U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  But the moment I began eating, my mortification reversed its engines and transformed itself into a fierce desire to gloat: I was chewing my way through something substantial, tiered, sweet, meaty, that had cost everyone else in the room money but which I had gotten for free. I had a five-dollar bill in my wallet that I hadn’t had before: McDonald’s was paying me to eat here! I wanted to laugh a wicked mean pitiless insane laugh, the kind that some bums, who for some reason always found the sight of me funny, would often helplessly produce, shaking their heads, pointing a finger, as my too-tall, wire-rimmed, pinheaded form caught their dissolutely untetrahydrozolinable eye: among bums I felt like an established and salaried Upper East Sider, but among Upper East Siders, I felt I had hugely swollen ankles and tattered back issues of magazines projecting from several pockets and dirty bandages hanging by one wing on my face. And contributing at least half of this joyful inburst was William James himself, who, it turned out, was really good: unpretentious, jolly, at his ease—as smart as, but completely different from, his brother. I came to a page with an illustration—a number of shaky curved lines all traveling by different routes from a point A to a point Z—meant to illustrate the various paths that the recently christened, pre-Joycean “stream of thought” might take in moving from one established idea to another. It was a glorious sight. The confident, lighthearted didacticism of this small drawing made me shake my head with instant affection for William James; I thought of him frowning over it, attempting to capture by the tremble in his execution the irregular uniqueness of each thought path, prouder of this artwork perhaps than the prose that led up to it, because his first wish had been to become a painter; and I thought of those several contemporary illustrators whose style was based on the same trembly, Dow-Jonesy contour line: William Steig, for instance, and Seymour Chwast, and whoever did that Alka-Seltzer cartoon commercial in the sixties in which (as I remembered it) a yiddishly unhappy human stomach, gesticulating from an analyst’s couch or chair, its esophagus waggling like an unruly forelock, told its troubles to a nodding murmuring doctor; and I thought also of the frail, capelli d’angelesque decorative markings a professor of philosophy at Haverford, Richard Bernstein, used to leave behind on the chalkboard as he “gave some texture to” an argument in Popper, Lakatos, or Paul Feyerabend—filaments of faint connectivity that visually supplemented the lengthy meditative “ee-ee-ee-ee” noise that he used to extend his favorite transitional phrase, “in a certain sort of way.” In a certain sort of way-ee-ee-ee. Now, when William James enters my thoughts unexpectedly, the accompanying image most often takes this form, as the sight of the drawing on that right-hand page on that evening at McDonald’s. And yet the major coincidence of the occasion—the explicit exchange of pennies for thoughts, the sudden, specially sauced incarnation on Seventieth Street of that formerly empty saying—did not make itself felt to me until this year, as I worked on my second novel, in which small change figured, against my will, as a minor theme, and I finally recognized, with disappointment conjoined with gratitude, that this previous William Jamesian memory explained to some degree why pennies and their brethren seemed so strangely evocative to me; disappointment, of course, because one always wants one’s fascinations to come originally from life and not from the library. And when, this year as well, I made some smalltime publicity appearances in connection with my first novel and was typically, Americanly inarticulate—indeed, worse than typical: tongue-tied, “um”-saying, jargon-ridden, flatvoweled—when I saw the eyes of the radio interviewess widen in alarm as the stretch of dead air lengthened, and when I compared myself miserably with an amazing performance by Updike on Dick Cavett that I recalled from the late seventies, where he spoke in swerving, rich, complex paragraphs of unhesitating intelligence that he finally allowed to glide to rest at the curb with a little downward swallowing smile of closure, as if he almost felt that he ought to apologize for his inability even to fake the need to grope for his expression, and for inspiring the somewhat frantic efforts Cavett made to keep archly abreast of this unoratorical, uncrafty, generous precision; and when I compared my awkward public self-promotion too with a documentary about Updike that I saw in 1983, I believe, on public TV, in which, in one scene, as the camera follows his climb up a ladder at his mother’s house to put up or take down some storm windows, in the midst of this tricky physical act, he tosses down to us some startlingly lucid little felicity, something about “These small yearly duties which blah blah blah,” and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs on a ladder!—when, as I say, I compared myself very unfavorably to Updike’s public manner after my own radio disasters (I heard myself over the car radio and had to pull over on a side street and get out and shut the door on my upstate voice, which I was tape-recording), I repeatedly comforted myself with a thing against spoken eloquence from Addison that I had read in Boswell: “I have but ninepence in my pocket,” it roughly goes, “but I can draw on a thousand pounds”; and the fiscal simile here too attached itself to my idea of William James, whom I thought of, wrongly no doubt, as struggling for expression, or at least for a form proper to his style of reasoning, while his gay brother unfumblingly dictated sentence after incredible sentence to his typist.

