U and I: A True Story

7

Mean? Yes, he is mean. He seems at times to admire meanness — I’m thinking, for instance, of that puzzling sentence of his that always appears on Anne Tyler paperbacks: “Anne Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good.” He favors the sudden devastating zingers that people spit at each other in moments of anger. (In the scene that made me stop reading Marry Me, the husband and wife really do spit, using real saliva, at each other. [Actually the husband says “You dumb cunt” and the wife then spits in his face.]) The mother in Of the Farm hisses extraordinarily sharp things to Joey, the divorced narrator, things like, “You can support one woman, but not two,” and “You’ve stolen my grandchildren from me.” (This second line, which like the first may not exist, especially impressed my mother. In fact, I don’t remember reading it myself; I only remember my mother once citing it to me years ago as an instance of Updike’s perceptiveness about divorce.) In Marry Me, again, he has the protagonist swat one of his sons on the head in the middle of dinner [really in the middle of saying grace], in a creakingly psychological bit of “taking the divorce out on the children.” I hate this. In the carefully modulated dynamic range of a psychological novel, a swat on the head or spit in the face severs (and Murdoch’s A Severed Head may well be behind Marry Me and Couples) the bond with the reader as unpleasantly as something out of a slasher movie. Maybe it really happened — so much the worse for my opinion of Updike. The meanness that first bothered me, though, when I encountered it a decade ago, long before I was married, was in a short story in Pigeon Feathers in which a young husband returns with hamburgers and eats them happily with his family in front of the fire, and thinks lovingly of his wife’s Joyceanly “smackwarm” thighs, and then, in the next paragraph, says as narrator (the “you” directed at the narrator’s wife), “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly.… The skin between your breasts is a sad yellow.” And a little later, “Seven years have worn this woman.” This hit me as inexcusably brutal when I read it. I couldn’t imagine Updike’s real, nonfictional wife reading that paragraph and not being made very unhappy. You never know, though; the internal mechanics of marriages are shielded from us, and maybe in the months after that story came out the two of them enjoyed a wry private joke whenever they went to a party and she wore a dress with a high neckline and they noticed some interlocutor’s gaze drop to her breasts and they saw together the little knowing look cross his unpleasantly salacious features as he thought to himself, Ho ho: high neckline to cover up all that canary-yellow, eh? Updike knows that people are going to assume that the fictional wife of an Updike-like male character corresponds closely with Updike’s own real-life wife — after all, Updike himself angered Nabokov by suggesting that Ada was Vera. How can Updike have the whatever, the disempathy, I used frequently to ask myself, and ask myself right now, to put in print that his wife appeared ugly to him that morning, especially in so vivid a way? It just oughtn’t to be done! It makes us readers imagine her speculating as she read it: “Which morning was he thinking that? He sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast and thinking I was ugly and worn! And I had no idea.” It is not enough for Updike to say that he had to have the narrator be disapproving in the morning in order to protect him from the charge of “smackwarm” oversentimentality that the earlier passage invites (but does not deserve). When it’s believable, sentiment is not a liability; nor would unnecessary cruelty on a subsequent page counterbalance true treacle. If Updike is doing this deliberately, in the belief that a high artistic intent sanctions it, it is just as bad as his doing it unknowingly, unaware that something like this might cause hurt.

