U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  Auden strikingly said (so I read in a review by Cyril Connolly in The Evening Colonnade and I’m paraphrasing and amplifying) that you should not speak ill of any writer, living or dead, to anyone but your closest friends, and absolutely not in print. Simply don’t talk about, don’t give space to, things you don’t like. I think I agree with that, except in cases where the writer has invited criticism by being intemperately critical himself. Thus I was wrong to gripe about Updike’s queasy adolescent heroes a little way back (there may be ex-queasy adolescents who like this quality in early Updike more than any other: why should I introduce an artificial dissatisfaction?), but I was justified in slamming him for slamming Nabokov as not supplying suspense or for calling his fictional wife yellow-skinned in the morning. We don’t want the sum of pain or dissatisfaction to be increased by a writer’s printed passage through the world. His task is simply to delight and to instruct as well as he can. I now think I see, in fact, that the contention that his Active wife is matinally ugly and the contention that Glory fails to generate suspense grow out of one and the same infirmity in Updike’s personality: he is able to discriminate between flaw and beauty too neatly in the things he loves. If you love, or at least like Glory, it cannot fail to do anything—and really, the only suspense a book needs, as Updike by now must know, having tolerantly motored through dozens of much more experimental bad novels for our benefit, is not “What will happen next?” but simply “Will I ever want to stop reading?” Likewise, if you love your wife, her yellow breast-skin can’t make you jump so suddenly to the ascription of an industrial-strength predicate like “ugly.” If on the other hand you dislike or are indifferent to an entity, then all sorts of elegantly shaded discriminations are possible.

  From this distance, unable to check anything, with all of Updike’s fiction packed away in boxes for the past year and a half, and most, if read, read years before that, I find that whenever I try to point out a flaw in his writing, I fail. For instance, all right, here is a real flaw—small but worthy of note. He gives each of his male characters a profession, and then he has him think in metaphors drawn from that profession. That’s not right. In the beginning of a story called “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” a man, a photographer by trade, thinks of his baby as having f/2 eyes and skin like developing film. (Skin, not surprisingly considering Updike’s debility, is all over the place in his fiction: the only example I can remember to substantiate this, though, aside from the yellowness above and the baby’s skin here, is the case of the stepson in Of the Farm, who has, we learn, inherited his father’s “sanguine and distant skin.”) A photographer would not so directly use his professional equipment in the metaphors he applied to his immediate surroundings—he would use it sometimes, but not in the first paragraph of the story he told. Film and f-stops are huge real presences to him, and can’t so easily be manipulated as tokens of comparison. Similarly, in Of the Farm, the narrator works in advertising [or “corporate image presentation”], and at one point he thinks, beautifully, while looking at a field, “Flowers … the first advertisements.” Not believable. Something different from this really happens to the metaphorically minded who are immersed in a particular specialized vocation. It is not that they resort to professional imagery when they want to describe something in daily life, such as their child or a field of flowers; it is rather that the specific equipment they use begins to absorb the rest of the world into itself—that in defending the advertising profession at a party, say, they will reach for an analogy to the bee-luring bloom, or when standing in the darkroom, with the film in their hands, they will think with surprise of how similar film is to their baby’s skin. Their profession doesn’t blanket the world; the world feeds its specifics into their profession. But Updike’s only profession has been writing, whose basic equipment is the metaphor itself, and as a result he is less convincing on the direction of metaphorical flow for the white-collar worker than he might be. (The typewriter is his other tool: and notice that in A Month of Sundays he has a nice image of a typewriter ribbon winding itself back and forth [“A little fray in the typewriter ribbon moves back and forth like a sentry”], while he doesn’t, I don’t think, compare a scarf or mummy’s windings or an Ace Bandage to a typewriter ribbon.) I am tempted for a moment to call this vocational metaphorizing habit of his a flaw—but do I really want “The Day of the Dying Rabbit” to begin any other way than as it does, with the f/2 eyes and the filmic skin? I do not, because its beautiful last sentence, as the expiring rabbit is compared to the sinking of photography paper in a trough of developer, depends entirely on it. A superb ending! And do I want the hero of Of the Farm not to think to himself, Flowers, the first advertisements? No, because without Updike’s determination to get some measure of control over his constant instinct to fling outward with a simile by filtering his correspondences through the characters’ offstage fictional professions, he would probably not have come up with this nice little thing, dropped as it is into the middle of a paragraph. My “No”s point, of course, to the defining quality of a major writer: he exists above the threshold of assent, that faint magenta line over which nothing he can do can possibly be felt as a mistake. Anything that causes doubt is either forgotten or is rerouted through some further circuit of forgiveness as more recalcitrant, and hence fresher, evidence of greatness. “I remember,” says Henry James, of his first happy reading of Zola’s La Débâcle, “that in the glow of my admiration there was not a reserve I had ever made that I was not ready to take back.” That’s the right attitude. It isn’t, as Coleridge and other bardolators used to claim, that “not one word” of Shakespeare could be altered without destroying the whole—it is rather that these specific words were the ones Shakespeare happened to choose, and Shakespeare is a great man (though the plays are admittedly difficult to bear on television or on stage), and any particular clinker we might instance disappears into the general pension fund of admiration or becomes, if truly awful, merely interesting, revealing, never simply bad. In an oft-blurbed line, Updike once praised Nabokov for writing prose “the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically”: if true, this pronouncement ought to hold good for critical prose as well—and yet if I can force myself to utter a fixed doubt about Updike, it is paradoxically that he isn’t ecstatic and immoderate enough about the writers he loves. He is too able to write a rave review that nonetheless includes the obligatory penultimate section of quibbles—his inability to blind himself to Nabokov’s many weaknesses, in particular, and to see them as so much a part of Nabokov’s foreordained self that they must be immediately explained away as part of the complex of traits that gave rise to all that is good in all those books, is the very weakness in Updike I have the most trouble forgiving. Books and life interpenetrate—like the drop of suntan oil on a page of Proust—and yet the measured, unsurprisable tone of many of Updike’s book reviews is incompatible with the grief and turmoil and copulation in his novels. But he is a practicing professional critic, not a one-time closed book examiner as I am, and the duty of the practicing critic is to write about writers out of rhythm with his own passing inclinations and bursts of grateful affection—ecstasy and the assigned bound galleys only fall in perfect step on a few lucky occasions. Nor am I giving sufficient attention to the possibility that by publicly isolating a flaw in a writer he loves, Updike is simply trying to maintain his admiration against the inroads of second thoughts: like the Cat in the Hat scrubbing the bathtub, he offloads an awareness of the flaw onto the rest of us in an effort to restore his own appreciation to a higher state of purity. It may simply be, too, that he is not one of those writers who can gush without correcting himself a moment later: he notes with amused approval Nabokov’s saying (of Joyce) something like “God can that man write!” [I haven’t been able to find this]; but Updike may be better about failures and middling achievements—at seeing what good there is in the fundamentally not so hot. Or perhaps his prevailing coolness is conclusive proof of an enormous secret pride, of the delib
erate inward reserve of a man intent on keeping his peculiarities intact over years of selling his literary opinions for money.

