U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  The general whimperiness of this passage of mine, combined with the reliance on B-list metaphors like “wash of millenia” [sic] and “ache” to keep the prose at a higher verbal pitch than its ideas can hold by themselves, has the ring of vulgarized early Updike, whose boy-heroes are sometimes more sensitive and queasier-stomached than one wants them to be. You feel when one of his young men’s GI-tracts yet again does some unbecoming acrobatic in reaction to a piece of social unhappiness that a writing teacher at Harvard must have told him that it was a good idea to have the reader get his mood-information through all of his senses, and that dutifully he is applying this distorting dictum to excess; just as in movie after movie whenever the character gets a piece of terrible news the scriptwriter immediately has him or her bend at the waist, grasp the front bumper, and (to use an idiom that understandably caught Edmund Wilson’s ear) “snap lunch”—in laziness resorting to brutally externalized physiology because any subtler sort of core dump is so difficult, cinematically and fictionally, to achieve; and yet hardly do I venture this small criticism when I remember a later character, in “Twin Beds in Rome,” I think, who much more believably than his predecessors gets sick on a maritally crucial vacation and can feel in the initial moment of his illness the entire shape of his stomach within him, an unprepossessing tuber—a magnificent trope, which uses an ugly, earthen, marginally-edible-sounding thing to describe the location of the discomfort it would cause if eaten, and which may owe its existence entirely to the whole unsatisfactory preceding series of youthful indigestions. [To my astonishment, I have not found “tuber” so used in “Twin Beds in Rome” or anywhere else I looked; could it be that I made it up? That it is my own image? Doubtful. In any case, the passing sickness in that story works in a way that the bellyaching in The Centaur does not.] “To the stomach quatted with dainties,” said Lyly, “all trifles seem queasie”; and the moral we might draw from Updike’s early prose is that the perfectly healthy, euphuistic wish to caramelize every crab apple and clove every ham ought not to be accompanied by too keen an interest in the hero’s emotio-gastric status. (I write this, needless to say, during the holidays.)

  But here again, here again, I have to call attention to this problem of tone. Is it like me to rope somebody like John Lyly into the present context? No, it is not. Or rather, it is only when I can then call the reference immediately into question by a follow-up act of self-reproach. When Beckett allowed his nervousness about Proust to commandeer his attitude, it made him “acerb,” as Updike duly saw; but when I am betrayed by what I take to be a somewhat similar nervousness—a feeling that the stakes are very high, that everything depends on the quality of my thinking right here, that this essay is the test of whether I should bother to be a writer or not, and yet the feeling at the same time that there is a fatal prematurity in so arranging things, since it forces discipleship and competitiveness to clash awkwardly when with time the two would have arrived at a subtler and more composed relationship—the betrayal takes the form of smirks and smartass falsifications, such as when I spoke earlier of trying to “hustle” Updike on the golf course into thinking I was less perceptive than I was, or when I used faux-naïf expletives like “Jeezamarooni!” or called myself a writer “on the make.” I really must read The Anxiety of Influence as soon as I finish writing this, because the fragmentary idea I have of it keeps steering my approach into oversimplifications. It might even be that two of Updike’s own early characters are in large part to blame for my errantly cocky tone—the convergence of contingent and chronic influences being especially hard to shake off. In the story called “The Kid’s Whistling” a kid disturbs the creative concentration of a retail-store manager by whistling blithely while the increasingly irritated manager tries to finish a sign that says something like “Have a Happy Holiday” [“Toyland” actually] in multicolored tinsel on glue [“Silverdust” on poster paint]. (I reread this story in 1987, ten years after I first read it, remembering only the tide, because I needed to be sure that I wasn’t overlapping Updike’s use of whistling in a scene in my first novel. Such checking to control against overlaps is in my experience one of the main motives for the miscellaneous reading that writers do.) And in another early story, which I read circa 1978 and whose tide I can’t bring back [“Intercession”], an overcheerful buttinsky kid messes up the golf game of a somewhat older, more serious sportsman by his running commentary. The Bugs Bunny/ Elmer Fudd pattern of both stories, though it unquestionably does capture a fractional component of the true nature of my feelings toward Updike, is much too easy to ride out into exaggeration—and I am aware too that people would probably rather hear me be smartass, thereby digging my own grave and taking old Updike down a peg or two at the same time, than hear me be grateful and woozily admiring.