The other example, more direct still, that I frequently think of in this connection is when Updike called Phaedra, the small press that brought out Nabokov’s The Eye and Nabokov’s Quartet (which included the supreme description of an Ithacan thaw, “part jewel, part mud,” with the shadows from icicle-drops rising to meet the drops themselves and the “humble fluting” of the garbage cans), a “miserable little bindery.” Such harshness is Nabokovian, of course (though Nabokov, protesting loudly, clearly didn’t think so): Updike instanced Nabokov’s “reflexive contempt” as one of the least attractive things about him (and man did I repeat that perfect adjective over to myself when I read it in a Berkeley library in 1981; I tried to use it in every sentence I uttered—“reflexive” acronyms, “reflexive” demonologies, “reflexive” car chases) — but Nabokov’s hatreds were most of them directed at dead people: Freud, Dostoevski, Zola, etc. It is far more painful, I think, to see Phaedra called “a miserable little bindery” than to see Freud brushed off as a “Viennese quack.” Think for a second of the employees of this firm (I don’t know if it is still in business or not), proud to have lucked into publishing Nabokov and doing a perfectly acceptable job of it, too: think of them coming in to work the day after reading Updike’s needlessly severe epitaph, hanging their heads. They should be praised and cheered on for playing an important part in Nabokov’s publishing history, not held up to ridicule by a Jansonist Knopfer who thinks he is canny about bookmaking because he once worked a linotype machine and knows about widows and orphans. Foremost in my mind, as a matter of fact, as I wrote about the Franklin Library earlier in this essay, was my concern that I was on the verge of subjecting that publisher to the same sort of killing dismissal that Updike had dumped on Phaedra, and I toned down my words a little (though not enough), because, hey, why do that to people? Those who like the Franklin Library should be entitled to like the frigging Franklin Library — why should I cause them to look up at their shelf of monthly classics and suddenly feel doubtful? And those who work for the Franklin Library should be entitled to feel some pride in doing so. Think of the thousands of helpful dollars that the several Franklin combines — mint, porcelain, whatever — spend on magazine advertising: for that transfer of wealth alone they deserve our support. I do contend, though, that making fun of (not “poking fun at,” please) the Franklin Library’s binding and gilt is slightly more defensible than calling Phaedra miserable, since Phaedra was the only publisher of certain of Nabokov’s books, whereas the sole reason for the Franklin Library’s existence is to offer expensive, fancy versions of works that are for the most part available in other editions.

Fine. But would I know to go easy on the Franklin Library if Updike hadn’t been so hard on Phaedra? He teaches even in his transgressions. Would I know to try always to forgive Updike’s flaws if he hadn’t treated his sometime hero, Nabokov, so peremptorily? In a review of Despair, Updike criticizes Nabokov for frittering away time on this sort of translation of early work when the world awaited another masterpiece [it’s really a review of Speak, Memory: “… instead of composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to Pale Fire, [he] fusses with backward-looking projects.…”] — and Updike’s scolding seems woefully short on perception, considering that he had by then been in the business for at least fifteen years and was presumably well aware of the varieties of unhappiness (including reviewer-instigated unhappiness) and simple distraction or boredom or fatigue that can disrupt the rhythm of novel production, and especially considering that around 1961 he had himself gone through, as we now know from several hints here and there, such as in his introductory note to Marry Me [no, his introductory note to a story in Burnett’s This Is My Best, reprinted in Hugging the Shore], a time of fear that he would never write again. (The sexual revolution disrupted and enriched the middle of Updike’s writing career; the same might be said for the emigrations and gaps and second winds that the Bolshevik revolution imposed on Nabokov — but that is a sort of 80 percent rhetorical reviewery comparison that I never like reading; it is pleasant to do it, though, I must say.) And when Ada finally did arrive, Updike did such a number on it in his review that he felt compelled to explain in the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces that he writes faster than he reads (I’m not sure I understand what that gnomistry means, but I like it) and that therefore he may have grown impatient with some of the longer books he had to cover, such as Ada. Even the relatively good “cause for celebration” [no, “let us all rejoice”] review of Glory suddenly presents the charge that the book “never really awakens to its condition as a novel, its obligation to generate suspense.” Can you imagine Nabokov soaking in his Geneva bathtub, squeezing a sponge of warm water over his head, an act he claimed (in that same Tri-Quarterly tribute) was one of the keenest pleasures of his later days, and then, as the water cooled on his face and the instant of dropleted bliss moved on, suddenly having the plug of his deserved happiness pulled by the memory of pipsqueak Updike’s saying that all that work by himself and his translating son Dmitri fails to generate suspense? Updike is no master of cliff-hanging himself, remember. But at a certain point, I think, having gotten bad silly not-to-the-point reviews enough times yourself, you must finally think, I’ll try it myself — I’ll just see what it is like to charge someone with something idiotic like failing to offer suspense. Updike may have felt that it was a badge of veteran professionalism, of his status as a scarred and battle-seasoned dugong, to thump Nabokov once on the nose for suspenselessness. I can even almost imagine Updike hesitating a moment before typing “miserable little bindery” and then remembering, liberatingly, amorally, some particularly painful phrase that a reviewer had used on him, and his thinking “That dirty little fuckface! Well, I’ve taken my knocks! And The Eye is a poorly produced book and my job is to tell the truth—‘miserable little bindery’ it is!” But we see how cruelty begets cruelty: Nabokov’s uncharitable streak took hold of Updike as he wrote about Nabokov; Updike’s borrowed gall now infects me in my criticism of Updike.

