U and I: A True Story

4

One such tracing might begin, for instance, at the 125th anniversary party for The Atlantic, held in the fall of 1982. I rented a black tie outfit and went with my now-wife. We stood on the black-and-white tiled basement floor of the Marriott Long Wharf, relieved to see that the crowd was much too big for us to be expected to talk to anyone. I said things like “Are those what are known as ‘spaghetti straps’?” indicating with my chin a woman whose back was to us, and my now-wife said things like “Almost: those over there are”—and we nodded and laughed exaggeratedly, as if we hadn’t taken a cab there together but had met for the first time in years at this grand function. And yet after forty-five minutes, the pressure, slight at first but growing, to have at least one extra-dyadic conversation that I could use to imply hours of raucous socializing in later accounts, began to make me glance around with more purpose. I began to feel slightly desperate. We were forced to eat sliced and stuffed things at traypoint: each time the tray came around I felt that the bearer was adding another yes checkmark to his suspicion that we had arrived and talked to nobody but ourselves. Finally an associate editor introduced us to Judith Martin, Miss Manners, who had been deep in real, unfeigned conversation with somebody else. She, understandably revolted by our foolish beaming pleading miserable faces, and put off by the borderline rudeness of the person who had performed the introduction, since he had failed to take into account how very deep her preexisting conversation had been, apparently felt that it was her duty as a syndicated upholder of social norms not to talk to us or nod kindly at us or even to look at us until we could demonstrate that we were comfortable and capable in this sort of expensive literary ceremony — perhaps at The Atlantic’s 130th anniversary party (which I wasn’t invited to anyway). I looked at her intelligent, appealing profile, and in the midst of my sincere discomfiture (“shitting and pissing in terror,” as William Burroughs might say) I was grateful to her, for my now-wife and I now had a story to tell: Miss Manners had cut us dead. We backed away. I spotted Tim O’Brien. “There’s Tim O’Brien!” I hissed. “Finally somebody I know!” We hustled over. He’d forgotten me. He (Going after Cacciato, National Book Award, 1979) had been one of the faculty in a two-week writer’s conference at Berkeley in 1981; I’d been a student in Donald Barthelme’s class at the same conference. “So why are you here?” Tim O’Brien asked, rather brutally.

I told him we lived in Boston and that I’d had some things in The Atlantic. He nodded. We all looked around, nodded approvingly at the hors d’oeuvres, looked around again. A feeling of major literary power was in the room, but it was difficult to locate it in any one person. “Is Updike here?” I asked.

Tim O’Brien said something like “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

“I haven’t either.”

My now-wife shook her head: she hadn’t seen Updike either.

“Bellow’s supposedly here,” said Tim O’Brien.

“Yes, so I heard,” I said. “I was wondering about Updike, though. They would have invited him, don’t you think? I mean he had a story, ‘Pygmalion,’ in the magazine fairly recently.”

Tim O’Brien thought Updike probably would have been invited. And then he dropped his bomb. “I go golfing with Updike.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we go golfing. It’s kind of nice. But he has one rule: no talk about books.”

We nodded — wise, very wise. Updike didn’t make an appearance at the party, but this short exchange with Tim O’Brien, especially coming just after our devastating but dine-out-on-able failure with Miss Manners (who functioned allegorically for me as the bouncer at the porte cochere of the cultural establishment), was more than enough literary ferment for one evening. I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn’t written a book of any kind, and didn’t know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O’Brien. That “astounded” ball and the “divot the size of an undershirt” in Updike’s golf essay that had made my mother laugh so hard were what had first switched my attention from music to writing. I was clubable! And I knew that he had read me, because the year before, an editor at The New Yorker wrote me saying that Updike had seen my story there and had asked who I was. And now, by 1982, with a full four short stories published, I thought my writing could plausibly claim a peak metaphorical infusion rate closer to Updike’s own than Tim O’Brien’s (though I had scarcely read O’Brien then). It was true that I hadn’t done anything in that line anywhere near as good as Updike’s description of the large block of ice in Rabbit, Run, with its eraser markings leading the eye deep into the white exploding star at the center, or the “cool margins of the bed” in The Centaur, but that, and not the expert storyteller’s pacing of Going after Cacciato, was clearly the direction I was going to improve in if I improved at all. The metaphors I came up with might well turn out to be “pushed,” in the very worrisome adjective Updike used in a review of Blue Highways, but there were going to be lots of them, at least at the beginning. (The metaphorical sense, along with the flea-grooming visual acuity that mainly animates it, fades in importance over most writing careers, replaced, with luck, by a finer social attunedness — although in a story from 1987 [or rather 1986—“The Afterlife”] Updike has a tossed-off description of an excitable horse’s “gelatinous” eyeball that still outsees everyone else writing.) But wasn’t the very gulf of method that separated O’Brien and Updike the point, I asked myself? If Updike was going to choose a golf-buddy from the ranks of existing writers, relative recognition or merit or promise aside, wasn’t he more likely to choose someone whose bag of tricks was different enough from his own to keep that natural rivalrousness, that “wariness,” as much at bay as possible?

