U and I: A True Story

6

As I feared, sky has sucked me in. For I had planned, in bringing the last paragraph to a close and in opening up this one, to say that I had a good deal more to say about the whole problem of self-repetition and self-influence (a problem which we can be sure that Updike takes seriously, since in a review of a late Borges collection he points out that the blind belletrist quotes the same passage from Chesterton in three separate places), but that my wife gave me Thomas Mallon’s brand-new Stolen Words for Christmas (yes, it is already December 28, 1989, and I have only gotten this far in this essay!), which includes (page 140) a brief discussion of the topic of self-repetition that though incomplete neutralized my own parochial sense of novelty; moreover (I planned to say) I was beginning to comprehend, by extending Updike’s notion of novelistic space into the wider dimension of oeuvral space, that not everything I had mounded up to say under a given head needed to be said in one spot: I could leave some images or observations unshoehorned and trust that they would clamor their unexpected pertinence later on; later on in the same essay or book, or later on in a different essay or book — although I was also beginning to see that by putting aside some of what you had to say for later (out of simple consideration for the reader’s already redlining threshold of vexation and puzzlement, and out of the desire to demonstrate that you were not so compulsive that you couldn’t avoid narrative clogs when you wished to), you condemned yourself to the appearance of another sort of compulsion, in that readers would be sure to assume that your later returns to the subject came about because you were drawn inexorably toward a certain theme, when in truth you would have been delighted never to have to mention it again if there had been any reasonably graceful way to include all of it in one extended shishkebob. For instance (I planned to point out) in writing my second novel I had found that I had more to say about model airplanes and about coins than I could possibly accommodate on its already overburdened chassis: I was distressed to see this; I had to keep telling myself that there would be other occasions — and indeed I found a way to clean out the entire model airplane depository in the essay I wrote just before starting on this piece of madness about Updike, and in this very thing on Updike I have successfully gotten rid of one of the coin sequences left over from the novel. But at a price: I now will seem to be obsessed with model airplanes and coins, when on my scale of obsessions they are very low. (Even to call Updike an obsession — my wife first used the word on me in this connection in 1987—overstates it; for though I think about Updike a lot I seldom read him: surely a true obsessive would read all the available works.)

More disheartening still, in finding a stable environment for the last coin sequence (me at McDonald’s reading James after the five hundred pennies) I find that I also offer the reader the opportunity to accuse me of being overinterested in scenes in which a person eats and thinks at the same time: my first book describes a thoughtful lunch hour, and my second is about a man giving a bottle to an infant while again thinking away, and now I have a guy (really and truly me this time, though only a tiny transverse slice of me) chewing on a Big Mac and reading about James’s stream of thought. I don’t want my work to have this prominent “philosophical snack” motif! And yet the repetition of this type of moment was unavoidable: I had to balance the relief of consigning a large scoop of my residual coin-moments to this essay (there is, happily, only one more large scoop to go) against the possible career harm of seeming to imply by this recurrence that I want above all to be remembered in the act of chewing. Relief won in this case. But I am at a very delicate point in my development, it now occurs to me: the point where you decide that some thematic repetitions aren’t going to be thought of as unwelcome evidence of a failure to strike out in new directions but as lifelong themes: like the “Nina”s hidden in every Hirschfeld, or the moths and fritillaries that come back in Nabokov, or Updike’s sweetly graphic sexual infidelities, or Melville’s sea. The question is, is eating-and-thinking going to be my “Nina” or not? I hope not.