Auden strikingly said (so I read in a review by Cyril Connolly in The Evening Colonnade and I’m paraphrasing and amplifying) that you should not speak ill of any writer, living or dead, to anyone but your closest friends, and absolutely not in print. Simply don’t talk about, don’t give space to, things you don’t like. I think I agree with that, except in cases where the writer has invited criticism by being intemperately critical himself. Thus I was wrong to gripe about Updike’s queasy adolescent heroes a little way back (there may be ex-queasy adolescents who like this quality in early Updike more than any other: why should I introduce an artificial dissatisfaction?), but I was justified in slamming him for slamming Nabokov as not supplying suspense or for calling his fictional wife yellow-skinned in the morning. We don’t want the sum of pain or dissatisfaction to be increased by a writer’s printed passage through the world. His task is simply to delight and to instruct as well as he can. I now think I see, in fact, that the contention that his Active wife is matinally ugly and the contention that Glory fails to generate suspense grow out of one and the same infirmity in Updike’s personality: he is able to discriminate between flaw and beauty too neatly in the things he loves. If you love, or at least like Glory, it cannot fail to do anything — and really, the only suspense a book needs, as Updike by now must know, having tolerantly motored through dozens of much more experimental bad novels for our benefit, is not “What will happen next?” but simply “Will I ever want to stop reading?” Likewise, if you love your wife, her yellow breast-skin can’t make you jump so suddenly to the ascription of an industrial-strength predicate like “ugly.” If on the other hand you dislike or are indifferent to an entity, then all sorts of elegantly shaded discriminations are possible.

