Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  I drove home thinking, That’s true, that’s the best thing about the song. Singing into the lit blackness of Tennyson’s black-bat night, when suddenly his voice goes high and gives it a bluesy turn that is astounding. He meaning Paul, or Sir Paul as he is called now, and why not? Better that Paul McCartney is knighted than some petroleum baron or air marshal.

  Thirty-one

  I MAILED ROZ THE BOOK of Mary Oliver’s poems and a CD with some music on it. I was going to include some of my own songs, but I thought better of it. I sent her “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5,” plus Kate Earl’s “Melody,” Tracy Chapman’s “Change,” McCartney’s “Blackbird” in case she didn’t have it, George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” Lennon’s “Imagine,” DNA’s remix of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” and also, what the hell, Paul Jacobs playing Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” I’ve got “The Sunken Cathedral” coming into my headphones right now. I’m listening to it all the way through for the first time since I began writing this book, if it is in fact a book, and I think it is. You have to be careful not to overlisten to a piece of music you love, or you’ll wear it out—it has to last your whole life. You know it’s there—the weight of the piano is there—but sometimes it’s backstage, covered in quilted padding, waiting for the tuner to arrive and tighten its screws.

  I have eight different versions of “The Sunken Cathedral” on iTunes. One version is played by Håkon Austbø—moody and sonorous. One is by Ingrid Fuzjko Hemming—interestingly murky, with good swinging bell-clanging. One is by Elaine Greenfield—brisker and lighter, performed on a 1907 Blüthner grand piano very similar to the one that Debussy owned. One is by Julian Lawrence Gargiulo—a live performance, with a distant energetic piano and audible chair creaks from a fidgeter nearby. One is by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli—part of the BBC Legends series, with a wrong note enshrined in it two minutes from the beginning. One is by Noriko Ogawa—full of nervous, restrained brilliance and unusual tempos. One is by Claude Debussy himself, playing distantly on a Welte-Mignon player piano in 1914. But my favorite version is by Paul Jacobs, the pianist for the New York Philharmonic, who died of AIDS in 1983. The microphone seems to be right inside Jacobs’s piano. That’s the version I’m listening to now. It’s so closely miked that when you swim into the center of the cathedral about halfway through and look around, the chords are almost unbearably loud—and at the end, when everything’s much softer, and mortality has been faced and accepted, you can hear the felt pads come gently down to dampen the strings as they ring out their last sound.

