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 (“100 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 c
oncentration 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.