soon beg[ins] to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes.
What I liked so much about Of the Farm was that Updike’s terror was under control; the proportion between consumed and unconsumed holes was just right; you could still see through the mesh of the screen, but the clinging metaphorical figures, such as the droplet-needlework image itself, were there in cross-eyed, painstaking abundance.
Unfortunately, I finished reading Of the Farm a few weeks before I finished writing my book; looking around for more Updike to prolong the helpful high, I read the awards-acceptance speeches he includes in Hugging the Shore. As a result, I lay awake two nights planning the acceptance speech I would make when my novel won the National Book Award. There were two problems relating to the speech. First, Updike had set a standard of felicitous gratitude that I could never better. Should I be in reaction somber, or incoherently at a loss, or shy-debutantishly brief? Should I apologize for all the bad places in my book—even supply some last-minute textual corrections to the lorgnetted assembly? “And on page sixty eight, if you will indulge me in one more amendment, six lines up from the bottom, the word ‘twiddle’ should properly read ‘fiddle.’ ” Should I thank Updike for inspiring me? Should I say right out how hard it was to write an acceptance speech after reading the Castiglionean models he provided in Hugging the Shore? I simply could not formulate a first sentence that felt interesting and properly heterogenous and yet acceptably free from Updike’s influence. The second problem was, assuming I did come up with a speech that did the job, and I delivered it without incident, and years went by—what should I do with the text then? Updike was right to include his in a prose book—acceptance speeches were a distinct form of literature, akin to toasts and letters but with their own distinct requirements and opportunities—but doing so was somewhat unusual, was it not, was itself a part of Updike’s originality? If I included my speech I would feel that I was slavishly copying Updike, more so even than in the matter of the copyright-page acknowledgment. On the other hand, I didn’t want to deliver a speech that I didn’t think was worth publishing permanently. And I liked very much the idea that Updike could look at Picked-Up Pieces or Hugging the Shore and know that they contained all of his nonfictional self from that particular decade. Yet it might be a nice idea, attractively humble, to have a bunch of miscellaneous writings of acceptable quality left over for the posthumous mop-up volume. Or no—the arrogance of engineering your appearance of humility was itself fluorescently vile. The only thing to do was to refuse to accept the award altogether. But that extreme would merely be a ripoff of Pasternak and Sartre, both Nobel-decliners.
Lucky for me, I didn’t win anyway. I wasn’t one of the five nominees. In fact, my publisher didn’t even bother to send in my book for consideration. I won no awards of any kind—not the NBA, the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN/Hemingway, the Whiting Foundation, the Joe Savago New Voice Award, the National Book Critics Circle, or a Big Mac. Not a single dinky award! Fuck them all! But no, it’s good, it’s good, it’s better that way: few people will imitate me, because there is clearly no glory in it, and my relatively unrecognized and unfeted position allows me, just barely, to write this kind of a nose-pressed-against-the-store-window book, if book it turns out to be, about Updike. I did get some very good reviews—but the interesting thing about those bolts of elation was that though Updike was in my thoughts constantly while I wrote my book, not a single reviewer mentioned him as a possible antecedent. I was reminiscent of, owed much to, or failed to measure up to Abish, Barth, Borges, Bove, Calvino, Friedman, Joyce, Lem, O’Brien (Flann, not Tim or Edna), Perec, Ponge, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Sterne, Tati, and Trow—never Updike. What can this mean? That I think I’m influenced when I’m not? Or that there are differences between a role-model sort of influence and a purely stylistic one? [Updike’s name did come up in a few reviews of my second novel, but by then I had said that he and Nabokov were heroes in several interviews.]
