Updike reminds us what it's like to be twenty

A month ago, Patrick Kurp, on his Anecdotal Evidence blog, mentioned in passing a John Updike story, "The Happiest I've Been," first published in the New Yorker in 1959. Patrick described the story as,

the best fictional treatment I know of the exhilarating free-fall between high school and college, adolescence and faux-adulthood.

We all have those writers whom we've simply failed to read, not through distaste or deliberate choice, but simply because, as Hussain Haddawy put it in the introduction to his translation of some of the Arabian Nights stories, "There are other fair creatures in the world." Updike has long been one of mine, wholly unread--though in recent years I've been edging closer: I read Nicholson Baker's U and I, and sentence after sentence that he quoted impressed me, as did his--and other writers'--tales of Updike's courtesy and kindness, the notes he would send to young writers whose work he appreciated, the professionalism with which he seemed to approach his work. For all that I enjoy reading about the Byrons of the world, my heart (to say nothing of my admiration) is with those artists who evince kindness and courtesy.

Patrick's praise was enough. I sought out "The Happiest I've Been"--and if all you want to know is whether Patrick is right, you can stop reading here: the first thing I did after reading it was make two copies to send to friends. It's that good, full of sharp observations expressed in sentences whose every word seems diligently labored over, glowing with a sense that it was chosen through deliberation aiming at perfection rather than the logorrhea of chance.

The story, told in the first person, relates a night-long party in the narrator's hometown, a party to which he's taken unexpectedly by a friend with whom he's supposed to be sharing a ride to Chicago a few days before the end of the Christmas break of his freshman year of college. He only learns of the party after he's been loaded into the car, and, "In everything that followed there was this sense of my being picked up and carried somewhere."

That's a feeling that will be familiar, I suspect, to anyone who was fortunate enough to ease into their twenties largely in the company of others who were doing the same--and a feeling that most of us rarely re-encounter in later years. What Updike does brilliantly is to show us all the ever-varying vantage points we had on those moments: enjoyment and abandon, uncertainty and isolation, confusion and anticipation. "The party was the party I had been going to all my life," the narrator notes: a girl cries and dances at the same time; three former athletes, "still . . . with that well-coordinated looseness, a look of dangling on strings," crash the party, then disappear silently into the basement; the host plays the same jazz record over and over and over, deliberately soaking in melancholy.

When the host's parents return home, the narrator realizes that they, too, see the same party they've always seen: "It was a pleasant joke to see in their smiles that, however corrupt and unwinking we felt, to them we looked young and sleepy: Larry's friends." But the few months that the narrator has been away have been enough to make him feel estranged. At one point he wanders off and buries himself for a while in the first book he finds, the second volume of Henry Esmond; at another, the sight of a pile of shoes discarded by the girls at the party brings unexpected emotion:

Sitting alone and ignored in a great armchair, I experienced within a warm keen dishevelment, as if there were real tears in my eyes. Had things been less unchanged, they would have seemed less tragic. But the girls who had stepped out of these shoes were, with few exceptions, the ones who had attended my life's party. The alterations were so small: a haircut, an engagement ring, a tendency toward plumpness more frankly confessed. While they wheeled above me I sometimes caught from their faces an unfamiliar glint, off of a hardness I did not remember, as if beneath their skins these girls were growing more dense. The brutality added to the features of the boys I knew seemed a more willed effect, more desired and so less grievous.

These are the people he knew, but he no longer knows them; he wonders "at the easy social life that evidently existed among my friends at three-thirty in the morning." And later, his sense of being out of time and place, focused on one person and one relationship, reaches an acuity that verges on cruelty:

So I talked to Margaret about Larry, and she responded, showing really quite an acute sense of him. To me, considering the personality of a childhood friend so seriously, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn't even deeply believe that in her world he mattered much. Larry Schuman, in little more than a year, had become nothing to me.

That's the moment that Updike recreates so well in this story and carries through to a perfect ending: the time when we've worked enough slack into our family ties to feel free and the ties to old friends--stripped of the circumstances that catalyzed them--have atrophied to the point of inexplicability, yet the claims of our future have not yet been made. At twenty, on the right night in the right circumstances, we are as close to being free as we ever will be--and, briefly, it can seem like the best possible way to live.

Nicholson Baker on influences

One of the books I carried with me on vacation last week, and very much enjoyed, was U and I (1991), Nicholson Baker's attempt to plumb the extent of John Updike's influence on his reading, writing, and life.

Like so much of Baker's writing, U and I is eminently quotable--and bloggable, and discussable. There are sentences on nearly every page that you can't help but want to read to a friend and talk over, even if, like me, you've read barely a word of Updike: Baker's questions about influence and career and style, even as they're firmly rooted in his own neuroses, are broadly applicable.

Tonight I'll focus on the section in which Baker, after confessing to some anxiety about not having read Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence before embarking on this project, sets out a distinction between contingent and chronic influences:

A contingent influence springs to mind as you try to solve the problems suggested by a chosen subject and then it goes away.

