B & Me

by J. C. Hallman

  Or scratch that, because it was me who was being snotty. Snotty all around, in fact. For I’ve actually enjoyed books by Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, and Martin Amis (Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, and The Information are in my opinion the canonical works), and truth be told Nicholson Baker wasn’t even English, a fact I discovered when I glanced at the author’s note in my copy of U and I. He was an American writer, born and bred. This revelation hit me less like a sensation of click and release than a devastating psychological crumbling in the face of the uncanny. How could I not have known this? I’d heard of Nicholson Baker, and apparently I had a very faint acquaintance with his oeuvre, but how could I have been in possession of even a fraction of the knowledge one should have of a nonessential writer and still not know what country he hailed from, particularly when it was my own? Looking back at it now, that’s when it became clear that there was something peculiar about my relationship with Nicholson Baker. Something that could not be explained solely by marketing efforts launched on behalf of an author for whom I’d begun to feel a mysterious draw.

  4

  THE AUTHOR’S NOTE ALSO INFORMED ME THAT NICHOLSON BAKER was only ten years older than I was. This annoyed me. Nicholson Baker published his first book in 1988 at thirty-one years of age, and since then he’d been more or less regularly banging out tomes. He was a writer, in other words. As a writer myself I had a somewhat later start, and I was admittedly far less essential, less canonical. I had to allow for the fact that I was intimidated and jealous. After all, I’d been reading—seriously reading—for roughly a quarter century, and I hoped that in that time I had canon-dabbled my way to a certain level of expertise. But then, all of a sudden, here comes this guy who was only ten years older than I was, and he was already, magically, absolutely essential to me, while I was completely inessential to him.

  This is part and parcel for writers these days. Writers who magically become essential have the added burden of breaking down walls of pent-up resistance in fellow writers. For example, I was also annoyed—for no good reason—that I had no idea what Nicholson Baker looked like. If I had known what he looked like, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been repelled by the thought that he was English. Was Nicholson Baker hiding? His author’s note was cagey, but I believed that the eye on the right side of the cover of my copy of U and I (a clever double entendre by the designer) belonged to Nicholson Baker. The image was a bit out of focus, but he appeared to have a beard. A beard that probably indicated insecurities of his own, for obviously it was a mask (and I won’t even discuss the roundish Harry Potter–like spectacles). I recognized John Updike, of course, who was clean-shaven and apparently had good vision, and I even knew where John Updike hailed from—I’ve read the canonical Updike—but Nicholson Baker, by comparison, appeared to be hiding, appeared to be reluctant to step out from behind, let’s say, the bars of his book cover. Nicholson Baker’s author’s note was cagey because he was caged.

  And doesn’t that begin to get at how it feels to be on the brink of giving in to a newly essential writer these days, to transcending your own selfish concerns long enough so that you can open your soul to the soul of another, to a writer’s soul? Gone are the days when one could hear of a book or a writer and experience the slow, delicious process of a long-building sensation of attraction: an initial, casual familiarity that gradually becomes a crush, which accelerates into longing, and which then, very suddenly, becomes a satisfying splurt into the freedom and joy of reading. It doesn’t work that way anymore. We’ve been blurbed, book-packaged, keyworded, and target-advertised into a kind of prison-camp oblivion. These days, why does anyone read the writers they read? Do readers choose books, or do marketing departments choose readers? Are we truly satisfied by whatever winds up on a celebrity’s book club list? Do we browse or surf? Do we read or scroll? It’s not that we’re brainwashed. We know what’s happening. We’ve all become savvy—all too savvy. Anyone who picks up a book in a bookstore knows full well that they might be being duped by its campaign. Even a gut-level attraction to a writer of whom we’ve caught an enticing glimpse seems suspect to our new cyborgy selves.

  Of course my crisis—and this was my crisis—was nothing new at all. Gone are the days when people were not saying things like “Gone are the days . . .” Still, I think there’s something unique to the current state of modern literature, to today, this moment, right now. These days, it’s not you, the reader, who is set free by reading, it’s the writer. By reading, you free the writer from obscurity, from the cage, the prison of his or her book. But even that’s been said before, most notably by Samuel Butler, who said, “Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.” Which proves my point, for I did not pull Butler down from a shelf and quote him. Rather, Catherine, who had been watching me serially pick up and put down U and I for weeks, lovingly gave me a copy of photographer Abelardo Morell’s A Book of Books, full of inspiring literary quotations and wonderful photos of old, decaying codices. Butler was in there . . . and so was Nicholson Baker. He’d written the introduction. That’s why Catherine gave it to me, as a gentle prod to go ahead and read a writer I clearly needed to read. Baker’s introduction—I skimmed it—describes the “impenetrability” of books, their prison-like “rectangularity” and “thickness.” He didn’t quite say it, but he implied it: These days, we break into books.

