Nicholson Baker: U and I: A True Story

“Blooming buzzing confusion.” “Hard, gemlike flame.” “Hobgoblin of little minds.” “The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.” “I refute it thus.” They’re all dead and fully folded away, accessible by one or two of these handy pull tabs, in the thick faded Harper Torchbook of intellectual history. But not only is Updike himself physically alive, his writing feels alive as well: it’s still in constant democratic motion, unteachable, not in equilibrium, free to organize itself around any particular scene or image or pronouncement, no standardized ID phrase yet dangling from a protruding morgued toe. I find myself speculating, in fact, what phrase will become the jingle we will have to fight past at some point in the future to reawaken our real pleasures in Updike. From Self-Consciousness reviewers quoted “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” and there is a certain memorable shock in that, but it’s too downbeat to represent his tone adequately. When I asked my mother what she remembered from Updike, the first thing she mentioned was the sentence about divorce from the foreword to Too Far to Go : “That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.” She’s absolutely right, it should be in the next edition of Bartlett’s. And Nabokov long ago quoted admiringly a beautiful, beautiful phrase from one story: “Their conversation was like a basket woven underwater around a useless stone.” [No no no — the sentence really goes: “The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.”] Perhaps that too will become one of Updike’s tags, since its image by example so nicely defuses the tiresome criticism that he doesn’t have anything — that is, any useless stone [no, worthless stone — there’s a difference] of exotic experience — to write about. But meanwhile, lucky for me, there is no aphoristic consensus to deflect and distort the trembly idiosyncratic paths each of us may trace in the wake of the route that the idea of Updike takes through our consciousnesses.

One such tracing might begin, for instance, at the 125th anniversary party for The Atlantic , held in the fall of 1982. I rented a black tie outfit and went with my now-wife. We stood on the black-and-white tiled basement floor of the Marriott Long Wharf, relieved to see that the crowd was much too big for us to be expected to talk to anyone. I said things like “Are those what are known as ‘spaghetti straps’?” indicating with my chin a woman whose back was to us, and my now-wife said things like “Almost: those over there are”—and we nodded and laughed exaggeratedly, as if we hadn’t taken a cab there together but had met for the first time in years at this grand function. And yet after forty-five minutes, the pressure, slight at first but growing, to have at least one extra-dyadic conversation that I could use to imply hours of raucous socializing in later accounts, began to make me glance around with more purpose. I began to feel slightly desperate. We were forced to eat sliced and stuffed things at traypoint: each time the tray came around I felt that the bearer was adding another yes checkmark to his suspicion that we had arrived and talked to nobody but ourselves. Finally an associate editor introduced us to Judith Martin, Miss Manners, who had been deep in real, unfeigned conversation with somebody else. She, understandably revolted by our foolish beaming pleading miserable faces, and put off by the borderline rudeness of the person who had performed the introduction, since he had failed to take into account how very deep her preexisting conversation had been, apparently felt that it was her duty as a syndicated upholder of social norms not to talk to us or nod kindly at us or even to look at us until we could demonstrate that we were comfortable and capable in this sort of expensive literary ceremony — perhaps at The Atlantic ’s 130th anniversary party (which I wasn’t invited to anyway). I looked at her intelligent, appealing profile, and in the midst of my sincere discomfiture (“shitting and pissing in terror,” as William Burroughs might say) I was grateful to her, for my now-wife and I now had a story to tell: Miss Manners had cut us dead. We backed away. I spotted Tim O’Brien. “There’s Tim O’Brien!” I hissed. “Finally somebody I know!” We hustled over. He’d forgotten me. He ( Going after Cacciato , National Book Award, 1979) had been one of the faculty in a two-week writer’s conference at Berkeley in 1981; I’d been a student in Donald Barthelme’s class at the same conference. “So why are you here?” Tim O’Brien asked, rather brutally.

I told him we lived in Boston and that I’d had some things in The Atlantic. He nodded. We all looked around, nodded approvingly at the hors d’oeuvres, looked around again. A feeling of major literary power was in the room, but it was difficult to locate it in any one person. “Is Updike here?” I asked.

Tim O’Brien said something like “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

“I haven’t either.”

My now-wife shook her head: she hadn’t seen Updike either.

“Bellow’s supposedly here,” said Tim O’Brien.

“Yes, so I heard,” I said. “I was wondering about Updike, though. They would have invited him, don’t you think? I mean he had a story, ‘Pygmalion,’ in the magazine fairly recently.”

Tim O’Brien thought Updike probably would have been invited. And then he dropped his bomb. “I go golfing with Updike.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we go golfing. It’s kind of nice. But he has one rule: no talk about books.”

We nodded — wise, very wise. Updike didn’t make an appearance at the party, but this short exchange with Tim O’Brien, especially coming just after our devastating but dine-out-on-able failure with Miss Manners (who functioned allegorically for me as the bouncer at the porte cochere of the cultural establishment), was more than enough literary ferment for one evening. I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn’t written a book of any kind, and didn’t know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O’Brien. That “astounded” ball and the “divot the size of an undershirt” in Updike’s golf essay that had made my mother laugh so hard were what had first switched my attention from music to writing. I was clubable! And I knew that he had read me, because the year before, an editor at The New Yorker wrote me saying that Updike had seen my story there and had asked who I was. And now, by 1982, with a full four short stories published, I thought my writing could plausibly claim a peak metaphorical infusion rate closer to Updike’s own than Tim O’Brien’s (though I had scarcely read O’Brien then). It was true that I hadn’t done anything in that line anywhere near as good as Updike’s description of the large block of ice in Rabbit, Run , with its eraser markings leading the eye deep into the white exploding star at the center, or the “cool margins of the bed” in The Centaur , but that, and not the expert storyteller’s pacing of Going after Cacciato , was clearly the direction I was going to improve in if I improved at all. The metaphors I came up with might well turn out to be “pushed,” in the very worrisome adjective Updike used in a review of Blue Highways , but there were going to be lots of them, at least at the beginning. (The metaphorical sense, along with the flea-grooming visual acuity that mainly animates it, fades in importance over most writing careers, replaced, with luck, by a finer social attunedness — although in a story from 1987 [or rather 1986—“The Afterlife”] Updike has a tossed-off description of an excitable horse’s “gelatinous” eyeball that still outsees everyone else writing.) But wasn’t the very gulf of method that separated O’Brien and Updike the point, I asked myself? If Updike was going to choose a golf-buddy from the ranks of existing writers, relative recognition or merit or promise aside, wasn’t he more likely to choose someone whose bag of tricks was different enough from his own to keep that natural rivalrousness, that “wariness,” as much at bay as possible?