So I meant to go on to say this about repetition, treating it slightly more fully than I have been able to in renouncing my intention to treat it, but that word “sky” has unexpectedly stopped the forward flow of my essay: not exactly with the lethal bottomlessness of the simple concrete word, but with that more general hypertrophied word and phrase reverence that has much to do with flash cards, and which has proven to be, in fact, one of the worst hazards of the sort of criticism of Updike I’m engaged in here, a style of book chat that, in the unlikely event that it has not already been recognized and does not already have a name, might be called something sexy like memory criticism, or phrase filtration, or closed book examination. If it is merely a subset of the “reader response” school (which I know nothing about), or is a variant of the old Paterian impressionistic criticism or of Arnold’s touchstone technique, fine — but if it is something new, I’m raising my flag now! Nobody can take this supreme moment from me, if it is a moment! (“Too clever by half” is a charge I’ve never understood. Who originated it and why has its unambitious ratio persisted to damn so effortlessly all of our wildest upsurges?) Leave aside the other strains in this essay, such as the interleaving of autobiography (familiar enough, perhaps), and the insistence that what I’m doing be done on a living writer: memory criticism, understood as a form of commentary that relies entirely on what has survived in a reader’s mind from a particular writer over at least ten years of spotty perusal, is possibly a new and useful way of discussing literature. Its risks are (1) that it depends to an unusual extent on whether you like me and whether consequently you have some faith that even though I may remember an entirely different set of phrases from Updike than you remember, you feel that you could conceivably have remembered them yourself, had you read what I had read by Updike in the order I read it, and were Updike as important to you as he apparently is to me. And (2) if it is indeed a new style of interpretation, it promises to open a depressing flood of bad work that strings together a couple of three-word phrases by a certain writer and a few “Well, I remember”s. And (3) this abuse will in time bring about another deadly wave of close reading in reaction, for of course instead of pulling you back to the books under discussion, this approach pulls you away from them, demanding that you not consult them while you are letting your thoughts clarify. And (4) it assumes that the filtration processes of memory are less chancy, more dependably self-consistent, than they really are. Those are the risks. But it is a lot of fun, and it offers a nice pseudoscientific thrill as you begin to treat your haphazard book-memories as a fund of data on which to operate, and it costs nothing, takes no great reading, and forces a degree of honesty from the critic that might, for about five minutes, be beneficial. But no, no — I don’t want it to happen: the fame that comes from having touched off or reinforced some humanistic trend, and especially from having supplied a phrase that too succinctly sums up the whole approach, is not the kind of slow-burn fame that a novelist needs to keep developing. Manifesto-fame kills. I don’t want to see the techniques of “closed book examination” applied to any other novelist. I want this essay to be the end of it. I hate myself for trying even jokingly to increase its market penetration with a cheap name. It reminds me of Gilbert Ryle’s employment of the term “category mistake” in debunking the existence of mental entities — the phrase was too powerful for its own good, it fell into the wrong hands, spread too quickly, destroyed any helpfulness it may at first have helped disseminate. Sexy names are so often Germanic noun pairs or trios: category mistake, paradigm shift, catastrophe theory, reader response criticism, And now something like deprived recall analysis? No! Fight it off. When a snippet like “vast dying sea” sticks in your memory even when shorn of its casings, this durability is a good thing, because the phrase is intrinsically interesting and funny — the foundling survives on its own merits, not on its promise. “Paradigm shift,” on the other hand, never moved anyone to tears (and I will instantly admit that it is a good deal snappier, more catchy, than my own attempted catchphrases): it was all promise, it offered the prospect of infinite applicability, of normally reticent colleagues from a hundred distinct disciplines singing in one great lusty chorus. The fate of “paradigm shift” rises or falls with every subtle or crude application of the theory it stands for; whereas “vast dying sea” is self-reliant, and it can only be harmed by my unrelenting overquotation. But if I were an American academic, I don’t think I would be able to resist turning my memory-filtered approach to Updike into a method. I would check hurriedly to be sure that Walter Benjamin or one of the Frenchmen hadn’t done it all already, and if it looked as if it was indeed sufficiently new, I would sketch out a first footnote that found hints of my new approach in Updike himself, when he says that Eliot’s plays fade, “as most plays do,” but lines of his poetry have a grim ability to hang on [“… what lines of poetry between Yeats’s late poems and the verse that Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote from within the shadow of death burn deeper, better remember themselves, than Eliot’s?”]; and in Henry James, when in the midst of his Hawthorne study he offers an account of how as a boy he first heard the tide The Scarlet Letter and felt its power, and how later at a museum someone pointed out a painting on the subject of The Scarlet Letter to him and told him it was about a book he would someday read, and how he first read the opening pages of a middle installment of Madame Bovary: Etude des moeurs near a fireplace in Paris as a teenager and felt the pull of its tide and its style before it was dignified by the salvers of fame; and in George Saintsbury, when he worried that he hadn’t noticed lately the incidental quotations and passing mentions of Smollett which in the world of letters are the principal means we have of knowing the degree of a writer’s “sempervirescence”; and in Anthony Burgess when he praised scenes in Isherwood’s A Single Man for their surprising ability to stay with you; and in Frost, in his potsticker about the poet’s task being to come up with words that “lodge” in the memory — and I would find some other obscurer examples that felt apt and toss them in and perhaps scramble the order so that Updike and James weren’t once again at the top, and I’d say — ah, they all had inklings, they all felt instinctively that the closed book examination of literature was of primary importance, but none of them thought to make it a method. That’s what I might say. But I’m not an American academic. (Harvard’s philosophy department rejected my application for graduate study in 1981—and why? Because I’d taken only three philosophy courses in college, two of these during my freshman year in music school? Because I’d gotten a trilobitic score on the Logic and Reasoning section of the GRE trivium? Because my application essay was ten pages of pompous pleading that ended by my misspelling and misusing the word “elenchus”? These aren’t reasons.) I count myself fortunate in being able to extract all the pretend-scholarly pleasure I want out of my method without urging it on anyone else.

