U and I Read online

  “I should,” I typed that morning, “write some appreciation” of Updike. And “it has to be done while he is alive.” As with Barthelme, the idea of such an essay wasn’t an entirely new plan. Since embarking on the project, I have found in my piles of typing various earlier mentions of exercitations like this—“Make a whole book about my obsession with Updike,” I typed in October 1988, and followed it with three pages of notes. On September 8, 1987, after reading a number of Updike’s reviews of Wilson and Nabokov, I typed: “Lately I have thought again of writing an essay on Updike.” But, I said,

  with people you feel this complicatedly about, you should wait until they are dead, because then the fact that they are lost to you—that they aren’t potentially on the other end of any piece of print—makes you value them so much more and more truly. Now I would have crabby things to say.…

  See, Barthelme’s death changed my mind completely. It felt positively contemptible now to wait until a writer has died to exercise one’s best powers on his work—such a delay indeed seemed to me post-Barthelme to go directly counter to one of the principal aims of the novel itself, which is to capture pieces of mental life as truly as possible, as they unfold, with all the surrounding forces of circumstance that bear on a blastula of understanding allowed to intrude to the extent that they give a more accurate picture. The commemorative essay that pops up in some periodical, full of sad-clown sorrowfulness the year following the novelist’s death (as in Henry James’s essays on Zola and Trollope, or his long review of the first biography of Emerson), is unworthy of the fine-tuned descriptive capacities of the practicing novelist: confronted for once by a character in life that he actually does have the possibility to understand, given the daily literary regimen and tastes he shares with his subject, he instead lazily waits for the fixity of the autopsy table before doing a likeness. A beginning novelist like me is charged with describing life now, not writing history; and the huge contribution that the books by a senior living writer make to his life requires in its importance some attempt at a novelistically inclusive response.

  I knew now that I had a real deadline: I had to write about Updike while people could still conceivably sneer at him simply for being at the top of the heap, before any false valedictory grand-old-man reverence crept in, as it inevitably would. The literary world demanded some sort of foreign-ness as the price of its attention: failing geographical distance, senile remoteness would do. But what it lost in this demand was the possibility for real self-knowledge; for you can never come up with truths of an acceptable resolution if what you select for study is estranged by time or language or background or by a physiognomy in its authoritative, slow-talking decline. I would study my feelings for Updike while he was still in that phase of intellectual neglect that omnipresence and best-selling popularity inspire.

  I began that morning to put down phrases or scenes I remembered from Updike’s writing, just as they occurred to me. The first one was

  vast, dying sea

  I put an asterisk in front of those items, like the couple spitting at each other in Marry Me, that were bad memories. It was an odd sensation: a particular item would arrive about once every ten seconds, not without some eyes-closed searching, separated from its predecessor in the list by a mental blur similar to the fast camera pan that separated scenes in old Batman shows. It felt as though I could continue typing these discrete, often phrasal memories of Updike for days. Some of the others in the train were:

  (2) Mom reading Too Far to Go in a hotel when we were visiting some family—maybe around the time she and Dad had decided on a divorce

  (5) The Chateau Mouton Rotschild [sic] that the man gives the kid in Updike’s first story

  (6) ‘The blue below is ultramarine. Sometimes the blue below is green.’ Misquoted

  (7) The Bulgarian Poetess, title—and some sense of her: pulled back hair, ‘coiffed.’

  (10) The ice cube in Rabbit, Run

  (14) ‘and the sad curve of time it subtends,’ dedication in Problems

  (16) *‘Seems’ or ‘seemed’—constantly used word

  (17) Leeches climbing up legs in some short story

  (20) Divot the size of an undershirt, that made Mom laugh so hard that Sunday.

  I had a list of about thirty-five of these by the time I had to stop writing that morning and drive with my family to the zoo. But I did nothing with it. Instead I wrote a review of a biography of Flann O’Brien and an essay on model airplanes: frivolity. In mid-October my great uncle Dick committed suicide, overwhelmed by various incurable afflictions. My grandmother said that she felt very alone now, with nobody to tell her family memories to who would respond with supplemental ones of his own; and she quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes: “the last leaf upon the tree.” The letter from him that I now never had to answer (his very first to me) rested at the top of a prioritized (and why not use that word if it is handy?) pile of correspondence that I had been guiltily eyeing for months. In it he mentions that he has read something of mine with “his sighted eye,” and closes with: “I don’t ask forgiveness for my poor penmanship—merely an understanding of a less than easy task.” My wife stood in the middle of a different rug (we were back home by this time, done house-sitting) with round eyes, saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Again, in reaction, I felt the luck of being Updike’s contemporary, but I did nothing with it.

  Finally, a week or so later, on October 24, 1989, I read this in Henry James’s long essay on Emerson:

  It was impossible to be more honoured and cherished, far and near, than he was during his long residence in Concord, or more looked upon as the principal gentleman in the place. This was conspicuous to the writer of these remarks on the occasion of the curious, sociable, cheerful public funeral made for him in 1883 by all the countryside, arriving, as for the last honours to the first citizen, in trains, in waggons, on foot, in multitudes. It was a popular manifestation, the most striking I have ever seen provoked by the death of a man of letters.

