Nicholson Baker: U and I: A True Story

“Well!” said my parents, independently. “If you’re writing about Updike you’ll have to go back and read everything he’s written!” But in the midst of my various Halloween uncertainties and forebodings, the fact that I should not supplement or renew my impressions with fresh draughts of Updike was the one thing of which I was absolutely sure. I was not writing an obituary or a traditional critical study, I was trying to record how one increasingly famous writer and his books, read and unread, really functioned in the fifteen or so years of my life since I had first become aware of his existence as I sat at the kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, watching with envious puzzlement my mother laugh harder than I had ever seen her laugh before (except at a Russell Baker column a few years earlier) as she read an Updike essay on golf in a special edition of The New York Times Book Review. Unlike her laughter at my slow-motion imitations of drivers undergoing head-on collisions, or at my father’s mimed weight-lifting routines, or at my sister’s sudden pretend facial tics while doing a barre, my mother’s delight that Sunday had no charity or encouragement in it: it was miraculous, sourced in the nowhere of print, unaided by ham mannerisms; it caused her to spill her tea. She tried to read me some of it—“A divot the size of … a divot the size of an undershirt …”—but she couldn’t, it was too funny. Nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical. I took note of The New York Times Book Review after that day, and I began increasingly to want to be a part of the prosperous-seeming world of books (prosperous in contrast, that is, to the grant-dependent and sparsely attended concerts for living composers, whose ranks I had up until then wanted to join), where there was money for screaming full-page ads and where success was quantified as it was on the Billboard charts, and where consequently there didn’t seem to be quite the enormous gulf between popular and elite efforts as there was in music. Indeed, Updike himself regularly appeared on the best-seller list! Could anyone claim that Elliot Carter or Morton Subotnick or Walter Piston or John Cage or even Gian-Carlo Menotti was a complete tweeter-woofer-crossover success in the way that Updike was? It looked as if (this was mid-seventies) classical music was at one of the very lowest points of its postbaroque harmonic cycle, and I knew I didn’t have anything like the talent someone would need to yank it out of its slump single-handedly.

Fiction, on the other hand, was a regular block party! People evidently had things to say with words, and other people appeared to be willing to read them. Fueled by this primitive observation, I began to write fiction in December of 1976, when I was nineteen and on leave from college. For Christmas my mother gave me Picked-Up Pieces , a collection that included the golf essay that had cracked her up a few years earlier: she said she liked the cover a lot, which was a wide-angle black-and-white shot of Updike in his front yard holding out a handful of fallen leaves. I was secretly disappointed by the gift, because I wanted to own paperback fiction, not hardback collections of book reviews, and I threw out the jacket because I wanted the hardback books I did have on my shelf to look more like the books in university libraries, which, unlike the embarrassingly crinkly tenants of public institutions, weren’t shelved with their jackets on. But I did read some of it, starting with the interviews in the back and the essay near the beginning called “On Meeting Writers”—in it I read his account of having tea with Joyce Cary, who mentioned James Joyce and E. E. Cummings with approval. “I absurdly shook my head No,” Updike says, and immediately I wondered whether I would ever write anything as good as that phrase, with its adverb so economically dropped in. And since that Christmas of 1976 I have been reading Updike very intermittently, but thinking about him constantly, comparing myself with him, using my inventory of remembered phrases and scenes in his writing as touchstones — some negatively, but most positively charged. Writing this reminds me of a touching fritter from the preface to Gilbert Murray’s Ancient Greek Literature : “… for the past ten years at least, hardly a day has passed on which Greek poetry has not occupied a large part of my thoughts, hardly one deep or valuable emotion has come into my life which has not been either caused, or interpreted, or bettered by Greek poetry.” Hardly a day has passed over the last thirteen years in which Updike has not occupied at least a thought or two; and while his constant summonings were at the outset brought on more by skeptical ambition than by simple enjoyment, the enjoyment and admiration were increasingly there as well.

And yet, shockingly, I’ve read fewer than five pages of:

Rabbit Is Rich

Buchanan Dying

S.

Tossing and Turning

Telephone Poles

Fewer than twenty pages of:

Roger’s Version

A Month of Sundays

The Carpentered Hen

Bech Is Back

Midpoint

Assorted Prose

Couples

Less than half of:

The Witches of Eastwick

The Coup

Problems

Trust Me

While I have read more than half of:

Marry Me

Bech: A Book

Hugging the Shore

The Centaur

Self-Consciousness

Picked-Up Pieces

And I’ve read most or all of:

Pigeon Feathers

Of the Farm

The Poorhouse Fair

Rabbit, Run

Rabbit Redux

The Music School

Museums and Women

The Same Door

This man , you say, is parading his ignorance! This man is taking up precious space writing about Updike when he admits to having read less than half the words Updike has written! It’s not a disarming admission, it’s an enraging admission! But this very spottiness of coverage is, along with the wildly untenable generalizations that spring from it, one of the most important features of the thinking we do about living writers: as with nearby friends we seldom see because their very proximity removes the pressing need to drop by, so the living writer’s continuing productivity dulls any urgent feelings we might have about filling in our unread gaps in his oeuvre. When he’s dead we suddenly scramble to make our knowledge whole. Nor does the large proportion of early Updike on the “most or all” list above imply a straightforward value judgment: I am most interested in the books Updike wrote when he was my age or younger, because these are the ones whose problems I stand the best chance of understanding; the older I get, the more drawn I expect to be by his later books.