In fact, at this very moment I have at my left elbow a rubber-banded pile of three-by-five cards, each holding a phrase I remember from Updike, sorted in alphabetical order by key word. I’m modeling myself on Nabokov’s lovable Pnin, who retires to a carrel with one drawer of the card catalog like a squirrel with a nut — and on Nabokov himself, of course, who detailed his three-by-five-card method of fictional composition so comprehensively that Gore Vidal said in some essay that he was sick of hearing about it. I have only to pluck out one of these phrase cards at random, such as presided over by a serene and mutual deafness, Updike’s perfect characterization of Nabokov’s and Wilson’s epistolary argument over poetic meter, to feel that I have dots left to connect, and that I am crisply advancing the cause of self-knowledge. [The correct quotation, however, is “derived from a serene and mutual deafness.”] But when I came to the end of that earlier paragraph, with the vastness of the open sky visible through a rent in it, I thumbed through these three-by-five cards in vain: I found I had no simple way back to Updike. I could mention an aerial description I knew from Many Me that goes (in my misremembered version)

Sally became a bird, a heroine. The clouds boiled beneath her, radiant, motionless. For twenty pages of Camus, while the air conditioner nozzle whispered in her hair, something something something

[and in Updike’s real version:

Then Sally flew; she became a bird, a heroine. She took the sky on her back, levelled out on the cloudless prairie above the clouds — boiling, radiant, motionless — and held her breath for twenty pages of Camus while the air-conditioner nozzle whispered into her hair.]

which I remember simply because I was distressed in 1987 to come across the throwaway mention of the air nozzle in Updike after I had resolved to write in detail about my own reverence for it. (The only other mention I knew of was in John Dickson Carr’s 1951 The Nine Wrong Answers, in which it’s called a “little ventilator” that sends “a shaft of cool air on [the hero’s] face.”) But this sky-Marry Me connection led me nowhere useful. Or I could make an imperious sort of modern transition by first citing Updike’s mention of something that John Hawkes had once told him, which was (approximately), “When I want a character to fly, I just say, ‘He flew’ ” (see, I would never have taken this piece of advice to heart if Hawkes himself had said it to me, because Hawkes’s fictional imagery is too gruesome for him to be a possible friend, but transmitted through Updike I have found it very useful), and by then announcing that I was adapting Hawkes via Updike by saying “When I want to make a transition, I just say, ‘I’m making a transition’ ”—but again there was no promise of riches beyond the pass. Or I could simply rattle on about influence, but I felt that I badly needed a break from that.

So I was left with the word “sky”—and as everything I had still to say crowded tighter around this sudden hole in my essay, shouting advice and pointing urgently off in different directions, I began to notice that the sensation of tumbling into a word like “sky” was not much different from the sensation I had experienced already several times in thinking over one or another of Updike’s phrases: set off on three-by-five cards, they now constituted my universe, or rather my dictionary, and consequently each was prone to an alarming inflation. On one card I have a slightly garbled version of Updike’s Picked-Up Pieces politesse toward his fact checkers: “Many the untruth quietly curbed, the misspelling invisibly mended.” Quietly curbed—simple, beautiful, beautiful, simple! I have reduced Updike’s millions of words to these few flash cards, and like the disembodied idioms that are projected behind the Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, the isolates I have rubber-banded together can rapidly become too incantatory to retain their standing as exemplars of grace.

