U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  But I don’t mean of course to suggest that Updike’s developmental path has taken him from obscure latinity to Saxon simplicity: from the first he has been a sultan of the monosyllable, and of the monosyllabic settings for richesse, as when in Of the Farm he mentions “the pool of a dandelion,” using “pool” here, I think, to mean the whitish spherical frizz of Tinkertoyed seeds, a botanical sense of the word that is interestingly unfamiliar to me, or when in one of his early poems he talks about the view from shipboard:

  The blue below

  Is Aquamarine

  Sometimes the blue below

  Is green

  [The real lines, from “Shipbored,” are:

  That line is the horizon line.

  The blue above it is divine.

  The blue below it is marine.

  Sometimes the blue below is green.]

  The comic movement of the stanza turns on the opposition [in my garbled and impoverished version, not in Updike’s real version] between the line-filling latinity of “aquamarine” humbled into the contradictory surprise of “green.” But the best example of this sort of syllabic eloquence that I can remember is near the end of the introduction to Hugging the Shore, when, after complaining about the dangers of writing book reviews, he says that the money he got from writing them “roughly balanced a monthly alimony payment that was mine to make.” “Mine to make” is awfully good: a state of penance conveyed by the King Jamesian ring of duties as privileges; a whole bible of contrition “foreshortened” (as King Henry James would say) into a single cadence. Nabokov may have been showily able to describe dog urine in snow as “xanthic holes,” but he was not enough of a native speaker to get the mine-to-make kind of melody.

  No, the confusion of verbal oddity with exuberance, and of neologism (especially noun/adjective and adjective/noun transvestitism) with strength of conviction, is my problem, not Updike’s. I want not to use “florilegia” but I can’t help myself. I’m afraid of small pure words like “sky” or “water” or “blue” or “green”: they too quickly induce an auto-suggestive trance of consent and submission, in which (as with “catchy” above) you say, “Ah, simple, beautiful, beautiful, simple!”; and in less than fifteen seconds that isolated vocable has expanded to blot out everything else—all intelligence, all conscience, all conversation, all libraries—

  sky

  And it’s too much! You lose your bearings! Every concrete substantive seems arbitrarily lyrical! You don’t need paragraphs or arguments or careful description at all! To protect yourself from this agoraphobic sensation of falling into a bottomless and eventually toxic word, you need a clunkier and uglier and more conspicuously Victorian vocabulary around it, full of nearlys and indeeds and evens and himselfs—terms of near but not perfect transparency, that can almost be employed every fifth sentence or so without anyone’s noticing, but not quite—so that you can use the language freely, without being transfixed into a mute and foolish nounage by the sacredness of the words you learned first.

  6

  As I feared, sky has sucked me in. For I had planned, in bringing the last paragraph to a close and in opening up this one, to say that I had a good deal more to say about the whole problem of self-repetition and self-influence (a problem which we can be sure that Updike takes seriously, since in a review of a late Borges collection he points out that the blind belletrist quotes the same passage from Chesterton in three separate places), but that my wife gave me Thomas Mallon’s brand-new Stolen Words for Christmas (yes, it is already December 28, 1989, and I have only gotten this far in this essay!), which includes (page 140) a brief discussion of the topic of self-repetition that though incomplete neutralized my own parochial sense of novelty; moreover (I planned to say) I was beginning to comprehend, by extending Updike’s notion of novelistic space into the wider dimension of oeuvral space, that not everything I had mounded up to say under a given head needed to be said in one spot: I could leave some images or observations unshoehorned and trust that they would clamor their unexpected pertinence later on; later on in the same essay or book, or later on in a different essay or book—although I was also beginning to see that by putting aside some of what you had to say for later (out of simple consideration for the reader’s already redlining threshold of vexation and puzzlement, and out of the desire to demonstrate that you were not so compulsive that you couldn’t avoid narrative clogs when you wished to), you condemned yourself to the appearance of another sort of compulsion, in that readers would be sure to assume that your later returns to the subject came about because you were drawn inexorably toward a certain theme, when in truth you would have been delighted never to have to mention it again if there had been any reasonably graceful way to include all of it in one extended shishkebob. For instance (I planned to point out) in writing my second novel I had found that I had more to say about model airplanes and about coins than I could possibly accommodate on its already overburdened chassis: I was distressed to see this; I had to keep telling myself that there would be other occasions—and indeed I found a way to clean out the entire model airplane depository in the essay I wrote just before starting on this piece of madness about Updike, and in this very thing on Updike I have successfully gotten rid of one of the coin sequences left over from the novel. But at a price: I now will seem to be obsessed with model airplanes and coins, when on my scale of obsessions they are very low. (Even to call Updike an obsession—my wife first used the word on me in this connection in 1987—overstates it; for though I think about Updike a lot I seldom read him: surely a true obsessive would read all the available works.)

