Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

“I think I do,” I said. But I didn’t.

“Ascetic means self-denying . You forgo pleasures. And then there’s a word that sounds like ascetic , which is acidic .” That one was too easy; I wrote it down to humor him anyway. I didn’t want more. But he was on a roll. “And there’s one other, that sounds like acidic —there’s one other you might find interesting,” he said. He told me one more word. Occasionally, years afterward, I would picture this long-lost green hinged box (it sat on my desk that whole school year but my vision of its being packed with well-thumbed vocabulary cards never materialized — the cards stayed blank; I added almost nothing to it after my father’s contributions) and I would recall my father giving me that graduated series of near homonyms, and I would try to resurrect what the last word had been. Hassidic? Asymptotic? Once you decide on a profession, you riffle back through your past to find early random indications of a leaning toward your chosen interest and you nurture them into a false prominence: so it was naturally very important to me, as a writer on the make, to have this sixth-grade vocabularistic memory in its complete form. It was still incomplete, however, when on December 5 I found the unopened, plastic-covered packet of Oxford Index Cards (“10 °Cards, 8 pt. Standard Grade, manufactured and distributed by Esselte Pendaflex Corporation, Made in USA, Item no. 31”) and began, with an immoderate sixth-grader’s delight, to copy down my store of remembered Updikean phrases. Above the single candy-stripe of the magenta line I wrote down the quotation, as well as I remembered it; below, on the blue pin-striping, was the source, if I knew it, and the date and time I made the card, and what number it was in the total sequence, and any other notes I felt called on to make. I saw myself sorting this deck in tricky ways; shuffling it repeatedly to attain a veracious stochasticism; checking individual cards off in several colors and with several attractively cryptic check marks (green circled x’s, little blue spirals, long and short arrows to indicate linkages with other cards); flipping through them at high speed in spare moments, like a language student studying for a final; laying them all out side by side on the rug and playing some sort of game of concentration with them. I very much wanted them to become dog-eared. I wanted to get good at wristily doubling the rubber band around them when I had finished with them for the day. But I half knew at the outset that they would prove less useful than the initial pleasure of filling them out would lead me to expect — and in truth they haven’t been helpful, except, as I say, as a physical presence. Many of the quotations I use here I didn’t write down on cards, and many of the ones I did write down on cards I didn’t find a place for.

But never mind! That very day, December 5, after blowing most of the morning making out cards and rereading what I’d written of the whole essay up to that point, I was finally able, with Updike’s help, to complete the memory of my father’s three vocabulary words. Here’s how it happened. I stood in front of the microwave in the kitchen in a state of growing disappointment and self-doubt, sure that this essay was a failure. It was much too long, for one thing. The editor of The Atlantic had agreed to a length of seven to ten thousand words, and he had warned me specifically that if I sent them something of twenty or thirty thousand words they just wouldn’t know what to do with it. “A long piece eats up so much space in the magazine,” he said. “And if it’s on a subject that a reader isn’t interested in, he thinks he’s gotten gypped for that whole month.” Gypping the reader? I certainly didn’t want to be a party to that! So probably The Atlantic would turn it down. Nobly I would refuse the kill fee, since I had not upheld my end of the bargain. Or maybe I couldn’t afford to be that noble. I would undoubtedly sink into a severe depression. I had to have a fall-back plan. I might try to persuade a book publisher to bring “U and I” out along with the model airplane essay and the three quasi-philosophical essays that appeared in The Atlantic in ′82, ′83, and ′84, as long as I could put some disclaimer in the table of contents that the three philosophical essays were vehehehery early work (“Three Early Essays” perhaps, with their dates of publication in parenthesized italics at the end of each, as in Updike’s Museums and Women , and my birth date screechingly conspicuous in the author’s note on the jacket?), or if “U and I” ’s path from A to Z wavered and looped for long enough, I could see whether a publisher might bring it out on its own as one of those books that even Gesualdo-tape-playing bookstores don’t have a satisfactorily standardized set of shelves for: “Essays and Belles Lettres,” or “Criticism,” or “Biography.” [The editor of The Atlantic read the finished essay in February 1990 and called me. “I have the authority to run a piece this long,” he said. “But that’s like saying that the captain of a Pan Am 747 has the authority to take his family up for a quick flight.” A month later he sent me a set of galleys that expertly condensed the essay from forty-five thousand words to thirteen thousand while preserving its general shape. I called him from a pay phone near my dermatologist, nauseous and glum from PUVA therapy pills, and said no: seamless though his version was, most of the things that had made the essay seem worth writing were now gone or uncomfortably contiguous. So we agreed instead that The Atlantic would publish a fifteen-hundred-word fragment, a solution I liked because that way I would not have to refuse directly the overgenerous kill fee for the original essay and thereby get into a disagreement with my agent, who said I simply could not refuse a kill fee—“Everyone will laugh at you if you do,” a disturbing prospect — and the editor wouldn’t have to insist in his courtly way on my taking the kill fee, and my relationship with The Atlantic would be shakily preserved. But why hadn’t I been good enough to hijack that transatlantic 747? Why hadn’t they run it all, made an exception for me and me only — just as The New Yorker made an exception for Barthelme by running all of Snow White in one issue?]

Length wasn’t the essay’s only problem, of course. There was the disturbing question of tone. Beckett’s early short disquisition on Proust had come to mind several times as I wrote (I had looked it up in July or August in a different context and read snatches of it), and now I wondered whether the oddly smartass tone I took in places here might share its quality of unease with Beckett’s book — an unease that arose from intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration combined with an impatience with criticism as a literary form. Updike himself, I recalled, had in an essay neatly maneuvered past Beckett’s exegesis of Proust: “rather acerb,” he’d called it. (The same essay on Proust, by the way, contains one of my favorite things in all Updike, when he mentions that a page or two of his copy of Moncrieff’s translation is stained with drops of his now-alimonied wife’s suntan oil: suntan oil, the thicker exstillation of summer and leisure, crushed from the Palm at the End of the Mind — and I wonder, is this Stevensian sense of “palm” the explanation for why Updike mysteriously changed the title of one of his best early stories from “Walter Briggs” to the less good “Walter Palm” in an eighties trade paperback reissue? — has a Proust-ian viscosity, I think; I envision the near transparency that the drops of lotion must have created in the paper as methylparaben portholes in Marcel’s prose through which we glimpse for a moment the knowable, verifiable life we have now, in America, with spouses and deck chairs and healing sunlight, as opposed to the unknowable life of a homosexual genius in France before the First World War.) And then two neural power lines crossed and I felt a buzz of shorting circuits, for acerbic was the very long-lost vocabulary word my father had given me: aesthetic, ascetic, acidic, acerbic.