U and I

by Nicholson Baker

  Updike took the podium and began to read. We all, after Self-Consciousness, know to expect a stutter (he hadn’t, however, in reading the motherhood address I heard on the radio); but to my prelapsarian ear it was so strangely contained and refined a faltering—a stately “pop, pop, pop” before a “p” word in an opening sentence [“popular”] like the three first bounces of a Ping-Pong ball before rapidity sets in—that I interpreted it more as a form of nonthesaural ornamentation than as a handicap; in fact, I first assumed there was simply something echoey wrong with the microphone or that in Updike’s boredom with the idea of speech-making he was pausing to blow thoughtful smoke rings. The popping happened no more than three times in the speech; maybe only twice. The last time I heard it I understood that it technically could be termed a stutter and I was amazed: Rochester, New York, of all places, was making Updike nervous. I was making him nervous.

  That knowledge made me relax and listen to what he was saying a little more closely. He was trying to find out “what went wrong” with Melville’s later novels. I don’t know if he used those very words in the speech itself, but he had done so in an interview I’d read several months earlier called “Bech Interviews Me.” Bech asks him at the end what he is up to now, and Updike answers (in The New York Times Book Review) “I’ve been reading the late Melville lately, to see what went wrong, if anything.” For a writer to announce so casually in print ahead of time what he was reading and thinking about and working on, thereby coolly challenging all competitors to beat him to it and giving all detractors the time to elongate their yawns even further than normal, had struck me on that earlier Sunday as a highly impressive move; and there had been an admirable carelessness, too, in phrasing the chosen subject in such a way that the sneer-prone would be certain to apply it immediately to Updike’s own career. We couldn’t be sure whether he was playfully pretending to be struggling to profit by the example of Melville’s untimely truncation, or whether he seriously believed himself to be, post-Rabbit Is Rich, at an analogous juncture. I still don’t know. Standing miraculously in the downtown of my own city and treating the promised subject, he kept himself out of the argument entirely, avoiding contemporary references—only once did the audience, starved for dirt, go “Ooooh!” when Norman Mailer’s name came up as an example of a writer who’d had a huge early success and had run into trouble getting beyond it. That high-schoolish “Ooooh!” from my Rochester—which, in its betrayed yearning to be privy to an imagined arena of high authorial spite, disgusted me—is the first thing I remember after the opening pops; probably I disliked it mostly because the rest of the audience had understood quicker than I had that Updike had said something that could be taken as a jibe. The third thing I remember is Updike’s saying that one of Melville’s books, perhaps Billy Budd [no, The Confidence Man], was “the most homosexual of Melville’s works.” And I hadn’t even known Melville was gay! How stupid could I have been? In bed with Queequeg? I adjusted to this fact for a while, and began spooling out little theories about Conrad and Defoe, too (not only Friday—also the parrot: aural narcissism), and merchant shipping in general. He quoted a passage from Pierre, I think, to make the point that even in a book with a completely landlocked subject matter [no, Clarel, a poem about the Holy Land], Melville’s oceangoing mind irrepressibly reached for sea similes in describing what it saw. But the best moment by far was when Updike figured out how much Melville was paid, in current dollars, for his writing, and used that low figure to make the cheering point that the United States was not then, as it happily is now, populous and literate enough to sustain a writer even of Melville’s difficulty. [“The United States of his time would seem to have been like Third World countries today—able to breed a literary community of sorts but with a reading public insufficiently large to sustain a free-lance writer of books.”]

  It was a smooth speech … but “smooth” sounds patronizing. It dissatisfied me then because it wasn’t fiendish enough—it didn’t take one of Melville’s sentences or images and do a mad-scientist number on it, brandishing the analytical instruments while they still steamed from their autoclaves, exulting in every banned or questionable area of forensics, clutching and rattling the chosen page with a seizure of louped scrutiny that alone could make the drowned man’s words rise again. But now I think I see better that equanimity is as much a critical virtue as mania is; what disappoints me about the speech today, when I think over it, is simply that it was too much Melville and not enough Updike. All it had of Updike was that stylized stutter. But Rowland Collins, then chairman of the University of Rochester’s English Department, who had invited Updike, raved afterward to my mother and me: “When I heard it was going to be on Melville, I thought ‘Oh Lord no,’ but it was really extremely good.”

