U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  Say he and I were golfing, and I was getting the hang of it a little better, and the birds were supplying their own spatial illusions to the sound track, and I suddenly came out with “Wow, John—golf. Now I see why you like it so much. It’s an externalized battle with your skin. Your job as a golfer and as a psoriatic is to keep from drifting into the rough, right? You want to arrive as efficiently as possible at the finest, smoothest section of grass!” Say I said this fairly dumb thing to him one balmy afternoon. (Crossing my fingers, in doing so, in the hope that it wasn’t something he himself had written that I had forgotten.) And what if a few years later he has occasion to write another golf story—some masterfully pastoral Byezhin Meadowy kind of thing—and the golf-course/psoriasis parallel occurs to him then, and he drops it in in a perfect spot, without the exclamation point, improved almost beyond recognition. Will I be happy to read this? Maybe eventually, but it will take some adjustment. As I say, I’m a psoriatic myself, and though Updike has said lots of what can be said about the disability, there is more, and there might come a time when I would want to have a scaly-rinded character imagine himself or herself as smooth as a golf course. So no—I couldn’t talk about psoriasis with Updike: I’d be too scared of hearing something from him that I would itch to use before he’d used it, or of tempting him with a flake or two from my experience that I would want to keep for myself—or of hearing him say something similar to something I’d already noted down and was planning to use, and having my note killed by his passing mention. And I would sense his detection of all this ridiculous guardedness on my part: I would see him smiling to himself after I had begun to say something animated and then had halted abruptly and switched to a conventional formula because I had realized midway through that what I had been intending to say was possibly interesting enough for me to want to use somewhere, or because I wanted to hustle him into thinking I was denser and more conventional than I was, so that he would relax and talk more freely, and so that I could surprise him later, making him think to himself when he read some piece of mine, “Hm, I guess that Nick Baker is not to be underestimated.” Our very guardedness and mutual suspicion, or at least my suspicion (or hope, rather) that the suspicion was mutual, would be an undertone of the outing that both of us might have our eye secretly on, to see whether there was anything in it that had an unsaid quality that could be transported effectively into print. Perhaps I would come right out and allude to my awareness of his potential wariness of me, just to see what happened, and he would reply that if there is wariness it is a middle phase and passes, as does the more specific hate you can feel toward young bright unsaddened people running up and down the aluminum ladders of their own insides (in Forster’s phrase) with no storm windows yet to change, no duties or sins to bend their chirping ambition in interesting ways, and that in fact you begin to take a sort of nostalgic joy in seeing that unrefined unwise reputationless rawness start to sort itself out, and you begin to find some amusement in watching a young writer prepare himself to do the small bold thing in the elder writer’s presence, such as I had just done in alluding to his wariness, and that if I wrote with pretend farseeingness about my egotistical thought that he had a wistful wish to be me, he would counter by writing about his self-disgust at the pretense of generousness he’d shown in so breezily pretending that he didn’t care whether I appropriated the complexities of that afternoon game of golf or not, and about the feeling you can have of delegating a piece of experience to someone, happy in the knowledge that though the idea of a biography’s being produced about you is horrifying, the idea that someone is catching you in action from a perspective you’d never yourself have is pleasing. Quickly there would be a screech of feedback and the whole discussion would have to be cut short and I would be carted or caddied quickly off. Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we’re wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we’re not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can’t flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren’t in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we’ve each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies like Midnight Run or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or The Pope of Greenwich Village when we need a shot of the old camaraderie. (Updike catches some of the false jocularity of reunions in a story about two ex-Harvard Lampoon types in New York, one of whom is angling for a job, in “Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow.”) And yet I want to be Updike’s friend now! Forget the guardedness! Helen Vendler once asked him in an interview about decorum and propriety and taste in poetry, and in particular about the sexual poems in a certain collection that seem a trifle indecorous. Updike said in reply that poetry is experienced in private, and that life is too short to worry about propriety. [His actual words, soaring miles above my ratty paraphrase, are: “I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”] Well, life is too short to worry about a lot of things—reserve, tact, the advisability of saying in an essay that you are so miserly with your perceptions that you hesitate to imagine yourself golfing with another writer for fear that he would use something you said and that even so you still want very much to be friends with him. I am friends with Updike—that’s what I really feel—I have, as I never had when I was a child, this imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation. Which leads me to a point that seems worth making. Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain. If Hippocrates or Seneca, whom I know nothing about, says that art is long and life is short, it means little to me: it is merely an opinion some strangers have had and others have emptily quoted. But if Updike says that life is short, I feel the strength of it with something close to shock. The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true. Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you’ve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