He then notes the many contingent influences weighing on him as he works on this project, which include Bloom, Henry James's "A Figure in the Carpet," Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, and more. (Had Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage existed in 1991, it would surely have made the list.) This, he writes,

is the arrangement of bayonets and blowguns whose hostage I currently am and whose exact middle point, as far from any single peril of encroachment as possible, is what I'm trying to find as I write; and yet when I'm done, the particular threats will tiptoe off as quickly as they came and I will be surprised to remember,w hen I see the shape my essay finally take,s how uncomfortable and beset they all made me feel.

Chronic influences, on the other hand, stay with you:

Unlike contingent influences, who (or which) you are always hoping will turn out to be more different from you than you felt them to be at the time they made themselves known, permanent influences like Updike (and, to a lesser extent, Nabokov), make you very unhappy when they threaten to be more unlike you as human beings than you had thought. . . . Because you are matching yourself constantly against a permanent influence, any divergence between you and him assumes the proportions of a small crisis, any convergence is an occasion to nod as if it were all in the cards. . . . Normally if I read something I think is wrong, I forget it two days later . . . but with Updike, when I disagree with him, there is an element of pain, of emotional rupture, that makes me remember my difference, and as a result I keep returning unhappily to it over the years and checking to see whether the disaccord remains in effect--and because each time I check it I have to find grounds that will satisfy me for my continued refusal to be convinced by what he's said, I am able to refine my opinions in a way I could never do if I did find him universally agreeable.

On the one hand, Baker is expressing a view that I think even he, self-deprecating to the bone, would agree is essentially childish: we want to feel that we know our heroes, that they are like us, and, when young, we have a lot of trouble separating the doer from the deed, the creator from the creation. In adult life, we're supposed to be beyond that.

But with our very favorite writers, the ones whose words have molded ours beyond what we can even tell anymore, that separation remains hard to make--and in that last sentence, Baker comes close to justifying us in our failure to fully break free. It's true: it's not just that the flaw in the beloved makes the beauty stand out, but that the disagreement, worried over and maintained, forces us to look closely at the ground we're holding in opposition, and shore it up against all manner of assault that wouldn't have even threatened us had we not so much at stake.

"A feeling of long-term fondness which is perhaps the most important residual emotion of the experience of literature," or, How I love Nicholson Baker

Months ago, when I was first contemplating writing about David Shields's Reality Hunger, I was struck by something that Nicholson Baker said in the course of a wonderful interview with Chris Lydon for Radio Open Source. Baker was talking about his charming and funny novel The Anthologist, and he said it all started when he was sitting in the side yard one day and began thinking of a new way of understanding poetic meter and rhyme:

So when I realized that I had, this to me exciting discovery, I thought, you know, I've got, I've got a novel here, and I rubbed my hands together and then, and I wrote lots of notes, and I didn't have a novel, I had, I had a theory. But it was an extreme enough theory that it seemed to me the right thing for a fictional character to have. This guy has strong opinions, and the great liberating thing about writing it as a novel is that you can just follow out those, those, strong opinions--you can just lay it out, and realize you're being inconsistent with yourself, but you're, you're, you're telling it as truthfully as, as you know how to tell it, that afternoon, out in the side yard. You're doing your best--that's what a novel allows you to do, is do your best at that moment and not worry about the fact that you're not coming up with a codified, perfectly consistent body of theory that you can publish as a, as a new doctrine of rhyme.

"You're doing your best--that's what a novel allows you to do." The task of defining the novel is impossible, every definition doomed by exceptions, but I'm tempted to adopt Baker's: it's an attempt, the best attempt one can make, to get down what it was like at that moment. Which, unexpectedly, aligns me to some extent with Shields, who loves the idea of the essay as the verb form of the word, a test or attempt, and who lists Baker as one of the hybrid writers he admires--though if one accepts that the novel (and, let us be broad, fiction in general) is fundamentally a hybrid genre, capable of assimilating nearly everything, then the need for a manifesto damning its sins rapidly fades away.

And while I'm on the topic of Baker, towards whom I feel inordinately fond, in no small part because of the way that he blurs the line between authorial and fictional voice, it seems right to make sure you've all seen his letter to John Updike that appeared in the June 21 issue of the New York Review of Books. Baker explains in the introduction that he sent the letter to Updike in March of 1985, as he was in the throes of writing his first novel, and that Updike's failure to respond was entirely forgivable, since he didn't include a return address. The letter is worth reading in full--hell, it's worth buying the entire issue for. While I've never been an Updike fan, it seems succinctly to get at many, if not most, of the charms of reading a living writer. If you've read this blog for long, you know how I love Trollope, and the way Baker invokes him will give you a sense of the appreciative tone of the letter:

I thought what an amazing thing that Mr. Updike has been writing all the years that I have been growing up, and how I have come to depend on the idea that he is writing away as a soothing idea, and then I was reminded of Trollope, and how nice it must have been for writers back then to go about their lives knowing that Mr. Trollope was going to have a new book coming out soon, that it would be good; and they might not read all of the things he wrote, but they would read some, and they would know that what they didn’t read they were missing, but were comforted also that they knew what kind of man he was because they had already read a lot of what he wrote; and the idea they had of the man who gradually had written all these books was a powerful, happy thing in their lives.

All too often, we aim for detachment, rational assessment of artworks; once in a while, it's okay to make a space for unabashed love, and the gratitude that should follow.