U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  There is a confusion here, though. I have been mentioning two separate classes of influence on me as if they were of equivalent weight—Bloom’s influence and Updike’s influence. One, however, is an influence only on this essay; another is a permanent influence on my life. It thus seems that there are (and I’m sure baby Bloomers have already pointed this out) contingent influences and chronic influences. A contingent influence springs to mind as you try to solve the problems suggested by a chosen subject and then it goes away: in the case of this essay, in which the subject is a writer thinking about an older writer, the conscious contingent influences that have to be worked around somehow are, in addition to Harold Bloom, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island (in which he does a lot of thinking about Edmund Wilson), Janet Malcolm’s great recent thing about journalistic betrayal, James Atlas’s The Great Pretender, some diary entries by Louis Simpson (I think) that I read years ago in a literary magazine that traced the ups and downs of his feelings for a Trollope novel he was reading, Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, and Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise. This is the arrangement of bayonets and blowguns whose hostage I currently am and whose exact middle point, as far from any single peril of encroachment as possible, is what I’m trying to find as I write; and yet when I’m done, the particular threats will tiptoe off as quickly as they came and I will be surprised to remember, when I see the shape my essay finally takes, how uncomfortable and beset they all made me feel. In recently skimming Exley’s Pages from a Cold Island, for instance, I worried that his book begins with his reading of the death of Edmund Wilson in the paper, just as this essay begins with my hearing of the death of Barthelme, and I reassured myself by saying, ah, but that is just where you are trying to take the next step, since Exley then occupies himself with talking to Edmund Wilson’s daughter and rereading his fiction, whereas you leave Barthelme behind and move to someone whose survivors aren’t yet hugely important, because the man lives still! And I note, too, that Exley doesn’t feel he has to mention Harold Bloom just because he’s doing a book about literary influence, and I don’t miss his mentioning Harold Bloom, and yet out of some grinding gear of self-betrayal I have to do it: perhaps it’s what my grandfather, who wanted very much to be a novelist and patterned his very alcoholism on Fitzgerald’s and Norman Douglas’s habits, called “the ingrown toenail of the Quaker conscience.”

  Unlike contingent influences, who (or which) you are always hoping will turn out to be more different from you than you felt them to be at the time they made themselves known, permanent influences like Updike (and, to a lesser extent, Nabokov) make you very unhappy when they threaten to be more unlike you as human beings than you had thought. In some review or address Updike praises the capacity to lie as being of all traits the most important to the novelist. I felt myself disagreeing so violently as I read this that my whole imaginary friendship with Updike was momentarily disrupted: it was, first, a cliché of American writing seminars and book reviews, and it went utterly against what I believed (which was that the urge not to lie about, not to be unfair to, not to belie what was there was the dominant propellant, and the desire to undo earlier lies of our own or of others was what drew us on to write further, and that intentional lying came in only at those always dissatisfying points where the futile pursuit of coherence or economy temporarily won out), but more than that, it seemed to go against what Updike had a hundred times shown himself to believe—when for instance he said that comedy was an unsatisfactory form because it forced one to falsify and exaggerate, and when he claimed superbly in the foreward to Olinger Stories, “Not an autobiography, they [the stories] have made one impossible” (though it turns out, as I knew it would, that this isn’t true—see Self-Consciousness), and when he quotes (in a review of Lectures on Russian Literature) with surprised and amused neutrality Nabokov’s naïve-sounding (but correct) contention that fiction is a gradually evolving effort to be more accurate about life. Because you are matching yourself constantly against a permanent influence, any divergence between you and him assumes the proportions of a small crisis, any convergence is an occasion to nod as if it were all in the cards: when Updike had Henry Bech smugly report (in a pretend interview) that Updike still had all his hair, I thought, What a rotten thing to say—rotten in that it shows such public pride at his exemption from the horror of hair loss, and rotten in that it proves that he and I are different in this crucial respect. When my psoriasis began to get bad, on the other hand, I welcomed its spread at first—I’d