Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

Most important, without Updike’s example I would not be able to describe the first time I met the man himself, late in 1981, at the Xerox Auditorium in Rochester. He was in town giving a speech on Melville for the Friends of the Rochester Public Library. I went with my mother. (Even at this moment I am compelled to explain why a young man of twenty-four would be going to an event such as this with his mother — that I was back from some months spent in Berkeley with my now-wife, and that I was waiting for her to finish at Bryn Mawr and decide where she wanted to live so that I could follow her there.) I was feeling burstingly high-toned and unprovincial that evening, having been only a week or two earlier to the offices of The New Yorker for the first time, after announcing pretentiously to an editor (I had recently skimmed some of Evelyn Waugh’s letters) that the telephone “made me nervous” and thus I had to go over my story with her in person. Because of my New Yorker trip, Updike’s sudden appearance in my unprepossessing hometown took on to me the odd quality almost of a courtesy reciprocated. I remembered his account (somewhere) of E. B. White showing up on his doorstep and offering him a staff writing job, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that his speech on Melville wasn’t simply a pretext for covertly scoping out my upstate origins before giving the final OK to the high command to hire me. The whole audience seemed as jumpy and alert as I felt, much more eager than the concert-going audiences I was familiar with, as if we all thought that we were about to undergo a subtle but conclusive trial: what things we smiled shrewdly at and what angles we held our heads at, and whether we were capable of making it clear by our untroubled rumpledness and our audible head-scratching and our mock-impatient thumping of rolled programs on kneecaps that we were there purely out of sincere interest and not out of the cheapest, lowest lust for proximity, would mark us definitely as being worth the Oversou’s eternal attention or not.

Updike took the podium and began to read. We all, after Self-Consciousness , know to expect a stutter (he hadn’t, however, in reading the motherhood address I heard on the radio); but to my prelapsarian ear it was so strangely contained and refined a faltering — a stately “pop, pop, pop” before a “p” word in an opening sentence [“popular”] like the three first bounces of a Ping-Pong ball before rapidity sets in — that I interpreted it more as a form of nonthesaural ornamentation than as a handicap; in fact, I first assumed there was simply something echoey wrong with the microphone or that in Updike’s boredom with the idea of speech-making he was pausing to blow thoughtful smoke rings. The popping happened no more than three times in the speech; maybe only twice. The last time I heard it I understood that it technically could be termed a stutter and I was amazed: Rochester, New York, of all places, was making Updike nervous. I was making him nervous.

That knowledge made me relax and listen to what he was saying a little more closely. He was trying to find out “what went wrong” with Melville’s later novels. I don’t know if he used those very words in the speech itself, but he had done so in an interview I’d read several months earlier called “Bech Interviews Me.” Bech asks him at the end what he is up to now, and Updike answers (in The New York Times Book Review ) “I’ve been reading the late Melville lately, to see what went wrong, if anything.” For a writer to announce so casually in print ahead of time what he was reading and thinking about and working on, thereby coolly challenging all competitors to beat him to it and giving all detractors the time to elongate their yawns even further than normal, had struck me on that earlier Sunday as a highly impressive move; and there had been an admirable carelessness, too, in phrasing the chosen subject in such a way that the sneer-prone would be certain to apply it immediately to Updike’s own career. We couldn’t be sure whether he was playfully pretending to be struggling to profit by the example of Melville’s untimely truncation, or whether he seriously believed himself to be, post- Rabbit Is Rich , at an analogous juncture. I still don’t know. Standing miraculously in the downtown of my own city and treating the promised subject, he kept himself out of the argument entirely, avoiding contemporary references — only once did the audience, starved for dirt, go “Ooooh!” when Norman Mailer’s name came up as an example of a writer who’d had a huge early success and had run into trouble getting beyond it. That high-schoolish “Ooooh!” from my Rochester — which, in its betrayed yearning to be privy to an imagined arena of high authorial spite, disgusted me — is the first thing I remember after the opening pops; probably I disliked it mostly because the rest of the audience had understood quicker than I had that Updike had said something that could be taken as a jibe. The third thing I remember is Updike’s saying that one of Melville’s books, perhaps Billy Budd [no, The Confidence Man ], was “the most homosexual of Melville’s works.” And I hadn’t even known Melville was gay! How stupid could I have been? In bed with Queequeg? I adjusted to this fact for a while, and began spooling out little theories about Conrad and Defoe, too (not only Friday — also the parrot: aural narcissism), and merchant shipping in general. He quoted a passage from Pierre , I think, to make the point that even in a book with a completely landlocked subject matter [no, Clarel , a poem about the Holy Land], Melville’s oceangoing mind irrepressibly reached for sea similes in describing what it saw. But the best moment by far was when Updike figured out how much Melville was paid, in current dollars, for his writing, and used that low figure to make the cheering point that the United States was not then, as it happily is now, populous and literate enough to sustain a writer even of Melville’s difficulty. [“The United States of his time would seem to have been like Third World countries today — able to breed a literary community of sorts but with a reading public insufficiently large to sustain a free-lance writer of books.”]

It was a smooth speech … but “smooth” sounds patronizing. It dissatisfied me then because it wasn’t fiendish enough — it didn’t take one of Melville’s sentences or images and do a mad-scientist number on it, brandishing the analytical instruments while they still steamed from their autoclaves, exulting in every banned or questionable area of forensics, clutching and rattling the chosen page with a seizure of louped scrutiny that alone could make the drowned man’s words rise again. But now I think I see better that equanimity is as much a critical virtue as mania is; what disappoints me about the speech today, when I think over it, is simply that it was too much Melville and not enough Updike. All it had of Updike was that stylized stutter. But Rowland Collins, then chairman of the University of Rochester’s English Department, who had invited Updike, raved afterward to my mother and me: “When I heard it was going to be on Melville, I thought ‘Oh Lord no,’ but it was really extremely good.”

“It was, it was,” we agreed; and I suspect that if I were to reread it now (which I can just barely keep from doing: Hugging the Shore , where it is collected along with an essay on Hawthorne I also have never read, is in a pile of books somewhere in this very room, glowing around the clock with the capacity to disprove my arguments and demonstrate my inaccuracies once I open it; and I have even ordered Assorted Prose , the omnibus from Updike’s first writing decade, with its reviews of Kierkegaard and Tillich, and its funny introductory sentence about the time, early on, when Updike had been in danger of becoming viewed as The New Yorker ’s resident expert in philosophical and theological speculation, so that whenever one of the “slim, worthy-looking volumes” by Tillich or Heidegger crossed the book review editor’s desk, it zoomed straight to him — or is that all in Picked-Up Pieces? [it is] — so that when I need to correct my misquotations it will be here to refer to as well: I want desperately to be done with this study!), if I were to reread it now I would admire it more than I did then, because I can appreciate now how hard it is to stay at that ideal benevolent altitude, from which vantage each book is the size of a county, its highways and townships and eyesores and terrain easily discernible, and the farseeing reader can take in at a glance, as an instance of a general type, an image or incident that would have entoiled me for three months.