  This piece was Debussy saying good-bye to everything. It isn’t specifically about the lost cathedral city of Ys, off the coast of Brittany, possibly near Douarnenez. That’s a crude, programmatic interpretation that was imposed on the music after the fact by a young critic named Dane Rudhyar and an older pianist named Alfred Cortot, neither of whom knew Debussy well or understood the way his imagination worked. Saying that “The Sunken Cathedral” is about the sunken city of Ys is like saying that “Footsteps in the Snow” is about the Abominable Snowman. It’s true that there is an opera by Édouard Lalo called The King of Ys about the flooding of Ys, based partly on a forged Breton ballad by Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, and true that Debussy had wildly applauded Lalo’s ballet Namouna while at the conservatory, and had memorized parts of it, including perhaps the scandalous waltz in which Namouna rolls a cigarette for her paramour—but he was less fond of Lalo’s son, Pierre, who became a powerful and malicious music critic for Le Temps, writing, of Debussy’s La Mer, “I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea.” “The Sunken Cathedral” is bigger and blurrier, more overdetermined, than the story of Ys. It’s really about all sunken frightening beautiful artful ruined human things. It’s about Poe’s city in the sea, and about the cathedral cliffs in Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams,” and about the sinking cathedral and the rising lake in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and about the real flood of the Seine in 1910 that submerged a railroad station in Paris—a newspaper writer called it the “Station of Ys”—and lapped at the foundation of Notre Dame Cathedral. And it’s about the fearsome ruined abbey H. G. Wells saw in his undersea story “In the Abyss,” and about Swinburne’s crumbling, wave-gnawed cathedral town of Dunwich—Debussy admired Swinburne, who was translated by his friend Gabriel Mourey and championed by his friend Pierre Louÿs—and about the watery bells in Brahms’s lost city of Vineta. And it’s about Gerhart Hauptmann’s Sunken Bell, and about Verlaine’s and Huysmans’s cathedrals, and about the “ville disparu” in Victor Hugo’s Légende des Siècles and the underwater reef with “the sublimity of the cathedral” in Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. And it’s about the article Proust wrote for Le Figaro on the death of the cathedrals. If France’s cathedrals were allowed to fall into ruin, Proust wrote in 1904, the country would be like a beach strewn with giant empty shells. It’s about the loss of nineteenth-century certainties. It’s about all these things. And it’s about Chopin’s preludes, too, which were submerged and dissolved and remade by Debussy, with new harmonic flavors and fragrances, and it’s about the two operas that Debussy knew he would never finish, one based on the Tristan story, and one based on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” and it’s about the Gothic arches of the inner harp of the piano that he knows he can’t play forever—the black box of hammers that outlives the hammerer. It’s about death and what survives death. It’s about burial at sea. It’s about all the plans and loves and flaxen-haired singers of Debussy’s idle youth that are now no more. It’s about the time he and his friend Gabriel Pierné cut out pictures from a bound edition of Le Monde Illustré and put them up in his room. It’s about the time that Debussy and his wife, Emma, and their young daughter, wearing a big floppy hat, had a wicker-basket picnic in dappled woods. It’s about morphine and despair and undersea sponges and the long-gone days of focused effort when he was a soon-to-be father composing La Mer. It’s about wanting to be a young prizewinning improvisational genius again, and knowing that this moment in C major was the best he could do now. Debussy didn’t normally write in the key of C major. He chose C major this time, I think, because C is like water, clear and simple and bright and transparent, composed entirely of white keys, but if you hold down the pedal and play the clear white notes together in a certain way, the sound becomes blurred and pale blue and lost in haze, like a distant monument seen through water. He swam closer toward the cathedral, and its image became more clearly defined, with pounding, towering, unblurred C major chords, until he reached middle C, or middle sea. That’s what the sunken cathedral is—it’s the piano of his whole life.

  • • •

  ON MONDAY I woke up feeling dull and lost, as sometimes happens on Mondays, and I drove to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where “The Sunken Cathedral” was first performed in the United States a little more than a hundred years ago, on July 26, 1910. The pianist was Walter Morse Rummel, a then famous songwriter who was the grandson of the inventor of the telegraph. Also on the program—I guess it was a long evening—were some Chopin pieces, some Couperin, some Handel, Rummel’s own piano sonata “To a Memory,” and two compositions by Edward MacDowell, “From a Wandering Iceberg” and “To the Sea.” Rummel was Debussy’s favorite pianist. Once Debussy wrote Rummel a praising letter, in his tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting, about a performance Rummel had given. “One doesn’t congratulate the sea for being more beautiful than cathedrals,” he said.

  I got to Stockbridge at about noon, and after a lot of GPS’ing and driving around—always being careful to use my turn signal—I found the former Casino building where Rummel had played. In the twenties the building was moved to a quieter place out of town, and it’s now the main stage of the Berkshire Theatre Festival. It was designed by Stanford White. This was where the cathedral first submerged itself in the United States. I looked at the white building from the car for a while, parked near a young birch tree, and I ate a carrot and felt very little emotion. Then I climbed a
set of steps to a permanently locked door. Its windows were covered with a layer of rubberized diffuser, painted black, as were the three large arched windows on the front façade. They wanted it dark inside. An abandoned wasps’ nest was tucked into the doorway’s lower left corner. I took some pictures and got back in the car. I considered putting on my headphones and listening again to Paul Jacobs play “The Sunken Cathedral,” to beef up the occasion, but the building had been moved, after all. You have to choose your sunken occasions carefully.