been worried that because the disease had shown up late in me (phase 1 involved only the scalp and penis) and was for five years insignificant compared with Updike’s affliction (he had one unfortunate fictional representative vacuuming out the bed every morning) I possessed by implication a writing talent less prodigal in its mitotic unstoppableness than Updike’s own. Normally if I read something I think is wrong, I forget it two days later (except in unusual cases, like Bloom’s burial phrase above); but with Updike, when I disagree with him, there is an element of pain, of emotional rupture, that makes me remember my difference, and as a result I keep returning unhappily to it over the years and checking to see whether the disaccord remains in effect—and because each time I check it I have to find grounds that still satisfy me for my continued refusal to be convinced by what he’s said, I am able to refine my opinions in a way I could never do if I did find him universally agreeable. For instance, I often test whether I still disagree with something I read in 1984 in Hugging the Shore, standing in what was then called the Paperback Booksmith on Boylston Street in Boston. (I didn’t buy the paperback until 1987.) Updike was reviewing one of Wilson’s journals, I think. He says that journal-keeping was not the way to write novels—when you wrote novels, you couldn’t quarry from journals, you had to let the past bubble up. Naipaul had said something similar, and so had Anthony Powell, but they weren’t imaginary friends the way Updike was, so I wasn’t concerned by their opinions. But Updike went on to quote a passage from Wilson’s journal about a sunset or something [yes—a sunset in Provincetown—I’m amazed I remembered its subject!], and said that it couldn’t be used in fiction, that it would “clog any narrative.” I fretted, and still fret, over these words. I object to his reviewery certainty here, and I particularly object to his use of the word “clog,” which in this context seems deliberately overcolorful and down-homey without being original. There was, as with his statement about lying in fiction, self-rejection in it, since many of his best moments, like Nabokov’s, are clogs to the narrative: the description of the rain-wetted screen in Of the Farm, “like a sampler half-stitched”; and the description of Peggy asleep after the hero’s and the mother’s long conversation, her shoes “lying beside her feet as if dislodged by a shift of momentum”; and the interior of the gas tank in The Centaur [no, Of the Farm], and the tire tracks in the snowy parking lot in “A Sense of Shelter” and, best of all, the magnificent passage in which the hero mows the field in Of the Farm: a description that carries the burden too of expressing the price you pay for description, as more and more of your life is mowed, and the hopping creatures that are unhoused seek refuge in the odd triangles and rectangles of rough that still remain. What he meant to say, I thought, I hoped, was that Edmund Wilson’s passage was simply no good, not that one’s aim was to avoid clogging narratives with description. The only thing I like are the clogs—and when, late in most novels, there are no more in the pipeline to slow things down, I get that fidgety feeling, and I start bending the pliable remainder of the book so that it makes a popping sound, and I pick off the price sticker on the back and then regret doing so and stick it back on because it is a piece of information I will always want to have (a delight, as Updike memorably says of picking at a psoriasis lesion, thereby capturing a whole world of furtiveness we would otherwise not know about, that “must be experienced to be forgiven”). I wanted my first novel to be a verit
able infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage-points of passage.

  In August, speaking of clogs, while I was thinking about this essay and not writing it, the sewer in my in-laws’ house backed up. The service, with the appealing name of Another Rooter, had to be called twice. The problem finally turned out to be tampons: their strings caught on a tufty invading root and expanded to the full extent of their puff, about thirty of them. Earthworms took up residence in them—a bizarre gloss on Andrew Marvell. “I found your problem,” the rooter called up nonchalantly, and beckoned me down to an Edenic scene in the lower garden near the standpipe: around the probe of his machine was a roil of roots and black tampon-fruits and pinkly prosperous earthworms. “Best to cut the strings off,” he advised, and wrote “sanetery napkens” on the invoice—our vocabulary always lags reality. And why shouldn’t this very clog clog some narrative of mine? To the worms it was not obstructive, it wasn’t revolting, it was life itself. It is life itself. I’m delighted by the idea that these tampons (which their user treated as Elvis Presley treated his scarves in his decline, barely touching them to his neck before flinging them mechanically out to the audience as souvenirs) underwent this lurid purgatorio out in the garden.

