very wealthy family's home) and just casually happening upon one masterpiece after another--"oh look, a Monet, and a Rembrandt, and isn't that El Greco?"--Updike captures the magic intimacy of the place, which was always my favorite New York museum, and which remains one of the places I miss the most from my erstwhile home town. It's so accessible, the Frick, at 70th and Fifth, across from the park, behind its little lawn--the only front lawn, Updike points out, on Fifth Avenue. It's discreet, too, a quality one would not necessarily have associated with Robber Baron Frick, Mr. U.S. Steel, once called "America's Most-Hated Man" as a consequence of his brutal put-down of the Homestead steelworkers' strike in 1892; and yet, his former residence is an oasis of peace, elegance, and tranquillity, perhaps owing more to Mrs. Frick in that regard. Anyway, it's a beautiful building, a comfortable home, and a repository of my favorite artists, especially the Dutch--especially Frans Hals; Cuyp the landscape genius, with his overarching skies; the Officer and Laughing Girl of Vermeer, god of inner light; Rembrandt, purveyor of deepest melancholy (his Polish Horseman, a self-portrait)....Monet's Vetheuil in Winter, glimpsed from across the Seine and at a corner of the hallway, outside the Fricks' dining room (imaginary scents of heavy sauces and a post-prandial cigar)...for dessert, luscious strawberry-and-cream Gainsborough beauties...and so on. Greatest of all, probably, Bellini's electrifying St. Francis in the Desert. Then it's on to that Greek coffee shop on the corner of 67th and Madison for a nice dolmas and a beer.