Friend of TNC James Wolcott has a characteristically hilarious essay in Vanity Fair on the "man crush," a bipartisan and media-propagated phenomenon that has grown straight men going weak in the knees for each other. No need to slap the other guy on the back when you hug him anymore the way you cough when you... well, never mind. Not since Rove fell for a young Bush in a bomber jacket, Chris Matthews discovered Cary Grant in every tie-wearing politico on television, and Clooney worked one too many heist movies with Pitt has the non-sexual male-on-male attraction been quite so pervasive and accepted. Yet the most interesting species of the man crush is the literary one,
by which I don’t mean the classic acolyte relationship (such as Alec Wilkinson’s beautifully rendered My Mentor: A Young Writer’s Friendship with William Maxwell), but the yearning-from-afar expressed in Nicholson Baker’s U and I, the hilarious, astute account of Baker’s moth-fluttering fixation with the deceptively offhand mastery and distinction of John Updike. His ass-scratching ignorance of much of Updike’s work is no impediment to wanting to enter his orbit, and a pang of envy strikes when Baker runs into prizewinning novelist Tim O’Brien at the 125th-anniversary party for The Atlantic, where O’Brien tells him he sometimes plays golf with Updike. Baker is majorly miffed. “I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn’t written a book of any kind, and didn’t know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O’Brien.” In those sentences one hears the peevish whimper of a Man Crush platonically cockblocked.
Let's hope Baker's infatuation with historical revisionism is weaker than his Rabbit, Run vapors. But in point of fact, the literary man-crush long predates our confessional and metrosexual culture. Kipling had it bad for Twain (you should read about the day he actually met him in the flesh). K. Amis's correspondence with Larkin was a monument to the requited sort. And even our brave correspondent has elsewhere seemed pretty taken with Norman Mailer (who broke his heart) and Gore Vidal (who may still yet). Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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