When Updike Saved Me from Morrison (and Myself)
By Mohsin Hamid
One day in the spring of 1993, Toni Morrison took me out for
lunch. It was my last semester at Princeton, and I was in her long-fiction
creative writing workshop. I’d done two semesters of short story work with
Joyce Carol Oates, and I hoped to be a novelist. So I was writing fast. I think
we had to produce thirty or forty or fifty pages for Toni. I’d hit a hundred
and was still going.
We sat and chatted and ate (what I don’t remember, but it
included fries). I told her I’d gotten into law school. I told her I was
planning to take time off first, to head back to Pakistan and write. I told her
I’d been cooking for myself this year. I told her I made a mean pasta and she
ought to give it a try. Really? she said. Yeah, I said. I invited her down to
the basement kitchen of Edwards Hall and told her she wouldn’t be disappointed.
To my surprise, she said she’d come. It better not be
over-boiled spaghetti in some sauce out of a can, she warned me. I smiled.
Confident. As we left the restaurant she noticed a paperback hidden between
notebooks and printouts in my hands. She asked me what it was. I told her it
was Jazz. She asked if it was the first of hers I’d picked up. I confessed it
was. She signed it for me. Then she said, Read Beloved, it’s good.
I still remember how she said it: good. Drawn-out. Beautiful
and powerful, the way words she spoke often were. When she read our stuff out
loud to us in class, it sounded like literature. So I picked up Beloved next.
And she was right. It was good.
I thought I was pretty good myself back then. I thought the
novel I was writing was good. I thought my cooking was good. I was twenty-one
years old and didn’t know better, thank goodness. And luckily for me, Toni
never showed up for that pasta.
Instead, I got a message on my answering machine from her
assistant. Toni couldn’t make it that day, sadly. John Updike (I think it was
Updike) had come to campus. I hadn’t yet read Updike but the name sounded
familiar. I called back and said no problem.
It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me my cooking
might not have been quite as good as I thought it was. My pasta was indeed
spaghetti. It was probably over-boiled. And while the sauce didn’t come out of
a can, it did come out of a bottle. All I really did was add some hot chillies
to it. And maybe a couple of other spices. But maybe not.
Why I was so proud of it, I can’t now for the life of me
recall.
As for the novel I was writing, I finished a draft for her
class. Toni liked it enough to ask me to read from it at the annual end-of-year
creative writing event. I still have a manuscript with several pages of her
exquisitely fountain-penned suggestions on the reverse. I figured I was almost
done.
It wasn’t ready for publication for another seven years.
(From: the Daily Princetonian)
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