  In writing this down, however, with the usual disappointment at the pallor a once pressing idea finally assumes on my page, I notice that my account is incomplete: there was in reality a preliminary stage to my appreciation of Updike’s truth that life is short. In 1985, an ex-professor put my name on the mailing list of writers to receive Guggenheim applications. I took the packet of cream-colored paper that came in the mail very seriously, because the Guggenheim was the only philanthropic grant that Updike had made use of: he wrote The Centaur with its help. (And I can’t help suspecting that the odd artsy mythological chapters in that book, which is elsewhere so packed with visual delights, are there not only to introduce what he called “novelistic space,” that feeling, as I understand the term, of having two or more processes going on concurrently among which the reader is shuttled, so that he forgets a little of each process in h
is exposure to the others, and feels the delight of re-acquaintance, and doesn’t grow rebellious as quickly, but are there also to show the Guggenheimish world that this book is not merely a book about a kid worrying about the health of his father during a cold snap, which we couldn’t possibly take seriously as the outcome of a financial award, but is a book fully aware of the myth criticism that so appealed to fifties literary folk. [I could not be more wrong in this theory: Rabbit, Run, it turns out, not The Centaur at all, was the book he wrote with a Guggenheim.]) But I was sure I wouldn’t win the award and I was feeling very doubtful about my writing in general and disliked the idea of asking several people to write recommendations—that awful moment I imagined in the phone call where the exchange of news falters and you say, “Another reason I’m calling is …” and suddenly your real motives are laid bare: you’re looking for a recommendation, that’s all, you wheedling wretch, you don’t really miss the professor or want to tell him how much you still think about his class, you just want further help in your dishonorable little battle up the grass-blade toward some sort of eminence. Besides, the application would only be complete and worth sending, to my mind, if Updike was one of the ones who’d written a recommendation, and there was no way I could write Updike and ask him to write me a recommendation based on the things I’d had published. So I called my father-in-law (who’d won two Guggenheims in history) to ask him what he thought about going through with the application. I told him that I hated to ask people for recommendations and that I doubted Updike would write me one and moreover (my voice here took on a fluting, over-earnest tone) I was still in a very preparatory stage and I didn’t feel I knew what I was doing well enough yet to deserve a Guggenheim. He said that it was virtuous of me to think that way (generously not pointing out that I was much more pleased and unperplexed by the appearance of this application in the mail than I pretended, though including an almost imperceptible edge of chastisement in his voice, there if I wanted to hear it, at what he easily saw was my transparently false modesty), but he said that if I thought that way for too long I’d “end up in heaven.” I laughed, but I felt a moment of panic or rebuke—my father-in-law had always said that things had come early and easily for me, and now he was implying that I was getting older and putting things off and pretending to bemoan my imperfect apprenticeship. His voice, saying essentially, “But if you wait too long to apply for a Guggenheim your life will be over and you’ll have done nothing,” had the force it had because it was his voice, and because I fancied I could detect in it the always compelling tincture of veiled self-reproach: he regretted not writing more himself (so I crudely interpreted), regretted the wasteful rhythm of the academic year, which demands that half the summer be spent re-familiarizing oneself with the excitement one was just beginning to feel about one’s chosen project by the end of the summer before, regretted how extremely much pleasure teaching itself gave him, even though he knew that its static sparks of eloquence robbed him of some of the stored voltage necessary to finish his next work of history; and his voice, in this sampled and stored and overinterpreted version, was what I mixed into the voice I heard a few years later when I read Updike saying, with that tone of almost impatient fatigue that often marks the high point of an interview with a writer, that life was too short to worry about propriety: in a momentary synthetic unison, these two men, one on the phone and the other on the page of Hugging the Shore, put a constructive fear of death in me. (I didn’t apply for a Guggenheim, though.) Before you can accept it as true, you need to have the sensation, the illusion, that something is said directly to you, or that the idea has occurred to someone who resembles you enough to serve as your emotional plenipotentiary. And what a writer of an essay like this is trying to do, it now seems to me, is to cheat in a sense on this process: I’m trying to convince the reader that I’m such a stone-washed article that even lacking a recognized corpus or a biography or a remembered history of dorm-cafeteria conversation, or any known self outside of the one chunk of me here offered, I am somebody you know: we’ve been through the wars together, eaten at McDonald’s, submitted to base motives, sweated through social gatherings, and so when I propose to tell you that John Updike is a genius, for example, my contention will have some trustworthy impulse of convincingness behind it.