  And to the extent that my cockiness is useful to Updike himself—as the whistling turns out to be an essential distraction to the retail manager in the first story, and as the buttinsky golf-kid finally helps the elder golfer in the second story to some more distant green of philosophy that I do not remember—I am pleased to carry on with it, but I have been unusually on guard against this fault lately because of something that happened just this September. I was sent a copy of a review of an Iris Murdoch novel that began extremely unusually by saying, “The arrival of this blockbuster [Murdoch’s The Message to the Planet] interrupted my reading of—” and then mentioned my first novel. The reviewer, who was Jan Morris, held Murdoch and me in explicit opposition: to her I represented up-to-the-minutiae, as it were, while Murdoch stood for a tradition that had been played out and ought to be brought to a close. I have had a literary crush on Murdoch since 1985, so I shot off a letter to her saying how horrified I was by the opening gambit of the review and told her that I thought she was the best novelist we have. (I was telling the truth: Updike is my favorite living writer; Murdoch is my favorite living novelist—although in drawing this distinction I clearly remember how little I liked reading an essay by John Leonard, I think, in The New York Times Book Review in 1978 or so in which he named Updike as one of the five best living American writers but then nastily qualified this by saying that Updike was a better essayist than he was a novelist. It doesn’t work that way: the novels and essays lend reciprocal authority to one another, and in point of fact no essay does outdo Of the Farm.) I ended the letter by saying, “Now you don’t need a philistine schmuck like me to tell you how good you are, but I assure you that not one sentence in the narrow miscellany of mine that Ms. Morris refers to would have been conceivable without your superb and unequallable flights of intellect, and that to mention you and me in the same breath is really a joke.” To this embarrassing gush Murdoch wrote a prompt and gracious response: she said she hadn’t seen the review anyway. I was pained, as all those who send raving letters to writers must be, by the failure of my praise of her to turn me somehow into a better person, and after a few days of rehearsing my shame to myself I pinpointed, while walking from one room to another, its real source. The awfulness of “Now you don’t need a philistine schmuck like me …” had, it turned out, a direct recent antecedent: I had been, I now saw, patterning my letter on the example of a raucous, middle-aged, American woman character in Murdoch’s own strange play The Black Prince. The character was straight-talking and used lots of words in the “schmuck” category, and (as Ms. Deborah Norton played her in late August 1989 at the Aldwych Theater in London) had an impressively loud, theatrical, braying laugh. In writing to Murdoch I felt uncomfortably American, and hence I overplayed my Americanness in the letter by using a tone taken directly from her own American character. And I have made the same mistake with Updike in a number of places here. I fight the effrontery that my essayistic stance seems formally to call for, but because I invariably project Updike’s self onto the heroes of his stories, I have to assign my own projected self the roles that remain—infuriating junior whistler, or bothersome golf-kid, or even, in the case of Of the Farm, the direct role of smart-aleck stepson. W
hen I first read that novel in 1978, I found myself almost indifferent to the mental life of the narrator, and I instead matched myself to and felt jealous of the bright, eleven-year-old, science-fiction-reading child of his new wife. A decade later, the same confusion clearly persists, explaining my use of “Jeezamarooni” and my pretense of being a direct, enthusiastic, slightly crazed, fringe, no-bullshit idiot savant who pipes up in opposition to Updike’s peerless, polished, mainstream, genteel lucidity, when we all know perfectly well that it is not fair to call Updike genteel (I think a capsule reviewer in 7 Days used that loaded word on him pretty recently): he is much too smart, too sneaky, too sexually appetitive, and too mean to fill that bill.