But I can always stop flipping through them; I can always leave the rubber band undisturbed: really it is only the physical availability of the three-by-five stack, the fact of it at my elbow, that I need, since it sustains the temporarily pleasurable illusion that I am a graduate student in some delightfully narrow (but fully accredited) course of study and research. As a matter of fact, on the night I first thought of rationalizing my Updike memories on file cards (December 5, 1989), I had an unusually complete dream in which I enrolled in a high-powered Melville seminar at a prestigious university. I caught a glimpse of some of the other seminar participants on registration day: they were all young women, likable-seeming, plain, disturbingly intelligent and well read. I hurried to the dream’s bookstore because I knew almost nothing about Melville and feared humiliation, and I found there a slipcased edition of a slim green and black biography of the author by V. S. Pritchett that I was amazed to see was part of the long-defunct “English Men of Letters” series. Opening it, I thought I saw a copyright date of 1888, but giving it a moment’s thought, I knew I must have misread the century, since Pritchett is still alive, and for him to have written such a book in 1888 would make him at least a hundred and twenty years old now. I pulled it out of the slipcase and opened it; I came to a page that was very thick, like those pretend books you can buy from Barnes & Noble whose interiors have a big hole cut in them to store valuables: there was a printed warning saying “Punch Bound,” and I realized that I was looking at something very similar to the back of a pop-up or “turn and learn” children’s book page, where the rivets and tabs and sliding mechanisms of the understructure are fully disclosed. As I began to turn this resistant page, I saw a soft white whale-tail begin to emerge, made from a three-quarter-inch pile of Kleenexes cut into a tail shape; when I opened further, the rest of the bias-folded cetacean, made out of the same thickness of brand-new Kleenex, rose out of the book and straightened itself out. It seemed odd that the young Pritchett would have felt it necessary to resort to a pop-up to demonstrate what a white whale looked like, but I nonetheless admired the oddity, and I thought that the book, though expensive (thirty-nine dollars), would appreciate dramatically in value because of this feature. I decided I had to buy it: the promise of Pritchett’s careful, unbaroque prose applied to a sloppy but brilliant American like Melville was very exciting, and its lack of critical jargon would serve as a useful corrective to the Melville seminar, filled with supersmart grad students who had read ten times what I had read. I had some trouble getting the Kleenex whale to fold away properly back into the book, and I felt once again the familiar sadness about display items, which in abetting the sale of identical but sealed versions of themselves are treated so carelessly by shoppers that they will never find a buyer of their own, and as a result I decided that I would not put the demo edition back on the shelf and buy the unopened one, but would buy instead this very one I had already fingered, despite the crumpled tail. How exciting it was to be beginning an English seminar after all these years, and after all the scorn I’d felt toward the academic study of literature! And how exciting that all the smart grad students would have read the latest American biography, while I would have the principal events of Melville’s life funneled through old Pritchett’s natty English mind! As I turned toward the cash register, I woke, feeling for once that the term “well rested” had meaning. And that morning, still under the grad-student spell, I located in my office an unopened packet of three-by-five cards that I’d bought several years earlier, having seen them in a stationery store and thought, I’ll never use these guys, but I have to own them anyway. When I was twelve, I saw my mother use a green metal box filled with three-by-five cards in connection with some course she was taking for her master’s degree, and when my sixth-grade teacher told my reading group that we ought to start “building” our vocabularies by writing the definitions of unfamiliar words down as we came across them, I asked my mother for a similar green box and some cards of my own, which she bought for me. I placed the box on top of my desk at school with the clean sense of starting out on a project: coin collecting had lasted two weeks as a hobby, model-airplane building had lasted two years — but now, in word collecting, I thought (mistakenly) that I had found something superior, more permanent, than either of these. For several days I carried the green box back and forth on the school bus, in case I came across a notable word at home, but it was awkward to hold, and I was finding anyway that I was fussy about what words I wanted it to contain. So far the only ones that had seemed worthy of the box were “aesthetic” and “antidisestablishmentarianism,” and the latter I wrote down reluctantly, because it was such a hackneyed longie. I told my father about my new hobby, and I asked him if he knew any interesting words. I was eating an orange, I think. He said, “Sure! You’re starting with a? All right. Here’s a word that sounds like aesthetic: ascetic. You know that one?”

“I think I do,” I said. But I didn’t.