  “It was, it was,” we agreed; and I suspect that if I were to reread it now (which I can just barely keep from doing: Hugging the Shore, where it is collected along with an essay on Hawthorne I also have never read, is in a pile of books somewhere in this very room, glowing around the clock with the capacity to disprove my arguments and demonstrate my inaccuracies once I open it; and I have even ordered Assorted Prose, the omnibus from Updike’s first writing decade, with its reviews of Kierkegaard and Tillich, and its funny introductory sentence about the time, early on, when Updike had been in danger of becoming viewed as The New Yorker’s resident expert in philosophical and theological speculation, so that whenever one of the “slim, worthy-looking volumes” by Tillich or Heidegger crossed the book review editor’s desk, it zoomed straight to him—or is that all in Picked-Up Pieces? [it is]—so that when I need to correct my misquotations it will be here to refer to as well: I want desperately to be done with this study!), if I were to reread it now I would admire it more than I did then, because I can appreciate now how hard it is to stay at that ideal benevolent altitude, from which vantage each book is the size of a county, its highways and townships and eyesores and terrain easily discernible, and the farseeing reader can take in at a glance, as an instance of a general type, an image or incident that would have entoiled me for three months.

  There was a small table to one side of the auditorium, near the stage; Updike took a seat there and began signing books. A line grew up the middle aisle that my mother and I finally took our place in; it moved surprisingly fast. The woman ahead of us held an armload of perhaps fifteen books, most paperbacks: when she reached the table where Updike sat she handed them over in bundles of four or five. He politely signed them all and nodded a thanks to her. Then it was our turn. Smiling fatuously, I handed him a brand-new copy of Rabbit Is Rich I had bought that day. This act was the outcome of some serious thought. I had wondered whether I should have him sign anything at all, since the practice was so nutty—complete strangers wanting a man to scribble in their book, body and blood, all of that. (Oh, but it’s all worth it, because Updike is repayingly brilliant in Self-Consciousness when he mentions a strange interruption in his act of signature between the “p” and the “d” of his last name that has increased, not decreased, in severity after all these years of book-signing—this cursive hiccup he neatly links with the stutter. [No—surprisingly, he does not make that link, in “On Being a Self Forever.”]) Wouldn’t it be, I reflected, more of a statement of my understanding of what his life was like if I consciously didn’t take up his time by meeting him and having his book signed? Years later, I could say, when I finally did meet him, “I saw you in Rochester, but I thought better of having you sign my copy of your book.” No, I had to meet him that day. As a compromise I entertained the notion of bringing some relatively uncommon book of his in to sign; but for it to impress him it would have had to have been very special: not merely The Carpentered Hen (which I didn’t own anyway) or that early paperback of Of the Farm, with its Van Heusen shirt man pensively embracing a “Christina’s World” woman, but something really unusual, like the mysterious edition of chapter one of Marry Me published by some press with a name like Abandocali or Adobacondi or
Abacondai. [It’s Albondocani.] I’ve never seen this version, by the way; I’ve wondered, though, over the years, whenever I looked at Marry Me’s copyright page and saw it cited there, what his motives were in making that limited edition—was it a gift, and if so, given the dune-time tryst it lovingly details, to whom? Copyright pages are, if I may wander from the scene at the Xerox Auditorium for a further moment for Harold Bloom’s benefit, at the molten center of the neophyte’s anxiety of influence: especially their ritualistic, commaed-off phrase “in somewhat different form.” “Portions of this book first appeared, in somewhat different form, in [magazine].” “The following stories first appeared, in somewhat [or ‘slightly’] different form, in [magazine].” Am I right in thinking that my generation is madly plagiarizing Updike when we all publish books with this classic example of the Updikean rhythm murmuring its parentage in our copyright pages? Even if he simply took it over from some predecessor, it has come to stand completely for Updike’s prosody. For my first novel I was taking no chances: I took a look at the copyright page of The Centaur and copied it. For my second novel, though, I was determined to strike out on my own in this area. The word “portions” had come to seem (like “home” instead of “house”) decisively non-U, in the snobbish Mitfordian sense, and I decided to try the more U word “parts.” After much erasure and galley rethinking, the passage on my copyright page now reads: “Chapter 1 and parts of chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in The New Yorker. A brief passage in chapter 9 first appeared, in different form, in The Atlantic” (italics mine). [At least, so it reads in the UK edition (Granta/Penguin), which was published first. A week before printing, the American publisher, Grove Weidenfeld, completely reworded the first sentence without telling me, reinstating the “portions” that I’d been so careful to avoid.] I meant to convey volumes by that dropping of “somewhat” between “in” and “different” in The Atlantic’s acknowledgment: I meant to indicate that I had done a major overhaul of that 1984 passage; I meant to make it clear that I had improved as a writer since then—although I’m not in fact sure it is better in its second version: rewritings, even tiny changes (e.g., Walter “Palm,” James’s mannered revisitings, Nabokov’s embaubling of Conclusive Evidence as collated for us by Updike in an interesting review) are always dangerous; but improvement or not it had to be different for me to interest myself in it enough to work it in. Don DeLillo went even further in the copyright page of his first novel, about football: he said “in very different form” (italics mine), which I used unfoundedly to take to mean that he’d gotten pissed off by the degree of editorial intervention at The New Yorker and employed that “very” of the final version as his tiny revenge. [None of this is true, oddly enough: End Zone is not DeLillo’s first novel, and there is nothing like the “in very different form” that I remembered reading in the acknowledgment. What is wrong with me?] (Of the two dreams I’ve had about Updike, one contains a prominent copyright page. It occurred at 5:30 in the morning on May 31, 1986. I pulled a hardcover version of The Same Door off some staff writer’s bookshelf. I turned at once to the copyright page and saw

  Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1934 by John Updike

  I had known that looking at the book would make me unhappy, but when I noticed the last date I felt a momentary mean-spirited triumph, thinking that poor young Updike hadn’t even been able to keep a typo out of his copyright page—as I had felt in real life once earlier, when I had discovered Iris Murdoch listed as “Murdock” in the index to Picked-Up Pieces. But then I looked again, and the “34” blurred and re-formed itself as “39,” which I believed was the year that Updike was twenty-eight, and I let the book spine slump into my hand so that the book closed; the moment it closed I closed my eyes and felt a sob reach my face, because always, always, Updike turned out to be right in the end. Then I woke. In the second dream, which occurred at 2:20 in the morning on September 23, 1986, Updike showed up drunk, fedora askew, in New Orleans and had to work his way back to New York as a train conductor. I worried about him, quite surprised that he was that much of a drinker, but also impressed by his ability to bluff his way into being a train conductor, and I wondered if the ability was acquired from all those years of novel-writing, or was simply the result of a natural capacity to charm. He had said somewhere, I remembered in the dream, that there was a little bit of a salesman in the writer, which made him able to do things like make public appearances and sign books. [What he really said was: “I don’t dislike the spouting-off, the conjuring-up of opinions. That’s show biz, and you don’t go into this business without a touch of ham. But as a practitioner trying to keep practicing in an age of publicity, I can only decry the drain on the brain,” etc.])

  I finally decided, anyway, that I shouldn’t try to be fancy that evening: I wanted to meet him and my only chance was going to be if I had a book for him to sign and it should simply be a brand-new copy of his latest, Rabbit Is Rich. I handed it to him and he bent his head to the task. I watched his pen form the word “John”—it looked more like “Jon”—and I said to his extraordinarily full head of hair: “I was at The New Yorker offices last week—I noticed you had a story scheduled for very soon!”

  “Yes.” He blinked. And then very politely, knowing that it was what I wanted him to do, he asked, “And what were you doing at The New Yorker?”