  Instead I read an interview that Debussy gave to a woman from The New York Times that same summer of 1910, soon after he had himself first performed “The Sunken Cathedral” and three other of the preludes in Paris. Debussy, who was wearing a blue suit, left the Blüthner piano when the interviewer arrived and sat at his desk, which was immaculate except for a few ink stains on the blotter. The interviewer asked him how he composed. Debussy said that he really didn’t know how to explain it. He had to begin with a subject, he said. He concentrated on the subject for a while. “Gradually after these thoughts have simmered for a certain length of time music begins to centre around them, and I feel that I must give expression to the harmonies which haunt me. And then I work unceasingly.”

  Did he always like music? the interviewer asked. Yes, he was always fond of music, he said, although he was no child prodigy. He didn’t always agree with what he was taught at the Conservatory, but he kept his opinions to himself—he wanted to graduate. He didn’t care for genres and classifications—he just wanted music to be beautiful. “Beauty in a woman—and in music—is a great deal, a very great deal.”

  I banged the steering wheel. Right on, Claude! I kept reading. He said he couldn’t live up to the ideals he tried to put into his music. “I feel the difference there is in me, between Debussy, the composer, and Debussy, the man. And so, you see, from its very foundations, art is untrue. Everything about it is an illusion, a transposition of facts.” The interviewer disagrees. By the end of the article it’s clear that she—I think it’s a she, I think it’s a writer named Emilie Bauer—has fallen in love with Debussy. “He spoke with such warmth,” she writes, “he was so carried away, that one felt how the work of the French composer is exactly a reproduction of his soul—a sensitive, delicate soul, yet determined and firm.”

  I turned on the ignition and drove home a different way, and here’s what I saw: town, town, town, town, town, town. None of the towns made sense anymore because the needs that had brought them into being as towns were no longer needs. The flow of the river, the spire of the church, the little cluster of stores, they were none of them important. What lasted was the clustering itself—the grouping of houses and the fiction of the center of town, and then the miracle mile outside town where people really shopped. The supermarket with the bakery in it with passable octopus muffins that killed the real bakery. I drove by the abandoned road that led down to the lost town of Enfield, flooded in the forties during the building of the Quabbin Reservoir. I got some gas in a convenience store and went inside to buy a bag of salted almonds. A kid of maybe eighteen was walking around the store with his mother, cracking his knuckles. He was one of the loudest knuckle-crackers I’ve ever heard. He had a gift for it. The sound was like those clacking balls that were in vogue for a while when I was in grade school. He held one hand up, as if to support a violin, and with the other hand he bent his thumb back, and then bent his finger, and from his hands came a ghastly clacking. I stared openly at him and he ignored me, and I realized that like me he was doing his best to let the world know that he existed. I drove off toward New Hampshire, thinking maybe I should rent a bassoon and start playing again. Then I thought of the ache in my jaw. Good-bye, bassoon.

  • • •

  ON ROUTE 16, I saw a yellow banner on the back of a truck that said OVERSIZE LOAD. I turned on my recorder. “He was driving down the road with an oversize load,” I sang.

  It was big

  It was bad

  It was round

  It could explode

  Yeah, he was driving down the road

  With an oversize load.

  I remembered a talk I’d gone to at the University of New Hampshire once. Rebecca Rule, who is Portsmouth’s jolly postmistress of literature, was in conversation with Charles Simic onstage. Simic hadn’t yet been appointed Poet Laureate back then. He read a poem by a Serbian poet named Vasko Popa, part of the poet’s “little box” series. Poets sometimes write a series of poems on one subject. Ted Hughes did it with Crow, the book he published after his wife Sylvia Plath killed herself, which has frightening Leonard Baskin illustrations. I tried to do it with my flying spoon poems but I finished only one of them. Vasko Popa’s poem was a story about a little box that grew and swallowed up the cabinet that it, or she—she was a female box—was in. She got bigger and then the room was inside her, and then the house, and then the town, and then the whole world. And now there’s a little box that you can put in your pocket that holds everything. It’s easy to lose it. “Take care of the little box” is the last line of the poem.

  I passed the truck, which was carrying half of a modular house. The driver had an elbow on the door. He was relaxed. He knew his job. Ahead of us there was some slow traffic and the driver pulled on his jake brake for a moment. He pulled it almost lovingly. And I suddenly understood about jake brakes.