From this distance, unable to check anything, with all of Updike’s fiction packed away in boxes for the past year and a half, and most, if read, read years before that, I find that whenever I try to point out a flaw in his writing, I fail. For instance, all right, here is a real flaw — small but worthy of note. He gives each of his male characters a profession, and then he has him think in metaphors drawn from that profession. That’s not right. In the beginning of a story called “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” a man, a photographer by trade, thinks of his baby as having f/2 eyes and skin like developing film. (Skin, not surprisingly considering Updike’s debility, is all over the place in his fiction: the only example I can remember to substantiate this, though, aside from the yellowness above and the baby’s skin here, is the case of the stepson in Of the Farm, who has, we learn, inherited his father’s “sanguine and distant skin.”) A photographer would not so directly use his professional equipment in the metaphors he applied to his immediate surroundings — he would use it sometimes, but not in the first paragraph of the story he told. Film and f-stops are huge real presences to him, and can’t so easily be manipulated as tokens of comparison. Similarly, in Of the Farm, the narrator works in advertising [or “corporate image presentation”], and at one point he thinks, beautifully, while looking at a field, “Flowers … the first advertisements.” Not believable. Something different from this really happens to the metaphorically minded who are immersed in a particular specialized vocation. It is not that they resort to professional imagery when they want to describe something in daily life, such as their child or a field of flowers; it is rather that the specific equipment they use begins to absorb the rest of the world into itself—that in defending the advertising profession at a party, say, they will reach for an analogy to the bee-luring bloom, or when standing in the darkroom, with the film in their hands, they will think with surprise of how similar film is to their baby’s skin. Their profession doesn’t blanket the world; the world feeds its specifics into their profession. But Updike’s only profession has been writing, whose basic equipment is the metaphor itself, and as a result he is less convincing on the direction of metaphorical flow for the white-collar worker than he might be. (The typewriter is his other tool: and notice that in A Month of Sundays he has a nice image of a typewriter ribbon winding itself back and forth [“A little fray in the typewriter ribbon moves back and forth like a sentry”], while he doesn’t, I don’t think, compare a scarf or mummy’s windings or an Ace Bandage to a typewriter ribbon.) I am tempted for a moment to call this vocational metaphorizing habit of his a flaw — but do I really want “The Day of the Dying Rabbit” to begin any other way than as it does, with the f/2 eyes and the filmic skin? I do not, because its beautiful last sentence, as the expiring rabbit is compared to the sinking of photography paper in a trough of developer, depends entirely on it. A superb ending! And do I want the hero of Of the Farm not to think to himself, Flowers, the first advertisements? No, because without Updike’s determination to get some measure of control over his constant instinct to fling outward with a simile by filtering his correspondences through the characters’ offstage fictional professions, he would probably not have come up with this nice little thing, dropped as it is into the middle of a paragraph. My “No”s point, of course, to the defining quality of a major writer: he exists above the threshold of assent, that faint magenta line over which nothing he can do can possibly be felt as a mistake. Anything that causes doubt is either forgotten or is rerouted through some further circuit of forgiveness as more recalcitrant, and hence fresher, evidence of greatness. “I remember,” says Henry James, of his first happy reading of Zola’s La Débâcle, “that in the glow of my admiration there was not a reserve I had ever made that I was not ready to take back.” That’s the right attitude. It isn’t, as Coleridge and other bardolators used to claim, that “not one word” of Shakespeare could be altered without destroying the whole — it is rather that these specific words were the ones Shakespeare happened to choose, and Shakespeare is a great man (though the plays are admittedly difficult to bear on television or on stage), and any particular clinker we might instance disappears into the general pension fund of admiration or becomes, if truly awful, merely interesting, revealing, never simply bad. In an oft-blurbed line, Updike once praised Nabokov for writing prose “the only way it should be written — that is, ecstatically”: if true, this pronouncement ought to hold good for critical prose as well — and yet if I can force myself to utter a fixed doubt about Updike, it is paradoxically that he isn’t ecstatic and immoderate enough about the writers he loves. He is too able to write a rave review that nonetheless includes the obligatory penultimate section of quibbles — his inability to blind himself to Nabokov’s many weaknesses, in particular, and to see them as so much a part of Nabokov’s foreordained self that they must be immediately explained away as part of the complex of traits that gave rise to all that is good in all those books, is the very weakness in Updike I have the most trouble forgiving. Books and life interpenetrate — like the drop of suntan oil on a page of Proust — and yet the measured, unsurprisable tone of many of Updike’s book reviews is incompatible with the grief and turmoil and copulation in his novels. But he is a practicing professional critic, not a one-time closed book examiner as I am, and the duty of the practicing critic is to write about writers out of rhythm with his own passing inclinations and bursts of grateful affection — ecstasy and the assigned bound galleys only fall in perfect step on a few lucky occasions. Nor am I giving sufficient attention to the possibility that by publicly isolating a flaw in a writer he loves, Updike is simply trying to maintain his admiration against the inroads of second thoughts: like the Cat in the Hat scrubbing the bathtub, he offloads an awareness of the flaw onto the rest of us in an effort to restore his own appreciation to a higher state of purity. It may simply be, too, that he is not one of those writers who can gush without correcting himself a moment later: he notes with amused approval Nabokov’s saying (of Joyce) something like “God can that man write!” [I haven’t been able to find this]; but Updike may be better about failures and middling achievements — at seeing what good there is in the fundamentally not so hot. Or perhaps his prevailing coolness is conclusive proof of an enormous secret pride, of the deliberate inward reserve of a man intent on keeping his peculiarities intact over years of selling his literary opinions for money.

From this last vantage, I am the one making the big mistake, broadcasting my limitations, by proclaiming so un-reservedly that Updike is a genius. He doesn’t want to hear me say that. How embarrassing! Nobody wants to hear that right now. But it is one of the telling traits of neotericks who think they have an outside shot at being called geniuses by later equally forward neotericks that they use the word “genius” as if it has a useful meaning. It doesn’t. The word is like the gold confetti [no, “Silverdust”] that Updike’s retail manager was using to make his holiday sign: it is a way of decorating a plain expression of enthusiasm with rarefied twinkly materials and tonalities. But I’ve been using it in this essay because sometimes we need a little twinkle. It disappoints me to see the label confined to obvious candidates like Flaubert or Henry James. Let’s assume that right now, 1990, is as good as it gets. Let’s try genius out on Updike!