  “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.

  4

  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?

  It may seem incredible, given how little I had published and how bad it was, that I could have even idly theorized as to why Updike wasn’t making an effort to seek me out, but I did. I was puzzled as well by his need to golf with a writer. One of the things I had admired about him was his deliberate self-removal from New York, and his unwillingness to participate in writer’s conferences or accept academic appointments or get himself involved in that whole tragic, talent-draining process whereby writers cluster together to attract aspirants who pay big money in exchange for some chumminess and advice (meanly I call it tragic, when I had been very willing to write out a check for hundreds of dollars in order to gain the audience of Donald Barthelme, and I had had a wonderful time!): yet here Updike was seeking out another writer to play golf with. It was that frigging National Book Award, I thought: that was the ticket into his esteem. But this was ridiculous. There were many explanations, aside from Tim O’Brien’s simple likability. Updike was perhaps even then working on the essay about his pro-Vietnam-war activities, and he might well have been interested in getting to know somebody articulate who knew as much about Vietnam firsthand as O’Brien did. He could have already done the nonliterary golf-buddy thing and found that even with a strict prohibition against bookchat, even if they only talked about cars or the resale market for dredged golf balls or urban renewal programs, a writer was a more engaging companion to clump from hole to hole with than some division manager from Digital. Still, it was this anti-bookchat rule that especially focused my resentment. “Yup, we’re going to pretend we’re two regular guys,” is how I first interpreted it. Imagine having a rule of conversation. Jeezamarooni! If I were out there with Updike on the fairway right now, and he had laid down that rule, I would, between bogeys, be coming out with nervous snickering references to Richard Yates and Patrick Süskind and Julian Barnes, just to test his tolerance of me as a golf partner—just to see if he would make an exception for me.

  And yet of course I saw why the prohibition was necessary. When you spend a fair amount of time writing about other people’s books, or making sure to steer clear in your own books of images or scenes that you remember from other people’s books, you naturally don’t want in your off hours to cover the same ground with all the diminishing slackness and imprecision of conversation. You’re trying to be as different as possible from everyone else, as Frost more or less said, and you don’t want any influences to travel back and forth in advance of the demonstrable influences you supply and receive in the public world of print. (Plus there must be a kind of small thrill in feeling the power in yourself to be able to set a rule of conversation: feeling the unsettling authority of saying, “But Tim, I do think we should follow one rule …”) If I were golfi
ng with Updike this week, would I tell him, “Hey, I’m reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, and you know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realize that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years! The guy does everything—dialogue, scenic pageantry, wit, pathos, everything!” I would want to tell him this, but I wouldn’t, I don’t think, because what if by some chance Updike hadn’t read Hollinghurst yet, and what if my say-so, the last of many, was just enough to make his eye pause on this book in the Vintage catalog and order it, and what if he read it and its presence in his mind caused him to shift his writing ever so slightly in a particular direction either toward or away? Or, alternatively, what if Updike found me irritating enough as a person that my ravings about Hollinghurst dimmed his own previous excitement about the book? Would I want to have tampered casually with his literary development, his fate, in that way? And what if he mentioned that he’d been rereading Shaftsbury and liking him, or rereading Wallace Stevens and liking him less? For months afterward, this bit of inside information would be the first thing I would think of in connection with these artists: I would read them with a slightly different eye, and I might as a result write differently. So no talk about books. But it was much worse than that. Could John Updike and I talk about cars or self-doubts or the weather? About the psoriasis we have in common?