“Ascetic means self-denying. You forgo pleasures. And then there’s a word that sounds like ascetic, which is acidic.” That one was too easy; I wrote it down to humor him anyway. I didn’t want more. But he was on a roll. “And there’s one other, that sounds like acidic—there’s one other you might find interesting,” he said. He told me one more word. Occasionally, years afterward, I would picture this long-lost green hinged box (it sat on my desk that whole school year but my vision of its being packed with well-thumbed vocabulary cards never materialized — the cards stayed blank; I added almost nothing to it after my father’s contributions) and I would recall my father giving me that graduated series of near homonyms, and I would try to resurrect what the last word had been. Hassidic? Asymptotic? Once you decide on a profession, you riffle back through your past to find early random indications of a leaning toward your chosen interest and you nurture them into a false prominence: so it was naturally very important to me, as a writer on the make, to have this sixth-grade vocabularistic memory in its complete form. It was still incomplete, however, when on December 5 I found the unopened, plastic-covered packet of Oxford Index Cards (“10 °Cards, 8 pt. Standard Grade, manufactured and distributed by Esselte Pendaflex Corporation, Made in USA, Item no. 31”) and began, with an immoderate sixth-grader’s delight, to copy down my store of remembered Updikean phrases. Above the single candy-stripe of the magenta line I wrote down the quotation, as well as I remembered it; below, on the blue pin-striping, was the source, if I knew it, and the date and time I made the card, and what number it was in the total sequence, and any other notes I felt called on to make. I saw myself sorting this deck in tricky ways; shuffling it repeatedly to attain a veracious stochasticism; checking individual cards off in several colors and with several attractively cryptic check marks (green circled x’s, little blue spirals, long and short arrows to indicate linkages with other cards); flipping through them at high speed in spare moments, like a language student studying for a final; laying them all out side by side on the rug and playing some sort of game of concentration with them. I very much wanted them to become dog-eared. I wanted to get good at wristily doubling the rubber band around them when I had finished with them for the day. But I half knew at the outset that they would prove less useful than the initial pleasure of filling them out would lead me to expect — and in truth they haven’t been helpful, except, as I say, as a physical presence. Many of the quotations I use here I didn’t write down on cards, and many of the ones I did write down on cards I didn’t find a place for.

But never mind! That very day, December 5, after blowing most of the morning making out cards and rereading what I’d written of the whole essay up to that point, I was finally able, with Updike’s help, to complete the memory of my father’s three vocabulary words. Here’s how it happened. I stood in front of the microwave in the kitchen in a state of growing disappointment and self-doubt, sure that this essay was a failure. It was much too long, for one thing. The editor of The Atlantic had agreed to a length of seven to ten thousand words, and he had warned me specifically that if I sent them something of twenty or thirty thousand words they just wouldn’t know what to do with it. “A long piece eats up so much space in the magazine,” he said. “And if it’s on a subject that a reader isn’t interested in, he thinks he’s gotten gypped for that whole month.” Gypping the reader? I certainly didn’t want to be a party to that! So probably The Atlantic would turn it down. Nobly I would refuse the kill fee, since I had not upheld my end of the bargain. Or maybe I couldn’t afford to be that noble. I would undoubtedly sink into a severe depression. I had to have a fall-back plan. I might try to persuade a book publisher to bring “U and I” out along with the model airplane essay and the three quasi-philosophical essays that appeared in The Atlantic in ′82, ′83, and ′84, as long as I could put some disclaimer in the table of contents that the three philosophical essays were vehehehery early work (“Three Early Essays” perhaps, with their dates of publication in parenthesized italics at the end of each, as in Updike’s Museums and Women, and my birth date screechingly conspicuous in the author’s note on the jacket?), or if “U and I” ’s path from A to Z wavered and looped for long enough, I could see whether a publisher might bring it out on its own as one of those books that even Gesualdo-tape-playing bookstores don’t have a satisfactorily standardized set of shelves for: “Essays and Belles Lettres,” or “Criticism,” or “Biography.” [The editor of The Atlantic read the finished essay in February 1990 and called me. “I have the authority to run a piece this long,” he said. “But that’s like saying that the captain of a Pan Am 747 has the authority to take his family up for a quick flight.” A month later he sent me a set of galleys that expertly condensed the essay from forty-five thousand words to thirteen thousand while preserving its general shape. I called him from a pay phone near my dermatologist, nauseous and glum from PUVA therapy pills, and said no: seamless though his version was, most of the things that had made the essay seem worth writing were now gone or uncomfortably contiguous. So we agreed instead that The Atlantic would publish a fifteen-hundred-word fragment, a solution I liked because that way I would not have to refuse directly the overgenerous kill fee for the original essay and thereby get into a disagreement with my agent, who said I simply could not refuse a kill fee—“Everyone will laugh at you if you do,” a disturbing prospect — and the editor wouldn’t have to insist in his courtly way on my taking the kill fee, and my relationship with The Atlantic would be shakily preserved. But why hadn’t I been good enough to hijack that transatlantic 747? Why hadn’t they run it all, made an exception for me and me only — just as The New Yorker made an exception for Barthelme by running all of Snow White in one issue?]