Once in June of 1984 I was in the Paperback Booksmith (now Buddenbrooks) on Boylston Street when I picked up a novel by a man named Spackman, who was born in 1905 but was new on the horizon. It had an introduction by Edmund White, I think, whom I paid attention to despite my then homophobia because Nabokov had (so I dimly remembered from a blurb) praised him. I read a little of the introduction: Edmund White said that something in the tone of Spackman’s essays seemed to have the authority of a person like Nabokov, “who knows he’s a genius.” It was an interesting idea, that Nabokov or Spackman or anyone else could know, in quite that definite way, so momentous a truth about himself. Did Edmund White say this of Nabokov because he, White, knew he was a genius himself, or because he knew he wasn’t, or because he wasn’t sure? The possibility of such knowledge made me uncomfortable, because of course I badly wanted to be a genius myself someday and I didn’t yet feel any of that sort of foursquare certainty. But I did recognize the tone White meant: Yeats had it maybe, writers develop it over the years, an air of rangy assurance, built on the knowledge that there are plenty of people who are interested in what the guy has said up till now, and that the hush that has surrounded his past publications is unlikely to be replaced with indifference anytime soon, no matter what he does. This fixed certainty, the feeling of being pretty damned consequential, of tossing a few scraps to the eternally grateful who cluster around the podium, is in some personalities necessary perhaps to the completion of big, complex works. But is it true to say that Nabokov knew, in the sense of having a ground bass of belief that thrummed under everything he did, that he was a genius? He coveted the Nobel a tad too sincerely, I think, for him to be charged with such unwaveringness. (At least, an obituary I read in a Rochester paper said that his failure to receive the prize was one of the disappointments of his later years.) The unpleasant haughtiness of his late prefaces is, to this apologist, an indication of certainty and its morose opposite locked in struggle, as it is with Henry James’s prefaces — even the megalomania of the twice-stroke-deluded and failing James dictating letters to family announcing his plans for fabulous renovations to his several imaginary Napoleonic palaces are sufficient proof to me that the decision to think of himself as a genius was an act of will, an imperial edict to himself, demanding constant fussy renewal and tending and plumping up to keep it from succumbing to doubt. Doubt, anxiousness, the nibbled lower lip, have to constitute the medium for most great works: Nabokov’s emigration to the States and struggle to switch languages and make a living here, to the extent that it temporarily heightened the uncertainty of a constitutionally highly assured man, was what made possible Pnin and Speak, Memory, my two favorites. If, I thought, replacing Spackman on the shelf, Nabokov knew he was a genius back when he was writing Glory at age thirty, he knew it only intermittently: it was a fleeting suspicion, not certain knowledge, something incredibly exciting and jinxing and unthinkable that kept peeping at him over the rise of his best paragraphs, distinct from arrogance, mixed in with probably-nots and bright, leaping maybes. “Maybe I am, maybe I am!” And don’t you have to admit, whatever your doubts are about the utility of the word, that it is pleasing, almost thrilling, to think of our very own living Updike at thirty-two or so writing “Her pointed yellow high-heeled shoes lay beside her feet as if dislodged by a sudden shift of momentum” and experiencing, when he looked at the words he had just so happily and casually combined, that same puzzled, curious, surprised sensation—“Maybe I am!”? I would be overdoing it to claim for so tender and closely observed and unassuming a domestic moment as this shot of his stockinged wife asleep that the passing shift of momentum it adduces is a distant transmuted aftershock of the enormous geophysical disaster of divorce;—that would be carrying it a bit too far, probably. But something big and refractive and vaguely frightening stole ripplingly through the living room that evening in the early sixties, and if it wasn’t Divorce, then it had to be Genius.

