U and I: A True Story

8

“Also, homosexuals,” my mother once very uncomfortably explained when I asked her what one was, after reading a Dear Abby column circa 1965, “often have unusually intense relationships with their mothers.” That observation, which still seems quite true, used to worry me, until Updike’s example slowly sank in, and I realized that straights could have strong maternal dependencies as well. My mother is very important to my writing life. She first told me, when I was still in grade school, and long before I had heard of Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Mailer, about a mysterious set of forces called “the enemies of promise” that brought writers low, especially in America; and when I finally read Cyril Connolly’s book by that name, a few months after The Atlantic and The New Yorker accepted stories of mine in 1981, determined (in my expectation of instant celebrity) to be on guard against “the slimy mallows” of success and the “blue Bugloss” of journalism and the “nodding poppies” of indiscipline and chemical addiction and the rest of the besetting vocational dangers that it so winningly lists, I felt I was remembering a moral universe older and more primary than Aesop. Even these days, when I reread the 1960 Anchor paperback reissue, attractively subtitled “An Autobiography of Ideas,” originally bought by my grandfather and now stained by a transparent liquid that seeped out the slackening mouth of a narrow pumpkin I had placed protectively on a stack of books in the window one Halloween when smashing was in vogue in the sixties and hadn’t bothered to throw out for weeks (the hardbound of Cousteau’s World Without Sun was also badly warped by the same Halloween syrup, and a fancily printed signed bibliography of Bernard Berenson was slightly foxed — and whenever I come across a book in my mother’s bookcases that clearly evidences the part it played in supporting my one indoor pumpkin I feel a special thankfulness and affinity for it, as if the pile hadn’t been random after all but prophetic of links and influences that in leaving their timed-release mark on me had allowed me to leave my vandalizing mark on them as well) — even now, rereading, I’m surprised to find that Connolly’s funny, hung-over, peremptory, friendly style, and the scarily chronological lists of books he offers from the first third of this century (that is, the period of his own youth), and the battle he describes between the mandarins and the vernacular you-men (“Is there any hope? Is there a possibility of a new kind of prose developing out of a synthesis of Orlando and the Tough Guy?”), and the occasional injections of his own life (like the plane tree in the sultry garden under which he begins the first chapter, and his description of himself as “a lazy, irresolute person, overvain and overmodest, unsure in my judgments and unable to finish what I have begun”), all affect me with an unexpectedly intense level of emotion. I wish I had known him. I wish he had written about Updike and Nabokov. I wish there weren’t such things as older and younger generations and the inevitable deaths that make you think you have some special connection with a writer just because a pumpkin of yours once rotted on his book. I seem to think that if I don’t turn out to be like Updike, who successfully feinted past every single enemy of promise there was (though the “charlock’s shade,” or sex — adultery in his case — did seem to give him some insomnia.… ah! — another link between Nabokov and Updike and Updike and me: insomnia!), then I will become a picturesque failure like Connolly. But no, I am even less like Connolly than I am like Updike: I’m not a drunk and in fact have a growing paranoia about liquor, I didn’t have a string of successes in high school that rendered the rest of my life anticlimactic, and I haven’t gotten sucked in to book reviewing. When fame and the other enemies do seek me out, though, and oddly enough they don’t seem to be doing so yet, I will be fully prepared for their terrors, thanks to my mother and Cyril Connolly. Updike’s mother, or rather her fictional equivalent in the story “Flight,” tells him, as they stand on a hill overlooking their town, that everyone else is stuck there, but “You’re going to fly”—and here perhaps is one of the more important differences (aside from writing talent and intelligence) between Updike and me: Updike’s mother tells him what great things he’s going to achieve, flying off to Harvard and The Nuevo Yorker, while mine simply assumed the great things and was already thinking ahead to their negative consequences. We didn’t subscribe to either The Atlantic or The New Yorker when I was growing up; I read Look, Life, Advertising Aye, Car & Driver, and Popular Photography. “Promise is guilt — promise is the capacity for letting other people down”—perhaps with these words from Connolly tolling in her memory, my mother, wanting me to have a good life and be a good person and not to fret too much about disappointing expectations, avoided hilltop predictions and other allusions to my promise, except that she told me more than once about a time in nursery school when I had drawn a picture of the three bears in which the trio weren’t presented standing side by side in diminishing size, but were superimposed one in front of the other, indicating (to her) competencies in spatial manipulation beyond the nursery school level, and about another time that same nursery school year when I made a three-tiered organ keyboard by snipping three fringed lengths of paper and taping them together, each one layered over the next. “You were a special little kid,” she said once. Why bother to pretend to be like Rabbit? [“Intellectually, I’m not essentially advanced over Harry Angstrom,” Updike says in an interview.] He knew he was going to fly! And I knew I was a special little kid! We had great mothers! One way or another, we both knew we had promise! (Note the phonetic similarity of The Enemies of Promise and The Anxiety of Influence.) And Updike did then disappoint — not us, but his mother: he said somewhere that his mother still liked those early stories [or rather, his first New Yorker story] best of all the things he’d done; and I remember being struck by a passage in “Midpoint,” a long autobiographical poem accompanied by deliberately indistinct pictures of Updike and his mother, in which she, or a motherish woman anyway, accuses him of writing about ugly things, [“you fed me tomatoes until I vomited / because you wanted me to grow and you / said my writing was ‘a waste’ about ‘terrible people’.”] Yet, in spite of his having let her down with some of his later work, which was unavoidable, he kept at it: and that is what is so magnificent about him as an example for the rest of us. He knows that some of his books are better than others, and he has even gone so far as to say (I first heard it on the 1983 PBS special about him, but I think the sentiment also appears in Self-Consciousness) that his best things, his ticket to immortality, are probably his early short stories; and yet, even knowing that, he has gone on writing. He quotes with approval a bracing sentence from Iris Murdoch, something about the writer moving on to write the next novel in order to make hasty amends for the last. He has brilliance and longevity.