  7

  Mean? Yes, he is mean. He seems at times to admire meanness—I’m thinking, for instance, of that puzzling sentence of his that always appears on Anne Tyler paperbacks: “Anne Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good.” He favors the sudden devastating zingers that people spit at each other in moments of anger. (In the scene that made me stop reading Marry Me, the husband and wife really do spit, using real saliva, at each other. [Actually the husband says “You dumb cunt” and the wife then spits in his face.]) The mother in Of the Farm hisses extraordinarily sharp things to Joey, the divorced narrator, things like, “You can support one woman, but not two,” and “You’ve stolen my grandchildren from me.” (This second line, which like the first may not exist, especially impressed my mother. In fact, I don’t remember reading it myself; I only remember my mother once citing it to me years ago as an instance of Updike’s perceptiveness about divorce.) In Marry Me, again, he has the protagonist swat one of his sons on the head in the middle of dinner [really in the middle of saying grace], in a creakingly psychological bit of “taking the divorce out on the children.” I hate this. In the carefully modulated dynamic range of a psychological novel, a swat on the head or spit in the face severs (and Murdoch’s A Severed Head may well be behind Marry Me and Couples) the bond with the reader as unpleasantly as something out of a slasher movie. Maybe it really happened—so much the worse for my opinion of Updike. The meanness that first bothered me, though, when I encountered it a decade ago, long before I was married, was in a short story in Pigeon Feathers in which a young husband returns with hamburgers and eats them happily with his family in front of the fire, and thinks lovingly of his wife’s Joyceanly “smackwarm” thighs, and then, in the next paragraph, says as narrator (the “you” directed at the narrator’s wife), “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly.… The skin between your breasts is a sad yellow.” And a little later, “Seven years have worn this woman.” This hit me as inexcusably brutal when I read it. I couldn’t imagine Updike’s real, nonfictional wife reading that paragraph and not being made very unhappy. You never know, though; the internal mechanics of marriages are shielded from us, and maybe in the months after that story came out the two of them enjoyed a wry private joke whenever they went to a party and she wore a dress with a high neckline and they noticed some interlocutor’s gaze drop to her breasts and they saw together the little knowing look cross his unpleasantly salacious features as he thought to himself, Ho ho: high neckline to cover up all that canary-yellow, eh? Updike knows that people are going to assume that the fictional wife of an Updike-like male character corresponds closely with Updike’s own real-life wife—after all, Updike himself angered Nabokov by suggesting that Ada was Vera. How can Updike have the whatever, the disempathy, I used frequently to ask myself, and ask myself right now, to put in print that his wife appeared ugly to him that morning, especially in so vivid a way? It just oughtn’t to be done! It makes us readers imagine her speculating as she read it: “Which morning was he thinking that? He sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast and thinking I was ugly and worn! And I had no idea.” It is not enough for Updike to say that he had to have the narrator be disapproving in the morning in order to protect him from the charge of “smackwarm” oversentimentality that the earlier passage invites (but does not deserve). When it’s believable, sentiment is not a liability; nor would unnecessary cruelty on a subsequent page counterbalance true treacle. If Updike is doing this deliberately, in the belief that a high artistic intent sanctions it, it is just as bad as his doing it unknowingly, unaware that something like this might cause hurt.

  The other example, more direct still, that I frequently think of in this connection is when Updike called Phaedra, the small press that brought out Nabokov’s The Eye and Nabokov’s Quartet (which included the supreme description of an Ithacan thaw, “part jewel, part mud,” with the shadows from icicle-drops rising to meet the drops themselves and the “humble fluting” of the garbage cans), a “miserable little bindery.” Such harshness is Nabokovian, of course (though Nabokov, protesting loudly, clearly didn’t think so): Updike instanced Nabokov’s “reflexive contempt” as one of the least attractive things about him (and man did I repeat that perfect adjective over to myself when I read it in a Berkeley library in 1981; I tried to use it in every sentence I uttered—“reflexive” acronyms, “reflexive” demonologies, “reflexive” car chases)—but Nabokov’s hatreds were most of them directed at dead people: Freud, Dostoevski, Zola, etc. It is far more painful, I think, to see Phaedra called “a miserable little bindery” than to see Freud brushed off as a “Viennese quack.” Think for a second of the employees of this firm (I don’t know if it is still in business or not), proud to have lucked into publishing Nabokov and doing a perfectly acceptable job of it, too: think of them coming in to work the day after reading Updike’s needlessly severe epitaph, hanging their heads. They should be praised and cheered on for playing an important part in Nabokov’s publishing history, not held up to ridicule by a Jansonist Knopfer who thinks he is canny about bookmaking because he once worked a linotype machine and knows about widows and orphans. Foremost in my mind, as a matter of fact, as I wrote about the Franklin Library earlier in this essay, was my concern that I was on the verge of subjecting that publisher to the same sort of killing dismissal that Updike had dumped on Phaedra, and I toned down my words a little (though not enough), because, hey, why do that to people? Those who like the Franklin Library should be entitled to like the frigging Franklin Library—why should I cause them to look up at their shelf of monthly classics and suddenly feel doubtful? And those who work for the Franklin Library should be entitled to feel some pride in doing so. Think of the thousands of helpful dollars that the several Franklin combines—mint, porcelain, whatever—spend on magazine advertising: for that transfer of wealth alone they deserve our support. I do contend, though, that making fun of (not “poking fun at,” please) the Franklin Library’s binding and gilt is slightly more defensible than calling Phaedra miserable, since Phaedra was the only publisher of certain of Nabokov’s books, whereas the sole reason for the Franklin Library’s existence is to offer expensive, fancy versions of works that are for the most part available in other editions.