I don’t care so much whether from an encyclopedic perspective Updike is or isn’t worthy of the word; what I want, tautologically if that’s what it takes, is to determine to my own satisfaction that when he was just setting out, writing those early novels and stories, he was once in a while startled to catch himself in an idle moment tapping that golden finger at his own breastbone, because I need to know what someone who had plausibly reached such a conclusion about himself, however fleeting, could do with it, and did do with it, in a country and time I understood. Did the story “Leaves,” of which he is justly proud (defending it against the charge that it was mere “lace-making,” he said, “Well, if ‘Leaves’ is lace, it is taut and symmetrical lace, with scarce a loose thread”—and I liked this moment of sharp, slightly irritable confidence enough to remember it), come before or after such a detection, or was that very story first responsible for it? If through Updike I could learn at second hand what that brief, actuating intimation felt like, and nurse along any modest equivalencies in myself, if I could demonstrate to my strictest internal tribunals that I resembled Updike in certain important ways, then, thus inspired, I might just pivot myself one or two handholds higher along the sacred mimetic continuum. But the truth is that I am less like Updike than I used to think. We are both white, Eastern American, upper-middle-class, psoriatic, and heterosexual — but so what? That class includes millions. I feel closer to him than to any other living writer simply because I know more about him than any other living writer, but he writes better than I do and he is smarter than I am and that’s what counts. This observation will surprise no one; it came, however, as quite a shock to me. Ten years ago, in my last semester of college, I was sitting in a dorm cafeteria at Bryn Mawr after lunch flipping through a library copy of The Centaur with my now-wife. We were pointing out passages we liked and ones we thought were no good. Work study students in white outfits were wiping off the tables all around us. “Now see, here he ruins it again!” I said, shaking my head. Scornfully I pointed to a sentence about gasoline shivering into an engine [“He poured shivering gasoline into the hungry motor”] and began criticizing Updike’s habit of using words like “shivering” that were slightly too cutely anthropomorphizing for their contexts. (In the first Rabbit book there is, I seem to remember, a fair amount of skittering and slithering and whatnot, too, none of which I now mind … but how strange. I promised myself when I began this memory-dependent essay that I would not use the tempting phrase “seem to remember,” which Updike uses once or twice in Self-Consciousness, and which appears on page 156 of Speak, Memory and a number of places in the late James, because Updike ought to be able to enjoy the satisfaction of having returned it single-handedly to currency for a year or two at least, and because “seem” is even on its own so treacherously alluring an Updikeanism, especially in the characteristic early uncoupled-copula rhythm of “her blank seemed, in its blinkety blankness and blanketed blinkness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk,” that I always feel a twinge of derivativeness when I resort to it, even though Updike can hardly have a patent on something so widespread, and because anyway “seem to remember” has a mists-of-timey vagueness and veiledness that, so I thought two months ago, made it no good for me — but now look: it has offered itself to my typing fingertips, and they accepted!) After I delivered my criticism, I took note of my annoyed tone and suddenly wondered whether my now-wife was thinking to herself, What’s he done that is so good that he thinks he can freely criticize Updike? So I asked her, “Do you think I’m a better writer than Updike?”

“I think you’re smarter than he is, but that he’s a better writer than you are,” she said.

I nodded slowly, wounded, but pleased by her brave willingness, in the name of truth, to inflict such a wound and to muffle it so cleverly with a giant, distracting compliment. She thought I was smarter than Updike — I could live with that! Smarts, pure octane. I would go to the moon with them. But then, a month or two later, at home before starting my job, I was bothered by an identical doubt after reading some of The Same Door. Wasn’t I a better writer than Updike had been at my age? I asked my mother.

There was a silence.

“But you have to think that!” I said. “I need you to think that.”

“I think you will be a better writer than John Updike — I have every faith that you will be a better writer than John Updike.”

That wasn’t what I needed to know, though; the present test was everything. I went off and lay on the floor near the loudspeakers for three minutes, in acute distress, letting the truth sink in. Then I went back to the kitchen and told my mother what my now-wife had said when I had asked her the same question.

“Well, yes!” my mother then said with evident relief. “Good for her. That’s a good way to think of it.”

And so I got several years of self-propulsion out of thinking that I was, if not a better writer, at least smarter than Updike. When my psoriasis turned inward, arthritizing first one knee and then a hip and ankle joint, I took this to be a manifestation of our difference: he had the surface involvement — style — while I had the deep-structural, immobilizing synovial ballooning of a superior mind. This psoriatic opposition still sometimes helps me to go on, but I am increasingly unsure what it means. It means something: despite all those claims (as in Trollope) that intelligence is a secondary trait in the novelist, I find I am much more liable to perk up when I hear that such and such a book has that particular quality than if lyricism, humor, compassion, atmosphere, period detail, etc., is claimed for it. No word so instantly reinforces my existing sympathies: I almost shouted with joy when I read someone quoted in a TLS a few years ago as saying, quite believably, that Proust was “the most intelligent person who ever wrote a novel.” And I ordered Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library entirely on the strength of another TLS review that ended by saying, “Few novels in recent years have been better written, and none I know of has been more intelligent.” The novel is the greatest of all literary forms — the most adaptable and subspecialty-spanning and roomiest and most selfless, in the sense of not imposing artificialities on its practitioners and letting the pursuit of truth pull it forward — and as a result one recognizes the need to posit a certain variety of accompanying intelligence that is itself more adaptable, more multiplanar, sloppier, more impatient of formal designs, roomier, and more truth-drawn than other kinds, a variety that Proust, for instance, has a whole lot of. But what I have only slowly begun to see, over the past five years, is the dreadful degree of inefficiency and outright waste there is in the transmutation of this invisible and evasive, but real, intelligence into a piece of readable prose. You have to be at least twice as smart internally as you hope to be demonstrably in your writing. Therefore, in judging Updike’s aptitudes that afternoon in the cafeteria, my now-wife was undershooting their true magnitude by half. Updike is a better writer than I am and he is smarter than I am — not because intelligence has no meaning outside the written or spoken behavioral form it takes, but because all minds, dumb and smart alike, do such a poor job of impanating their doings in linear sentences.

