Nicholson Baker: U and I: A True Story

That phrase which reviewers take such pains to include when delivering their judgments — when they say that among living writers so-and-so is or isn’t of the first rank — had once seemed to me unnecessary: the writing, I had thought, was good or bad, no matter whether the writer was here or not. But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of presence or absence , which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone’s opinion, any talent. Is he alive or dead? — just tell me that. The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y — phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore. Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly.

Yet in other ways the dead gain by death. The level of autobiographical fidelity in their work is somehow less important, or, rather, extreme fidelity does not seem to harm, as it does with the living, our appreciation for the work. The living are “just” writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives , wow wow wow. Egotism, monomania, the delusional traits of Blake or Smart or that guy who painted the electrically schizophrenic cats are all engaging qualities in the dead. To show our sophistication across time, we laugh politely whenever we sense, say in Sheridan, that a dead person is trying to be funny, although seldom with the real honking abandonment that the living can inspire. At one point in Boswell’s Life of Johnson , the subject of Garrick’s recent funeral comes up. They talk about how grand and extravagant it was. A woman says that she heard that there were six horses drawing each coach in the procession. Here Johnson finally loses his patience and says, “Madam, there were no more six horses than six phoenixes.” When I first read this, Johnson’s lovable huffiness seemed funny enough to merit a shout and a thigh slap; but right on the tail of this response I was confused, because at the moment I laughed I had been sure in the genuineness of my amusement that Johnson had to be alive somewhere, right then, in seclusion, forgotten by reporters, in order for his words to have made so direct a connection with me. And then the certainty faded, and I heard the hollow droning dirge sound that you can make by humming or lowing through a mailing tube as I realized that no, Johnson was truly dead, and any comic life he had was of a mystical, phoenix-like impermanence — and now I know, looking at his sentence again, that one part of what made it seem funny to me was that such indignation is more comic in dead men than in living men. You had not to be there.

So I abandoned Barthelme completely. But the various morbidities his death occasioned — as well as the sense of fragility and preciousness of all life that is inevitably triggered by even a minor sickness in one’s own child — were all close at hand when, on that Sunday morning early in August, I hesitated for an instant after being reminded of Updike’s sentence about how easily the words come in the morning. Updike was much more important to me than Barthelme as a model and influence, and now the simple knowledge that he was alive and writing and had just published one of his best books, Self-Consciousness , felt like a piece of huge luck. How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive! But though the book was very good — true to the way memory files things away under subject headings, and quite original, I thought, in building an autobiography out of discrete topical essays (as Harold Nicolson had made a sort of autobiography out of the fictionalized acquaintances in Some People ) — Updike’s book was uncomfortably full of notions of closure, the long view, failing bodily systems, and a kind of distant fly-fishing retrospection quite different from the young writer’s need to get rid of the topmost layers of his grade-school and high-school memories so that he can move on without their constant distraction. The framed photograph on the front cover (his best-looking cover by far) was clearly the same one as is described in detail early in Of the Farm —he was coming clean. Nor had I liked reading a recent story of his about a man in his sixties who was startled, every day when he walked to the mailbox, by the doves that suddenly flapped up at his approach. The image was terrific, but the implication, that Updike was putting his intelligence to work on his forgetfulness, on what new could be said about the loss of one’s powers, was very disturbing. With Barthelme gone I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike’s death. All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike’s immortality: his open-ended stream of books, reviews, even poems, and especially responses to pert queries from Mademoiselle and The New York Times Book Review. I thought I remembered his saying recently in Esquire , in response to a survey question about popular fiction, that “in college I read what they told me and was much the better for it.” I wanted more of these monocellular living appearances. More awards-acceptance speeches! He was, I felt, the model of the twentieth-century American man of letters: for him to die would be for my generation’s personal connection with literature to die, and for us all to be confronted at last with the terrifying unmediated enormity of the cast-concrete university library, whose antitheft gates go click-click-click-click as we leave, dry laughter at how few books we can carry home with us.

“I should,” I typed that morning, “write some appreciation” of Updike. And “it has to be done while he is alive.” As with Barthelme, the idea of such an essay wasn’t an entirely new plan. Since embarking on the project, I have found in my piles of typing various earlier mentions of exercitations like this—“Make a whole book about my obsession with Updike,” I typed in October 1988, and followed it with three pages of notes. On September 8, 1987, after reading a number of Updike’s reviews of Wilson and Nabokov, I typed: “Lately I have thought again of writing an essay on Updike.” But, I said,