  Here again, though, I think I understand what Updike was doing in censuring clogs. When he wrote the review of Edmund Wilson’s diary he was tired of the Proustian and Nabokovian and Of the Farmian set piece. He was tired of the feel of cranking up those cylinders in himself. The most fertile internal acres of lyrical observation had already been mowed. Increasingly he was interested in the other things novelists are expected to do. Even the very word “clog” shows his impatience with his old self. After a certain point, the management of one’s own past vocabulary, the avoidance of repetition, becomes a major burden. Your earlier formulations become contingent influences—and they hunt you down. An interviewer asked him if he worried in writing so much about repeating himself, and he said something like, You do after a while get the feeling of having been in the same place before. Ah! When I first read that, years ago, I wanted so badly to know that feeling! If, on a dozen earlier narrative occasions, you’ve obstructed the narrative, caused the narrative to hang fire, made it negotiate a trifling embouchement, etc., you finally get a kick out of using the word that you’ve been holding at bay all these years: you’ve earned the privilege of using it—to you it’s fresh, since what feels tired now are your own earlier attempts at freshness. The sheer amount of memory it takes as you’re writing and you pause at some nominative juncture and review the options, and one by one reject those that file before your mind because you clearly recall or dimly suspect that you’ve found an earlier home for them—the sheer mounting strain of this, like the strain of a chess player who has to keep every move of every game he has ever played available for immediate review—must be exhausting. (Updike mentions the theme of suburban adultery that has occupied him since Marry Me, “a subject that, if I have not exhausted it, has exhausted me.” Clever bastard!) It is almost with relief that once in a while we think we have come across a pre-enjoyed image, such as the white crosswalk lines on the street that are pulled this way and that by passing cars in Of the Farm and another book. (The image bears up well under this joint custody, by the way [if joint custody it is: I thought the second crosswalk image was in The Centaur but I wasn’t able to find it there]—though we take to it in part because we feel tender toward it, uncertain of the level of Updike’s devotedness: yes, he liked it enough to consent to it when it appeared in a street scene the first time, and yet he didn’t like it well enough for his memory to warn him off a second placement.) How many hundreds of book reviews has he embarked on—even in the rigidly conventionalized first sentence or two of these exacting etudes forever finding some tilt or pressure of the needle that allows entrance into that scarred and track-marked territory of literary synopsis, correlation, and judgment? I can feel his pride, despite his expressions of relative coolness toward his nonfictional achievements, when he quietly says in the acknowledgments page for Hugging the Shore, that x and y and z first appeared in The New Yorker, along with “ninety-two of the book reviews.” What an astounding number! You know he’s slightly proud of it: there was no reason he had to count them.

  At some point, then, at several points, Updike must have felt that panic that the founder of any highly successful entrepreneurial concern feels, when his business has grown so big that he can’t remember all of his employees’ names. The very sensation of that overfertile sump of your own previous usages, a vast dying sea just on its own, never mind the rest of the marine world, begins to force you in the direction of simplicity: you can see this force operating, for example, in an essay Updike wrote for Esquire in 1987, about listening to the radio. (I remember the essay well because, though it didn’t say what I wanted to say, it still came too close to an essay I was doing on the same subject for me to finish mine.) In it, Updike remembers how in the cold car of his childhood (the same car as in The Centaur), he would “lean into the feeble glow of the radio dial as if into warmth,” and he brings his radio affections up to date by saying that he likes a certain tune by Madonna [“True Blue”], and he closes the sentence of approval with a colon and a single word: “catchy.” A thirty-year-old Updike would never have resorted to that word, because calling a tune “catchy” isn’t on its own interesting enough: the Updike of that era would have exerted himself to find a more refulgent dinglebolly of an adjective as diligently as Whitney Balliett, that tireless prodigy, still does in writing about music. But Updike has chosen “catchy” and it satisfies us in its setting, because he feels and we feel the inversion of word frequency that happens over the course of a life of careful writing, as the near-to-hand and superficially uninteresting become interesting through relative neglect. If you begin as something of a mannerist and phrasemaker, you offer yourself the hope of gradually disgusting yourself into purity and candor; if on the other hand you start by affecting a direct Saxon