  “I have a story coming out pretty soon, too. So we’re fellow contributors.”

  “And what’s your name?”

  I told him.

  “And what issue is it?”

  I told him.

  “Good,” he said.

  “And I’m his mother!” said my mother, waving. (Why didn’t I do the proper thing and introduce her?)

  Updike nodded at us both. “I look forward to reading it,” he said, giving us back his novel. My mother and I smiled good-bye and walked away, with flushed, What-new-fields-can-we-conquer-now? faces. “Well!” my mother said. “Wow! That was a lot of fun! Was that all right do you think?”

  “Yeah, it was good, I think,” I said.

  Behind us, Updike went on signing, signing.

  When I told the story of this meeting to my wife a year ago, she slid down in her chair with her hands over her face in mortification. “I would never have done it,” she said. “But you’re different from me.”

  9

  I would never have done it either—drag in The New Yorker name so obviously to get his attention—except that life was too short not to. Those ticking seconds of signature might be the only chance I would ever get to embarrass myself in his presence. When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don’t count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on. The same goes for constitutionally ungross people who push themselves to chime in with something off-color—in choosing to go along they step into a world so saturated with revulsions that its esthetic structure is impossible for them to discern, and as a result they shout out some horrible inopportune conversation-stopper, often relying on a word like “pustulating,” when natural Rabelaisians—who after-ward exchange knowing glances with each other that say, “Sad—way out of his league”—know to keep their colostomy sacks under wraps for the moment. Which referenced sacks bring us to the second time I met Updike—for I did, as it happened, get a further opportunity to embarrass myself.

  At the offices of the Harvard Lampoon, in November 1984, I sprang out in front of him near a plate of ham cuttings as he was hurrying to leave the post-Harvard-Yale-game party. A friend (insofar as male friendship is possible) said I should come with him to this party because the building was worth seeing. As he showed me around, sensing my testy inner readiness to see the Lampoon’s flaws and its self-satisfaction, he bad-mouthed the institution severely—nobody really good ex
cept Updike came through here, he said, gesturing at the second-floor library, where all the Benchleys and more recent wizards were shelved. It was true that the idea of working on a college magazine would have been inconceivable to me at Haverford. (Well, no—in fact I once submitted two poems to the literary magazine, which were rejected.) Why waste weeks working on something that is distributed internally, that doesn’t appear on a transcript; something that doesn’t count? It’s like putting on plays for your family; it’s grade-school stuff. But clearly the Harvard Lampoon did count in New York: Updike himself said once (I think) that a New Yorker editor had noticed something of his, light verse perhaps, in the Lampoon and had written asking to see more. And he had done the introduction to an anthology of Lampoon humor—he obviously thought of it as something worth thinking about even after he had graduated. Yet his physical presence that day was, to me at least, completely unexpected. Did he come every time the game was in Cambridge? Had he actually been to the Harvard-Yale game that day? God I hoped not. It was very important to me that this postgame Lampoon visit was not typical Updike behavior—I wanted him not to have anything to do with writers’ conferences, literary awards committees, college reunions, magazine anniversaries, idiotic flag-waving school spirit: his only allegiances should be, I think I thought, a Craigenputtock purist myself by force of my own obscurity and isolation, to the isolated writers he liked: Henry Green, Nabokov, Tyler, Proust, Murdoch, Melville. And yet if he hadn’t felt enough fondness for his old school magazine to show up that day, I wouldn’t have had my chance to wait for him near the ham tidbits, steeling myself to be pushy. I knew it was pointless, but I wanted to talk to him more than anyone else I didn’t know. I spied on him as he stood in a rearward room, giving serious advice to an exceedingly tall person who was editor or president of the Lampoon that year. Then he took his leave of everyone and briskly walked along the long neomedieval table of hewn food toward the door. He was done socializing; I could see that. But I sprang out anyway. I blocked his path, standing with my hand held out for him to shake. Yes, the editor/president with whom he had been in close conference was very tall and skinny; but I was very tall and skinny too—perhaps taller, skinnier! I needed my outsider’s moment!