“Hi, I’m Nick Baker.”
“I’m John Updike.”
“I know.” (This “I know” is a faint source of shame to me now, but it is nonetheless what I said.) “We met once in Rochester, but very briefly.”
He nodded, still thinking he could escape by giving the general appearance of hurry. But I wasn’t going to let him go. “I, um, had a story in The New Yorker a long time ago.”
Resigned to this standard interchange (“people who want something from me” is one of the categories of humanity he lists in “Getting the Words Out” as not inspiring him to stutter), he asked me what the story was about. I told him, and he said, “Mmm,” but he didn’t look as if he remembered. He asked me my name again. I told him and mentioned the long story I had had in The Atlantic, too. Closing his eyes, pressing on his forehead with his index and thumb, he forced himself to recall who I was. “Didn’t you also write a story about some musicians on the West Coast?” he suddenly asked.
Surprising as this may sound, I had to think for a second. It was a work I didn’t want to exist. Both The Atlantic and The New Yorker had rejected it, as had many little magazines; it had finally appeared in a place called, emblematically, The Little Magazine, where John Gardner had seen it and included it in the 1982 volume of Best American Short Stories that he edited before he was killed on his motorcycle, too soon for me to get around to writing him a thank-you. In his introduction Gardner called it “very slight” (he also called it “beautiful,” but naturally I paid no attention to that); he almost apologized for including it over other more “major” entries. That soured me on it—I didn’t want to be a lightweight. But the main reason I had tried to forget about the story was that it was, by a hair, my first published work, appearing a week or two before the story in The New Yorker, and I was extremely sensitive then to the fateful progression in which (see Updike, Helprin, Gill, and the others) a writer has his first story published in The New Yorker and lifts off from there into a string of successes. When The Little Magazine came in the mail on that November day in 1981, incontrovertibly first, it was an evil portent: in a stroke it condemned me as a late bloomer, a come-from-behind guy. Now when I collected my stories in a book (if I ever published more stories, which by 1984, when I stood in the Lampoon building, was looking doubtful, since I wasn’t writing much of anything by then and the The New Yorker and The Atlantic had rejected or bought and shelved the few pieces of fiction I had sent out), I would either have to leave out the Little Magazine story entirely, or I would have to begin the book with it, since, in another case of copyright-page anxiety, I was determined to do just as Updike had done [on the copyright pages of The Same Door and The Music School] in proclaiming that “They [the stories] were written in the order they have here.” I had more or less decided to leave the story out. The extreme childishness of my attitude is obvious to me now, because once you’ve published a book your dignity’s dependence on magazines temporarily disappears, but back then the columbarium-like array of quarterlies, displayed on angled steel shelves or in piles on tables or in echoing alphabetization in places like the University of Rochester’s periodical reading room, subscribed to and renewed when necessary and stamped with the date received and warehoused and eventually sent to the bindery and put on other, more inaccessible shelves whose lighting system was often controlled by little oven-timers you had to turn and whose insistent grinding rushed you to your next call number, threatened me with annihilation. All those arbitrarily evocative names (once, under the influence of poetic titling habits, pop groups gave themselves and their vanity corporations and their albums colorful concrete noun-names, but at some point the balance shifted and little magazine titles began to seem instead derivative of pop practices), and all the regional awards, all the calls for manuscripts in the classifieds of Coda (now Poets and Writers), all that awful, awful young writing like mine that should never have been published, and the contributors blazoned on the covers as if they were big-drawing names when they were utter unknowns like me, and the general conviction that most of the publications were, even more so than the Harvard Lampoon, places that just didn’t count, weren’t read, had no reason for being, made me determined to keep my indiscriminate distance from all of them. So when Updike finally remembered who I was on the strength of that Little Magazine story I was taken aback—I didn’t know for an instant what he was talking about. “Musicians on the West Coast?” I said, puzzled, and then, realizing that I probably appeared to him to be pretending to have to make an effort to remember something that I really knew right off the bat, I said, “Yes! Right! I did!”