It may seem incredible, given how little I had published and how bad it was, that I could have even idly theorized as to why Updike wasn’t making an effort to seek me out, but I did. I was puzzled as well by his need to golf with a writer. One of the things I had admired about him was his deliberate self-removal from New York, and his unwillingness to participate in writer’s conferences or accept academic appointments or get himself involved in that whole tragic, talent-draining process whereby writers cluster together to attract aspirants who pay big money in exchange for some chumminess and advice (meanly I call it tragic, when I had been very willing to write out a check for hundreds of dollars in order to gain the audience of Donald Barthelme, and I had had a wonderful time!): yet here Updike was seeking out another writer to play golf with. It was that frigging National Book Award, I thought: that was the ticket into his esteem. But this was ridiculous. There were many explanations, aside from Tim O’Brien’s simple likability. Updike was perhaps even then working on the essay about his pro-Vietnam-war activities, and he might well have been interested in getting to know somebody articulate who knew as much about Vietnam firsthand as O’Brien did. He could have already done the nonliterary golf-buddy thing and found that even with a strict prohibition against bookchat, even if they only talked about cars or the resale market for dredged golf balls or urban renewal programs, a writer was a more engaging companion to clump from hole to hole with than some division manager from Digital. Still, it was this anti-bookchat rule that especially focused my resentment. “Yup, we’re going to pretend we’re two regular guys,” is how I first interpreted it. Imagine having a rule of conversation. Jeezamarooni! If I were out there with Updike on the fairway right now, and he had laid down that rule, I would, between bogeys, be coming out with nervous snickering references to Richard Yates and Patrick Süskind and Julian Barnes, just to test his tolerance of me as a golf partner — just to see if he would make an exception for me.

And yet of course I saw why the prohibition was necessary. When you spend a fair amount of time writing about other people’s books, or making sure to steer clear in your own books of images or scenes that you remember from other people’s books, you naturally don’t want in your off hours to cover the same ground with all the diminishing slackness and imprecision of conversation. You’re trying to be as different as possible from everyone else, as Frost more or less said, and you don’t want any influences to travel back and forth in advance of the demonstrable influences you supply and receive in the public world of print. (Plus there must be a kind of small thrill in feeling the power in yourself to be able to set a rule of conversation: feeling the unsettling authority of saying, “But Tim, I do think we should follow one rule …”) If I were golfing with Updike this week, would I tell him, “Hey, I’m reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, and you know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realize that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years! The guy does everything — dialogue, scenic pageantry, wit, pathos, everything!” I would want to tell him this, but I wouldn’t, I don’t think, because what if by some chance Updike hadn’t read Hollinghurst yet, and what if my say-so, the last of many, was just enough to make his eye pause on this book in the Vintage catalog and order it, and what if he read it and its presence in his mind caused him to shift his writing ever so slightly in a particular direction either toward or away? Or, alternatively, what if Updike found me irritating enough as a person that my ravings about Hollinghurst dimmed his own previous excitement about the book? Would I want to have tampered casually with his literary development, his fate, in that way? And what if he mentioned that he’d been rereading Shaftsbury and liking him, or rereading Wallace Stevens and liking him less? For months afterward, this bit of inside information would be the first thing I would think of in connection with these artists: I would read them with a slightly different eye, and I might as a result write differently. So no talk about books. But it was much worse than that. Could John Updike and I talk about cars or self-doubts or the weather? About the psoriasis we have in common?