  More disheartening still, in finding a stable environment for the last coin sequence (me at McDonald’s reading James after the five hundred pennies) I find that I also offer the reader the opportunity to accuse me of being overinterested in scenes in which a person eats and thinks at the same time: my first book describes a thoughtful lunch hour, and my second is about a man giving a bottle to an infant while again thinking away, and now I have a guy (really and truly me this time, though only a tiny transverse slice of me) chewing on a Big Mac and reading about James’s stream of thought. I don’t want my work to have this prominent “philosophical snack” motif! And yet the repetition of this type of moment was unavoidable: I had to balance the relief of consigning a large scoop of my residual coin-moments to this essay (there is, happily, only one more large scoop to go) against the possible career harm of seeming to imply by this recurrence that I want above all to be remembered in the act of chewing. Relief won in this case. But I am at a very delicate point in my development, it now occurs to me: the point where you decide that some thematic repetitions aren’t going to be thought of as unwelcome evidence of a failure to strike out in new directions but as lifelong themes: like the “Nina”s hidden in every Hirschfeld, or the moths and fritillaries that come back in Nabokov, or Updike’s sweetly graphic sexual infidelities, or Melville’s sea. The question is, is eating-and-thinking going to be my “Nina” or not? I hope not.

  So I meant to go on to say this about repetition, treating it slightly more fully than I have been able to in renouncing my intention to treat it, but that word “sky” has unexpectedly stopped the forward flow of my essay: not exactly with the lethal bottomlessness of the simple concrete word, but with that more general hypertrophied word and phrase reverence that has much to do with flash cards, and which has proven to be, in fact, one of the worst hazards of the sort of criticism of Updike I’m engaged in here, a style of book chat that, in the unlikely event that it has not already been recognized and does not already have a name, might be called something sexy like memory criticism, or phrase filtration, or closed book examination. If it is merely a subset of the “reader response” school (which I know nothing about), or is a variant of the old Paterian impressionistic criticism or of Arnold’s touchstone technique, fine—but if it is something new, I’m raising my flag now! Nobody can take this supreme moment from me, if it is a moment! (“Too clever by hal
f” is a charge I’ve never understood. Who originated it and why has its unambitious ratio persisted to damn so effortlessly all of our wildest upsurges?) Leave aside the other strains in this essay, such as the interleaving of autobiography (familiar enough, perhaps), and the insistence that what I’m doing be done on a living writer: memory criticism, understood as a form of commentary that relies entirely on what has survived in a reader’s mind from a particular writer over at least ten years of spotty perusal, is possibly a new and useful way of discussing literature. Its risks are (1) that it depends to an unusual extent on whether you like me and whether consequently you have some faith that even though I may remember an entirely different set of phrases from Updike than you remember, you feel that you could conceivably have remembered them yourself, had you read what I had read by Updike in the order I read it, and were Updike as important to you as he apparently is to me. And (2) if it is indeed a new style of interpretation, it promises to open a depressing flood of bad work that strings together a couple of three-word phrases by a certain writer and a few “Well, I remember”s. And (3) this abuse will in time bring about another deadly wave of close reading in reaction, for of course instead of pulling you back to the books under discussion, this approach pulls you away from them, demanding that you not consult them while you are letting your thoughts clarify. And (4) it assumes that the filtration processes of memory are less chancy, more dependably self-consistent, than they really are. Those are the risks. But it is a lot of fun, and it offers a nice pseudoscientific thrill as you begin to treat your haphazard book-memories as a fund of data on which to operate, and it costs nothing, takes no great reading, and forces a degree of honesty from the critic that might, for about five minutes, be beneficial. But no, no—I don’t want it to happen: the fame that comes from having touched off or reinforced some humanistic trend, and especially from having supplied a phrase that too succinctly sums up the whole approach, is not the kind of slow-burn fame that a novelist needs to keep developing. Manifesto-fame kills. I don’t want to see the techniques of “closed book examination” applied to any other novelist. I want this essay to be the end of it. I hate myself for trying even jokingly to increase its market penetration with a cheap name. It reminds me of Gilbert Ryle’s employment of the term “category mistake” in debunking the existence of mental entities—the phrase was too powerful for its own good, it fell into the wrong hands, spread too quickly, destroyed any helpfulness it may at first have helped disseminate. Sexy names are so often Germanic noun pairs or trios: category mistake, paradigm shift, catastrophe theory, reader response criticism, And now something like deprived recall analysis? No! Fight it off. When a snippet like “vast dying sea” sticks in your memory even when shorn of its casings, this durability is a good thing, because the phrase is intrinsically interesting and funny—the foundling survives on its own merits, not on its promise. “Paradigm shift,” on the other hand, never moved anyone to tears (and I will instantly admit that it is a good deal snappier, more catchy, than my own attempted catchphrases): it was all promise, it offered the prospect of infinite applicability, of normally reticent colleagues from a hundred distinct disciplines singing in one great lusty chorus. The fate of “paradigm shift” rises or falls with every subtle or crude application of the theory it stands for; whereas “vast dying sea” is self-reliant, and it can only be harmed by my unrelenting overquotation. But if I were an American academic, I don’t think I would be able to resist turning my memory-filtered approach to Updike into a method. I would check hurriedly to be sure that Walter Benjamin or one of the Frenchmen hadn’t done it all already, and if it looked as if it was indeed sufficiently new, I would sketch out a first footnote that found hints of my new approach in Updike himself, when he says that Eliot’s plays fade, “as most plays do,” but lines of his poetry have a grim ability to hang on [“… what lines of poetry between Yeats’s late poems and the verse that Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote from within the shadow of death burn deeper, better remember themselves, than Eliot’s?”]; and in Henry James, when in the midst of his Hawthorne study he offers an account of how as a boy he first heard the tide The Scarlet Letter and felt its power, and how later at a museum someone pointed out a painting on the subject of The Scarlet Letter to him and told him it was about a book he would someday read, and how he first read the opening pages of a middle installment of Madame Bovary: Etude des moeurs near a fireplace in Paris as a teenager and felt the pull of its tide and its style before it was dignified by the salvers of fame; and in George Saintsbury, when he worried that he hadn’t noticed lately the incidental quotations and passing mentions of Smollett which in the world of letters are the principal means we have of knowing the degree of a writer’s “sempervirescence”; and in Anthony Burgess when he praised scenes in Isherwood’s A Single Man for their surprising ability to stay with you; and in Frost, in his potsticker about the poet’s task being to come up with words that “lodge” in the memory—and I would find some other obscurer examples that felt apt and toss them in and perhaps scramble the order so that Updike and James weren’t once again at the top, and I’d say—ah, they all had inklings, they all felt instinctively that the closed book examination of literature was of primary importance, but none of them thought to make it a method. That’s what I might say. But I’m not an American academic. (Harvard’s philosophy department rejected my application for graduate study in 1981—and why? Because I’d taken only three philosophy courses in college, two of these during my freshman year in music school? Because I’d gotten a trilobitic score on the Logic and Reasoning section of the GRE trivium? Because my application essay was ten pages of pompous pleading that ended by my misspelling and misusing the word “elenchus”? These aren’t reasons.) I count myself fortunate in being able to extract all the pretend-scholarly pleasure I want out of my method without urging it on anyone else.