But his mother, I learned just last week, is now dead. She died in October. My wife told me that there was a review of her last novel in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1990), which I can’t read because they interviewed Updike in a sidebar, and I know if I turned to that page, I wouldn’t be able to resist reading what Updike said about his mother, and then I would have again to apologize for not adhering to the principles of closed book examination. Plus I would be visited by highly unwelcome imaginings of what life will be like when (if, I still think) my own mother dies. I first heard Updike’s voice in 1977 on a PBS radio show I turned on by chance — and what was he reading? He was reading a Mother’s Day tribute to mothers before some national motherhood association. (Where is this speech? I haven’t seen it in any of his collections.) I remember thinking, in surprise, Well, how very embarrassing for him! But over time I began to think of the speech as brave and ballsy. It was just as brave and ballsy for Proust to write about waiting for momma to come upstairs and tuck him in; but Proust’s example simply couldn’t have carried weight with me. Unless somebody like Updike (i.e., living and talented and heterosexual) had written about his mother, particularly in “Museums and Women” (one of my mother’s favorite stories), I could not have written about mine — and, more to the point, I couldn’t be writing about mine here. Without Updike’s example I couldn’t right now state how often over the past ten years my mother and I have talked about Updike—long Sunday-afternoon phone conversations between Boston and Rochester during which, after saying “I know we’ve already said this, but …” we covered once again one of our three main Updikean themes. These were, as my mother articulated them: (1) it was good for me to have to plug away at nonwriting jobs — Updike would have benefited from the same necessity; (2) Updike wrongly took sexual advantage of his irresistible prestige as a young writer to poach on suburban marriages while the husbands were off at work; and (3) my reluctance to go into all the bad things in my childhood — the parental fights over money, the dunners ringing the doorbell, the mess and the Saturday-morning fight about the real source of the mess, etc. — was admirable and kind of me but bad for my writing, because it severely limited my range: I should try, she said, to do more as Updike did by telling the bad and not worrying about the hurt this breach would cause. “Dad and Rache [my sister Rachel] and I will be very brave,” she would say. And I would answer, “But there is nothing bad to tell! Some money squabbles — so what!”

Most important, without Updike’s example I would not be able to describe the first time I met the man himself, late in 1981, at the Xerox Auditorium in Rochester. He was in town giving a speech on Melville for the Friends of the Rochester Public Library. I went with my mother. (Even at this moment I am compelled to explain why a young man of twenty-four would be going to an event such as this with his mother — that I was back from some months spent in Berkeley with my now-wife, and that I was waiting for her to finish at Bryn Mawr and decide where she wanted to live so that I could follow her there.) I was feeling burstingly high-toned and unprovincial that evening, having been only a week or two earlier to the offices of The New Yorker for the first time, after announcing pretentiously to an editor (I had recently skimmed some of Evelyn Waugh’s letters) that the telephone “made me nervous” and thus I had to go over my story with her in person. Because of my New Yorker trip, Updike’s sudden appearance in my unprepossessing hometown took on to me the odd quality almost of a courtesy reciprocated. I remembered his account (somewhere) of E. B. White showing up on his doorstep and offering him a staff writing job, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that his speech on Melville wasn’t simply a pretext for covertly scoping out my upstate origins before giving the final OK to the high command to hire me. The whole audience seemed as jumpy and alert as I felt, much more eager than the concert-going audiences I was familiar with, as if we all thought that we were about to undergo a subtle but conclusive trial: what things we smiled shrewdly at and what angles we held our heads at, and whether we were capable of making it clear by our untroubled rumpledness and our audible head-scratching and our mock-impatient thumping of rolled programs on kneecaps that we were there purely out of sincere interest and not out of the cheapest, lowest lust for proximity, would mark us definitely as being worth the Oversou’s eternal attention or not.