Say he and I were golfing, and I was getting the hang of it a little better, and the birds were supplying their own spatial illusions to the sound track, and I suddenly came out with “Wow, John—golf. Now I see why you like it so much. It’s an externalized battle with your skin. Your job as a golfer and as a psoriatic is to keep from drifting into the rough, right? You want to arrive as efficiently as possible at the finest, smoothest section of grass!” Say I said this fairly dumb thing to him one balmy afternoon. (Crossing my fingers, in doing so, in the hope that it wasn’t something he himself had written that I had forgotten.) And what if a few years later he has occasion to write another golf story — some masterfully pastoral Byezhin Meadowy kind of thing — and the golf-course/psoriasis parallel occurs to him then, and he drops it in in a perfect spot, without the exclamation point, improved almost beyond recognition. Will I be happy to read this? Maybe eventually, but it will take some adjustment. As I say, I’m a psoriatic myself, and though Updike has said lots of what can be said about the disability, there is more, and there might come a time when I would want to have a scaly-rinded character imagine himself or herself as smooth as a golf course. So no — I couldn’t talk about psoriasis with Updike: I’d be too scared of hearing something from him that I would itch to use before he’d used it, or of tempting him with a flake or two from my experience that I would want to keep for myself — or of hearing him say something similar to something I’d already noted down and was planning to use, and having my note killed by his passing mention. And I would sense his detection of all this ridiculous guardedness on my part: I would see him smiling to himself after I had begun to say something animated and then had halted abruptly and switched to a conventional formula because I had realized midway through that what I had been intending to say was possibly interesting enough for me to want to use somewhere, or because I wanted to hustle him into thinking I was denser and more conventional than I was, so that he would relax and talk more freely, and so that I could surprise him later, making him think to himself when he read some piece of mine, “Hm, I guess that Nick Baker is not to be underestimated.” Our very guardedness and mutual suspicion, or at least my suspicion (or hope, rather) that the suspicion was mutual, would be an undertone of the outing that both of us might have our eye secretly on, to see whether there was anything in it that had an unsaid quality that could be transported effectively into print. Perhaps I would come right out and allude to my awareness of his potential wariness of me, just to see what happened, and he would reply that if there is wariness it is a middle phase and passes, as does the more specific hate you can feel toward young bright unsaddened people running up and down the aluminum ladders of their own insides (in Forster’s phrase) with no storm windows yet to change, no duties or sins to bend their chirping ambition in interesting ways, and that in fact you begin to take a sort of nostalgic joy in seeing that unrefined unwise reputationless rawness start to sort itself out, and you begin to find some amusement in watching a young writer prepare himself to do the small bold thing in the elder writer’s presence, such as I had just done in alluding to his wariness, and that if I wrote with pretend farseeingness about my egotistical thought that he had a wistful wish to be me, he would counter by writing about his self-disgust at the pretense of generousness he’d shown in so breezily pretending that he didn’t care whether I appropriated the complexities of that afternoon game of golf or not, and about the feeling you can have of delegating a piece of experience to someone, happy in the knowledge that though the idea of a biography’s being produced about you is horrifying, the idea that someone is catching you in action from a perspective you’d never yourself have is pleasing. Quickly there would be a screech of feedback and the whole discussion would have to be cut short and I would be carted or caddied quickly off. Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we’re wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we’re not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can’t flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren’t in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we’ve each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies like Midnight Run or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or The Pope of Greenwich Village when we need a shot of the old camaraderie. (Updike catches some of the false jocularity of reunions in a story about two ex-Harvard Lampoon types in New York, one of whom is angling for a job, in “Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow.”) And yet I want to be Updike’s friend now! Forget the guardedness! Helen Vendler once asked him in an interview about decorum and propriety and taste in poetry, and in particular about the sexual poems in a certain collection that seem a trifle indecorous. Updike said in reply that poetry is experienced in private, and that life is too short to worry about propriety. [His actual words, soaring miles above my ratty paraphrase, are: “I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”] Well, life is too short to worry about a lot of things — reserve, tact, the advisability of saying in an essay that you are so miserly with your perceptions that you hesitate to imagine yourself golfing with another writer for fear that he would use something you said and that even so you still want very much to be friends with him. I am friends with Updike — that’s what I really feel — I have, as I never had when I was a child, this imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation. Which leads me to a point that seems worth making. Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain. If Hippocrates or Seneca, whom I know nothing about, says that art is long and life is short, it means little to me: it is merely an opinion some strangers have had and others have emptily quoted. But if Updike says that life is short, I feel the strength of it with something close to shock. The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true. Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you’ve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

