Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

There is a confusion here, though. I have been mentioning two separate classes of influence on me as if they were of equivalent weight — Bloom’s influence and Updike’s influence. One, however, is an influence only on this essay; another is a permanent influence on my life. It thus seems that there are (and I’m sure baby Bloomers have already pointed this out) contingent influences and chronic influences. A contingent influence springs to mind as you try to solve the problems suggested by a chosen subject and then it goes away: in the case of this essay, in which the subject is a writer thinking about an older writer, the conscious contingent influences that have to be worked around somehow are, in addition to Harold Bloom, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island (in which he does a lot of thinking about Edmund Wilson), Janet Malcolm’s great recent thing about journalistic betrayal, James Atlas’s The Great Pretender , some diary entries by Louis Simpson (I think) that I read years ago in a literary magazine that traced the ups and downs of his feelings for a Trollope novel he was reading, Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve , Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot , and Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise. This is the arrangement of bayonets and blowguns whose hostage I currently am and whose exact middle point, as far from any single peril of encroachment as possible, is what I’m trying to find as I write; and yet when I’m done, the particular threats will tiptoe off as quickly as they came and I will be surprised to remember, when I see the shape my essay finally takes, how uncomfortable and beset they all made me feel. In recently skimming Exley’s Pages from a Cold Island , for instance, I worried that his book begins with his reading of the death of Edmund Wilson in the paper, just as this essay begins with my hearing of the death of Barthelme, and I reassured myself by saying, ah, but that is just where you are trying to take the next step, since Exley then occupies himself with talking to Edmund Wilson’s daughter and rereading his fiction, whereas you leave Barthelme behind and move to someone whose survivors aren’t yet hugely important, because the man lives still! And I note, too, that Exley doesn’t feel he has to mention Harold Bloom just because he’s doing a book about literary influence, and I don’t miss his mentioning Harold Bloom, and yet out of some grinding gear of self-betrayal I have to do it: perhaps it’s what my grandfather, who wanted very much to be a novelist and patterned his very alcoholism on Fitzgerald’s and Norman Douglas’s habits, called “the ingrown toenail of the Quaker conscience.”

Unlike contingent influences, who (or which) you are always hoping will turn out to be more different from you than you felt them to be at the time they made themselves known, permanent influences like Updike (and, to a lesser extent, Nabokov) make you very unhappy when they threaten to be more unlike you as human beings than you had thought. In some review or address Updike praises the capacity to lie as being of all traits the most important to the novelist. I felt myself disagreeing so violently as I read this that my whole imaginary friendship with Updike was momentarily disrupted: it was, first, a cliché of American writing seminars and book reviews, and it went utterly against what I believed (which was that the urge not to lie about, not to be unfair to, not to belie what was there was the dominant propellant, and the desire to undo earlier lies of our own or of others was what drew us on to write further, and that intentional lying came in only at those always dissatisfying points where the futile pursuit of coherence or economy temporarily won out), but more than that, it seemed to go against what Updike had a hundred times shown himself to believe — when for instance he said that comedy was an unsatisfactory form because it forced one to falsify and exaggerate, and when he claimed superbly in the foreward to Olinger Stories , “Not an autobiography, they [the stories] have made one impossible” (though it turns out, as I knew it would, that this isn’t true — see Self-Consciousness ), and when he quotes (in a review of Lectures on Russian Literature ) with surprised and amused neutrality Nabokov’s naïve-sounding (but correct) contention that fiction is a gradually evolving effort to be more accurate about life. Because you are matching yourself constantly against a permanent influence, any divergence between you and him assumes the proportions of a small crisis, any convergence is an occasion to nod as if it were all in the cards: when Updike had Henry Bech smugly report (in a pretend interview) that Updike still had all his hair, I thought, What a rotten thing to say — rotten in that it shows such public pride at his exemption from the horror of hair loss, and rotten in that it proves that he and I are different in this crucial respect. When my psoriasis began to get bad, on the other hand, I welcomed its spread at first — I’d been worried that because the disease had shown up late in me (phase 1 involved only the scalp and penis) and was for five years insignificant compared with Updike’s affliction (he had one unfortunate fictional representative vacuuming out the bed every morning) I possessed by implication a writing talent less prodigal in its mitotic unstoppableness than Updike’s own. Normally if I read something I think is wrong, I forget it two days later (except in unusual cases, like Bloom’s burial phrase above); but with Updike, when I disagree with him, there is an element of pain, of emotional rupture, that makes me remember my difference, and as a result I keep returning unhappily to it over the years and checking to see whether the disaccord remains in effect — and because each time I check it I have to find grounds that still satisfy me for my continued refusal to be convinced by what he’s said, I am able to refine my opinions in a way I could never do if I did find him universally agreeable. For instance, I often test whether I still disagree with something I read in 1984 in Hugging the Shore , standing in what was then called the Paperback Booksmith on Boylston Street in Boston. (I didn’t buy the paperback until 1987.) Updike was reviewing one of Wilson’s journals, I think. He says that journal-keeping was not the way to write novels — when you wrote novels, you couldn’t quarry from journals, you had to let the past bubble up. Naipaul had said something similar, and so had Anthony Powell, but they weren’t imaginary friends the way Updike was, so I wasn’t concerned by their opinions. But Updike went on to quote a passage from Wilson’s journal about a sunset or something [yes — a sunset in Provincetown — I’m amazed I remembered its subject!], and said that it couldn’t be used in fiction, that it would “clog any narrative.” I fretted, and still fret, over these words. I object to his reviewery certainty here, and I particularly object to his use of the word “clog,” which in this context seems deliberately overcolorful and down-homey without being original. There was, as with his statement about lying in fiction, self-rejection in it, since many of his best moments, like Nabokov’s, are clogs to the narrative: the description of the rain-wetted screen in Of the Farm , “like a sampler half-stitched”; and the description of Peggy asleep after the hero’s and the mother’s long conversation, her shoes “lying beside her feet as if dislodged by a shift of momentum”; and the interior of the gas tank in The Centaur [no, Of the Farm ], and the tire tracks in the snowy parking lot in “A Sense of Shelter” and, best of all, the magnificent passage in which the hero mows the field in Of the Farm: a description that carries the burden too of expressing the price you pay for description, as more and more of your life is mowed, and the hopping creatures that are unhoused seek refuge in the odd triangles and rectangles of rough that still remain. What he meant to say, I thought, I hoped, was that Edmund Wilson’s passage was simply no good, not that one’s aim was to avoid clogging narratives with description. The only thing I like are the clogs — and when, late in most novels, there are no more in the pipeline to slow things down, I get that fidgety feeling, and I start bending the pliable remainder of the book so that it makes a popping sound, and I pick off the price sticker on the back and then regret doing so and stick it back on because it is a piece of information I will always want to have (a delight, as Updike memorably says of picking at a psoriasis lesion, thereby capturing a whole world of furtiveness we would otherwise not know about, that “must be experienced to be forgiven”). I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage-points of passage.