I felt myself to be stylistically influenced—deeply so. Even in the matter of skin I was his plagiaristic follower: a short time after I finished the book, finally joining the ranks of novelists, my psoriasis got suddenly much worse. It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-Glo-colored as a baboon’s, and most of my legs, much of my back, my neck, my arms. My navel was a disaster. I Vaselined myself like a Channel swimmer. I did not want to be touched or seen. There were grease stains and blood spots on all my pants and on all the pillowcases—my ears bled. I had to wipe off the receivers of pay phones on my shirttail after I used them. And truly no man has ever itched like I itched—it was a hyper-itch, a deep, swarming sort of interior toothpick sculpture, a subcutaneous “blooming buzzing confusion.” I had bloody skin under my fingernails from compulsive scratching that I cleaned out as I read by drawing the corner of a ten-page chunk of Of the Farm or Hugging the Shore under the rim of the nail and brushing the pink profligacy away. I put off the trip to the dermatologist that I knew was imminent, though, because I wanted to see whether my disease had it in itself to be worse, more consuming, than Updike’s disease—not only in the structural arthritic symptoms, which I had learned to live with, but right on the surface. Whose prose cells divided more uncontrollably? Whose canvas of visible self was more erythematously elaborated? I wanted to reach that mystical moment he describes, when “I couldn’t turn my head without pain.” And I did reach it. One afternoon I stood naked in the middle of my study with my arms extended and realized that I did not want to walk, sit down, dress, read, think, or live. I was becoming a giant lesion. I went to the doctor. He offered me the choice of going to Mass General or Beth Israel for phototherapy; I chose Beth Israel, because it was slightly closer, but as I was driving home I groaned, because I remembered that Updike had written that he went to Mass General: I might have sprung out at him again as he showed up for a treatment, wearing the prescribed pair of comically zooty, wraparound, retinally protective NoIr sunglasses. But I thought no, by this time (1988) he surely had bought his own home PUVA booth for thirty thousand, avoiding the long drive and unpleasant interaction with other people’s skin flakes that mark these visits. I loved going, though, at least for the first year: since quitting my job I had no professional obligations, no jotted meetings in a time management system, no schedule of any kind, and my thrice-a-week irradiations were a welcome bit of external bustle. By the time I moved away from Boston and bought Self-Consciousness, where the psoriasis essay appears in revised form, Updike had pulled ahead of me again: he had switched to the grandmaster drug methotrexate, the liver-witherer, while I hung fire with PUVA; so that even if I had chosen Mass General, I realized, I never would have run into him and become his friend and swapped repellent plaque-tectonic anecdotes at the Harvard Gardens on Cambridge St. and finally reached that inconceivable eventuality when, inspired by phototherapy’s clubby locker-room atmosphere of goggles, towels, sunscreen ointments, and hasty dressing, he might have asked, “Do you golf?”
But that’s all right. I don’t need to be his psoriatic friend and fellow sufferer. I have, in at least one tiny and characteristically dermal instance, communicated with him in a permanent way. I’m not referring to my half-nuts theories that I am Dale in Roger’s Version or that he is really talking about me in a book review of The Pigeon. In that 1981 story about musicians on the West Coast that he told me he liked, I wrote:
The first violinist … began inspecting his left index finger, pressing it tenderly with his right thumb.
“How’s your callus doing?” the cellist asked.
“Professor Belanyi said to file it down, so I just took a nail file and zapped the hard part off.” He extended the finger. There was a yellowish area on the end that had been flattened by a file. “It hurts when I start playing, then the skin warms up and it gets flexible.”
In Updike’s 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick, in a passage that I can finally look up and quote exactly, because my book is nearly done, Darryl praises Jane’s cello playing:
“You have precision.… Without precision, beaucoup de rien, huh? Even your thumb, on your thumb position: you really keep that pressure on, where a lot of men crump out, it hurts too much.” He pulled her left hand closer to his face and caressed the side of her thumb. “See that?” he said to Alexandra, brandishing Jane’s hand as if it were detached, a dead thing to be admired. “That is one beautiful callus.”
Laughably tiny, you say? Hard to credit? Maybe. Still, I suspect that Updike would not have written about Jane’s beautiful cello-callus unless I had first written about a musical callus that I had once seen and touched in Southern California. Because I exist in print, Updike’s book is, I think, ever so slightly different. For a minute or two, sometime in 1983, the direction of indebtedness was reversed. I have influenced him. And that’s all the imaginary friendship I need.
BOOKS BY NICHOLSON BAKER
“It’s hard to find an analogue for Baker’s combination of intellectual playfulness and lyricism. The music of Erik Satie comes to mind. Also peanut butter and bacon sandwiches—something weird and wonderful about which you can only say, ‘Try it. You’ll like it.’ ”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
THE FERMATA
Outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish, The Fermata is a graphic, but good-natured peep deep into the ethical interstices of time, testosterone, and the furtive male imagination.
Fiction/0-679-75933-6
THE MEZZANINE
Startlingly inventive and filled with offbeat wit, this wondrous novel turns a ride up the escalator of an office building into a dazzling meditation on our most familiar relationships with objects and people we usually take for granted.
Fiction/0-679-72576-8
ROOM TEMPERATURE
Nicholson Baker transforms a young father’s feeding-time reverie with a newborn baby into a dazzling catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.
Fiction/0-679-73440-6
U AND I
Baker constructs a splendid edifice that is at once a tribute to John Updike and a disarmingly, often hilariously frank self-examination—a work that lays bare both the pettiest and the most exalted transactions between writers and their readers.
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-73575-5
VOX
Vox remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous, It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.
Fiction/0-679-74211-5
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
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