There was a silence.
“But you have to think that!” I said. “I need you to think that.”
“I think you will be a better writer than John Updike—I have every faith that you will be a better writer than John Updike.”
That wasn’t what I needed to know, though; the present test was everything. I went off and lay on the floor near the loudspeakers for three minutes, in acute distress, letting the truth sink in. Then I went back to the kitchen and told my mother what my now-wife had said when I had asked her the same question.
“Well, yes!” my mother then said with evident relief. “Good for her. That’s a good way to think of it.”
And so I got several years of self-propulsion out of thinking that I was, if not a better writer, at least smarter than Updike. When my psoriasis turned inward, arthritizing first one knee and then a hip and ankle joint, I took this to be a manifestation of our difference: he had the surface involvement—style—while I had the deep-structural, immobilizing synovial ballooning of a superior mind. This psoriatic opposition still sometimes helps me to go on, but I am increasingly unsure what it means. It means something: despite all those claims (as in Trollope) that intelligence is a secondary trait in the novelist, I find I am much more liable to perk up when I hear that such and such a book has that particular quality than if lyricism, humor, compassion, atmosphere, period detail, etc., is claimed for it. No word so instantly reinforces my existing sympathies: I almost shouted with joy when I read someone quoted in a TLS a few years ago as saying, quite believably, that Proust was “the most intelligent person who ever wrote a novel.” And I ordered Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library entirely on the strength of another TLS review that ended by saying, “Few novels in recent years have been better written, and none I know of has been more intelligent.” The novel is the greatest of all literary forms—the most adaptable and subspecialty-spanning and roomiest and most selfless, in the sense of not imposing artificialities on its practitioners and letting the pursuit of truth pull it forward—and as a result one recognizes the need to posit a certain variety of accompanying intelligence that is itself more adaptable, more multiplanar, sloppier, more impatient of formal designs, roomier, and more truth-drawn than other kinds, a variety that Proust, for instance, has a whole lot of. But what I have only slowly begun to see, over the past five years, is the dreadful degree of inefficiency and outright waste there is in the transmutation of this invisible and evasive, but real, intelligence into a piece of readable prose. You have to be at least twice as smart internally as you hope to be demonstrably in your writing. Therefore, in judging Updike’s aptitudes that afternoon in the cafeteria, my now-wife was undershooting their true magnitude by half. Updike is a better writer than I am and he is smarter than I am—not because intelligence has no meaning outside the written or spoken behavioral form it takes, but because all minds, dumb and smart alike, do such a poor job of impanating their doings in linear sentences.
Yet there is one specific point of similarity between Updike and me that is more important, from the point of view of my own novelistic ambition, than the others (class standing, geographical origin, race, etc.). Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain perhaps than in any other. This important truth couldn’t hit us over the head until fairly recently: my own generation was the first to grow up with hard-core stars like Annette Haven a mere seventeen-year-old bike ride away, but more important, we were the first generation to grow up exposed to the range and subtlety and complexity of distinctively gay interests and ways of acting. These became common knowledge: they were no longer sexual semaphore among a gay elite, but were now a constant subject of discussion, delight, disgust, amusement, and enlightenment across an entire educated middle class. Our generation, I think it is fair to say, thinks it knows more about the moeurs of gaiety than any group so big and so mixed ever knew before, and armed with this marginally more sophisticated and less sniggering knowledge as we read past minorpieces and masterpieces, we gather hints and leap to conclusions with a confidence that would have horrified Edwardian bachelorettes. And slowly, with dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long-recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren’t gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can’t quite master. Heterosexual male novelists don’t for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing, and indeed of art, aspire, and this big-time grandeur attracts them, but they find, much to their perplexity, that they can’t internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges. At first they blame their false starts and archnesses on their own inexperience and continuing apprenticeship, and they redouble their efforts, but little by little they come to see, at first dispiritedly and then soon righteously, that they “stand outside the tradition”—that it is in a fundamental way alien to them. But they are smart, and ambitious, and hardworking, some of them, and they find that they can bleed off and redirect some of their other proficiencies in order artificially to bulk up the central novelistic understanding they want so badly and don’t innately possess. They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses, War and Peace, Pnin. In a field, then, in which heterosexuals end up so often on the periphery—as the legal counsel, drunken reviewers, imitative followers, codifiers, interpreters, academic apologists—for homosexual greatness, a person like Updike, who can be as tarabiscoté as George Saintsbury or Henry James, as foxily ironical as Lytton Strachey, as stylistically up to snuff as Pater, as metaphorically mother-witted as Proust, as zealously thematic as Melville, and who is thus in the same league at least with the bachelor-adepts of history, becomes supremely important to a writer like me, as a model of a man who has in his art successfully moved outside the limitations of his carnal circuitry.
