Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

The other example, more direct still, that I frequently think of in this connection is when Updike called Phaedra, the small press that brought out Nabokov’s The Eye and Nabokov’s Quartet (which included the supreme description of an Ithacan thaw, “part jewel, part mud,” with the shadows from icicle-drops rising to meet the drops themselves and the “humble fluting” of the garbage cans), a “miserable little bindery.” Such harshness is Nabokovian, of course (though Nabokov, protesting loudly, clearly didn’t think so): Updike instanced Nabokov’s “reflexive contempt” as one of the least attractive things about him (and man did I repeat that perfect adjective over to myself when I read it in a Berkeley library in 1981; I tried to use it in every sentence I uttered—“reflexive” acronyms, “reflexive” demonologies, “reflexive” car chases) — but Nabokov’s hatreds were most of them directed at dead people: Freud, Dostoevski, Zola, etc. It is far more painful, I think, to see Phaedra called “a miserable little bindery” than to see Freud brushed off as a “Viennese quack.” Think for a second of the employees of this firm (I don’t know if it is still in business or not), proud to have lucked into publishing Nabokov and doing a perfectly acceptable job of it, too: think of them coming in to work the day after reading Updike’s needlessly severe epitaph, hanging their heads. They should be praised and cheered on for playing an important part in Nabokov’s publishing history, not held up to ridicule by a Jansonist Knopfer who thinks he is canny about bookmaking because he once worked a linotype machine and knows about widows and orphans. Foremost in my mind, as a matter of fact, as I wrote about the Franklin Library earlier in this essay, was my concern that I was on the verge of subjecting that publisher to the same sort of killing dismissal that Updike had dumped on Phaedra, and I toned down my words a little (though not enough), because, hey, why do that to people? Those who like the Franklin Library should be entitled to like the frigging Franklin Library — why should I cause them to look up at their shelf of monthly classics and suddenly feel doubtful? And those who work for the Franklin Library should be entitled to feel some pride in doing so. Think of the thousands of helpful dollars that the several Franklin combines — mint, porcelain, whatever — spend on magazine advertising: for that transfer of wealth alone they deserve our support. I do contend, though, that making fun of (not “poking fun at,” please) the Franklin Library’s binding and gilt is slightly more defensible than calling Phaedra miserable, since Phaedra was the only publisher of certain of Nabokov’s books, whereas the sole reason for the Franklin Library’s existence is to offer expensive, fancy versions of works that are for the most part available in other editions.

Fine. But would I know to go easy on the Franklin Library if Updike hadn’t been so hard on Phaedra? He teaches even in his transgressions. Would I know to try always to forgive Updike’s flaws if he hadn’t treated his sometime hero, Nabokov, so peremptorily? In a review of Despair , Updike criticizes Nabokov for frittering away time on this sort of translation of early work when the world awaited another masterpiece [it’s really a review of Speak, Memory : “… instead of composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to Pale Fire , [he] fusses with backward-looking projects.…”] — and Updike’s scolding seems woefully short on perception, considering that he had by then been in the business for at least fifteen years and was presumably well aware of the varieties of unhappiness (including reviewer-instigated unhappiness) and simple distraction or boredom or fatigue that can disrupt the rhythm of novel production, and especially considering that around 1961 he had himself gone through, as we now know from several hints here and there, such as in his introductory note to Marry Me [no, his introductory note to a story in Burnett’s This Is My Best , reprinted in Hugging the Shore ], a time of fear that he would never write again. (The sexual revolution disrupted and enriched the middle of Updike’s writing career; the same might be said for the emigrations and gaps and second winds that the Bolshevik revolution imposed on Nabokov — but that is a sort of 80 percent rhetorical reviewery comparison that I never like reading; it is pleasant to do it, though, I must say.) And when Ada finally did arrive, Updike did such a number on it in his review that he felt compelled to explain in the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces that he writes faster than he reads (I’m not sure I understand what that gnomistry means, but I like it) and that therefore he may have grown impatient with some of the longer books he had to cover, such as Ada. Even the relatively good “cause for celebration” [no, “let us all rejoice”] review of Glory suddenly presents the charge that the book “never really awakens to its condition as a novel, its obligation to generate suspense.” Can you imagine Nabokov soaking in his Geneva bathtub, squeezing a sponge of warm water over his head, an act he claimed (in that same Tri-Quarterly tribute) was one of the keenest pleasures of his later days, and then, as the water cooled on his face and the instant of dropleted bliss moved on, suddenly having the plug of his deserved happiness pulled by the memory of pipsqueak Updike’s saying that all that work by himself and his translating son Dmitri fails to generate suspense? Updike is no master of cliff-hanging himself, remember. But at a certain point, I think, having gotten bad silly not-to-the-point reviews enough times yourself, you must finally think, I’ll try it myself — I’ll just see what it is like to charge someone with something idiotic like failing to offer suspense. Updike may have felt that it was a badge of veteran professionalism, of his status as a scarred and battle-seasoned dugong, to thump Nabokov once on the nose for suspenselessness. I can even almost imagine Updike hesitating a moment before typing “miserable little bindery” and then remembering, liberatingly, amorally, some particularly painful phrase that a reviewer had used on him, and his thinking “That dirty little fuckface! Well, I’ve taken my knocks! And The Eye is a poorly produced book and my job is to tell the truth—‘miserable little bindery’ it is!” But we see how cruelty begets cruelty: Nabokov’s uncharitable streak took hold of Updike as he wrote about Nabokov; Updike’s borrowed gall now infects me in my criticism of Updike.

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.