Nicholson Baker - U and I - A True Story

In writing this down, however, with the usual disappointment at the pallor a once pressing idea finally assumes on my page, I notice that my account is incomplete: there was in reality a preliminary stage to my appreciation of Updike’s truth that life is short. In 1985, an ex-professor put my name on the mailing list of writers to receive Guggenheim applications. I took the packet of cream-colored paper that came in the mail very seriously, because the Guggenheim was the only philanthropic grant that Updike had made use of: he wrote The Centaur with its help. (And I can’t help suspecting that the odd artsy mythological chapters in that book, which is elsewhere so packed with visual delights, are there not only to introduce what he called “novelistic space,” that feeling, as I understand the term, of having two or more processes going on concurrently among which the reader is shuttled, so that he forgets a little of each process in his exposure to the others, and feels the delight of re-acquaintance, and doesn’t grow rebellious as quickly, but are there also to show the Guggenheimish world that this book is not merely a book about a kid worrying about the health of his father during a cold snap, which we couldn’t possibly take seriously as the outcome of a financial award, but is a book fully aware of the myth criticism that so appealed to fifties literary folk. [I could not be more wrong in this theory: Rabbit, Run , it turns out, not The Centaur at all, was the book he wrote with a Guggenheim.]) But I was sure I wouldn’t win the award and I was feeling very doubtful about my writing in general and disliked the idea of asking several people to write recommendations — that awful moment I imagined in the phone call where the exchange of news falters and you say, “Another reason I’m calling is …” and suddenly your real motives are laid bare: you’re looking for a recommendation , that’s all, you wheedling wretch, you don’t really miss the professor or want to tell him how much you still think about his class, you just want further help in your dishonorable little battle up the grass-blade toward some sort of eminence. Besides, the application would only be complete and worth sending, to my mind, if Updike was one of the ones who’d written a recommendation, and there was no way I could write Updike and ask him to write me a recommendation based on the things I’d had published. So I called my father-in-law (who’d won two Guggenheims in history) to ask him what he thought about going through with the application. I told him that I hated to ask people for recommendations and that I doubted Updike would write me one and moreover (my voice here took on a fluting, over-earnest tone) I was still in a very preparatory stage and I didn’t feel I knew what I was doing well enough yet to deserve a Guggenheim. He said that it was virtuous of me to think that way (generously not pointing out that I was much more pleased and unperplexed by the appearance of this application in the mail than I pretended, though including an almost imperceptible edge of chastisement in his voice, there if I wanted to hear it, at what he easily saw was my transparently false modesty), but he said that if I thought that way for too long I’d “end up in heaven.” I laughed, but I felt a moment of panic or rebuke — my father-in-law had always said that things had come early and easily for me, and now he was implying that I was getting older and putting things off and pretending to bemoan my imperfect apprenticeship. His voice, saying essentially, “But if you wait too long to apply for a Guggenheim your life will be over and you’ll have done nothing,” had the force it had because it was his voice, and because I fancied I could detect in it the always compelling tincture of veiled self-reproach: he regretted not writing more himself (so I crudely interpreted), regretted the wasteful rhythm of the academic year, which demands that half the summer be spent re-familiarizing oneself with the excitement one was just beginning to feel about one’s chosen project by the end of the summer before, regretted how extremely much pleasure teaching itself gave him, even though he knew that its static sparks of eloquence robbed him of some of the stored voltage necessary to finish his next work of history; and his voice, in this sampled and stored and overinterpreted version, was what I mixed into the voice I heard a few years later when I read Updike saying, with that tone of almost impatient fatigue that often marks the high point of an interview with a writer, that life was too short to worry about propriety: in a momentary synthetic unison, these two men, one on the phone and the other on the page of Hugging the Shore , put a constructive fear of death in me. (I didn’t apply for a Guggenheim, though.) Before you can accept it as true, you need to have the sensation, the illusion, that something is said directly to you , or that the idea has occurred to someone who resembles you enough to serve as your emotional plenipotentiary. And what a writer of an essay like this is trying to do, it now seems to me, is to cheat in a sense on this process: I’m trying to convince the reader that I’m such a stone-washed article that even lacking a recognized corpus or a biography or a remembered history of dorm-cafeteria conversation, or any known self outside of the one chunk of me here offered, I am somebody you know: we’ve been through the wars together, eaten at McDonald’s, submitted to base motives, sweated through social gatherings, and so when I propose to tell you that John Updike is a genius, for example, my contention will have some trustworthy impulse of convincingness behind it.