  Immediately I tried to picture what sort of “popular manifestation” there would be at Updike’s funeral. Would the frumpy gathering of professional scribes be swelled by the modern equivalents of countryfolk: that is, secretaries, books-on-tape commuters, subscribers to the Franklin Library, members of Quality Paperback Book Club? The notion of all those thoughtful, likable, furrowed, middlebrow brows lowered in sadness seemed momentarily strange, after all of Updike’s lively and shocking and un-Emersonian writing about nakedness, fucking in piles of laundry, pubic hair like seaweed, dirty Polaroids, his next-door-neighbor’s pussy, and the rest—but then it seemed absolutely right. Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose. Once the sensation of the interior of a vagina has been compared to a ballet slipper (if my memory doesn’t distort that unlocatable simile) the sexual revolution is complete: just as Emerson made the Oversoul, the luminous timeless sphere of pure thought, available to the earnest lecture-going farm worker, so Updike made the reader’s solitary paperback-inspired convulsion an untrashy, cultivated attainment. (I myself have never successfully masturbated to Updike’s writing, though I have to certain remembered scenes in Iris Murdoch; but someone I know says that she achieved a number of quality orgasms from Couples when she first read it at age thirteen.) In grieving for Updike, the somber, predominantly female citizens would be grieving for their own youthful sexual pasts, whose hard-core cavortings were now insulated by wools and goose downs of period charm, vague remorse, fuzzy remembrance, spousal forgiveness, and an overall sense of imperfect attempts at cutting loose; they would be mourning the man who, by bringing a serious, Prousto-Nabokovian, morally sensitive, National-Book-Award-winning prose style to bear on the micromechanics of physical lovemaking, first licensed their own moans. But the concrete visual image of mourners in contemporary dress gathered around a real grave was too powerful and distasteful to contemplate for more than an instant; recoiling, I thought, But if he dies, he won’t
know how I feel about him, and was horrified. That night I wrote inside the back cover of the Henry James paperback I’d been reading, “Make Updike thing into long essay,” and the next day, trembling, I called the editor of The Atlantic to propose it to him.

  2

  But the editor wasn’t in and didn’t call me back. A week went by, including Halloween. My sense of relief increased daily. The prospect of writing a commissioned article about Updike was very frightening; not as frightening as the prospect of his death, but almost—more frightening, that is, than the prospect of my own death. I had almost no idea what I was going to be able to say, only that I did have things to say. And Updike could react, feel affronted, demolish me, ignore me, litigate. A flashy literary trial had some fantasy appeal, except that I knew that I would burst into tears if cross-examined by any moderately skillful attorney. But it probably wouldn’t come to that. The outriggers of Updike’s admirably quilled eyebrows would alter their tangential angles under the subdermal bunch of a frown of momentary consideration, and the eyes that have flown low over so many thousands of miles of print would finish skimming once over my words, and then a reply—wise, sensible, mildly amused, with a single burst of irritation perhaps to demonstrate out of kindness to me that my contortions had indeed received his undivided attention (like the burst in Nabokov’s reply to Updike’s “stylish” paragraph of praise in Tri-Quarterly, where Nabokov thanked Updike for liking the sad prostitute in Lolita, but was infuriated that Updike thought that Ada was “in a dimension or two” Nabokov’s own wife, Vera)—would wing its way to The Atlantic. Or, much, much worse, would not wing. Especially in planning to talk about my premature fears of another writer’s inevitable decline and death I was doing something that felt unseemly, taboo for very good reasons. When I am in my mid-fifties and full of plans and enjoying myself thoroughly, enjoying even the plaintive things I am beginning to write about age and about how one’s best work antedates celebrity, will I want a writer twenty-five years younger than I to fret publicly about the fact that at some decades-distant point I am going to stop writing and die? No. In the preface to Self-Consciousness, Updike mentions his horror when somebody approached him to write his biography: “to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!” And someone, Updike or Anthony Powell I believe [or maybe Mailer?], mentions the “wariness”—I think that’s the word—that older writers come to feel toward younger ones, a wariness that ought to be respected, I felt. Yet here I was, proposing to myself to steal Updike’s very death-dread from him. It was a terrible idea. I hated that kind of cocky, unsubtle, overcandid irreverence in young writers. If I saw an essay in The Atlantic entitled “U and I” I would click my tongue with disgust and slap the magazine back deliberately in the wrong place on the newsstand rack, behind Iron Horse or Needlecraft. But would my irritable reaction be purely negative, or would it have a component of recognition, a wish that I had tried to do the same thing myself? And if it would have such a component of recognition, was that really a compelling reason for going ahead and writing it myself, rather than waiting for someone abler and less risk-averse than I to do it in his or her own way? Waiting was probably better.

