U and I Read online

  Acclaim for Nicholson Baker’s

  U and I

  “Nicholson Baker is a first-class writer.… He has succeeded in finding a fruitful and idiosyncratic way of describing the quotidian processes of experience.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Hilarious … the informal literary criticism of U and I is as effervescent as the prose.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A brilliant stroke: in his quirkily rambling way Baker has given us an utterly sui generis chronicle of a reader’s interior life.… Its distinctive appeal derives from its celebration of language and the life-giving currents that pass from writer to reader.”

  —Mirabella

  “Nicholson Baker is one of the most remarkable and one of the oddest talents to have appeared in the past decade.”

  —John Banville

  “A loopy love letter, a fan’s notes by the most eccentric and garrulous of fans.”

  —Newsday

  “The form this book takes is such a sublime invention that its first use must also be its last.”

  —Esquire

  Nicholson Baker

  U and I

  Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published seven novels—The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994), The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998), A Box of Matches (2003), and Checkpoint (2004)—and three works of non-fiction, U and I (1991), The Size of Thoughts (1996), and Double Fold (2001), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999 he founded the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers.

  Books by Nicholson Baker

  THE MEZZANINE

  ROOM TEMPERATURE

  U AND I

  VOX

  THE FERMATA

  THE SIZE OF THOUGHTS

  THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY

  DOUBLE FOLD

  A BOX OF MATCHES

  CHECKPOINT

  VINTAGE BAKER

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1992

  Copyright © 1991 by Nicholson Baker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991. A small part of this book was first published in The Atlantic.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to reprint three lines from “Midpoint” from Midpoint and Other Poems, by John Updike. Copyright © 1969 by John Updike; and four lines from “Shipbored” from The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, by John Updike. Copyright © 1982 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Excerpts from the works of John Updike reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Nicholson.

  U and I : a true story / Nicholson Baker.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80750-2

  1. Baker, Nicholson—Authorship. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Authorship. I. Title. II. Title: You and I.

  [PS3552.A4325Z477 1992]

  813′.54—dc20

  [B] 91-50486

  v3.1

  FOR MY MOTHER

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  It may be us they wish to meet but it’s themselves

  they want to talk about.

  CYRIL CONNOLLY

  1

  On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law’s study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap. I began to type the date and the time, 9:46 A.M. I had no idea what subject I was going to cover that morning. A week or so earlier I had finished and sent off a novel, my second, and I was still full of the misleading momentum that, while it makes the completion of novels possible, also generally imparts a disappointingly thin and rushed feeling to their second halves or final thirds, as the writer’s growing certainty that he is finally a pro, finally getting the hang of it, coincides exactly with that unpleasant fidgety sensation on the reader’s part that he is locked into a set of characters and surroundings he knows a bit too well by now to enjoy. I wanted very much to keep slapping esemplastically away at the keys, and the imminence of this very pleasure made the words “the act of beginning to write in the morning never loses its pleasure” appear in the to-be-typed lounge in my awareness; but before I could move my fingers, I recalled that Updike had said something similar in Self-Consciousness: “In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God.” A memorable sentence for me (though I only remembered the first half) not only because it seemed simple and true, but because I had read it twice, first quoted in a book review and then in the book itself. And with this memory of Updike I hesitated; I didn’t type what I was going to type; I shifted course.