Yet there is one specific point of similarity between Updike and me that is more important, from the point of view of my own novelistic ambition, than the others (class standing, geographical origin, race, etc.). Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain perhaps than in any other. This important truth couldn’t hit us over the head until fairly recently: my own generation was the first to grow up with hard-core stars like Annette Haven a mere seventeen-year-old bike ride away, but more important, we were the first generation to grow up exposed to the range and subtlety and complexity of distinctively gay interests and ways of acting. These became common knowledge: they were no longer sexual semaphore among a gay elite, but were now a constant subject of discussion, delight, disgust, amusement, and enlightenment across an entire educated middle class. Our generation, I think it is fair to say, thinks it knows more about the moeurs of gaiety than any group so big and so mixed ever knew before, and armed with this marginally more sophisticated and less sniggering knowledge as we read past minorpieces and masterpieces, we gather hints and leap to conclusions with a confidence that would have horrified Edwardian bachelorettes. And slowly, with dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long-recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren’t gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can’t quite master. Heterosexual male novelists don’t for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing, and indeed of art, aspire, and this big-time grandeur attracts them, but they find, much to their perplexity, that they can’t internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges. At first they blame their false starts and archnesses on their own inexperience and continuing apprenticeship, and they redouble their efforts, but little by little they come to see, at first dispiritedly and then soon righteously, that they “stand outside the tradition”—that it is in a fundamental way alien to them. But they are smart, and ambitious, and hardworking, some of them, and they find that they can bleed off and redirect some of their other proficiencies in order artificially to bulk up the central novelistic understanding they want so badly and don’t innately possess. They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses, War and Peace, Pnin. In a field, then, in which heterosexuals end up so often on the periphery — as the legal counsel, drunken reviewers, imitative followers, codifiers, interpreters, academic apologists — for homosexual greatness, a person like Updike, who can be as tarabiscoté as George Saintsbury or Henry James, as foxily ironical as Lytton Strachey, as stylistically up to snuff as Pater, as metaphorically mother-witted as Proust, as zealously thematic as Melville, and who is thus in the same league at least with the bachelor-adepts of history, becomes supremely important to a writer like me, as a model of a man who has in his art successfully moved outside the limitations of his carnal circuitry.

I offer this line of argument tentatively, with every expectation that I will be laughed at for believing in so primitive a form of sexual determinism; it seems, however, unusually convincing to me at present because many of the novels that I’ve liked lately (The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Single Man) have been so directly premised on gaiety: you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as if they’re thinking to themselves, Well fuck it, while I’m humming along at this level of candor, why should I propagate all the other received fastidiousnesses? Truths are jumping out at me from every direction! My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo! (Have people talked, incidentally, about the prompting influence that Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have had on Lolita? Nabokov must have seen this gay book from 1952, in which the sole pure baddie is the heterosexual child molester, and thought that it was finally possible to amplify his reluctantly incinerated short story and show, now that gaiety was to an extent fictionally normalized, that even Humbert’s unthinkable perversion was more complicated and remorse-filled than Angus Wilson had made it out to be. Nabokov must have noticed how the undisguisedly gay angle of attack lit the old, overnovelized mores from new angles, and that a similarly reawakened sense of nanomanners might result from a fictional situation whose raking unthinkableness stirred his own endocrines more.) Of course, Edmund White’s apostrophe to the narrator’s boyfriend’s bottom (in a recent story in Granta) would not have been possible without Updike’s wide-screen description of a neighbor’s pussy; but nonetheless it is the homosexual novel right now, perhaps to an unusual degree, that seems to be driving us all toward advances and improvements.