Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

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. When 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.

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.