“A lovely thing,” said Updike. He also praised something else of mine that appeared in The Atlantic. And he said that I should keep writing because I had a gift. Should I not be including this pronouncement here? Is it self-serving? No, because mainly it shows Updike to be civil and generous in person, which is a thing worth knowing, and because it could easily be nothing more than the “mere babble of politeness,” as Henry James called some of his letters, and because my patently self-serving inclusion of it shows me to be even less likable than I might possibly otherwise have seemed. (Who will sort out the self-servingness of self-effacement?) Anyway, how can I not retain Updike’s moment of encouragement, when it is one of the very few events I have to offer in this whole plasmodium? It isn’t as if Updike said, “Nick Baker! Holy moly! Congratulations on being you! You’re going to fly!” It isn’t as if what he said was anything like what Schumann said about Brahms. Still, “a lovely thing” was a lovely thing for him to say—it helped me; it altered my opinion about that story, which I now will certainly include if I ever put out a book of stories. But did it also, I now discover myself wondering—and even my suggestion of such a possibility should serve as a warning to all eminent and tolerant writers not to be nice to people who pounce on them at parties—did it also lower him ever so slightly, in the old Groucho Marxian manner, in my estimation, since I can see, rereading the story now, that it is replete with false touches? Why didn’t he see through it? I wonder; in seeing through it myself I suspect for a minute that I have found a blind spot in him to the kind of cheapness it exhibits—when really he was simply doing what he knew I wanted him to do, which was to recognize my existence as a writer, to bless me by remembering who I was.
He asked me how I made a living, and I told him. “When I first got out of college …” I started to say.
“College here?” he interrupted, raising his eyebrows as if to settle an important question, and pointing at the floor.
“Myeah,” I said. A lie! A pathetic lie! Again he had caught me off guard; I knew he was in a rush and I had only a minute left to talk to him and in the instant of decision I shied at explaining that I was just someone’s guest and wasn’t aware of the Lampoon’s tradition of secrecy and that I’d really gone to Haverford College and had been rejected by Harvard’s grad school in philosophy and hadn’t applied as an undergraduate to Harvard because I had read Frank Conroy’s Stop Time, in which the hero ends up debarking from the Paoli Local at Haverford, and because several relatives had gone to Haverford, and because my mother had gone to Bryn Mawr, and because I was scared that Harvard would reject me as a transfer student from Eastman anyway. Rather than explain this, or rather than simply saying “No, I’m a guest,” which would have sufficed, I in effect told the classic, inexcusable, singles-bar kind of lie by letting John Updike think I’d gone to Harvard. He looked at me sharply for a second, as if he knew I was lying. (My capsule bio in the back of Best American Short Stories 1982 said “Haverford.”) I went on talking about my employment history. He said his son was thinking of taking a teaching job, but he, Updike, wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. “It’s hard,” he said, meaning hard to make a living at writing.
“It is hard,” I said. “But when I get deflated I go back to one of your early stories and I’m all fired up again!”
He had been backing away by then, knowing the obligatory praise-hea
ping and groveling scene was coming; at this he shook his head and waved and walked out. Had I insulted him by saying “early stories”? I had meant it as an allusion to his own statement on the PBS show that his early stories had the best chance of surviving; and I meant that I went back to them in particular because they were stories written when he was my age. (In 1984 I was twenty-seven.) But what I didn’t understand then was that he might not want his assessment of his work taken at face value. Do I, when I say that my Little Magazine story is “cheap,” necessarily want people to agree wholeheartedly with me? Not at all. I don’t want them to disagree strenuously to my face, either—I’m not fishing in quite that naked sense—but I do want to imagine that there are people out there thinking to themselves as they read that Oh no! I don’t find that story cheap at all! Perhaps there should be a corollary of Auden’s rule—the one about keeping your negative opinions about writers to yourself—that you must never bad-mouth your own past productions, since any good elements in them (and there are a few OK things in my first published story) are harmed in the overspill of your general dismissal. Look at what happens after you read Pynchon’s Slow Learner introduction to his early stories—he talks about how doubtful he is about them, how he looked up things in old Baedekers and did anything he could to be impressively obscure, and as you read it you think, How appealingly modest of the guy to tell us this, but after a few years go by, what he said takes on altogether too much authority—his virtuous self-criticism has hurt your capacity to appreciate residual merit. In later life, as I remember, Joyce thought that Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was his best book; as a result I may never finish Ulysses. And Updike’s high ranking of his early stories may well have made it too easy for me, less inclined to read his novels anyway, to excuse myself from making the slight additional effort in that direction, when there are surely plenty of rewards to be had.
I had a pimple or two on my forehead that day at the Harvard Lampoon. (Synalar, a topical steroid I was using to treat my psoriasis, often flipflopped my forehead skin toward the other, oilier extreme.) When Roger’s Version came out a year or two later [1986], with its nice pale blue cover faintly inset with crosses, I stood in Lauriat’s in downtown Boston and read the first few pages. My single powerful reaction was: I was Dale. Updike was describing me. I actually believed (and still do believe, though with less conviction) that Updike got Dale’s extreme gawky tallness, his thinning hair, his bad skin, his overeager, technotalkative, slack-but-smart way of speaking, and Roger’s own immediate sense of being threatened by and mildly disliking Dale, all from that one tiny encounter with me. Updike had broken free from my chatlock, I figured, gone home muttering to himself about pushy younger writers, gotten up the next morning, and written me into the first scene of his novel as a computer nerd. A few years later I mentioned this theory to my mother, who had just read the book, as I still have not. She didn’t like the notion at all. “You, the model for that awful Dale? No.”