  For a full week after trying to reach the editor of The Atlantic, I occupied myself with other things. On October 31 I made some cheerful notes about Tracy Chapman’s singing and about Bizet’s Carmen. On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn’t enough. Without some sort of anxiousness writing loses its charm. There is the straightforward suspense that is built into a certain kind of novel—a first-order plot-anxiety that I often dislike and find physically uncomfortable—and then there is the much more important second-order thrill that the writer himself shivers gleefully with as he writes: “Ooh boy, I’m really going to catch it this time! They’re going to cremate me! I’m going to be pulverized!” (And then he does catch it, and he is stunned by how badly it hurts, and he never ignores that particular warning fear so completely again.) So, craving danger, looking up from my still-throbbing ingrown toenail, I called the editor of The Atlantic again on November 2. This time he was in, and, when I described the project to him in a low, worried voice, he was fairly agreeable. He and an agent worked out terms. The agent called me in the afternoon and told me that the editor had told her that he thought an essay such as I described about Updike could be good or it could be “very creepy.”

  At first “creepy” seemed a poor choice of word, but once I began writing in earnest, its aptness became increasingly apparent. What I was doing was creepy. Halloween was, after all, still in the air. Halloween is taken extremely seriously in the town where I live: there is a Halloween parade on Main Street at which policemen enthusiastically tamper with through traffic, and hundreds of children visit every lit house, and the local medium-security prison advertises to X-ray all bags of candy for harmful objects until 11:00 P.M. on the big night. My wife told me about the X-ray ad (which she had seen in the local free weekly) the morning after, and I was crazy with regret. If John Updike were thirty-two years old and living in this town, I thought, he would have known beforehand about that incredible X-ray offer and he would have driven up there with his kids after going trick-or-treating with them and he would have talked affably with the prison guard about some of the concealed weaponry the guard had found in gifts to prisoners and whether there had ever in fact been any adulterated candy of any kind detected locally or whether it was simply a mythical precautionary thing intended to demonstrate the prison’s wish to contribute in whatever way it could to the happiness and welfare of the community in which it found itself, and Updike would have slyly looked around and caught a little flavorsome garniture of the X-ray room, perhaps a sign whose text would look funny in small caps, and he would maybe have jotted down a few comments his kids made as the image of the nuts in the miniature Snickers bars and the internal segmentation in the Smarties packets appeared on the gray screen, and then he would have driven home and in less than an hour produced a nice Talk of the Town piece that worked understatedly through the low-grade ghoulishness of driving to a medium-security prison to have your children’s Halloween candy X-rayed for razor blades, in an epoch when apples were so completely not a Halloween treat anymore, and when all candy bars had tamper-evident wrappers. No, no, worse than that: he wouldn’t have done it when he was thirty-two; he would have done it, better than I can do it now, when he was twenty-five. At thirty-two it would have been beneath him, too easy, too reportorial, too much of a typical Talk piece, whereas for me, I thought, it has the feeling of an outstanding topic, full of the exciting timeliness of nonfiction magazine writing. I, at thirty-two, had missed the story completely; the only piece (I dislike that journalismoid word “piece,” and yet it slips in all the time) I could possibly do was one about wanting to have written a bright little prison-visit piece: that is, about the adulterating of innocent children’s holidays by the writer’s hyperreceptivity to newsworthy small-town touches—and who would want to read that? I wanted so much to have the assured touch, the adjectival resourcefulness, that Updike had in all his occasional writings; for though early on he eloquently disparaged the “undercooked quality of prose written to order,” the truth was that some of his finest moments were to be found in the aforementioned introductions, awards-acceptance speeches, answers to magazine surveys, the last sentences of reviews (like the one that leaps, blurb-driven, to memory concerning Nabokov’s Glory: “In its residue of bliss experienced, and in its charge of bliss conveyed, Glory measures up as, though the last to arrive, far from the least of this happy man’s Russian novels”—terrifying mastery!), prefaces to his own writings, dedications (like the one that I think about all the time, in Problems and Other Stories, to his children, which includes the phrase “with the curve of sad time it subtends”—imagine him applying high school geometry to the mess of his own divorce in such a perfect figure!): those incidental forms that induce his verbal tact to close around some uncomfortable chip o
f reality even as it reaches to reawaken our dulled sense of why certain conventions (like book dedications) or stock phrases (like “last but not least”) exist and what limber life can be found in them; those forms whose mastery seems to me to be more convincing proof of the spontaneity of true talent, its irrepressive oversupply, than any single masterpiece is; and forms which for emulous younger writers can be more important as objects of study than the triple-deckers they besprinkle, because they are clues to the haberdashery of genius, its etiquette, its points of specific contact with the recognizable obligations of life, independent of some single lucky choice of subject that bigger forms such as the novel demand. But even as I saw the huge importance of incidental work to the presence, the coloring, the perceived surplusage, of the man of letters, I found that I was less and less able to imagine myself producing it with anything like the fertile freshness that Updike demonstrated almost weekly. In theory I resist the campy adult celebration of Halloween; and in theory I reject Harold Bloom’s allegories of literary influence and parricide and one-upmanship (of which more later, I hope); but when I heard that the editor of The Atlantic had said that what I was doing sounded “creepy,” and when I thought again of another of Updike’s phrases from Self-Consciousness that somebody quoted in a review, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” I realized that like it or not I was clearly risking with this essay the charge that I was simply engaged in a little trick-or-treating of my own on Updike’s big white front porch.