  In fact, at this very moment I have at my left elbow a rubber-banded pile of three-by-five cards, each holding a phrase I remember from Updike, sorted in alphabetical order by key word. I’m modeling myself on Nabokov’s lovable Pnin, who retires to a carrel with one drawer of the card catalog like a squirrel with a nut—and on Nabokov himself, of course, who detailed his three-by-five-card method of fictional composition so comprehensively that Gore Vidal said in some essay that he was sick of hearing about it. I have only to pluck out one of these phrase cards at random, such as presided over by a serene and mutual deafness, Updike’s perfect characterization of Nabokov’s and Wilson’s epistolary argument over poetic meter, to feel that I have dots left to connect, and that I am crisply advancing the cause of self-knowledge. [The correct quotation, however, is “derived from a serene and mutual deafness.”] But when I came to the end of that earlier paragraph, with the vastness of the open sky visible through a rent in it, I thumbed through these three-by-five cards in vain: I found I had no simple way back to Updike. I could mention an aerial description I knew from Many Me that goes (in my misremembered version)

  Sally became a bird, a heroine. The clouds boiled beneath her, radiant, motionless. For twenty pages of Camus, while the air conditioner nozzle whispered in her hair, something something something

  [and in Updike’s real version:

  Then Sally flew; she became a bird, a heroine. She took the sky on her back, levelled out on the cloudless prairie above the clouds—boiling, radiant, motionless—and held her breath for twenty pages of Camus while the air-conditioner nozzle whispered into her hair.]

  which I remember simply because I was distressed in 1987 to come across the throwaway mention of the air nozzle in Updike after I had resolved to write in detail about my own reverence for it. (The only other mention I knew of was in John Dickson Carr’s 1951 The Nine Wrong Answers, in which it’s called a “little ventilator” that sends “a shaft of cool air on [the hero’s] face.”) But this sky-Marry Me connection led me nowhere useful. Or I could make an imperious sort of modern transition by first citing Updike’s mention of some
thing that John Hawkes had once told him, which was (approximately), “When I want a character to fly, I just say, ‘He flew’ ” (see, I would never have taken this piece of advice to heart if Hawkes himself had said it to me, because Hawkes’s fictional imagery is too gruesome for him to be a possible friend, but transmitted through Updike I have found it very useful), and by then announcing that I was adapting Hawkes via Updike by saying “When I want to make a transition, I just say, ‘I’m making a transition’ ”—but again there was no promise of riches beyond the pass. Or I could simply rattle on about influence, but I felt that I badly needed a break from that.