  Donald Barthelme had just died, on July 23. My wife had seen the Associated Press obituary in the newspaper. My sense of being detached from the literary and academic communities, if there are such things, was reinforced by having learned of his death not through some grief-stricken phone call from a close associate or a devoted student of Barthelme’s, but merely from the local paper, whose information is available to all. I stared distractedly for half an hour, unsure of what to do, while my wife stood in the middle of the rug with round eyes, saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” I decided I should write a letter of condolence to his editor at The New Yorker, but I didn’t begin it. Then my daughter got an ear infection. On the first of August she said, “I’m going to choke, Daddy, I don’t want to choke,” and I held her awkwardly over the kitchen sink, cupping her forehead in my palm (suddenly remembering, from when my mother had held my own forehead, how this brain-embrace transferred some of the misery of your sickness to a higher power), and I felt her stomach muscles powerfully tighten. I took her to the doctor that day and got her some antibiotics and when we returned I remembered that I owed my great-uncle Dick, who was very ill, a letter. Instead of writing it I made several attempts at the letter to The New Yorker about Barthelme. I rejected “I’m torn up by,” “heartbroken,” and “He was a master.” But as I struggled to formulate something that sounded unmannered, I noticed that there was a morally bothersome taint to the effort I was making. Those black bars, those black bars, I kept thinking, that The New Yorker tastefully puts over its obituaries: the eulogies always come at the very end of an issue, and lately there had been ones for Saxon and Addams. But the one uppermost in my mind was the one that Updike wrote after Nabokov died, reprinted in Hugging the Shore: I remembered no particular phrase from it, except one smoothly saying that the consensus would probably be that Lolita was his best novel in English, and The Gift his best in Russian (this judgment stayed with me because these two weren’t my own favorites), but I did remember its tone: gentle, serious, unmaudlin, fluent without
affectation, deliberately unspectacular and unrivalrous—a model obituary. And I knew that Barthelme’s editor at The New Yorker was likely to write the Barthelme obituary, and that the tribute would probably include anonymous quotations from associates and fellow writers. Here precisely was the detectable taint of wrongdoing in my attitude, for some not insubstantial fraction of what was prodding me to write the letter of condolence was my self-centered, ungrieving ambition to come up with at least one sentence in it that would be in the same league as many in Updike’s obituary for Nabokov, and which would as a result have the sad but not-choked-up quotability that would allow me anonymously to “make” the Barthelme obituary, as if I were making some team.

  Disgusted with my mixed motives, I wrote in reaction a terse, four-sentence, utterly unexcerptable note that essentially said: miss him, wonderful titles, effortless originality, thank you publishing him, greats of this century. “It’s kind of choppy,” my wife decided. I sent it anyway; the choppiness was evidence of my virtue. (The obituary came out in due time; not, as it turned out, with a black bar above it at the back of the magazine, but as a “Notes and Comment” in the front, and there were indeed several quotations in it—none from me.) But I was still sad. My reaction, attractively self-denying though it was, didn’t meet the gravity of the case. I thought very briefly of writing a neo-Jamesian story about a guy who hears of the death of a big-name writer he has long admired and who agonizes over the letter of condolence to the big name’s editor, reproaches himself for having to agonize rather than simply and spontaneously to grieve, worries about whether he should destroy his early drafts of the letter, which betray how hard he worked to hit the proper spontaneous note, or whether such a compounding of deceptions, by robbing biographers of this material, furnished brave proof of how lightly he took his literary prospects. But a fictionalization was, so I thought, a far more crudely opportunist use of my bewilderment at Barthelme’s death than a lushly quotable letter would have been.

  I also considered the prospect of writing the critical appreciation of Barthelme that I’d had in mind for several years. It was, after all, the standard way to fill the hole a writer leaves behind. Henry James, for instance, wrote big lovely commemorative things on Emerson and Hawthorne after they were gone; he panned Trollope harshly while Trollope was alive to read the review, but the minute Trollope dozed to his final rest, James wrote of him full of immense tolerant affection. And Updike, too, wrote big lovely things on Hawthorne and Melville, and major reviews of Wilson’s posthumous diaries, as well as the Nabokov obituary. So, inspired by these advanced practitioners, I might reread Barthelme slowly and carefully, working myself up (as I knew from college I tended to do with any intrinsically good writer to whom I devoted lots of time) into an awestruck, fanatical receptivity to his proprietary strengths, and excusing his weaknesses in a way that made me seem wise and clear-sighted, rather than merely blind. But why bother? Barthelme would never know. And in any case, I wanted my choice of what to read at a given moment to be the outcome of more multiply confluent causes than the simple requirement of an obituarizing overview. That is, I wanted to reread Barthelme only when I really wanted to reread Barthelme, and not when his death suddenly obliged me to do so. He had died somewhat out of fashion, too, and I was curious to watch firsthand the microbiologies of upward revaluation or of progressive obscurity, as I had failed to observe them in the earlier cases of, say, John O’Hara or John Gardner. I felt no particular eagerness yet to try to make my personal opinion, to the extent that I could really be said to have something as fixed as an opinion about him, prevail.