Length wasn’t the essay’s only problem, of course. There was the disturbing question of tone. Beckett’s early short disquisition on Proust had come to mind several times as I wrote (I had looked it up in July or August in a different context and read snatches of it), and now I wondered whether the oddly smartass tone I took in places here might share its quality of unease with Beckett’s book — an unease that arose from intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration combined with an impatience with criticism as a literary form. Updike himself, I recalled, had in an essay neatly maneuvered past Beckett’s exegesis of Proust: “rather acerb,” he’d called it. (The same essay on Proust, by the way, contains one of my favorite things in all Updike, when he mentions that a page or two of his copy of Moncrieff’s translation is stained with drops of his now-alimonied wife’s suntan oil: suntan oil, the thicker exstillation of summer and leisure, crushed from the Palm at the End of the Mind — and I wonder, is this Stevensian sense of “palm” the explanation for why Updike mysteriously changed the title of one of his best early stories from “Walter Briggs” to the less good “Walter Palm” in an eighties trade paperback reissue? — has a Proust-ian viscosity, I think; I envision the near transparency that the drops of lotion must have created in the paper as methylparaben portholes in Marcel’s prose through which we glimpse for a moment the knowable, verifiable life we have now, in America, with spouses and deck chairs and healing sunlight, as opposed to the unknowable life of a homosexual genius in France before the First World War.) And then two neural power lines crossed and I felt a buzz of shorting circuits, for acerbic was the very long-lost vocabulary word my father had given me: aesthetic, ascetic, acidic, acerbic.

The sherbety pucker of “acerbic” makes it a better word in some sentences than the more neutrally spirited “acidic”—I saw that; but once my spike of intense joy in having finally remembered the contents of my sixth-grade vocabulary box passed, what interested me was that Updike had used the elegantly curtailed version of the word: acerb. This is so like him, to prefer words like “acerb” and “curbed” that enfold more mental syllables than they metrically exhibit. I naturally can’t check the date because it would mean opening Picked-Up Pieces, but I would suspect that Updike’s use of “acerb” in that sentence was roughly contemporaneous (give or take a year) with my father’s suggestion of “acerbic” to the sixth-grade me. (The conjunction is coincidental, however: my father is not an Updike reader.) And this sort of timeline matching is, for me at least, one of the basic activities that accompany the admiration of writers of the generation immediately preceding my own: I allow myself to move back from the burbling coffee maker of the present instant along those many linked extension cords of personal identity (rustling twenty-five-foot industrial orange lengths that hurt when you step on them in bare feet, with heavy three-pronged ends; narrower-gauge, permanently kinked white or brown varieties, molded from a cheaper sort of plastic, with a faceted multiple receiving end like a burnt-out brown-stone that stolidly resists the intrusion of the average plug) that lead down to the basement of my simpleminded younger self, back to when I sent off coupons to Charles Atlas from the back of comic books and drew plans of the triangular house-on-wheels I was going to live in (with its tiny kitchen and bedroom/driver’s seat at the forward apex, and the huge chemistry lab occupying all the rest); and then into the surplus sockets along this jury-rigged linear continuity I plug in one by one the flashing dates and tides of masterpieces from those years—Revolutionary Road, Of the Farm, A Severed Head, A Single Man, etc.; and once they are all lit up in Vegas colors, it seems miraculous that I could have lived through that same stretch the first time and not seen or felt any of this buzzing signage. Perhaps you never get over the futile hope that you might be able to rewire your earlier unknowing self so that it was linked from the first to all of those high-voltage parallelisms. Of the relatively few written notes I have made about Updike, the earliest one I’ve been able to find (written when I was twenty-five in the third person, partly inspired by the Updike story [“Flight”] about the self-conscious seventeen-year-old kid who “went around thinking about [himself] in the third person”) attempts this very rewiring. I reproduce it exactly here, misuse of “comprise” and all, with one clarification enclosed in brackets:

6/21/82. Harold, reading Updike’s The Centaur, fell in love with the short stOry that comprised chapter two — he thought of 1963, when the book appeared: the nostalgia for Updike’s feelings, at the beginnings of his career, mixed with his own early memories of the house they moved to, his family, in 1963—he remembered sitting on the bathroom floor upstairs, looking through a Metropolitan Museum calendar (one of his mother’s aunts sent one every year); the numbers 1963 had impressed him then: the specific location in such a wash of millenia — he was sitting with his mouth pressed on his knee, which had an odd taste; now he was so un-flexible he had not tasted his knee for over a decade — a datable memory, a memory of the revelation of date, almost as if that moment marked a Piagetian phase. Yet the interesting thing was the connection of this memory with Updike’s own reliving of his childhood memories, and the ache of wanting to have been him in 1963, and to equal him now — yet knowing that he [that is, Updike] was at twenty five far more polished than Harold was; and this sadness mixed with the comparison between Updike’s mother in Chapter two, and as she appears in the other stories (“Flight”), with his own — the very similar relationship, yet the sense that while Updike was at twenty five fulfilling his special destiny, satisfying the pride of his parents with story after story, Harold’s own path was on a steeper, rockier slope — he felt himself, month after month, defining himself on the losing side of the comparison.

The general whimperiness of this passage of mine, combined with the reliance on B-list metaphors like “wash of millenia” [sic] and “ache” to keep the prose at a higher verbal pitch than its ideas can hold by themselves, has the ring of vulgarized early Updike, whose boy-heroes are sometimes more sensitive and queasier-stomached than one wants them to be. You feel when one of his young men’s GI-tracts yet again does some unbecoming acrobatic in reaction to a piece of social unhappiness that a writing teacher at Harvard must have told him that it was a good idea to have the reader get his mood-information through all of his senses, and that dutifully he is applying this distorting dictum to excess; just as in movie after movie whenever the character gets a piece of terrible news the scriptwriter immediately has him or her bend at the waist, grasp the front bumper, and (to use an idiom that understandably caught Edmund Wilson’s ear) “snap lunch”—in laziness resorting to brutally externalized physiology because any subtler sort of core dump is so difficult, cinematically and fictionally, to achieve; and yet hardly do I venture this small criticism when I remember a later character, in “Twin Beds in Rome,” I think, who much more believably than his predecessors gets sick on a maritally crucial vacation and can feel in the initial moment of his illness the entire shape of his stomach within him, an unprepossessing tuber—a magnificent trope, which uses an ugly, earthen, marginally-edible-sounding thing to describe the location of the discomfort it would cause if eaten, and which may owe its existence entirely to the whole unsatisfactory preceding series of youthful indigestions. [To my astonishment, I have not found “tuber” so used in “Twin Beds in Rome” or anywhere else I looked; could it be that I made it up? That it is my own image? Doubtful. In any case, the passing sickness in that story works in a way that the bellyaching in The Centaur does not.] “To the stomach quatted with dainties,” said Lyly, “all trifles seem queasie”; and the moral we might draw from Updike’s early prose is that the perfectly healthy, euphuistic wish to caramelize every crab apple and clove every ham ought not to be accompanied by too keen an interest in the hero’s emotio-gastric status. (I write this, needless to say, during the holidays.)

But here again, here again, I have to call attention to this problem of tone. Is it like me to rope somebody like John Lyly into the present context? No, it is not. Or rather, it is only when I can then call the reference immediately into question by a follow-up act of self-reproach. When Beckett allowed his nervousness about Proust to commandeer his attitude, it made him “acerb,” as Updike duly saw; but when I am betrayed by what I take to be a somewhat similar nervousness — a feeling that the stakes are very high, that everything depends on the quality of my thinking right here, that this essay is the test of whether I should bother to be a writer or not, and yet the feeling at the same time that there is a fatal prematurity in so arranging things, since it forces discipleship and competitiveness to clash awkwardly when with time the two would have arrived at a subtler and more composed relationship — the betrayal takes the form of smirks and smartass falsifications, such as when I spoke earlier of trying to “hustle” Updike on the golf course into thinking I was less perceptive than I was, or when I used faux-naïf expletives like “Jeezamarooni!” or called myself a writer “on the make.” I really must read The Anxiety of Influence as soon as I finish writing this, because the fragmentary idea I have of it keeps steering my approach into oversimplifications. It might even be that two of Updike’s own early characters are in large part to blame for my errantly cocky tone — the convergence of contingent and chronic influences being especially hard to shake off. In the story called “The Kid’s Whistling” a kid disturbs the creative concentration of a retail-store manager by whistling blithely while the increasingly irritated manager tries to finish a sign that says something like “Have a Happy Holiday” [“Toyland” actually] in multicolored tinsel on glue [“Silverdust” on poster paint]. (I reread this story in 1987, ten years after I first read it, remembering only the tide, because I needed to be sure that I wasn’t overlapping Updike’s use of whistling in a scene in my first novel. Such checking to control against overlaps is in my experience one of the main motives for the miscellaneous reading that writers do.) And in another early story, which I read circa 1978 and whose tide I can’t bring back [“Intercession”], an overcheerful buttinsky kid messes up the golf game of a somewhat older, more serious sportsman by his running commentary. The Bugs Bunny/ Elmer Fudd pattern of both stories, though it unquestionably does capture a fractional component of the true nature of my feelings toward Updike, is much too easy to ride out into exaggeration — and I am aware too that people would probably rather hear me be smartass, thereby digging my own grave and taking old Updike down a peg or two at the same time, than hear me be grateful and woozily admiring.

