From Chapter 1

The various morbidities [Donald Barthelme's] death occasioned—as well as the sense of fragility and preciousness of all life that is inevitably triggered by even a minor sickness in one's own child—were all close at hand when, on that Sunday morning early in August, I hesitated for an instant after being reminded of Updike's sentence about how easily the words come in the morning. Updike was much more important to me than Barthelme as a model and influence, and now the simple knowledge that he was alive and writing and had just published one of his best books, Self-Consciousness, felt like a piece of huge luck. How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive! But though the book was very good—true to the way memory files things away under subject headings, and quite original, I thought, in building an autobiography out of discrete topical essays (as Harold Nicolson had made a sort of autobiography out of the fictionalized acquaintances in Some People)—Updike's book was uncomfortably full of notions of closure, the long view, failing bodily systems, and a kind of distant fly-fishing retrospection quite different from the young writer's need to get rid of the topmost layers of his grade-school and high-school memories so that he can move on without their constant distraction. The framed photograph on the front cover (his best-looking cover by far) was clearly the same one as is described in detail early in Of the Farm—he was coming clean. Nor had I liked reading a recent story of his about a man in his sixties who was startled, every day when he walked to the mailbox, by the doves that suddenly flapped up at his approach. The image was terrific, but the implication, that Updike was putting his intelligence to work on his forgetfulness, on what new could be said about the loss of one's powers, was very disturbing. With Barthelme gone I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike's death. All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike's immortality: his open-ended stream of books, reviews, even poems, and especially responses to pert queries from Mademoiselle and The New York Times Book Review. I thought I remembered his saying recently in Esquire, in response to a survey question about popular fiction, that "in college I read what they told me and was much the better for it." I wanted more of these monocellular living appearances. More awards-acceptance speeches! He was, I felt, the model of the twentieth-century American man of letters: for him to die would be for my generation's personal connection with literature to die, and for us all to be confronted at last with the terrifying unmediated enormity of the cast-concrete university library, whose antitheft gates go click-click-click-click as we leave, dry laughter at how few books we can carry home with us.

From Chapter 3

And when, this year as well, I made some small-time publicity appearances in connection with my first novel and was typically, Americanly inarticulate—indeed, worse than typical: tongue-tied, "um"-saying, jargon-ridden, flat-voweled—when I saw the eyes of the radio interviewers widen in alarm as the stretch of dead air lengthened, and when I compared myself miserably with an amazing performance by Updike on Dick Cavett that I recalled from the late seventies, where he spoke in swerving, rich, complex paragraphs of unhesitating intelligence that he finally allowed to glide to rest at the curb with a little downward swallowing smile of closure, as if he almost felt that he ought to apologize for his inability even to fake the need to grope for his expression, and for inspiring the somewhat frantic efforts Cavett made to keep archly abreast of this unoratorical, uncrafty, generous precision; and when I compared my awkward public self-promotion too with a documentary about Updike that I saw in 1983, I believe, on public TV, in which, in one scene, as the camera follows his climb up a ladder at his mother's house to put up or take down some storm windows, in the midst of this tricky physical act, he tosses down to us some startlingly lucid little felicity, something about "These small yearly duties which blah blah blah," and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs on a ladder!—when, as I say, I compared myself very unfavorably to Updike's public manner after my own radio disasters (I heard myself over the car radio and had to pull over on a side street and get out and shut the door on my upstate voice, which I was tape-recording), I repeatedly comforted myself with a thing against spoken eloquence from Addison that I had read in Boswell: "I have but ninepence in my pocket," it roughly goes, "but I can draw on a thousand pounds"; and the fiscal simile here too attached itself to my idea of William James, whom I thought of, wrongly no doubt, as struggling for expression, or at least for a form proper to his style of reasoning, while his gay brother unfumblingly dictated sentence after incredible sentence to his typist.

"Blooming buzzing confusion." "Hard, gemlike flame." "Hobgoblin of little minds." "The terrible fluidity of self-revelation." "I refute it thus." They're all dead and fully folded away, accessible by one of two of these handy pull tabs, in the thick faded Harper Torchbook of intellectual history. But not only is Updike himself physically alive, his writing feels alive as well: it's still in constant democratic motion, unteachable, not in equilibrium, free to organize itself around any particular scene or image or pronouncement, no standardized ID phrase yet dangling from a protruding morgued toe. I find myself speculating, in fact, what phrase will become the jingle we will have to fight past at some point in the future to reawaken our real pleasures in Updike. From Self-Consciousness reviewers quoted "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face," and there is a certain memorable shock in that, but it's too downbeat to represent his tone adequately. When I asked my mother what she remembered from Updike, the first things she mentioned was the sentence about divorce from the foreword to Too Far to Go: "That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds." She's absolutely right, it should be in the next edition of Bartlett's. And Nabokov long ago quoted admiringly a beautiful, beautiful phrase from one story: "Their conversation was like a basket woven underwater around a useless stone." [No no no—the sentence really goes: "The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone."] Perhaps that too will become one of Updike's tags, since its image by example so nicely defuses the tiresome criticism that he doesn't have anything—that is, any useless stone [no, worthless stone—there's a difference] of exotic experience—to write about. But meanwhile, lucky for me, there is no aphoristic consensus to deflect and distort the trembly idiosyncratic paths each of us may trace in the wake of the route that the idea of Updike takes through our consciousnesses.

Born in 1957, Nicholson Baker has published six novels and three works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001. U and I is a meditation on the creative process in all its mysterious, frustrating glory and a paean to the man who has haunted and inspired Baker more than any other, John Updike.

The Works of John Updike

Audio Updike on the Power of Books

Excerpted from U and I by Nicholson Baker © 1992 by Nicholson Baker. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.