Nicholson Baker: U and I: A True Story

On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law’s study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap. I began to type the date and the time, 9:46 A.M. I had no idea what subject I was going to cover that morning. A week or so earlier I had finished and sent off a novel, my second, and I was still full of the misleading momentum that, while it makes the completion of novels possible, also generally imparts a disappointingly thin and rushed feeling to their second halves or final thirds, as the writer’s growing certainty that he is finally a pro, finally getting the hang of it, coincides exactly with that unpleasant fidgety sensation on the reader’s part that he is locked into a set of characters and surroundings he knows a bit too well by now to enjoy. I wanted very much to keep slapping esemplastically away at the keys, and the imminence of this very pleasure made the words “the act of beginning to write in the morning never loses its pleasure” appear in the to-be-typed lounge in my awareness; but before I could move my fingers, I recalled that Updike had said something similar in Self-Consciousness : “In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God.” A memorable sentence for me (though I only remembered the first half) not only because it seemed simple and true, but because I had read it twice, first quoted in a book review and then in the book itself. And with this memory of Updike I hesitated; I didn’t type what I was going to type; I shifted course.

Donald Barthelme had just died, on July 23. My wife had seen the Associated Press obituary in the newspaper. My sense of being detached from the literary and academic communities, if there are such things, was reinforced by having learned of his death not through some grief-stricken phone call from a close associate or a devoted student of Barthelme’s, but merely from the local paper, whose information is available to all. I stared distractedly for half an hour, unsure of what to do, while my wife stood in the middle of the rug with round eyes, saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” I decided I should write a letter of condolence to his editor at The New Yorker , but I didn’t begin it. Then my daughter got an ear infection. On the first of August she said, “I’m going to choke, Daddy, I don’t want to choke,” and I held her awkwardly over the kitchen sink, cupping her forehead in my palm (suddenly remembering, from when my mother had held my own forehead, how this brain-embrace transferred some of the misery of your sickness to a higher power), and I felt her stomach muscles powerfully tighten. I took her to the doctor that day and got her some antibiotics and when we returned I remembered that I owed my great-uncle Dick, who was very ill, a letter. Instead of writing it I made several attempts at the letter to The New Yorker about Barthelme. I rejected “I’m torn up by,” “heartbroken,” and “He was a master.” But as I struggled to formulate something that sounded unmannered, I noticed that there was a morally bothersome taint to the effort I was making. Those black bars, those black bars , I kept thinking, that The New Yorker tastefully puts over its obituaries: the eulogies always come at the very end of an issue, and lately there had been ones for Saxon and Addams. But the one uppermost in my mind was the one that Updike wrote after Nabokov died, reprinted in Hugging the Shore : I remembered no particular phrase from it, except one smoothly saying that the consensus would probably be that Lolita was his best novel in English, and The Gift his best in Russian (this judgment stayed with me because these two weren’t my own favorites), but I did remember its tone: gentle, serious, unmaudlin, fluent without affectation, deliberately unspectacular and unrivalrous — a model obituary. And I knew that Barthelme’s editor at The New Yorker was likely to write the Barthelme obituary, and that the tribute would probably include anonymous quotations from associates and fellow writers. Here precisely was the detectable taint of wrongdoing in my attitude, for some not insubstantial fraction of what was prodding me to write the letter of condolence was my self-centered, ungrieving ambition to come up with at least one sentence in it that would be in the same league as many in Updike’s obituary for Nabokov, and which would as a result have the sad but not-choked-up quotability that would allow me anonymously to “make” the Barthelme obituary, as if I were making some team.

Disgusted with my mixed motives, I wrote in reaction a terse, four-sentence, utterly unexcerptable note that essentially said: miss him, wonderful titles, effortless originality, thank you publishing him, greats of this century. “It’s kind of choppy,” my wife decided. I sent it anyway; the choppiness was evidence of my virtue. (The obituary came out in due time; not, as it turned out, with a black bar above it at the back of the magazine, but as a “Notes and Comment” in the front, and there were indeed several quotations in it — none from me.) But I was still sad. My reaction, attractively self-denying though it was, didn’t meet the gravity of the case. I thought very briefly of writing a neo-Jamesian story about a guy who hears of the death of a big-name writer he has long admired and who agonizes over the letter of condolence to the big name’s editor, reproaches himself for having to agonize rather than simply and spontaneously to grieve, worries about whether he should destroy his early drafts of the letter, which betray how hard he worked to hit the proper spontaneous note, or whether such a compounding of deceptions, by robbing biographers of this material, furnished brave proof of how lightly he took his literary prospects. But a fictionalization was, so I thought, a far more crudely opportunist use of my bewilderment at Barthelme’s death than a lushly quotable letter would have been.

I also considered the prospect of writing the critical appreciation of Barthelme that I’d had in mind for several years. It was, after all, the standard way to fill the hole a writer leaves behind. Henry James, for instance, wrote big lovely commemorative things on Emerson and Hawthorne after they were gone; he panned Trollope harshly while Trollope was alive to read the review, but the minute Trollope dozed to his final rest, James wrote of him full of immense tolerant affection. And Updike, too, wrote big lovely things on Hawthorne and Melville, and major reviews of Wilson’s posthumous diaries, as well as the Nabokov obituary. So, inspired by these advanced practitioners, I might reread Barthelme slowly and carefully, working myself up (as I knew from college I tended to do with any intrinsically good writer to whom I devoted lots of time) into an awestruck, fanatical receptivity to his proprietary strengths, and excusing his weaknesses in a way that made me seem wise and clear-sighted, rather than merely blind. But why bother? Barthelme would never know. And in any case, I wanted my choice of what to read at a given moment to be the outcome of more multiply confluent causes than the simple requirement of an obituarizing overview. That is, I wanted to reread Barthelme only when I really wanted to reread Barthelme, and not when his death suddenly obliged me to do so. He had died somewhat out of fashion, too, and I was curious to watch firsthand the microbiologies of upward revaluation or of progressive obscurity, as I had failed to observe them in the earlier cases of, say, John O’Hara or John Gardner. I felt no particular eagerness yet to try to make my personal opinion, to the extent that I could really be said to have something as fixed as an opinion about him, prevail.