And to the extent that my cockiness is useful to Updike himself — as the whistling turns out to be an essential distraction to the retail manager in the first story, and as the buttinsky golf-kid finally helps the elder golfer in the second story to some more distant green of philosophy that I do not remember — I am pleased to carry on with it, but I have been unusually on guard against this fault lately because of something that happened just this September. I was sent a copy of a review of an Iris Murdoch novel that began extremely unusually by saying, “The arrival of this blockbuster [Murdoch’s The Message to the Planet] interrupted my reading of—” and then mentioned my first novel. The reviewer, who was Jan Morris, held Murdoch and me in explicit opposition: to her I represented up-to-the-minutiae, as it were, while Murdoch stood for a tradition that had been played out and ought to be brought to a close. I have had a literary crush on Murdoch since 1985, so I shot off a letter to her saying how horrified I was by the opening gambit of the review and told her that I thought she was the best novelist we have. (I was telling the truth: Updike is my favorite living writer; Murdoch is my favorite living novelist—although in drawing this distinction I clearly remember how little I liked reading an essay by John Leonard, I think, in The New York Times Book Review in 1978 or so in which he named Updike as one of the five best living American writers but then nastily qualified this by saying that Updike was a better essayist than he was a novelist. It doesn’t work that way: the novels and essays lend reciprocal authority to one another, and in point of fact no essay does outdo Of the Farm.) I ended the letter by saying, “Now you don’t need a philistine schmuck like me to tell you how good you are, but I assure you that not one sentence in the narrow miscellany of mine that Ms. Morris refers to would have been conceivable without your superb and unequallable flights of intellect, and that to mention you and me in the same breath is really a joke.” To this embarrassing gush Murdoch wrote a prompt and gracious response: she said she hadn’t seen the review anyway. I was pained, as all those who send raving letters to writers must be, by the failure of my praise of her to turn me somehow into a better person, and after a few days of rehearsing my shame to myself I pinpointed, while walking from one room to another, its real source. The awfulness of “Now you don’t need a philistine schmuck like me …” had, it turned out, a direct recent antecedent: I had been, I now saw, patterning my letter on the example of a raucous, middle-aged, American woman character in Murdoch’s own strange play The Black Prince. The character was straight-talking and used lots of words in the “schmuck” category, and (as Ms. Deborah Norton played her in late August 1989 at the Aldwych Theater in London) had an impressively loud, theatrical, braying laugh. In writing to Murdoch I felt uncomfortably American, and hence I overplayed my Americanness in the letter by using a tone taken directly from her own American character. And I have made the same mistake with Updike in a number of places here. I fight the effrontery that my essayistic stance seems formally to call for, but because I invariably project Updike’s self onto the heroes of his stories, I have to assign my own projected self the roles that remain — infuriating junior whistler, or bothersome golf-kid, or even, in the case of Of the Farm, the direct role of smart-aleck stepson. When I first read that novel in 1978, I found myself almost indifferent to the mental life of the narrator, and I instead matched myself to and felt jealous of the bright, eleven-year-old, science-fiction-reading child of his new wife. A decade later, the same confusion clearly persists, explaining my use of “Jeezamarooni” and my pretense of being a direct, enthusiastic, slightly crazed, fringe, no-bullshit idiot savant who pipes up in opposition to Updike’s peerless, polished, mainstream, genteel lucidity, when we all know perfectly well that it is not fair to call Updike genteel (I think a capsule reviewer in 7 Days used that loaded word on him pretty recently): he is much too smart, too sneaky, too sexually appetitive, and too mean to fill that bill.