In so explicitly combining Updike and my father-in-law in what I have just said, I am aware that I am probably begging for Harold Bloom’s templates of literary patrimony to clamp confidently down on my life. But I haven’t read any Harold Bloom, and all the way through writing this essay so far I have been experiencing bursts of anxiety about my ignorance of The Anxiety of Influence. Am I simply resaying things he’s already said? “Adding texture”? I know about “misprision” only from book reviews — book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought, and contributing in that necessary role a certain class of distortions to the forward flow by allowing those works which contain plots and arguments that are easily summarized in their reviews to assume a level of cultural bulk and threat that the books themselves may or may not deserve. It’s not quite true to claim that I haven’t read any Bloom: in 1982 I did read one thing, a very personal and (I now think) attractively exasperating introduction to the Selected Writings of Walter Pater in which he claims that Pater’s “only begetter” was Ruskin, whose anxiety-causing effect “can be read, frequently through negation, throughout Pater’s work.” I finally lost my temper (“You dipshit,” I believe I said, slitting my eyes at the page) when I came to this snidely psychoanalytical sentence: “The overt influence [of Ruskin] Pater buried deep.” But my dislike of “Pater buried deep” marked it in my memory for long-term storage, saving it from otherwise certain inundation — and now, in reaction to Bloom, I wish to unbury and acknowledge my debt in this essay to Bloom himself, who is in the air; but just as I can’t read Updike now for fear that I would forfeit my one opportunity to represent as accurately as I can what I think of him when he comes to mind, and not when I summon him to mind, so I can’t now study The Anxiety of Influence for fear that the book would take me over, remove the urgency I feel about what I’m recording here, transform the particulars of my relationship with Updike into a rather uninteresting instance of a powerful and already proven general law — necessarily less interesting than the relationship between Ruskin and Pater or Ruskin and Proust or Henry James and Proust or Proust and Beckett or Proust and Nabokov or Nabokov and Updike because unlike the rest of the illustrious terms in these comparisons, I am nobody — fame (not to speak of talent) hasn’t conferred any external interest on my writhings. “Illustrious examples,” Edward Young wrote in 1760, in a passage that Bloom or his disciples have no doubt fixed on as an interesting prolepsis of the master’s views, “engross, prejudice , and intimidate. They engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judgment in favour of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they intimidate us with the splendour of their renown, and thus under diffidence bury our strength.” Well, I will not be diffident — I will even go so far as to say that in this matter of treating how a person adapts to the tradition that precedes him I have been just as influenced by David Dreman’s Contrarian Investment Strategy (a book I actually have read) as I have by the ideas of Harold Bloom that are in general invisible circulation. But why fight everyone’s suspicion? I am writing contre Harold Bloom, like it or not, ignorant of his work or not, and in being so forthright about this I have to admit to feeling slightly superior to Updike, who surprised an early interviewer by naming Jack Kerouac as an inspiration. [Actually he merely said that of his contemporaries Kerouac “attempted to grab it all; somehow, to grab it all. I like him.”] Kerouac? said the interviewer, in effect — just as Updike wanted him to. How interesting. And it may be that Kerouac’s typing of On the Road on a roll of shelf paper or a piano roll or whatever the myth is was a spur to Updike, who had a suspicion that his descriptive polish wouldn’t desert him even at full throttle and wanted to test its outer limits, after four years of the standard college rap about the sacredness of the act of revision. But I think we have to say that Kerouac isn’t really the big influence, nor is Salinger, whom Updike shook after a few stories (“Janny!” calls a very Salingeresque girl in the first story he published) — the real influences (elsewhere freely admitted) are, regardless of respective ages, Nabokov, Proust, and later, perhaps, after he underwent whatever romantic/religious/inspirational crisis I believe I remember his saying he experienced circa 1961, Iris Murdoch. His book reviews catch the accents of Edmund Wilson and Henry James. In the imaginary interviews I sometimes have with The Paris Review I have happily envisioned myself making long heterogeneous lists of predecessors in answer to that inevitable question: I’d say, “My lasting literary influences? Um— The Tailor of Gloucester , Harold Nicolson, Richard Pryor, Seuss’s If I Ran the Circus , Edmund Burke, Nabokov, Boswell, Tintin, Iris Murdoch, Hopkins, Michael Polanyi, Henry and William James, John Candy, you know, the usual crowd.” But that would be burying Updike deep, and I’m in reaction to Bloom, and therefore can’t bury Updike deep the way I might be expected to want to.