Updike took the podium and began to read. We all, after Self-Consciousness, know to expect a stutter (he hadn’t, however, in reading the motherhood address I heard on the radio); but to my prelapsarian ear it was so strangely contained and refined a faltering — a stately “pop, pop, pop” before a “p” word in an opening sentence [“popular”] like the three first bounces of a Ping-Pong ball before rapidity sets in — that I interpreted it more as a form of nonthesaural ornamentation than as a handicap; in fact, I first assumed there was simply something echoey wrong with the microphone or that in Updike’s boredom with the idea of speech-making he was pausing to blow thoughtful smoke rings. The popping happened no more than three times in the speech; maybe only twice. The last time I heard it I understood that it technically could be termed a stutter and I was amazed: Rochester, New York, of all places, was making Updike nervous. I was making him nervous.

That knowledge made me relax and listen to what he was saying a little more closely. He was trying to find out “what went wrong” with Melville’s later novels. I don’t know if he used those very words in the speech itself, but he had done so in an interview I’d read several months earlier called “Bech Interviews Me.” Bech asks him at the end what he is up to now, and Updike answers (in The New York Times Book Review) “I’ve been reading the late Melville lately, to see what went wrong, if anything.” For a writer to announce so casually in print ahead of time what he was reading and thinking about and working on, thereby coolly challenging all competitors to beat him to it and giving all detractors the time to elongate their yawns even further than normal, had struck me on that earlier Sunday as a highly impressive move; and there had been an admirable carelessness, too, in phrasing the chosen subject in such a way that the sneer-prone would be certain to apply it immediately to Updike’s own career. We couldn’t be sure whether he was playfully pretending to be struggling to profit by the example of Melville’s untimely truncation, or whether he seriously believed himself to be, post-Rabbit Is Rich, at an analogous juncture. I still don’t know. Standing miraculously in the downtown of my own city and treating the promised subject, he kept himself out of the argument entirely, avoiding contemporary references — only once did the audience, starved for dirt, go “Ooooh!” when Norman Mailer’s name came up as an example of a writer who’d had a huge early success and had run into trouble getting beyond it. That high-schoolish “Ooooh!” from my Rochester — which, in its betrayed yearning to be privy to an imagined arena of high authorial spite, disgusted me — is the first thing I remember after the opening pops; probably I disliked it mostly because the rest of the audience had understood quicker than I had that Updike had said something that could be taken as a jibe. The third thing I remember is Updike’s saying that one of Melville’s books, perhaps Billy Budd [no, The Confidence Man], was “the most homosexual of Melville’s works.” And I hadn’t even known Melville was gay! How stupid could I have been? In bed with Queequeg? I adjusted to this fact for a while, and began spooling out little theories about Conrad and Defoe, too (not only Friday — also the parrot: aural narcissism), and merchant shipping in general. He quoted a passage from Pierre, I think, to make the point that even in a book with a completely landlocked subject matter [no, Clarel, a poem about the Holy Land], Melville’s oceangoing mind irrepressibly reached for sea similes in describing what it saw. But the best moment by far was when Updike figured out how much Melville was paid, in current dollars, for his writing, and used that low figure to make the cheering point that the United States was not then, as it happily is now, populous and literate enough to sustain a writer even of Melville’s difficulty. [“The United States of his time would seem to have been like Third World countries today — able to breed a literary community of sorts but with a reading public insufficiently large to sustain a free-lance writer of books.”]