Imagine how difficult it is for me to keep from searching out her copy of Roger’s Version right now (she loaned it to us) and reading those first pages over again to be sure that Updike really does mention Dale’s bad skin and his height—that I haven’t just wished the parallel into being. [Dale is “the type of young man I like least: tall, much taller than I, and pale with an indoors passion. His waxy pallor was touched along the underside of his jaw with acne.… His dirty-looking, somewhat curly brown hair, I could see at his temples, was already beginning to thin.”] But even when the critical quarantine is lifted, I probably will read Of the Farm again before I read straight through Roger’s Version. I resist the books for which Updike did lots of impressive research, such as Roger’s Version or The Coup—and when last year I read, on the back of the paperback of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, Updike’s (just) praise of it as “beautifully researched,” irritable jealousy made me oppose this sort of preparatory effort more firmly than ever, though I did not hesitate to pop into the library myself under any pretext. The follow-up novel to Süskind’s Perfume, The Pigeon, came out right around the time excerpts from my first novel were appearing: in a review of it Updike spoke in general terms about writers who resort to magnification in an effort to find events and objects that haven’t already been described to death. I was fairly sure, here again, that he was referring obliquely to me. The question of whether he would come out with a more direct review of my own book as well (he would have had to do so outside The New Yorker, since “portions” of it had appeared there, and in recent years he had rarely reviewed outside)—a judicious, unsurprised, encouraging review—was the subject of prayer and dread quite often in my insomnias of late 1987, while I wrote it; which period marked, indeed, the very peak of my Updike “obsession.”
He said that he wrote The Poorhouse Fair in six months, so I quit my job and gave myself that same stretch to finish my first book. As I wrote it I read, more or less in this order, some of the journals of the Goncourt brothers for the first time, some of Flaubert’s Parrot for the first time, some of Huysmans’s Against the Grain for the first time, some of Chapman’s William Lloyd Garrison for the first time, all of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son for the first time, all of Roth’s My Life as a Man for the first time, some of Nabokov’s Glory for the twentieth time, half of Exley’s A Fan’s Notes for the first time, some of The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop for the first time, some of Edna O’Brien’s Night for the first time, and I reread a little of Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains. But none of these, not even Glory, felt close enough to me. Finally I took down Of the Farm: it was short, as my novel was turning out to be, and I already knew how good it was. (In 1989 Updike praised Mulisch’s The Assault as a “short, perfect novel.” Yes, the description applies to Of the Farm, too—if perfection can allow for those secondary circuits of forgiveness mentioned earlier—but secretly I regretted that Updike had used up this nice phrase on Mulisch, before I came out with a book that he could lay it on. And yet if he ever were to say something like that about me, the praise would become enemy number one of promise.) I went through Of the Farm very slowly that fall, a few pages every morning before I took up with my own manuscript. It was the first time since 1978 that I had read one of Updike’s books uninterruptedly from cover to cover, without skipping around or putting it aside before reaching the end. I let it soak in. I figured out how many words it had and compared that figure with my chapter subtotals. It became the measure of all worth. More than once I yelled “He’s a fucking maestro!” More than once I had tears in my eyes. For instance, I cried at the aforementioned description of the raindrops on the window screen like a crossword puzzle or a “sampler half-stitched”: it killed for the time being a patch of screen description of my own, but that didn’t matter, because Updike’s paragraph was so fine that my competitiveness went away; and when I found that Elizabeth Bishop’s 1948 New Yorker story called “The House-keeper” also had a screen whose clinging raindrops “fill[ed] the squares with cross-stitch effects that came and went,” this parallel only demonstrated to me how much more Updike could do with the same piece of reality: he had lifted it from the status of incidental setting and made its qualities part of the moral power and permanency of his mother’s house—no, I will say further, in a typical bit of appreciative overheatedness, that this screen is the novel itself—that geometric, formal, conventional, antimalarial grid through which you look into Daumier’s Third Class Carriage of social life (the reference here is strainingly obscure: I just mean that Daumier’s painting is overlaid with, because it’s unfinished, I guess, a matrix of vertical and horizontal lines—but now I worry, does Updike talk about Daumier in his brand-new Just Looking?), but which as you continue to write distracts you with its interesting nearby droplets and tiny rips and odorous rust dust and habit of shaking slightly in winds, until the “young embroiderer of the canvas of life,” as Henry James says in a cognate passage in the preface to Roderick Hudson that I’ve just been reading,
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