  That was true on a larger scale too, I thought. Libraries, long a core institution of the literary world, are no longer libraries—they are correctional institutions. Many, many books are incarcerated in libraries, serving life sentences, as it were. Of course this is troubling, in that it suggests we have imprisoned our soulfulness. But it does create an opportunity for romance. These days, readers must recognize when an author needs to be rescued, needs to be sprung from the prison of his or her book, held in the prison of a library. In the end, it’s all prisons within prisons.

  5

  SPEAKING OF PRISONS, DID I MENTION THAT I TEACH? THAT AS I was trying to launch a career as a writer I was a teacher of undergraduate literature and writing? I broach the subject again because it’s relevant to my thinking about Nicholson Baker.

  The truth about writers teaching literature and writing is bleak: These days it’s rare for writers to pursue almost any other sort of work. There may be noncanonical writers here or there who do something other than teach to put bread on their tables, but more likely than not you haven’t heard of them. As a general principle, writers teach. Essential writers may teach only cursorily—leasing out their names to diabolical institutions, limiting their contact to responsive graduate students—but nonessential writers teach undergraduate courses like galley slaves, and the problem of course is that to be a teacher, to be shackled deep in the hull of some slave ship institution, is to not be a writer at all.

  The psychological effect of sacrificing writing for teaching—and this was the other part of my crisis—trickles down onto students, who quickly come to seem like a bane and a vice. In class, as the teacher, as the “professor,” you sit there among them, trying to talk about books with the sort of sustained ardor you would need to produce a book of your own, and some of the students are sneezing, and you can see the snot dripping from their noses because they’re not yet old enough to have developed any kind of refined sense of nose etiquette (thirty is the new twenty, we’re told; twenty, therefore, is the new five), and some of them are covered with pimples because they still haven’t figured out that regular washing is generally a good idea, and some of them are asleep because they’ve decided that they would rather be vampires than people and so
they stay up all night long to try to make this come to pass. From your perspective it’s frustrating, because even though you evilly relish these shallow and mean-spirited thoughts about students, another part of you is actually quite fond of the students. Too fond, perhaps. For example, you completely identify with your male students, the men, the man-boys, who remind you of yourself at that age, even the ones who are clearly more masculine or athletic or intelligent than you were back then. And then of course there are the female students, the women, the girls who, because your frustrations with teaching have left you lonely and in a state of perpetual inner rant, provide you with material for escapist fantasy. There are women in your classes that you actually can’t wait to get home and masturbate to, the memory of how they cock their head when you’ve gotten off some really interesting point about Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (her greatest hit, incidentally). Of course, some of these women think about you when they masturbate, too. You know this to be true, you can see it in their eyes sometimes. That girl with her hands under her desk as she gazes steadily before her, appearing to be completely ignoring everything you’re saying, she’s not sending a handheld electronic device message to her stupid eighteen-year-old boyfriend who wouldn’t know cunnilingus from scratch and sniff—no, she’s in a state of thrall, and she’s thinking about you, she’s masturbating right there in class while you make some quite interesting, and apparently arousing, point about Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

  And that’s the state of modern literature in higher education these days: It’s all about masturbation. The “professor” is always masturbating to his female students as soon as he has the chance, and some of his female students really are masturbating to him in turn, and virtually all of the man-boys in class are masturbating too, though not to the teacher or the girls in the class, but to the tiny porn stars they call up on their own handheld electronic devices, a more or less constant activity in the modern classroom. The impact of handheld electronic devices on higher education is a subject deserving of significant attention, but for our purposes it will be sufficient to note that a good portion of a teacher’s job these days is to inspire students away from their handheld devices—to rouse them, even to arouse them. The trick is that one must accomplish this without either annoying students to such an extent that they exact petty, late-adolescent revenge on course evaluation forms that are of ever-increasing importance in the modern academy, or violating sexual harassment policies that are inconsistently interpreted but enforced with draconian zeal. Complicating matters, many canonical texts are quite lurid, so masturbation comes up as subject matter fairly often, but even on those rare occasions when a “seminar” seems to be about something other than masturbation, it’s still intellectual masturbation in that a public conversation about an event intended as a private encounter between two souls amounts to masturbatory activity. By which I mean desperate and craven.