It was a smooth speech … but “smooth” sounds patronizing. It dissatisfied me then because it wasn’t fiendish enough — it didn’t take one of Melville’s sentences or images and do a mad-scientist number on it, brandishing the analytical instruments while they still steamed from their autoclaves, exulting in every banned or questionable area of forensics, clutching and rattling the chosen page with a seizure of louped scrutiny that alone could make the drowned man’s words rise again. But now I think I see better that equanimity is as much a critical virtue as mania is; what disappoints me about the speech today, when I think over it, is simply that it was too much Melville and not enough Updike. All it had of Updike was that stylized stutter. But Rowland Collins, then chairman of the University of Rochester’s English Department, who had invited Updike, raved afterward to my mother and me: “When I heard it was going to be on Melville, I thought ‘Oh Lord no,’ but it was really extremely good.”

“It was, it was,” we agreed; and I suspect that if I were to reread it now (which I can just barely keep from doing: Hugging the Shore, where it is collected along with an essay on Hawthorne I also have never read, is in a pile of books somewhere in this very room, glowing around the clock with the capacity to disprove my arguments and demonstrate my inaccuracies once I open it; and I have even ordered Assorted Prose, the omnibus from Updike’s first writing decade, with its reviews of Kierkegaard and Tillich, and its funny introductory sentence about the time, early on, when Updike had been in danger of becoming viewed as The New Yorker’s resident expert in philosophical and theological speculation, so that whenever one of the “slim, worthy-looking volumes” by Tillich or Heidegger crossed the book review editor’s desk, it zoomed straight to him — or is that all in Picked-Up Pieces? [it is] — so that when I need to correct my misquotations it will be here to refer to as well: I want desperately to be done with this study!), if I were to reread it now I would admire it more than I did then, because I can appreciate now how hard it is to stay at that ideal benevolent altitude, from which vantage each book is the size of a county, its highways and townships and eyesores and terrain easily discernible, and the farseeing reader can take in at a glance, as an instance of a general type, an image or incident that would have entoiled me for three months.

There was a small table to one side of the auditorium, near the stage; Updike took a seat there and began signing books. A line grew up the middle aisle that my mother and I finally took our place in; it moved surprisingly fast. The woman ahead of us held an armload of perhaps fifteen books, most paperbacks: when she reached the table where Updike sat she handed them over in bundles of four or five. He politely signed them all and nodded a thanks to her. Then it was our turn. Smiling fatuously, I handed him a brand-new copy of Rabbit Is Rich I had bought that day. This act was the outcome of some serious thought. I had wondered whether I should have him sign anything at all, since the practice was so nutty — complete strangers wanting a man to scribble in their book, body and blood, all of that. (Oh, but it’s all worth it, because Updike is repayingly brilliant in Self-Consciousness when he mentions a strange interruption in his act of signature between the “p” and the “d” of his last name that has increased, not decreased, in severity after all these years of book-signing — this cursive hiccup he neatly links with the stutter. [No — surprisingly, he does not make that link, in “On Being a Self Forever.”]) Wouldn’t it be, I reflected, more of a statement of my understanding of what his life was like if I consciously didn’t take up his time by meeting him and having his book signed? Years later, I could say, when I finally did meet him, “I saw you in Rochester, but I thought better of having you sign my copy of your book.” No, I had to meet him that day. As a compromise I entertained the notion of bringing some relatively uncommon book of his in to sign; but for it to impress him it would have had to have been very special: not merely The Carpentered Hen (which I didn’t own anyway) or that early paperback of Of the Farm, with its Van Heusen shirt man pensively embracing a “Christina’s World” woman, but something really unusual, like the mysterious edition of chapter one of Marry Me published by some press with a name like Abandocali or Adobacondi or Abacondai. [It’s Albondocani.] I’ve never seen this version, by the way; I’ve wondered, though, over the years, whenever I looked at Marry Me’s copyright page and saw it cited there, what his motives were in making that limited edition — was it a gift, and if so, given the dune-time tryst it lovingly details, to whom? Copyright pages are, if I may wander from the scene at the Xerox Auditorium for a further moment for Harold Bloom’s benefit, at the molten center of the neophyte’s anxiety of influence: especially their ritualistic, commaed-off phrase “in somewhat different form.” “Portions of this book first appeared, in somewhat different form, in [magazine].” “The following stories first appeared, in somewhat [or ‘slightly’] different form, in [magazine].” Am I right in thinking that my generation is madly plagiarizing Updike when we all publish books with this classic example of the Updikean rhythm murmuring its parentage in our copyright pages? Even if he simply took it over from some predecessor, it has come to stand completely for Updike’s prosody. For my first novel I was taking no chances: I took a look at the copyright page of The Centaur and copied it. For my second novel, though, I was determined to strike out on my own in this area. The word “portions” had come to seem (like “home” instead of “house”) decisively non-U, in the snobbish Mitfordian sense, and I decided to try the more U word “parts.” After much erasure and galley rethinking, the passage on my copyright page now reads: “Chapter 1 and parts of chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in The New Yorker. A brief passage in chapter 9 first appeared, in different form, in The Atlantic” (italics mine). [At least, so it reads in the UK edition (Granta/Penguin), which was published first. A week before printing, the American publisher, Grove Weidenfeld, completely reworded the first sentence without telling me, reinstating the “portions” that I’d been so careful to avoid.] I meant to convey volumes by that dropping of “somewhat” between “in” and “different” in The Atlantic’s acknowledgment: I meant to indicate that I had done a major overhaul of that 1984 passage; I meant to make it clear that I had improved as a writer since then — although I’m not in fact sure it is better in its second version: rewritings, even tiny changes (e.g., Walter “Palm,” James’s mannered revisitings, Nabokov’s embaubling of Conclusive Evidence as collated for us by Updike in an interesting review) are always dangerous; but improvement or not it had to be different for me to interest myself in it enough to work it in. Don DeLillo went even further in the copyright page of his first novel, about football: he said “in very different form” (italics mine), which I used unfoundedly to take to mean that he’d gotten pissed off by the degree of editorial intervention at The New Yorker and employed that “very” of the final version as his tiny revenge. [None of this is true, oddly enough: End Zone is not DeLillo’s first novel, and there is nothing like the “in very different form” that I remembered reading in the acknowledgment. What is wrong with me?] (Of the two dreams I’ve had about Updike, one contains a prominent copyright page. It occurred at 5:30 in the morning on May 31, 1986. I pulled a hardcover version of The Same Door off some staff writer’s bookshelf. I turned at once to the copyright page and saw

Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1934 by John Updike

I had known that looking at the book would make me unhappy, but when I noticed the last date I felt a momentary mean-spirited triumph, thinking that poor young Updike hadn’t even been able to keep a typo out of his copyright page — as I had felt in real life once earlier, when I had discovered Iris Murdoch listed as “Murdock” in the index to Picked-Up Pieces. But then I looked again, and the “34” blurred and re-formed itself as “39,” which I believed was the year that Updike was twenty-eight, and I let the book spine slump into my hand so that the book closed; the moment it closed I closed my eyes and felt a sob reach my face, because always, always, Updike turned out to be right in the end. Then I woke. In the second dream, which occurred at 2:20 in the morning on September 23, 1986, Updike showed up drunk, fedora askew, in New Orleans and had to work his way back to New York as a train conductor. I worried about him, quite surprised that he was that much of a drinker, but also impressed by his ability to bluff his way into being a train conductor, and I wondered if the ability was acquired from all those years of novel-writing, or was simply the result of a natural capacity to charm. He had said somewhere, I remembered in the dream, that there was a little bit of a salesman in the writer, which made him able to do things like make public appearances and sign books. [What he really said was: “I don’t dislike the spouting-off, the conjuring-up of opinions. That’s show biz, and you don’t go into this business without a touch of ham. But as a practitioner trying to keep practicing in an age of publicity, I can only decry the drain on the brain,” etc.])

I finally decided, anyway, that I shouldn’t try to be fancy that evening: I wanted to meet him and my only chance was going to be if I had a book for him to sign and it should simply be a brand-new copy of his latest, Rabbit Is Rich. I handed it to him and he bent his head to the task. I watched his pen form the word “John”—it looked more like “Jon”—and I said to his extraordinarily full head of hair: “I was at The New Yorker offices last week — I noticed you had a story scheduled for very soon!”

“Yes.” He blinked. And then very politely, knowing that it was what I wanted him to do, he asked, “And what were you doing at The New Yorker?”

“I have a story coming out pretty soon, too. So we’re fellow contributors.”

“And what’s your name?”

I told him.

“And what issue is it?”

I told him.

“Good,” he said.

“And I’m his mother!” said my mother, waving. (Why didn’t I do the proper thing and introduce her?)

Updike nodded at us both. “I look forward to reading it,” he said, giving us back his novel. My mother and I smiled good-bye and walked away, with flushed, What-new-fields-can-we-conquer-now? faces. “Well!” my mother said. “Wow! That was a lot of fun! Was that all right do you think?”

“Yeah, it was good, I think,” I said.

Behind us, Updike went on signing, signing.

When I told the story of this meeting to my wife a year ago, she slid down in her chair with her hands over her face in mortification. “I would never have done it,” she said. “But you’re different from me.”