scrubbedness, then when a decade or so later you are finally ready to cut through the received ideas to say something true, the simplicity will feel used up and hateful and you’ll throw yourself with a wail on the OED and bring up great dripping sesquipedalian handfuls while your former admirers shake their chignons in pity. I know perfectly well that I should not be using inkhorners like “florilegia” when I mean “collection” and “plenipotentiary” when I mean “stand-in” at my age (b. 1957)—and though the latinate conscripts were indeed the ones that first sprang to mind as I was typing those sentences, I did look askance at them on the screen a minute after I used them, for two reasons. First, because their eager scholasticism made me wonder if others would wonder whether my choices had leaped from a thesaurus or one of those maddening block calendars that offer a new vocabulary word every day. (I still find the deracinated adjacency of the thesaurus objectionable, and never use one, and feel guilty when I try to make a dictionary serve the same slatternly function, and I am only tempted to seek one out in the reference section if I strongly suspect that a reader may say “Florilegia?—right, sure, he just looked up anthology, the fraud,” and I need to assure myself that the word I used is not sitting right there three words over from the word I think the reader will sneerily suppose I was wishing to avoid, and even then I resist the urge, because if I do find that the word I want to use is there and I avoid it I will be operating under the influence of Roger’s, too. Yet at the same time I hate all this overscrupulousness and I am drawn to Updike’s honest picture of himself in “Getting the Words Out” as “paw[ing]” through dictionaries and thesauruses, and I similarly admired Barthelme when at the Berkeley writers’ conference he blew Leonard Michaels’s (pale yellow) socks off by casually saying in a question-and-answer session that sure he used a thesaurus, absolutely, I love both Updike’s and Barthelme’s implied boredom with the purist’s pretense that ev
ery word he uses has to have been naturally retrieved from a past passage. So I agree with Updike that a thesaurus isn’t intrinsically evil, and yet I can’t use one—and I even feel slightly guilty when I use a certain word whose placement I have admired in something by Updike in roughly the same way he uses it: for instance, I wrote the phrase “consorted in the near vestibules of my attention” in my second novel, and I used “consorted” because one morning I was reading a review of a novel (can’t remember which one) in Hugging the Shore and was struck by a lovely use of “consort” [“… better consorts with our sense of what a writer should be …” in a review of Beckett’s Mercier and Camier] and again worried, just as I had all those years ago when I read “absurdly shook my head No” that I would never write as well as Updike. But now that I know from Self-Consciousness that Updike regularly uses thesauruses, I’m drawn to show the same dismissiveness toward “consort” that I worry others will direct at my use of “florilegia”: it (“consort” I mean) now feels as if he found it under “adjacency” or some other big rubric, when honestly he could have found it in a thousand places—Henry James is a frequent consorter, for example.) And, second, I looked askance at “florilegia” and “plenipotentiary” because I felt a needle jump in my déjà vu-meter that might indicate that I’d used them both before, and I didn’t like the idea of people (i.e., Updike) thinking, “Florilegia again? It wasn’t that great the first time! He’s pretending his vocabulary is a touch-me-anywhere-and-I’ll-secrete-a-mot-juste kind of thing, when it turns out to be this cribbed little circle of favored freaks that he uses over and over hoping nobody will notice!” So what I have to do now is to search the disks that hold my two novels for the words “florilegia” and “plenipotentiary”—an activity that has to be as artificial as any thesaurus search. Each novel I write will introduce another layer of this vocabularistic panic, and increasingly I will come to recognize the utility of words and phrases that don’t make waves, since their very commonness keeps them from being noted as events that can or cannot be unintentionally repeated; and eventually, one morning when I’m fifty or so, I will be trying to work up my long-abandoned notes for a pop music essay, and I’ll want simply to say that a certain song is good, and the adjectives will line up for the casting session, and one by one I will nod as they twirl past in the half-lit stage, saying I used you, too old, too young, I used you, I used you, I didn’t use you for x reason, I didn’t use you for y reason, and finally, like Hope following all the evils that flap out of Pandora’s box, the word “catchy” will flutter up, “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time,” as Madonna would say, and I will think, Hey!—but then, because I quoted it to illustrate the whole problem of vocabulary management in this essay, I will remember that Updike already used it and that it is off-limits, and, in a wistful non sequitur, I will find myself wishing that I had been Updike’s friend. Catchy, catchy: it is a beautiful word.