  5

  In so explicitly combining Updike and my father-in-law in what I have just said, I am aware that I am probably begging for Harold Bloom’s templates of literary patrimony to clamp confidently down on my life. But I haven’t read any Harold Bloom, and all the way through writing this essay so far I have been experiencing bursts of anxiety about my ignorance of The Anxiety of Influence. Am I simply resaying things he’s already said? “Adding texture”? I know about “misprision” only from book reviews—book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought, and contributing in that necessary role a certain class of distortions to the forward flow by allowing those works which contain plots and arguments that are easily summarized in their reviews to assume a level of cultural bulk and threat that the books themselves may or may not deserve. It’s not quite true to claim that I haven’t read any Bloom: in 1982 I did read one thing, a very personal and (I now think) attractively exasperating introduction to the Selected Writings of Walter Pater in which he claims that Pater’s “only begetter” was Ruskin, whose anxiety-causing effect “can be read, frequently through negation, throughout Pater’s work.” I finally lost my temper (“You dipshit,” I believe I said, slitting my eyes at the page) when I came to this snidely psychoanalytical sentence: “The overt influence [of Ruskin] Pater buried deep.” But my dislike of “Pater buried deep” marked it in my memory for long-term storage, saving it from otherwise certain inundation—and now, in reaction to Bloom, I wish to unbury and acknowledge my debt in this essay to Bloom himself, who is in the air; but just as I can’t read Updike now for fear that I would forfeit my one opportunity to represent as accurately as I can what I think of him when he comes to mind, and not when I summon him to mind, so I can’t now study The Anxiety of Influence for fear that the book would take me over, remove the urgency I feel about what I’m recording here, transform the particulars of my relationship with Updike into a rather uninteresting instance of a powerful and already proven general law—necessarily less interesting than the relationship between Ruskin and Pater or Ruskin and Proust or Henry James and Proust or Proust and Beckett or Proust and Nabokov or Nabokov and Updike because unlike the rest of the illustrious terms in these comparisons, I am nobody—fame (not to speak of talent) hasn’t conferred any external interest on my writhings. “Illustrious examples,” Edward Young wrote in 1760, in a passage that Bloom or his disciples have no doubt fixed on as an interesting prolepsis of the master’s views, “engross, prejudice, and intimidate. They engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judgment in favour of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they intimidate us with the splendour of their renown, and thus under diffidence bury our strength.” Well, I will not be diffident—I will even go so far as to say that in this matter of treating how a person adapts to the tradition that precedes him I have been just as influenced by David Dreman’s Contrarian Investment Strategy (a book I actually have read) as I have by the ideas of Harold Bloom that are in general invisible circulation. But why fight everyone’s suspicion? I am writing contre Harold Bloom, like it or not, ignorant of his work or not, and in being so forthright about this I have to admit to feeling slightly superior to Updike, who surprised an early interviewer by naming Jack Kerouac as an inspiration. [Actually he merely said that of his contemporaries Kerouac “attempted to grab it all; somehow, to grab it all. I like him.”] Kerouac? said the interviewer, in effect—just as Updike wanted him to. How interesting. And it may be that Kerouac’s typing of On the Road on a roll of shelf paper or a piano roll or whatever the myth is was a spur to Updike, who had a suspicion that his descriptive polish wouldn’t deser
t him even at full throttle and wanted to test its outer limits, after four years of the standard college rap about the sacredness of the act of revision. But I think we have to say that Kerouac isn’t really the big influence, nor is Salinger, whom Updike shook after a few stories (“Janny!” calls a very Salingeresque girl in the first story he published)—the real influences (elsewhere freely admitted) are, regardless of respective ages, Nabokov, Proust, and later, perhaps, after he underwent whatever romantic/religious/inspirational crisis I believe I remember his saying he experienced circa 1961, Iris Murdoch. His book reviews catch the accents of Edmund Wilson and Henry James. In the imaginary interviews I sometimes have with The Paris Review I have happily envisioned myself making long heterogeneous lists of predecessors in answer to that inevitable question: I’d say, “My lasting literary influences? Um—The Tailor of Gloucester, Harold Nicolson, Richard Pryor, Seuss’s If I Ran the Circus, Edmund Burke, Nabokov, Boswell, Tintin, Iris Murdoch, Hopkins, Michael Polanyi, Henry and William James, John Candy, you know, the usual crowd.” But that would be burying Updike deep, and I’m in reaction to Bloom, and therefore can’t bury Updike deep the way I might be expected to want to.