  That phrase which reviewers take such pains to include when delivering their judgments—when they say that among living writers so-and-so is or isn’t of the first rank—had once seemed to me unnecessary: the writing, I had thought, was good or bad, no matter whether the writer was here or not. But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of presence or absence, which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone’s opinion, any talent. Is he alive or dead?—just tell me that. The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y—phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore. Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly.

  Yet in other ways the dead gain by death. The level of autobiographical fidelity in their work is somehow less important, or, rather, extreme fidelity does not seem to harm, as it does with the living, our appreciation for the work. The living are “just” writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives, wow wow wow. Egotism, monomania, the delusional traits of Blake or Smart or that guy who painted the electrically schizophrenic cats are all engaging qualities in the dead. To show our sophistication across time, we laugh politely whenever we sense, say in Sheridan, that a dead person is trying to be funny, although seldom with the real honking abandonment that the living can inspire. At one point in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the subject of Garrick’s recent funeral comes up. They talk about how grand and extravagant it was. A woman says that she heard that there were six horses drawing each coach in the procession. Here Johnson finally loses his patience and says, “Madam, there were no more six horses than six phoenixes.” When I first read this, Johnson’s lovable huffiness seemed funny enough to merit a shout and a thigh slap; but right on the tail of this response I was confused, because at the moment I laughed I had been sure in the genuineness of my amusement that Johnson had to be alive somewhere, right then, in seclusion, forgotten by reporters, in order for his words to have made so direct a connection with me. And then the certainty faded, and I heard the hollow droning dirge sound that you can make by humming or lowing through a mailing tube as I realized that no, Johnson was truly dead, and any comic life he had was of a mystical, phoenix-like impermanence—and now I know, looking at his sentence again, that one part of what made it seem funny to me was that such indignation is more comic in dead men than in living men. You had not to be there.

  So I abandoned Barthelme completely. But the various morbidities his death occasioned—as well as the sense of fragility and preciousness of
all life that is inevitably triggered by even a minor sickness in one’s own child—were all close at hand when, on that Sunday morning early in August, I hesitated for an instant after being reminded of Updike’s sentence about how easily the words come in the morning. Updike was much more important to me than Barthelme as a model and influence, and now the simple knowledge that he was alive and writing and had just published one of his best books, Self-Consciousness, felt like a piece of huge luck. How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive! But though the book was very good—true to the way memory files things away under subject headings, and quite original, I thought, in building an autobiography out of discrete topical essays (as Harold Nicolson had made a sort of autobiography out of the fictionalized acquaintances in Some People)—Updike’s book was uncomfortably full of notions of closure, the long view, failing bodily systems, and a kind of distant fly-fishing retrospection quite different from the young writer’s need to get rid of the topmost layers of his grade-school and high-school memories so that he can move on without their constant distraction. The framed photograph on the front cover (his best-looking cover by far) was clearly the same one as is described in detail early in Of the Farm—he was coming clean. Nor had I liked reading a recent story of his about a man in his sixties who was startled, every day when he walked to the mailbox, by the doves that suddenly flapped up at his approach. The image was terrific, but the implication, that Updike was putting his intelligence to work on his forgetfulness, on what new could be said about the loss of one’s powers, was very disturbing. With Barthelme gone I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike’s death. All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike’s immortality: his open-ended stream of books, reviews, even poems, and especially responses to pert queries from Mademoiselle and The New York Times Book Review. I thought I remembered his saying recently in Esquire, in response to a survey question about popular fiction, that “in college I read what they told me and was much the better for it.” I wanted more of these monocellular living appearances. More awards-acceptance speeches! He was, I felt, the model of the twentieth-century American man of letters: for him to die would be for my generation’s personal connection with literature to die, and for us all to be confronted at last with the terrifying unmediated enormity of the cast-concrete university library, whose antitheft gates go click-click-click-click as we leave, dry laughter at how few books we can carry home with us.