  Which isn’t to say masturbation is bad. It isn’t. It’s how we learn what our bodies like, and our sex lives go on to be either good or terrible to the extent that we learn how to communicate this information to others. That kind of communication, intimate and intended to generate physiological reaction, is exactly how reading once was and ought to be, but no longer is. And my crisis, to the extent that I had begun to understand it, had a great deal to do with the fact that these days a significant portion of the world’s literary commerce is conducted in classrooms. More often than not, people begin to read not because they’ve become attracted to a writer and long to have a kind of virtual sex with him or her, not to have an experience that echoes the multivalent intensity of physical love, of two people made metaphorically naked by a willed suspension of ego, with only the silky membrane of the parchment, the page, between them, like a bedsheet—no, these days, most people begin reading with books assigned to them in the modern classroom, and they read these books dutifully, for “credit,” and then participate, because they’re graded on this too, in the exhausting but unsatisfying circle jerk known as “class discussion.”

  6

  ALL THIS MIGHT SOUND RADICAL OR SHOCKING. BUT IT SHOULDN’T. Here’s why.

  “Creative writing” began as an attempt to use language as a technology of intimacy, as a way of sharing intimate passions, thoughts, and sensations with strangers. Creative writing is a fetishization of self, a self that is stacked up and tied up in the book—bound, after all—and presented for sale so that many people across time and space can share and savor that preserved self. Or scratch all that. Because creative writing did not begin that way at all. Literature did. Or that’s what literature became after oral and written storytelling transcended overt historical and journalistic utility. “Creative writing,” on the other hand, began another way. Not long ago a prominent and well-intentioned critic claimed in the highly esteemed and often well-fact-checked magazine The New Yorker that creative writing first came into use as a phrase in the 1920s. He was wrong only by about eighty years. The first to use the phrase was Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The American Scholar,” a lecture delivered at Harvard in 1837. What did he mean by it? Well, if we make the assumption that Emerson was not trying to establish the modern definition of creative writing—a catch-all for the agreed-upon genres of literature—then a question naturally arises: Why did Emerson think we needed to be told that writing could be “creative”? Why indeed, unless the world had arrived at a moment—the first faint hints of modernity, say—when it was opting for language that was stale, dead, and insipid. For Emerson, creative writing wasn’t a loose allusion to creation, to procreation, to the grand scheme of two people coupling to make something beautiful out of nothing, it was a direct citation of it; “-ive” is the operative portion of the phrase; “-ive” is the suffix of similization. In the end, creative writing means “writing that is like fucking.” It’s from the Greek. Or the Latin. Long story short, Emerson refetishized the self (he got a leg up from Montaigne), Whitman borrowed it (along with a great blurb) and installed it in a “body” of work shrieking off the page, and for a good long time after that everyone happily fucked the body electric.

  Which brings me back to Nicholson Baker, to what was beginning to look like my plan for him. But there was a problem—or rather, two problems. Because when a teacher of literature and writing begins to form a plan for a writer, his or her first reflexive thought is to incorporate the writer’s work into a course. That was problem one, because it’s generally held that in order to teach an author, a “professor” really ought to have at least some level of familiarity with the author’s work. I had not read Nicholson Baker, and I had a pent-up resistance to doing so. I could get through that, surely—I had a plan for it—but even if I succeeded I would run afoul of problem two: teachability. I can go on for hours about teachability—ask Catherine, I have—but, in short, a teachable book, in academic terms, is a “good” book. And a good book has two main features: one, it can be understood even if students divide their attention between it and the much more important tasks that need to be completed on their handheld electronic devices; and two, it does not say anything that might discomfit a typical eighteen-year-old’s sensibility, which means it resembles television. Teachability was a problem because, at least on this scale, I didn’t think Nicholson Baker was a particularly good writer. True, I was guessing. I hoped for the opposite, in fact. Because privately—and this was core to my crisis—I knew that good, teachable books were actually bad books. And beyond not having read him, I couldn’t teach Nicholson Baker because somehow I knew that he was a terrible writer who was actually a great writer. Wha
t I really wanted to do with Nicholson Baker was have Emersonian sex with him, rather than try to masturbate to him with a bunch of kids who didn’t know the first thing about pulling themselves, or me, off.

  7

  SO I WAS BACK TO SQUARE ONE—NOT THAT I’D EVER REALLY LEFT it. To read Baker or not to read Baker. To B or not to B.

  Actually it wasn’t all that bad. Once I decided that teaching Nicholson Baker would be an abomination, I composed a few musing, meandering pages about one day possibly reading Nicholson Baker. Then I set them aside and went about my life, choosing for my courses the least bad teachable books I could think of. Class sessions proceeded with all due masturbatory rigor.