Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

He said that he wrote The Poorhouse Fair in six months, so I quit my job and gave myself that same stretch to finish my first book. As I wrote it I read, more or less in this order, some of the journals of the Goncourt brothers for the first time, some of Flaubert’s Parrot for the first time, some of Huysmans’s Against the Grain for the first time, some of Chapman’s William Lloyd Garrison for the first time, all of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son for the first time, all of Roth’s My Life as a Man for the first time, some of Nabokov’s Glory for the twentieth time, half of Exley’s A Fan’s Notes for the first time, some of The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop for the first time, some of Edna O’Brien’s Night for the first time, and I reread a little of Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains. But none of these, not even Glory , felt close enough to me. Finally I took down Of the Farm: it was short, as my novel was turning out to be, and I already knew how good it was. (In 1989 Updike praised Mulisch’s The Assault as a “short, perfect novel.” Yes, the description applies to Of the Farm , too — if perfection can allow for those secondary circuits of forgiveness mentioned earlier — but secretly I regretted that Updike had used up this nice phrase on Mulisch, before I came out with a book that he could lay it on. And yet if he ever were to say something like that about me, the praise would become enemy number one of promise.) I went through Of the Farm very slowly that fall, a few pages every morning before I took up with my own manuscript. It was the first time since 1978 that I had read one of Updike’s books uninterruptedly from cover to cover, without skipping around or putting it aside before reaching the end. I let it soak in. I figured out how many words it had and compared that figure with my chapter subtotals. It became the measure of all worth. More than once I yelled “He’s a fucking maestro!” More than once I had tears in my eyes. For instance, I cried at the aforementioned description of the raindrops on the window screen like a crossword puzzle or a “sampler half-stitched”: it killed for the time being a patch of screen description of my own, but that didn’t matter, because Updike’s paragraph was so fine that my competitiveness went away; and when I found that Elizabeth Bishop’s 1948 New Yorker story called “The House-keeper” also had a screen whose clinging raindrops “fill[ed] the squares with cross-stitch effects that came and went,” this parallel only demonstrated to me how much more Updike could do with the same piece of reality: he had lifted it from the status of incidental setting and made its qualities part of the moral power and permanency of his mother’s house — no, I will say further, in a typical bit of appreciative overheatedness, that this screen is the novel itself — that geometric, formal, conventional, antimalarial grid through which you look into Daumier’s Third Class Carriage of social life (the reference here is strainingly obscure: I just mean that Daumier’s painting is overlaid with, because it’s unfinished, I guess, a matrix of vertical and horizontal lines — but now I worry, does Updike talk about Daumier in his brand-new Just Looking ?), but which as you continue to write distracts you with its interesting nearby droplets and tiny rips and odorous rust dust and habit of shaking slightly in winds, until the “young embroiderer of the canvas of life,” as Henry James says in a cognate passage in the preface to Roderick Hudson that I’ve just been reading,

soon beg[ins] to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes.

What I liked so much about Of the Farm was that Updike’s terror was under control; the proportion between consumed and unconsumed holes was just right; you could still see through the mesh of the screen, but the clinging metaphorical figures, such as the droplet-needlework image itself, were there in cross-eyed, painstaking abundance.

Unfortunately, I finished reading Of the Farm a few weeks before I finished writing my book; looking around for more Updike to prolong the helpful high, I read the awards-acceptance speeches he includes in Hugging the Shore. As a result, I lay awake two nights planning the acceptance speech I would make when my novel won the National Book Award. There were two problems relating to the speech. First, Updike had set a standard of felicitous gratitude that I could never better. Should I be in reaction somber, or incoherently at a loss, or shy-debutantishly brief? Should I apologize for all the bad places in my book — even supply some last-minute textual corrections to the lorgnetted assembly? “And on page sixty eight, if you will indulge me in one more amendment, six lines up from the bottom, the word ‘twiddle’ should properly read ‘fiddle.’ ” Should I thank Updike for inspiring me? Should I say right out how hard it was to write an acceptance speech after reading the Castiglionean models he provided in Hugging the Shore ? I simply could not formulate a first sentence that felt interesting and properly heterogenous and yet acceptably free from Updike’s influence. The second problem was, assuming I did come up with a speech that did the job, and I delivered it without incident, and years went by — what should I do with the text then? Updike was right to include his in a prose book — acceptance speeches were a distinct form of literature, akin to toasts and letters but with their own distinct requirements and opportunities — but doing so was somewhat unusual, was it not, was itself a part of Updike’s originality? If I included my speech I would feel that I was slavishly copying Updike, more so even than in the matter of the copyright-page acknowledgment. On the other hand, I didn’t want to deliver a speech that I didn’t think was worth publishing permanently. And I liked very much the idea that Updike could look at Picked-Up Pieces or Hugging the Shore and know that they contained all of his nonfictional self from that particular decade. Yet it might be a nice idea, attractively humble, to have a bunch of miscellaneous writings of acceptable quality left over for the posthumous mop-up volume. Or no — the arrogance of engineering your appearance of humility was itself fluorescently vile. The only thing to do was to refuse to accept the award altogether. But that extreme would merely be a ripoff of Pasternak and Sartre, both Nobel-decliners.

Lucky for me, I didn’t win anyway. I wasn’t one of the five nominees. In fact, my publisher didn’t even bother to send in my book for consideration. I won no awards of any kind — not the NBA, the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN/Hemingway, the Whiting Foundation, the Joe Savago New Voice Award, the National Book Critics Circle, or a Big Mac. Not a single dinky award! Fuck them all! But no, it’s good, it’s good, it’s better that way: few people will imitate me, because there is clearly no glory in it, and my relatively unrecognized and unfeted position allows me, just barely, to write this kind of a nose-pressed-against-the-store-window book, if book it turns out to be, about Updike. I did get some very good reviews — but the interesting thing about those bolts of elation was that though Updike was in my thoughts constantly while I wrote my book, not a single reviewer mentioned him as a possible antecedent. I was reminiscent of, owed much to, or failed to measure up to Abish, Barth, Borges, Bove, Calvino, Friedman, Joyce, Lem, O’Brien (Flann, not Tim or Edna), Perec, Ponge, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Sterne, Tati, and Trow — never Updike. What can this mean? That I think I’m influenced when I’m not? Or that there are differences between a role-model sort of influence and a purely stylistic one? [Updike’s name did come up in a few reviews of my second novel, but by then I had said that he and Nabokov were heroes in several interviews.]