Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

There was a small table to one side of the auditorium, near the stage; Updike took a seat there and began signing books. A line grew up the middle aisle that my mother and I finally took our place in; it moved surprisingly fast. The woman ahead of us held an armload of perhaps fifteen books, most paperbacks: when she reached the table where Updike sat she handed them over in bundles of four or five. He politely signed them all and nodded a thanks to her. Then it was our turn. Smiling fatuously, I handed him a brand-new copy of Rabbit Is Rich I had bought that day. This act was the outcome of some serious thought. I had wondered whether I should have him sign anything at all, since the practice was so nutty — complete strangers wanting a man to scribble in their book, body and blood, all of that. (Oh, but it’s all worth it, because Updike is repayingly brilliant in Self-Consciousness when he mentions a strange interruption in his act of signature between the “p” and the “d” of his last name that has increased, not decreased, in severity after all these years of book-signing — this cursive hiccup he neatly links with the stutter. [No — surprisingly, he does not make that link, in “On Being a Self Forever.”]) Wouldn’t it be, I reflected, more of a statement of my understanding of what his life was like if I consciously didn’t take up his time by meeting him and having his book signed? Years later, I could say, when I finally did meet him, “I saw you in Rochester, but I thought better of having you sign my copy of your book.” No, I had to meet him that day. As a compromise I entertained the notion of bringing some relatively uncommon book of his in to sign; but for it to impress him it would have had to have been very special: not merely The Carpentered Hen (which I didn’t own anyway) or that early paperback of Of the Farm , with its Van Heusen shirt man pensively embracing a “Christina’s World” woman, but something really unusual , like the mysterious edition of chapter one of Marry Me published by some press with a name like Abandocali or Adobacondi or Abacondai. [It’s Albondocani.] I’ve never seen this version, by the way; I’ve wondered, though, over the years, whenever I looked at Marry Me ’s copyright page and saw it cited there, what his motives were in making that limited edition — was it a gift, and if so, given the dune-time tryst it lovingly details, to whom? Copyright pages are, if I may wander from the scene at the Xerox Auditorium for a further moment for Harold Bloom’s benefit, at the molten center of the neophyte’s anxiety of influence: especially their ritualistic, commaed-off phrase “in somewhat different form.” “Portions of this book first appeared, in somewhat different form, in [magazine].” “The following stories first appeared, in somewhat [or ‘slightly’] different form, in [magazine].” Am I right in thinking that my generation is madly plagiarizing Updike when we all publish books with this classic example of the Updikean rhythm murmuring its parentage in our copyright pages? Even if he simply took it over from some predecessor, it has come to stand completely for Updike’s prosody. For my first novel I was taking no chances: I took a look at the copyright page of The Centaur and copied it. For my second novel, though, I was determined to strike out on my own in this area. The word “portions” had come to seem (like “home” instead of “house”) decisively non-U, in the snobbish Mitfordian sense, and I decided to try the more U word “parts.” After much erasure and galley rethinking, the passage on my copyright page now reads: “Chapter 1 and parts of chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in The New Yorker. A brief passage in chapter 9 first appeared, in different form , in The Atlantic ” (italics mine). [At least, so it reads in the UK edition (Granta/Penguin), which was published first. A week before printing, the American publisher, Grove Weidenfeld, completely reworded the first sentence without telling me, reinstating the “portions” that I’d been so careful to avoid.] I meant to convey volumes by that dropping of “somewhat” between “in” and “different” in The Atlantic’s acknowledgment: I meant to indicate that I had done a major overhaul of that 1984 passage; I meant to make it clear that I had improved as a writer since then — although I’m not in fact sure it is better in its second version: rewritings, even tiny changes (e.g., Walter “Palm,” James’s mannered revisitings, Nabokov’s embaubling of Conclusive Evidence as collated for us by Updike in an interesting review) are always dangerous; but improvement or not it had to be different for me to interest myself in it enough to work it in. Don DeLillo went even further in the copyright page of his first novel, about football: he said “in very different form” (italics mine), which I used unfoundedly to take to mean that he’d gotten pissed off by the degree of editorial intervention at The New Yorker and employed that “very” of the final version as his tiny revenge. [None of this is true, oddly enough: End Zone is not DeLillo’s first novel, and there is nothing like the “in very different form” that I remembered reading in the acknowledgment. What is wrong with me?] (Of the two dreams I’ve had about Updike, one contains a prominent copyright page. It occurred at 5:30 in the morning on May 31, 1986. I pulled a hardcover version of The Same Door off some staff writer’s bookshelf. I turned at once to the copyright page and saw

Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1934 by John Updike

I had known that looking at the book would make me unhappy, but when I noticed the last date I felt a momentary mean-spirited triumph, thinking that poor young Updike hadn’t even been able to keep a typo out of his copyright page — as I had felt in real life once earlier, when I had discovered Iris Murdoch listed as “Murdock” in the index to Picked-Up Pieces. But then I looked again, and the “34” blurred and re-formed itself as “39,” which I believed was the year that Updike was twenty-eight, and I let the book spine slump into my hand so that the book closed; the moment it closed I closed my eyes and felt a sob reach my face, because always, always, Updike turned out to be right in the end. Then I woke. In the second dream, which occurred at 2:20 in the morning on September 23, 1986, Updike showed up drunk, fedora askew, in New Orleans and had to work his way back to New York as a train conductor. I worried about him, quite surprised that he was that much of a drinker, but also impressed by his ability to bluff his way into being a train conductor, and I wondered if the ability was acquired from all those years of novel-writing, or was simply the result of a natural capacity to charm. He had said somewhere, I remembered in the dream, that there was a little bit of a salesman in the writer, which made him able to do things like make public appearances and sign books. [What he really said was: “I don’t dislike the spouting-off, the conjuring-up of opinions. That’s show biz, and you don’t go into this business without a touch of ham. But as a practitioner trying to keep practicing in an age of publicity, I can only decry the drain on the brain,” etc.])

I finally decided, anyway, that I shouldn’t try to be fancy that evening: I wanted to meet him and my only chance was going to be if I had a book for him to sign and it should simply be a brand-new copy of his latest, Rabbit Is Rich. I handed it to him and he bent his head to the task. I watched his pen form the word “John”—it looked more like “Jon”—and I said to his extraordinarily full head of hair: “I was at The New Yorker offices last week — I noticed you had a story scheduled for very soon!”