I offer this line of argument tentatively, with every expectation that I will be laughed at for believing in so primitive a form of sexual determinism; it seems, however, unusually convincing to me at present because many of the novels that I’ve liked lately (The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Single Man) have been so directly premised on gaiety: you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as if they’re thinking to themselves, Well fuck it, while I’m humming along at this level of candor, why should I propagate all the other received fastidiousnesses? Truths are jumping out at me from every direction! My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo! (Have people talked, incidentally, about the prompting influence that Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have had on Lolita? Nabokov must have seen this gay book from 1952, in which the sole pure baddie is the heterosexual child molester, and thought that it was finally possible to amplify his reluctantly incinerated short story and show, now that gaiety was to an extent fictionally normalized, that even Humbert’s unthinkable perversion was more complicated and remorse-filled than Angus Wilson had made it out to be. Nabokov must have noticed how the undisguisedly gay angle of attack lit the old, overnovelized mores from new angles, and that a similarly reawakened sense of nanomanners might result from a fictional situation
whose raking unthinkableness stirred his own endocrines more.) Of course, Edmund White’s apostrophe to the narrator’s boyfriend’s bottom (in a recent story in Granta) would not have been possible without Updike’s wide-screen description of a neighbor’s pussy; but nonetheless it is the homosexual novel right now, perhaps to an unusual degree, that seems to be driving us all toward advances and improvements.
8
“Also, homosexuals,” my mother once very uncomfortably explained when I asked her what one was, after reading a Dear Abby column circa 1965, “often have unusually intense relationships with their mothers.” That observation, which still seems quite true, used to worry me, until Updike’s example slowly sank in, and I realized that straights could have strong maternal dependencies as well. My mother is very important to my writing life. She first told me, when I was still in grade school, and long before I had heard of Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Mailer, about a mysterious set of forces called “the enemies of promise” that brought writers low, especially in America; and when I finally read Cyril Connolly’s book by that name, a few months after The Atlantic and The New Yorker accepted stories of mine in 1981, determined (in my expectation of instant celebrity) to be on guard against “the slimy mallows” of success and the “blue Bugloss” of journalism and the “nodding poppies” of indiscipline and chemical addiction and the rest of the besetting vocational dangers that it so winningly lists, I felt I was remembering a moral universe older and more primary than Aesop. Even these days, when I reread the 1960 Anchor paperback reissue, attractively subtitled “An Autobiography of Ideas,” originally bought by my grandfather and now stained by a transparent liquid that seeped out the slackening mouth of a narrow pumpkin I had placed protectively on a stack of books in the window one Halloween when smashing was in vogue in the sixties and hadn’t bothered to throw out for weeks (the hardbound of Cousteau’s World Without Sun was also badly warped by the same Halloween syrup, and a fancily printed signed bibliography of Bernard Berenson was slightly foxed—and whenever I come across a book in my mother’s bookcases that clearly evidences the part it played in supporting my one indoor pumpkin I feel a special thankfulness and affinity for it, as if the pile hadn’t been random after all but prophetic of links and influences that in leaving their timed-release mark on me had allowed me to leave my vandalizing mark on them as well)—even now, rereading, I’m surprised to find that Connolly’s funny, hung-over, peremptory, friendly style, and the scarily chronological lists of books he offers from the first third of this century (that is, the period of his own youth), and the battle he describes between the mandarins and the vernacular you-men (“Is there any hope? Is there a possibility of a new kind of prose developing out of a synthesis of Orlando and the Tough Guy?”), and the occasional injections of his own life (like the plane tree in the sultry garden under which he begins the first