  From this last vantage, I am the one making the big mistake, broadcasting my limitations, by proclaiming so un-reservedly that Updike is a genius. He doesn’t want to hear me say that. How embarrassing! Nobody wants to hear that right now. But it is one of the telling traits of neotericks who think they have an outside shot at being called geniuses by later equally forward neotericks that they use the word “genius” as if it has a useful meaning. It doesn’t. The word is like the gold confetti [no, “Silverdust”] that Updike’s retail manager was using to make his holiday sign: it is a way of decorating a plain expression of enthusiasm with rarefied twinkly materials and tonalities. But I’ve been using it in this essay because sometimes we need a little twinkle. It disappoints me to see the label confined to obvious candidates like Flaubert or Henry James. Let’s assume that right now, 1990, is as good as it gets. Let’s try genius out on Updike!

  Once in June of 1984 I was in the Paperback Booksmith (now Buddenbrooks) on Boylston Street when I picked up a novel by a man named Spackman, who was born in 1905 but was new on the horizon. It had an introduction by Edmund White, I think, whom I paid attention to despite my then homophobia because Nabokov had (so I dimly remembered from a blurb) praised him. I read a little of the introduction: Edmund White said that something in the tone of Spackman’s essays seemed to have the authority of a person like Nabokov, “who knows he’s a genius.” It was an interesting idea, that Nabokov or Spackman or anyone else could know, in quite that definite way, so momentous a truth about himself. Did Edmund White say this of Nabokov because he, White, knew he was a genius himself, or because he knew he wasn’t, or because he wasn’t sure? The possibility of such knowledge made me uncomfortable, because of course I badly wanted to be a genius myself someday and I didn’t yet feel any of that sort of foursquare certainty. But I did recognize the tone White meant: Yeats had it maybe, writers develop it over the years, an air of rangy assurance, built on the knowledge that there are plenty of people who are interested in what the guy has said up till now, and that the hush that has surrounded his past publications is unlikely to be replaced with indifference anytime soon, no matter what he does. This fixed certainty, the feeling of being pretty damned consequential, of tossing a few scraps to the eternally grateful who cluster around the podium, is in some personalities necessary perhaps to the completion of big, complex works. But is it true to say that Nabokov knew, in the sense of having a ground bass of belief that thrummed under everything he did, that he was a genius? He coveted the Nobel a tad too sincerely, I think, for him to be charged with such unwaveringness. (At least, an obituary I read in a Rochester paper said that his failure to receive the prize was one of the disappointments of his later years.) The unpleasant haughtiness of his late prefaces is, to this apologist, an indication of certainty and its morose opposite locked in struggle, as it is with Henry James’s prefaces—even the megalomania of the twice-stroke-deluded and failing James dictating letters to family announcing his plans for fabulous renovations to his several imaginary Napoleonic palaces are sufficient proof to me that the decision to think of himself as a genius was an act of will, an imperial edict to himself, demanding constant fussy renewal and tending and plumping up to keep it from succumbing to doubt. Doubt, anxiousness, the nibbled lower lip, have to constitute the medium for most great works: Nabokov’s emigration to the States and struggle to switch languages and make a living here, to the extent that it temporarily heightened the uncertainty of a constitutionally highly assured man, was what made possible Pnin and Speak, Memory, my two favorites. If, I thought, replacing Spackman on the shelf, Nabokov knew he was a genius back when he was writing Glory at age thirty, he knew it only intermittently: it was a fleeting suspicion, not certain knowledge, something incredibly exciting and jinxing and unthinkable that kept peeping at him over the rise of his best paragraphs, distinct from arrogance, mixed in with probably-nots and bright, leaping maybes. “Maybe I am, maybe I am!” And don’t you have to admit, whatever your doubts are about the utility of the word, that it is pleasing, almost thrilling, to think of our very own living Updike at thirty-two or so writing “Her pointed yellow high-heeled shoes lay beside her feet as if dislodged by a sudden shift of momentum” and experiencing, when he looked at the words he had just so happily and casually combined, that same puzzled, curious, surprised sensation—“Maybe I am!”? I would be overdoing it to claim for so tender and closely observed and unassuming a domestic moment as this shot of his stockinged wife asleep that the passing shift of momentum it adduces is a distant transmuted aftershock of the enormous geophysical disaster of divorce;—that would be carrying it a bit too far, probably. But something big and refractive and vaguely frightening stole ripplingly through the living room that evening in the early sixties, and if it wasn’t Divorce, then it had to be Genius.

