Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

“A lovely thing,” said Updike. He also praised something else of mine that appeared in The Atlantic. And he said that I should keep writing because I had a gift. Should I not be including this pronouncement here? Is it self-serving? No, because mainly it shows Updike to be civil and generous in person, which is a thing worth knowing, and because it could easily be nothing more than the “mere babble of politeness,” as Henry James called some of his letters, and because my patently self-serving inclusion of it shows me to be even less likable than I might possibly otherwise have seemed. (Who will sort out the self-servingness of self-effacement?) Anyway, how can I not retain Updike’s moment of encouragement, when it is one of the very few events I have to offer in this whole plasmodium? It isn’t as if Updike said, “Nick Baker! Holy moly! Congratulations on being you! You’re going to fly! ” It isn’t as if what he said was anything like what Schumann said about Brahms. Still, “a lovely thing” was a lovely thing for him to say — it helped me; it altered my opinion about that story, which I now will certainly include if I ever put out a book of stories. But did it also, I now discover myself wondering — and even my suggestion of such a possibility should serve as a warning to all eminent and tolerant writers not to be nice to people who pounce on them at parties — did it also lower him ever so slightly, in the old Groucho Marxian manner, in my estimation, since I can see, rereading the story now, that it is replete with false touches? Why didn’t he see through it? I wonder; in seeing through it myself I suspect for a minute that I have found a blind spot in him to the kind of cheapness it exhibits — when really he was simply doing what he knew I wanted him to do, which was to recognize my existence as a writer, to bless me by remembering who I was.

He asked me how I made a living, and I told him. “When I first got out of college …” I started to say.

“College here ?” he interrupted, raising his eyebrows as if to settle an important question, and pointing at the floor.

“Myeah,” I said. A lie! A pathetic lie! Again he had caught me off guard; I knew he was in a rush and I had only a minute left to talk to him and in the instant of decision I shied at explaining that I was just someone’s guest and wasn’t aware of the Lampoon’s tradition of secrecy and that I’d really gone to Haverford College and had been rejected by Harvard’s grad school in philosophy and hadn’t applied as an undergraduate to Harvard because I had read Frank Conroy’s Stop Time , in which the hero ends up debarking from the Paoli Local at Haverford, and because several relatives had gone to Haverford, and because my mother had gone to Bryn Mawr, and because I was scared that Harvard would reject me as a transfer student from Eastman anyway. Rather than explain this, or rather than simply saying “No, I’m a guest,” which would have sufficed, I in effect told the classic, inexcusable, singles-bar kind of lie by letting John Updike think I’d gone to Harvard. He looked at me sharply for a second, as if he knew I was lying. (My capsule bio in the back of Best American Short Stories 1982 said “Haverford.”) I went on talking about my employment history. He said his son was thinking of taking a teaching job, but he, Updike, wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. “It’s hard,” he said, meaning hard to make a living at writing.

“It is hard,” I said. “But when I get deflated I go back to one of your early stories and I’m all fired up again!”

He had been backing away by then, knowing the obligatory praise-heaping and groveling scene was coming; at this he shook his head and waved and walked out. Had I insulted him by saying “early stories”? I had meant it as an allusion to his own statement on the PBS show that his early stories had the best chance of surviving; and I meant that I went back to them in particular because they were stories written when he was my age. (In 1984 I was twenty-seven.) But what I didn’t understand then was that he might not want his assessment of his work taken at face value. Do I, when I say that my Little Magazine story is “cheap,” necessarily want people to agree wholeheartedly with me? Not at all. I don’t want them to disagree strenuously to my face, either — I’m not fishing in quite that naked sense — but I do want to imagine that there are people out there thinking to themselves as they read that Oh no! I don’t find that story cheap at all! Perhaps there should be a corollary of Auden’s rule — the one about keeping your negative opinions about writers to yourself — that you must never bad-mouth your own past productions, since any good elements in them (and there are a few OK things in my first published story) are harmed in the overspill of your general dismissal. Look at what happens after you read Pynchon’s Slow Learner introduction to his early stories — he talks about how doubtful he is about them, how he looked up things in old Baedekers and did anything he could to be impressively obscure, and as you read it you think, How appealingly modest of the guy to tell us this, but after a few years go by, what he said takes on altogether too much authority — his virtuous self-criticism has hurt your capacity to appreciate residual merit. In later life, as I remember, Joyce thought that Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was his best book; as a result I may never finish Ulysses. And Updike’s high ranking of his early stories may well have made it too easy for me, less inclined to read his novels anyway, to excuse myself from making the slight additional effort in that direction, when there are surely plenty of rewards to be had.

I had a pimple or two on my forehead that day at the Harvard Lampoon. (Synalar, a topical steroid I was using to treat my psoriasis, often flipflopped my forehead skin toward the other, oilier extreme.) When Roger’s Version came out a year or two later [1986], with its nice pale blue cover faintly inset with crosses, I stood in Lauriat’s in downtown Boston and read the first few pages. My single powerful reaction was: I was Dale. Updike was describing me. I actually believed (and still do believe, though with less conviction) that Updike got Dale’s extreme gawky tallness, his thinning hair, his bad skin, his overeager, technotalkative, slack-but-smart way of speaking, and Roger’s own immediate sense of being threatened by and mildly disliking Dale, all from that one tiny encounter with me. Updike had broken free from my chatlock, I figured, gone home muttering to himself about pushy younger writers, gotten up the next morning, and written me into the first scene of his novel as a computer nerd. A few years later I mentioned this theory to my mother, who had just read the book, as I still have not. She didn’t like the notion at all. “You, the model for that awful Dale? No.”

Imagine how difficult it is for me to keep from searching out her copy of Roger’s Version right now (she loaned it to us) and reading those first pages over again to be sure that Updike really does mention Dale’s bad skin and his height — that I haven’t just wished the parallel into being. [Dale is “the type of young man I like least: tall, much taller than I, and pale with an indoors passion. His waxy pallor was touched along the underside of his jaw with acne.… His dirty-looking, somewhat curly brown hair, I could see at his temples, was already beginning to thin.”] But even when the critical quarantine is lifted, I probably will read Of the Farm again before I read straight through Roger’s Version. I resist the books for which Updike did lots of impressive research, such as Roger’s Version or The Coup —and when last year I read, on the back of the paperback of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume , Updike’s (just) praise of it as “beautifully researched,” irritable jealousy made me oppose this sort of preparatory effort more firmly than ever, though I did not hesitate to pop into the library myself under any pretext. The follow-up novel to Süskind’s Perfume, The Pigeon , came out right around the time excerpts from my first novel were appearing: in a review of it Updike spoke in general terms about writers who resort to magnification in an effort to find events and objects that haven’t already been described to death. I was fairly sure, here again, that he was referring obliquely to me. The question of whether he would come out with a more direct review of my own book as well (he would have had to do so outside The New Yorker , since “portions” of it had appeared there, and in recent years he had rarely reviewed outside) — a judicious, unsurprised, encouraging review — was the subject of prayer and dread quite often in my insomnias of late 1987, while I wrote it; which period marked, indeed, the very peak of my Updike “obsession.”