chapter, and his description of himself as “a lazy, irresolute person, overvain and overmodest, unsure in my judgments and unable to finish what I have begun”), all affect me with an unexpectedly intense level of emotion. I wish I had known him. I wish he had written about Updike and Nabokov. I wish there weren’t such things as older and younger generations and the inevitable deaths that make you think you have some special connection with a writer just because a pumpkin of yours once rotted on his book. I seem to think that if I don’t turn out to be like Updike, who successfully feinted past every single enemy of promise there was (though the “charlock’s shade,” or sex—adultery in his case—did seem to give him some insomnia.… ah!—another link between Nabokov and Updike and Updike and me: insomnia!), then I will become a picturesque failure like Connolly. But no, I am even less like Connolly than I am like Updike: I’m not a drunk and in fact have a growing paranoia about liquor, I didn’t have a string of successes in high school that rendered the rest of my life anticlimactic, and I haven’t gotten sucked in to book reviewing. When fame and the other enemies do seek me out, though, and oddly enough they don’t seem to be doing so yet, I will be fully prepared for their terrors, thanks to my mother and Cyril Connolly. Updike’s mother, or rather her fictional equivalent in the story “Flight,” tells him, as they stand on a hill overlooking their town, that everyone else is stuck there, but “You’re going to fly”—and here perhaps is one of the more important differences (aside from writing talent and intelligence) between Updike and me: Updike’s mother tells him what great things he’s going to achieve, flying off to Harvard and The Nuevo Yorker, while mine simply assumed the great things and was already thinking ahead to their negative consequences. We didn’t subscribe to either The Atlantic or The New Yorker when I was growing up; I read Look, Life, Advertising Aye, Car & Driver, and Popular Photography. “Promise is guilt—promise is the capacity for letting other people down”—perhaps with these words from Connolly tolling in her memory, my mother, wanting me to have a good life and be a good person and not to fret too much about disappointing expectations, avoided hilltop predictions and other allusions to my promise, except that she told me more than once about a time in nursery school when I had drawn a picture of the three bears in which the trio weren’t presented standing side by side in diminishing size, but were superimposed one in front of the other, indicating (to her) competencies in spatial manipulation beyond the nursery school level, and about another time that same nursery school year when I made a three-tiered organ keyboard by snipping three fringed lengths of paper and taping them together, each one layered over the next. “You were a special little kid,” she said once. Why bother to pretend to be like Rabbit? [“Intellectually, I’m not essentially advanced over Harry Angstrom,” Updike says in an interview.] He knew he was going to fly! And I knew I was a special little kid! We had great mothers! One way or another, we both knew we had promise! (Note the phonetic similarity of The Enemies of Promise and The Anxiety of Influence.) And Updike did then disappoint—not us, but his mother: he said somewhere that his mother still liked those early stories [or rather, his first New Yorker story] best of all the things he’d done; and I remember being struck by a passage in “Midpoint,” a long autobiographical poem accompanied by deliberately indistinct pictures of Updike and his mother, in which she, or a motherish woman anyway, accuses him of writing about ugly things, [“you fed me tomatoes until I vomited / because you wanted me to grow and you / said my writing was ‘a waste’ about ‘terrible people’.”] Yet, in spite of his having let her down with some of his later work, which was unavoidable, he kept at it: and that is what is so magnificent about him as an example for the rest of us. He knows that some of his books are better than others, and he has even gone so far as to say (I first heard it on the 1983 PBS special about him, but I think the sentiment also appears in Self-Consciousness) that his best things, his ticket to immortality, are probably his early short stories; and yet, even knowing that, he has gone on writing. He quotes with approval a bracing sentence from Iris Murdoch, something about the writer moving on to write the next novel in order to make hasty amends for the last. He has brilliance and longevity.