  I don’t care so much whether from an encyclopedic perspective Updike is or isn’t worthy of the word; what I want, tautologically if that’s what it takes, is to determine to my own satisfaction that when he was just setting out, writing those early novels and stories, he was once in a while startled to catch himself in an idle moment tapping that golden finger at his own breastbone, because I need to know what someone who had plausibly reached such a conclusion about himself, however fleeting, could do with it, and did do with it, in a country and time I understood. Did the story “Leaves,” of which he is justly proud (defending it against the charge that it was mere “lace-making,” he said, “Well, if ‘Leaves’ is lace, it is taut and symmetrical lace, with scarce a loose thread”—and I liked this moment of sharp, slightly irritable confidence enough to remember it), come before or after such a detection, or was that very story first responsible for it? If through Updike I could learn at second hand what that brief, actuating intimation felt like, and nurse along any modest equivalencies in myself, if I could demonstrate to my strictest internal tribunals that I resembled Updike in certain important ways, then, thus inspired, I might just pivot myself one or two handholds higher along the sacred mimetic continuum. But the truth is that I am less like Updike than I used to think. We are both white, Eastern American, upper-middle-class, psoriatic, and heterosexual—but so what? That class includes millions. I feel closer to him than to any other living writer simply because I know more about him than any other living writer, but he writes better than I do and he is smarter than I am and that’s what counts. This observation will surprise no one; it came, however, as quite a shock to me. Ten years ago, in my last semester of college, I was sitting in a dorm cafeteria at Bryn Mawr after lunch flipping through a library copy of The Centaur with my now-wife. We were pointing out passages we liked and ones we thought were no good. Work study students in white outfits were wiping off the tables all around us. “Now see, here he ruins it again!” I said, shaking my head. Scornfully I pointed to a sentence about gasoline shivering into an engine [“He poured shivering gasoline into the hungry motor”] and began criticizing Updike’s habit of using words like “shivering” that were slightly too cutely anthropomorphizing for their contexts. (In the first Rabbit book there is, I seem to remember, a fair amount of skittering and slithering and whatnot, too, none of which I now mind … but how strange. I promised myself when I began this memory-dependent essay that I would not use the tempting phrase “seem to remember,” which Updike uses once or twice in Self-Consciousness, and which appears on page 156 of Speak, Memory and a number of places in the late James, because Updike ought to be able to enjoy the satisfaction of having returned it single-handedly to currency for a year or two at least, and because “seem” is even on its own so treacherously alluring an Updikeanism, especially in the characteristic early uncoupled-copula rhythm of “her blank seemed, in its blinkety blankness and blanketed blinkness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk,” that I always feel a twinge of derivativeness when I resort to it, even though Updike can hardly
have a patent on something so widespread, and because anyway “seem to remember” has a mists-of-timey vagueness and veiledness that, so I thought two months ago, made it no good for me—but now look: it has offered itself to my typing fingertips, and they accepted!) After I delivered my criticism, I took note of my annoyed tone and suddenly wondered whether my now-wife was thinking to herself, What’s he done that is so good that he thinks he can freely criticize Updike? So I asked her, “Do you think I’m a better writer than Updike?”

  “I think you’re smarter than he is, but that he’s a better writer than you are,” she said.

  I nodded slowly, wounded, but pleased by her brave willingness, in the name of truth, to inflict such a wound and to muffle it so cleverly with a giant, distracting compliment. She thought I was smarter than Updike—I could live with that! Smarts, pure octane. I would go to the moon with them. But then, a month or two later, at home before starting my job, I was bothered by an identical doubt after reading some of The Same Door. Wasn’t I a better writer than Updike had been at my age? I asked my mother.