No, I couldn’t possibly read Updike chronologically through right now: it would irreparably harm the topography of my understanding of him. A multiplicity of examples would compete to illustrate a single point, in place of the one example that had made the point seem worth making in the first place; the restiveness of obligation would warp my likings; I’d try to come up with recherché proofs of Updike’s greatness rather than the ones I really believe in; I would in some cases possibly be disappointed by the immediate context of a phrase I loved, when the context was now hazy and irrelevant — indeed, the very readiness of certain phrases to shrug off their contexts and take their place as cherished independent inhabitants of my private florilegia was part of what I liked so much about them, as witness the infinite colorful magician’s handkerchief of years that is pulled from the inkwell in “A Sense of Shelter,” and especially that very first phrase I’d noted down on August 6: “vast dying sea.” In an early story a character leans his forehead against a bookcase, and considers “all the poetry he had once read evaporating in him, a vast dying sea.” It’s a stupendous moment in the story, in fiction, perfectly situated (at least so I remember it), but I think its stupendousness derives in part from its own plucky ability to stay afloat, like a lifesaving scrap of Queequeg’s coffin, as the rest of the story and almost all of literature capsizes and decays in deep corrosive oceans of totaled recall. I remember almost nothing of what I read. What once was Portrait of a Lady is now for me only a plaid lap-blanket bobbing on the waves; Anna Karenina survives as a picnic basket containing a single jar of honey; Pnin is a submerged aquamarine bowl; The Rock Pool’s cab meter still ticks away, showing a huge sum, but the Mediterranean has overtaken the rest of the resort town of Trou-sur-Mer; an antelope from some otherwise blank Christopher Isherwood short story springs wonderfully up out of oblivion “like a grand piano”; the ample landfall I think I have sighted in Paradise Lost turns out only to be the “scaly rind” of the Leviathan in the first book; and even Alan Hollinghurst’s stunning The Swimming-Pool Library , which I am right now in the process of reading, haven’t yet finished, have no excuse for forgetting, already hangs suspended in my inhospitable memory merely as a group of sodden “sticking plasters” fluttering, as he describes them, like an undersea plant near the grate of a water filter. My quality of recollection may well be more atomistically image-hoarding than some, yet the twice-ten-thousand-cavern-glutting expanse and depth of the “vast dying sea” of the once read, over which we all permanently and cheerfully row and pole and sail according to our talents, unless our sense of a particular work is falsely stimulated by review writing, the commemorative essay, teaching, an imminent exam, or the hasty once-over that a dinner guest seems to feel is necessary before he or she meets the writer after a long interval, is the most important feature of all reading lives. And if we want to know how we think about a writer without the artifice of preparation, how we think about Updike in particular only when we discover ourselves thinking about him, when some feature of the world or of our own thoughts spontaneously recalls a tone or tick or glimpse of his work, or even merely brings up the image of his face in a particular jacket photo (like the Poorhouse Fair shot of him sitting on a bench in which my mother thought he looked too pleased with himself) or the memory of some fifth-hand story one has heard or read about him — if we want that sort of elusive knowledge, even rereading a paragraph or a line while our meditation was in progress would be fatal to our oceanography. Indeed, my current aversion to seeing any printed word by Updike has reached such superstitious heights that, just as once several years ago I opened Hugging the Shore to the index and announced to myself, “If I don’t find an entry for J. K. Huysmans in this index, I will be a better writer than Updike” (I did find one, unfortunately), so lately I’ve been saying to myself, “If I accidentally read a direct sentence of Updike’s — not one that I have remembered on my own, but a real sentence set in type in a book or a magazine — while I’m writing this essay, the essay will turn out to be terrible and will never be published in The Atlantic or anywhere else.” But sadly, while I was at a used book store one evening two weeks ago, I was drawn uncontrollably to the Updike shelf, and I saw there a Franklin Library edition of Rabbit, Run. I wrestled with temptation — I had never before looked over an example of Franklin’s facture, and I had been fascinated by Updike’s “special message” accompanying the Franklin Library edition of Marry Me , reprinted in Hugging the Shore , where he mentions a bookcase he’s just finished building and painting, whose dents and defects will in time come to seem inevitable and comfortably comely, even as the flaws in Marry Me itself will undergo a parallel transformation, and I wanted to know if this edition of Rabbit, Run had some front matter I had not read. Finally my resistance collapsed and I pulled the weighty collector’s volume off the shelf. The padded, bright red binding was somewhat more reminiscent of a comfortable corner booth at an all-night, all-vinyl coffee shop than one might have thought fitting for so aggressively “classic” an enterprise; but even so a bible-ready black fabric bookmark did curl with high seriousness out of the gilt-edged, acid-free solidity of the massed pages like a dried umbilicus: I said, “Wow!”—moved to mingled feelings of tenderness and stern disapproval by the prematurely ornate, bootstrappingly heirloomish, “undercooked” look it had, and I was unable to keep from opening it up. Within I saw a Reader’s Digestive illustration of boys playing basketball, and then, as I turned the title page, my iris unwittingly allowed entry to several words from the opening sentence, thereby shattering all my fond hopes for the success of this essay — unless, unless , I deviously told myself, there was a way to include a confession of this very lapse in that part of my case study which mentioned how studiously and superstitiously I had otherwise avoided any rereading. That might work to fend off the bad omen! In his promptly funereal study of Zola (appearing in The Atlantic in August of 1903), Henry James at one point forces himself to admit that he hasn’t been able to reread every one of Zola’s novels while preparing himself for the job at hand: “There are efforts here at stout perusal that, frankly, I have been unable to carry through,” he confesses. I liked the idea that I, by contrast with Henry James, would have “frankly” to admit that I had happened to reread, contrary to all my severe resolutions, a single opening clause from one of Updike’s novels; the courageousness of that admission would somehow leave the seal over my own naturally pickled long-term “dying sea” memories of Updike acceptably intact.