Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

From this distance, unable to check anything, with all of Updike’s fiction packed away in boxes for the past year and a half, and most, if read, read years before that, I find that whenever I try to point out a flaw in his writing, I fail. For instance, all right, here is a real flaw — small but worthy of note. He gives each of his male characters a profession, and then he has him think in metaphors drawn from that profession. That’s not right. In the beginning of a story called “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” a man, a photographer by trade, thinks of his baby as having f/2 eyes and skin like developing film. (Skin, not surprisingly considering Updike’s debility, is all over the place in his fiction: the only example I can remember to substantiate this, though, aside from the yellowness above and the baby’s skin here, is the case of the stepson in Of the Farm , who has, we learn, inherited his father’s “sanguine and distant skin.”) A photographer would not so directly use his professional equipment in the metaphors he applied to his immediate surroundings — he would use it sometimes , but not in the first paragraph of the story he told. Film and f-stops are huge real presences to him, and can’t so easily be manipulated as tokens of comparison. Similarly, in Of the Farm , the narrator works in advertising [or “corporate image presentation”], and at one point he thinks, beautifully, while looking at a field, “Flowers … the first advertisements .” Not believable. Something different from this really happens to the metaphorically minded who are immersed in a particular specialized vocation. It is not that they resort to professional imagery when they want to describe something in daily life, such as their child or a field of flowers; it is rather that the specific equipment they use begins to absorb the rest of the world into itself —that in defending the advertising profession at a party, say, they will reach for an analogy to the bee-luring bloom, or when standing in the darkroom, with the film in their hands, they will think with surprise of how similar film is to their baby’s skin. Their profession doesn’t blanket the world; the world feeds its specifics into their profession. But Updike’s only profession has been writing, whose basic equipment is the metaphor itself, and as a result he is less convincing on the direction of metaphorical flow for the white-collar worker than he might be. (The typewriter is his other tool: and notice that in A Month of Sundays he has a nice image of a typewriter ribbon winding itself back and forth [“A little fray in the typewriter ribbon moves back and forth like a sentry”], while he doesn’t, I don’t think, compare a scarf or mummy’s windings or an Ace Bandage to a typewriter ribbon.) I am tempted for a moment to call this vocational metaphorizing habit of his a flaw — but do I really want “The Day of the Dying Rabbit” to begin any other way than as it does, with the f/2 eyes and the filmic skin? I do not, because its beautiful last sentence, as the expiring rabbit is compared to the sinking of photography paper in a trough of developer, depends entirely on it. A superb ending! And do I want the hero of Of the Farm not to think to himself, Flowers, the first advertisements ? No, because without Updike’s determination to get some measure of control over his constant instinct to fling outward with a simile by filtering his correspondences through the characters’ offstage fictional professions, he would probably not have come up with this nice little thing, dropped as it is into the middle of a paragraph. My “No”s point, of course, to the defining quality of a major writer: he exists above the threshold of assent, that faint magenta line over which nothing he can do can possibly be felt as a mistake. Anything that causes doubt is either forgotten or is rerouted through some further circuit of forgiveness as more recalcitrant, and hence fresher, evidence of greatness. “I remember,” says Henry James, of his first happy reading of Zola’s La Débâcle , “that in the glow of my admiration there was not a reserve I had ever made that I was not ready to take back.” That’s the right attitude. It isn’t, as Coleridge and other bardolators used to claim, that “not one word” of Shakespeare could be altered without destroying the whole — it is rather that these specific words were the ones Shakespeare happened to choose, and Shakespeare is a great man (though the plays are admittedly difficult to bear on television or on stage), and any particular clinker we might instance disappears into the general pension fund of admiration or becomes, if truly awful, merely interesting, revealing, never simply bad. In an oft-blurbed line, Updike once praised Nabokov for writing prose “the only way it should be written — that is, ecstatically”: if true, this pronouncement ought to hold good for critical prose as well — and yet if I can force myself to utter a fixed doubt about Updike, it is paradoxically that he isn’t ecstatic and immoderate enough about the writers he loves. He is too able to write a rave review that nonetheless includes the obligatory penultimate section of quibbles — his inability to blind himself to Nabokov’s many weaknesses, in particular, and to see them as so much a part of Nabokov’s foreordained self that they must be immediately explained away as part of the complex of traits that gave rise to all that is good in all those books, is the very weakness in Updike I have the most trouble forgiving. Books and life interpenetrate — like the drop of suntan oil on a page of Proust — and yet the measured, unsurprisable tone of many of Updike’s book reviews is incompatible with the grief and turmoil and copulation in his novels. But he is a practicing professional critic, not a one-time closed book examiner as I am, and the duty of the practicing critic is to write about writers out of rhythm with his own passing inclinations and bursts of grateful affection — ecstasy and the assigned bound galleys only fall in perfect step on a few lucky occasions. Nor am I giving sufficient attention to the possibility that by publicly isolating a flaw in a writer he loves, Updike is simply trying to maintain his admiration against the inroads of second thoughts: like the Cat in the Hat scrubbing the bathtub, he offloads an awareness of the flaw onto the rest of us in an effort to restore his own appreciation to a higher state of purity. It may simply be, too, that he is not one of those writers who can gush without correcting himself a moment later: he notes with amused approval Nabokov’s saying (of Joyce) something like “God can that man write!” [I haven’t been able to find this]; but Updike may be better about failures and middling achievements — at seeing what good there is in the fundamentally not so hot. Or perhaps his prevailing coolness is conclusive proof of an enormous secret pride, of the deliberate inward reserve of a man intent on keeping his peculiarities intact over years of selling his literary opinions for money.

From this last vantage, I am the one making the big mistake, broadcasting my limitations, by proclaiming so un -reservedly that Updike is a genius. He doesn’t want to hear me say that. How embarrassing! Nobody wants to hear that right now. But it is one of the telling traits of neotericks who think they have an outside shot at being called geniuses by later equally forward neotericks that they use the word “genius” as if it has a useful meaning. It doesn’t. The word is like the gold confetti [no, “Silverdust”] that Updike’s retail manager was using to make his holiday sign: it is a way of decorating a plain expression of enthusiasm with rarefied twinkly materials and tonalities. But I’ve been using it in this essay because sometimes we need a little twinkle. It disappoints me to see the label confined to obvious candidates like Flaubert or Henry James. Let’s assume that right now, 1990, is as good as it gets. Let’s try genius out on Updike!