  Fine. But would I know to go easy on the Franklin Library if Updike hadn’t been so hard on Phaedra? He teaches even in his transgressions. Would I know to try always to forgive Updike’s flaws if he hadn’t treated his sometime hero, Nabokov, so peremptorily? In a review of Despair, Updike criticizes Nabokov for frittering away time on this sort of translation of early work when the world awaited another masterpiece [it’s really a review of Speak, Memory: “… instead of composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to Pale Fire, [he] fusses with backward-looking projects.…”]—and Updike’s scolding seems woefully short on perception, considering that he had by then been in the business for at least fifteen years and was presumably well aware of the varieties of unhappiness (including reviewer-instigated unhappiness) and simple distraction or boredom or fatigue that can disrupt the rhythm of novel production, and especially considering that around 1961 he had himself gone through, as we now know from several hints here and there, such as in his introductory note to Marry Me [no, his introductory note to a story in Burnett’s This Is My Best, rep
rinted in Hugging the Shore], a time of fear that he would never write again. (The sexual revolution disrupted and enriched the middle of Updike’s writing career; the same might be said for the emigrations and gaps and second winds that the Bolshevik revolution imposed on Nabokov—but that is a sort of 80 percent rhetorical reviewery comparison that I never like reading; it is pleasant to do it, though, I must say.) And when Ada finally did arrive, Updike did such a number on it in his review that he felt compelled to explain in the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces that he writes faster than he reads (I’m not sure I understand what that gnomistry means, but I like it) and that therefore he may have grown impatient with some of the longer books he had to cover, such as Ada. Even the relatively good “cause for celebration” [no, “let us all rejoice”] review of Glory suddenly presents the charge that the book “never really awakens to its condition as a novel, its obligation to generate suspense.” Can you imagine Nabokov soaking in his Geneva bathtub, squeezing a sponge of warm water over his head, an act he claimed (in that same Tri-Quarterly tribute) was one of the keenest pleasures of his later days, and then, as the water cooled on his face and the instant of dropleted bliss moved on, suddenly having the plug of his deserved happiness pulled by the memory of pipsqueak Updike’s saying that all that work by himself and his translating son Dmitri fails to generate suspense? Updike is no master of cliff-hanging himself, remember. But at a certain point, I think, having gotten bad silly not-to-the-point reviews enough times yourself, you must finally think, I’ll try it myself—I’ll just see what it is like to charge someone with something idiotic like failing to offer suspense. Updike may have felt that it was a badge of veteran professionalism, of his status as a scarred and battle-seasoned dugong, to thump Nabokov once on the nose for suspenselessness. I can even almost imagine Updike hesitating a moment before typing “miserable little bindery” and then remembering, liberatingly, amorally, some particularly painful phrase that a reviewer had used on him, and his thinking “That dirty little fuckface! Well, I’ve taken my knocks! And The Eye is a poorly produced book and my job is to tell the truth—‘miserable little bindery’ it is!” But we see how cruelty begets cruelty: Nabokov’s uncharitable streak took hold of Updike as he wrote about Nabokov; Updike’s borrowed gall now infects me in my criticism of Updike.