In writing this down, however, with the usual disappointment at the pallor a once pressing idea finally assumes on my page, I notice that my account is incomplete: there was in reality a preliminary stage to my appreciation of Updike’s truth that life is short. In 1985, an ex-professor put my name on the mailing list of writers to receive Guggenheim applications. I took the packet of cream-colored paper that came in the mail very seriously, because the Guggenheim was the only philanthropic grant that Updike had made use of: he wrote The Centaur with its help. (And I can’t help suspecting that the odd artsy mythological chapters in that book, which is elsewhere so packed with visual delights, are there not only to introduce what he called “novelistic space,” that feeling, as I understand the term, of having two or more processes going on concurrently among which the reader is shuttled, so that he forgets a little of each process in his exposure to the others, and feels the delight of re-acquaintance, and doesn’t grow rebellious as quickly, but are there also to show the Guggenheimish world that this book is not merely a book about a kid worrying about the health of his father during a cold snap, which we couldn’t possibly take seriously as the outcome of a financial award, but is a book fully aware of the myth criticism that so appealed to fifties literary folk. [I could not be more wrong in this theory: Rabbit, Run, it turns out, not The Centaur at all, was the book he wrote with a Guggenheim.]) But I was sure I wouldn’t win the award and I was feeling very doubtful about my writing in general and disliked the idea of asking several people to write recommendations — that awful moment I imagined in the phone call where the exchange of news falters and you say, “Another reason I’m calling is …” and suddenly your real motives are laid bare: you’re looking for a recommendation, that’s all, you wheedling wretch, you don’t really miss the professor or want to tell him how much you still think about his class, you just want further help in your dishonorable little battle up the grass-blade toward some sort of eminence. Besides, the application would only be complete and worth sending, to my mind, if Updike was one of the ones who’d written a recommendation, and there was no way I could write Updike and ask him to write me a recommendation based on the things I’d had published. So I called my father-in-law (who’d won two Guggenheims in history) to ask him what he thought about going through with the application. I told him that I hated to ask people for recommendations and that I doubted Updike would write me one and moreover (my voice here took on a fluting, over-earnest tone) I was still in a very preparatory stage and I didn’t feel I knew what I was doing well enough yet to deserve a Guggenheim. He said that it was virtuous of me to think that way (generously not pointing out that I was much more pleased and unperplexed by the appearance of this application in the mail than I pretended, though including an almost imperceptible edge of chastisement in his voice, there if I wanted to hear it, at what he easily saw was my transparently false modesty), but he said that if I thought that way for too long I’d “end up in heaven.” I laughed, but I felt a moment of panic or rebuke — my father-in-law had always said that things had come early and easily for me, and now he was implying that I was getting older and putting things off and pretending to bemoan my imperfect apprenticeship. His voice, saying essentially, “But if you wait too long to apply for a Guggenheim your life will be over and you’ll have done nothing,” had the force it had because it was his voice, and because I fancied I could detect in it the always compelling tincture of veiled self-reproach: he regretted not writing more himself (so I crudely interpreted), regretted the wasteful rhythm of the academic year, which demands that half the summer be spent re-familiarizing oneself with the excitement one was just beginning to feel about one’s chosen project by the end of the summer before, regretted how extremely much pleasure teaching itself gave him, even though he knew that its static sparks of eloquence robbed him of some of the stored voltage necessary to finish his next work of history; and his voice, in this sampled and stored and overinterpreted version, was what I mixed into the voice I heard a few years later when I read Updike saying, with that tone of almost impatient fatigue that often marks the high point of an interview with a writer, that life was too short to worry about propriety: in a momentary synthetic unison, these two men, one on the phone and the other on the page of Hugging the Shore, put a constructive fear of death in me. (I didn’t apply for a Guggenheim, though.) Before you can accept it as true, you need to have the sensation, the illusion, that something is said directly to you, or that the idea has occurred to someone who resembles you enough to serve as your emotional plenipotentiary. And what a writer of an essay like this is trying to do, it now seems to me, is to cheat in a sense on this process: I’m trying to convince the reader that I’m such a stone-washed article that even lacking a recognized corpus or a biography or a remembered history of dorm-cafeteria conversation, or any known self outside of the one chunk of me here offered, I am somebody you know: we’ve been through the wars together, eaten at McDonald’s, submitted to base motives, sweated through social gatherings, and so when I propose to tell you that John Updike is a genius, for example, my contention will have some trustworthy impulse of convincingness behind it.