Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

Once in June of 1984 I was in the Paperback Booksmith (now Buddenbrooks) on Boylston Street when I picked up a novel by a man named Spackman, who was born in 1905 but was new on the horizon. It had an introduction by Edmund White, I think, whom I paid attention to despite my then homophobia because Nabokov had (so I dimly remembered from a blurb) praised him. I read a little of the introduction: Edmund White said that something in the tone of Spackman’s essays seemed to have the authority of a person like Nabokov, “who knows he’s a genius.” It was an interesting idea, that Nabokov or Spackman or anyone else could know , in quite that definite way, so momentous a truth about himself. Did Edmund White say this of Nabokov because he, White, knew he was a genius himself, or because he knew he wasn’t, or because he wasn’t sure? The possibility of such knowledge made me uncomfortable, because of course I badly wanted to be a genius myself someday and I didn’t yet feel any of that sort of foursquare certainty. But I did recognize the tone White meant: Yeats had it maybe, writers develop it over the years, an air of rangy assurance, built on the knowledge that there are plenty of people who are interested in what the guy has said up till now, and that the hush that has surrounded his past publications is unlikely to be replaced with indifference anytime soon, no matter what he does. This fixed certainty, the feeling of being pretty damned consequential, of tossing a few scraps to the eternally grateful who cluster around the podium, is in some personalities necessary perhaps to the completion of big, complex works. But is it true to say that Nabokov knew, in the sense of having a ground bass of belief that thrummed under everything he did, that he was a genius? He coveted the Nobel a tad too sincerely, I think, for him to be charged with such unwaveringness. (At least, an obituary I read in a Rochester paper said that his failure to receive the prize was one of the disappointments of his later years.) The unpleasant haughtiness of his late prefaces is, to this apologist, an indication of certainty and its morose opposite locked in struggle, as it is with Henry James’s prefaces — even the megalomania of the twice-stroke-deluded and failing James dictating letters to family announcing his plans for fabulous renovations to his several imaginary Napoleonic palaces are sufficient proof to me that the decision to think of himself as a genius was an act of will, an imperial edict to himself, demanding constant fussy renewal and tending and plumping up to keep it from succumbing to doubt. Doubt, anxiousness, the nibbled lower lip, have to constitute the medium for most great works: Nabokov’s emigration to the States and struggle to switch languages and make a living here, to the extent that it temporarily heightened the uncertainty of a constitutionally highly assured man, was what made possible Pnin and Speak, Memory , my two favorites. If, I thought, replacing Spackman on the shelf, Nabokov knew he was a genius back when he was writing Glory at age thirty, he knew it only intermittently: it was a fleeting suspicion, not certain knowledge, something incredibly exciting and jinxing and unthinkable that kept peeping at him over the rise of his best paragraphs, distinct from arrogance, mixed in with probably-nots and bright, leaping maybes. “Maybe I am, maybe I am!” And don’t you have to admit, whatever your doubts are about the utility of the word, that it is pleasing, almost thrilling, to think of our very own living Updike at thirty-two or so writing “Her pointed yellow high-heeled shoes lay beside her feet as if dislodged by a sudden shift of momentum” and experiencing, when he looked at the words he had just so happily and casually combined, that same puzzled, curious, surprised sensation—“Maybe I am!”? I would be overdoing it to claim for so tender and closely observed and unassuming a domestic moment as this shot of his stockinged wife asleep that the passing shift of momentum it adduces is a distant transmuted aftershock of the enormous geophysical disaster of divorce;—that would be carrying it a bit too far, probably. But something big and refractive and vaguely frightening stole ripplingly through the living room that evening in the early sixties, and if it wasn’t Divorce, then it had to be Genius.

I don’t care so much whether from an encyclopedic perspective Updike is or isn’t worthy of the word; what I want, tautologically if that’s what it takes, is to determine to my own satisfaction that when he was just setting out, writing those early novels and stories, he was once in a while startled to catch himself in an idle moment tapping that golden finger at his own breastbone, because I need to know what someone who had plausibly reached such a conclusion about himself, however fleeting, could do with it, and did do with it, in a country and time I understood. Did the story “Leaves,” of which he is justly proud (defending it against the charge that it was mere “lace-making,” he said, “Well, if ‘Leaves’ is lace, it is taut and symmetrical lace, with scarce a loose thread”—and I liked this moment of sharp, slightly irritable confidence enough to remember it), come before or after such a detection, or was that very story first responsible for it? If through Updike I could learn at second hand what that brief, actuating intimation felt like, and nurse along any modest equivalencies in myself, if I could demonstrate to my strictest internal tribunals that I resembled Updike in certain important ways, then, thus inspired, I might just pivot myself one or two handholds higher along the sacred mimetic continuum. But the truth is that I am less like Updike than I used to think. We are both white, Eastern American, upper-middle-class, psoriatic, and heterosexual — but so what? That class includes millions. I feel closer to him than to any other living writer simply because I know more about him than any other living writer, but he writes better than I do and he is smarter than I am and that’s what counts. This observation will surprise no one; it came, however, as quite a shock to me. Ten years ago, in my last semester of college, I was sitting in a dorm cafeteria at Bryn Mawr after lunch flipping through a library copy of The Centaur with my now-wife. We were pointing out passages we liked and ones we thought were no good. Work study students in white outfits were wiping off the tables all around us. “Now see, here he ruins it again!” I said, shaking my head. Scornfully I pointed to a sentence about gasoline shivering into an engine [“He poured shivering gasoline into the hungry motor”] and began criticizing Updike’s habit of using words like “shivering” that were slightly too cutely anthropomorphizing for their contexts. (In the first Rabbit book there is, I seem to remember, a fair amount of skittering and slithering and whatnot, too, none of which I now mind … but how strange. I promised myself when I began this memory-dependent essay that I would not use the tempting phrase “seem to remember,” which Updike uses once or twice in Self-Consciousness , and which appears on page 156 of Speak, Memory and a number of places in the late James, because Updike ought to be able to enjoy the satisfaction of having returned it single-handedly to currency for a year or two at least, and because “seem” is even on its own so treacherously alluring an Updikeanism, especially in the characteristic early uncoupled-copula rhythm of “her blank seemed, in its blinkety blankness and blanketed blinkness , almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk ,” that I always feel a twinge of derivativeness when I resort to it, even though Updike can hardly have a patent on something so widespread, and because anyway “seem to remember” has a mists-of-timey vagueness and veiledness that, so I thought two months ago, made it no good for me — but now look: it has offered itself to my typing fingertips, and they accepted!) After I delivered my criticism, I took note of my annoyed tone and suddenly wondered whether my now-wife was thinking to herself, What’s he done that is so good that he thinks he can freely criticize Updike? So I asked her, “Do you think I’m a better writer than Updike?”