  A jake brake is a method of somehow using the truck’s compressed air system to slow the truck down, rather than using the friction on the brake shoes. It makes a blatting, flatulent sound. The faster the truck is going, the louder the flatulence. And I knew that this driver was in the trucking business partly because he liked jake brakes. They made a lot of noise, and they sounded like motorcycles, and they were basically a way of having a wonderful huge powerful trumpeting farting sound emanating from where you were.

  What the driver of the oversize load wanted was not that different from what I wanted. He wanted to make a sound. He wanted to have people hear him. This truck was his medium. This was how he sang. Some people sing through motorcycles and wear T-shirts that say “Loud Pipes Save Lives,” some sing with a guitar, some people crack their knuckles loudly.

  When I got home I opened a letter from the IRS and read it. They were losing patience with me. I thought, This is dumb. I need fifteen hundred dollars right now. I called up a man I know at one of the boatyards in Kittery and asked him if they needed help shrink-wrapping boats. I knew they would, and they did. I’ve done it before during times of economic hardship. It’s satisfying work, better than painting houses because the ladders are shorter. You haul a sheet of white plastic off a large roller and drape it over a big boat called, for instance, Cookie’s Dream, whose owner can’t afford to keep it afloat, and then you pass a flaming wand over the plastic, not too close, so that it shrinks to the hull’s curve and the form of the frame that you’ve built over the deck, and in the end you have made an enormous white lumpy anonymous shape that sits outside in a boat parking lot with many other white anonymous shapes. The boatyard plays an oldies station on the radio, and they pay in cash. There are a lot of boats in the tall weeds out back, even in high summer, because so many people are out of money. Occasionally the owners return and cut away some of the plastic and have picnics on their stored boats, or play poker.

  Thirty-two

  I CALLED ROZ’S NUMBER and she answered. I asked if she was hungry.

  “Yes!” she said.

  “Because I have a fresh tank of hummus and some pita chips. Chickpeas are supposed to be good for you. They have lots of iron.”

  “I’d love some hummus.”

  “When should I come over?”

  “Now is good.”

  There was traffic on the highway and I was late getting there. Lucy let me in and greeted Smack, who wagged his tail wildly. Roz was in her bedroom, propped slightly on pillows. The room, which was white, with blue trim around the windows, had the qui
et, almost sacred feeling of convalescence.

  “It’s good to see you,” Roz said. “Pardon my state of dishevelment. Thank you for the Mary Oliver, and the music.”

  I opened the bag and gave her a chip. She dipped it into the hummus.

  “Wow, this is so delicious,” she said. “Wow, wow, wow.” She adjusted herself in the bed and winced. “I’m hugely bloated. My insides have expanded to fill the void.”

  I said I figured they had some adjusting to do.

  “They certainly do,” she said. “But everything seems to have worked out. Modern medicine, you know? When it’s good, it’s good.”

  She asked me what I was doing, and I told her I’d put in some afternoons of shrink-wrapping at the boatyard and that my arms were sore. And that I’d written a dance song using some of the three-word phrases she’d sent. And that I’d spent the afternoon in the parking lot while she had her operation.

  “That’s good of you. You’re a good man.”

  “A good man needs a good woman. How is Dr. Harris? Is he the man?”

  She patted my hand to silence me. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things,” she said. “Ellen, my gynecologist, believes in Reiki massage.”

  “Oh, heavens.”

  “No, no, it was good. Before the operation, they put me in an enormous hospital bathrobe and took me into a very dim room and I sat in a comfortable chair, and a woman came in with a portable kind of boom box that was playing, I guess, Reiki massage music. The woman was all in black, except for some turquoise jewelry, and she held her hands for a long time on my shoulders, then on my hips, then on my stomach, then on my feet. It was so soothing. She said, ‘Think of me as a cord that goes from the music to you.’ She said the music was from Tibet, and that it was two thousand years old. She said we had places in our bodies where the energy can get stuck, and that she was going to release the energy so that it could flow freely. It sounds very New Agey, but I just sat there with my eyes closed feeling peaceful, and my mind suddenly filled with happy memories of walking with you and the dear dog at Fort McClary. They were such good memories.”