But his mother, I learned just last week, is now dead. She died in October. My wife told me that there was a review of her last novel in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1990), which I can’t read because they interviewed Updike in a sidebar, and I know if I turned to that page, I wouldn’t be able to resist reading what Updike said about his mother, and then I would have again to apologize for not adhering to the principles of closed book examination. Plus I would be visited by highly unwelcome imaginings of what life will be like when (if, I still think) my own mother dies. I first heard Updike’s voice in 1977 on a PBS radio show I turned on by chance—and what was he reading? He was reading a Mother’s Day tribute to mothers before some national motherhood association. (Where is this speech? I haven’t seen it in any of his collections.) I remember thinking, in surprise, Well, how very embarrassing for him! But over time I began to think of the speech as brave and ballsy. It was just as brave and ballsy for Proust to write a
bout waiting for momma to come upstairs and tuck him in; but Proust’s example simply couldn’t have carried weight with me. Unless somebody like Updike (i.e., living and talented and heterosexual) had written about his mother, particularly in “Museums and Women” (one of my mother’s favorite stories), I could not have written about mine—and, more to the point, I couldn’t be writing about mine here. Without Updike’s example I couldn’t right now state how often over the past ten years my mother and I have talked about Updike—long Sunday-afternoon phone conversations between Boston and Rochester during which, after saying “I know we’ve already said this, but …” we covered once again one of our three main Updikean themes. These were, as my mother articulated them: (1) it was good for me to have to plug away at nonwriting jobs—Updike would have benefited from the same necessity; (2) Updike wrongly took sexual advantage of his irresistible prestige as a young writer to poach on suburban marriages while the husbands were off at work; and (3) my reluctance to go into all the bad things in my childhood—the parental fights over money, the dunners ringing the doorbell, the mess and the Saturday-morning fight about the real source of the mess, etc.—was admirable and kind of me but bad for my writing, because it severely limited my range: I should try, she said, to do more as Updike did by telling the bad and not worrying about the hurt this breach would cause. “Dad and Rache [my sister Rachel] and I will be very brave,” she would say. And I would answer, “But there is nothing bad to tell! Some money squabbles—so what!”
Most important, without Updike’s example I would not be able to describe the first time I met the man himself, late in 1981, at the Xerox Auditorium in Rochester. He was in town giving a speech on Melville for the Friends of the Rochester Public Library. I went with my mother. (Even at this moment I am compelled to explain why a young man of twenty-four would be going to an event such as this with his mother—that I was back from some months spent in Berkeley with my now-wife, and that I was waiting for her to finish at Bryn Mawr and decide where she wanted to live so that I could follow her there.) I was feeling burstingly high-toned and unprovincial that evening, having been only a week or two earlier to the offices of The New Yorker for the first time, after announcing pretentiously to an editor (I had recently skimmed some of Evelyn Waugh’s letters) that the telephone “made me nervous” and thus I had to go over my story with her in person. Because of my New Yorker trip, Updike’s sudden appearance in my unprepossessing hometown took on to me the odd quality almost of a courtesy reciprocated. I remembered his account (somewhere) of E. B. White showing up on his doorstep and offering him a staff writing job, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that his speech on Melville wasn’t simply a pretext for covertly scoping out my upstate origins before giving the final OK to the high command to hire me. The whole audience seemed as jumpy and alert as I felt, much more eager than the concert-going audiences I was familiar with, as if we all thought that we were about to undergo a subtle but conclusive trial: what things we smiled shrewdly at and what angles we held our heads at, and whether we were capable of making it clear by our untroubled rumpledness and our audible head-scratching and our mock-impatient thumping of rolled programs on kneecaps that we were there purely out of sincere interest and not out of the cheapest, lowest lust for proximity, would mark us definitely as being worth the Oversou’s eternal attention or not.
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