B & Me

by J. C. Hallman

  During this time, my paperback copy of U and I performed an odd transformation. Day by day I monitored a gentle curling of its cover stock, a slow metamorphosis as the pristine, tightly bound book borrowed moisture from the air and twisted the cover into the shape of a question mark, a question mark asking me why I was not deliriously consuming this book I would so obviously enjoy. But my pent-up resistance held, and I was able to keep the book at bay. In the meantime, Nicholson Baker kept on with the job of being a writer, traveling, giving talks and readings, and probably doing a whole lot of reading and writing. As a result of all this activity, I began to notice an uptick in the frequency of Nicholson Baker appearances in my life. By now I’d grown accustomed to regular but infrequent thoughts about Baker, but now I experienced an acceleration of Baker materializations. They marked off an almost pulsing rhythm, a primal drumbeat of Baker that made him seem unshackled, unimprisoned, and utterly essential.

  For example, I stumbled across a reference to Nicholson Baker on a prominent literary blog. Baker had appeared recently at a Canadian book festival, an event that the blogger claimed was woefully underattended, like Salter’s reading. Apparently, Canada was filled with people who had no real knowledge of Nicholson Baker, like me, or who had heard of him but felt no pressing need to see him in the flesh. In any event, Baker provided a nugget—via the blog—of spot-on Australian-style wisdom: “Writing,” the blogger said Baker said, “was a process of ‘re-engaging our excitement in the world around us by going out on a long journey,’” which he likened to the path of a boomerang. Precisely, I thought. Provided you can embark in the first place. Then I learned, via another blog, that the original manuscript of a short story by Nicholson Baker was being auctioned off for charity. I was too late to make a bid. The manuscript sold for $51. Drat!

  These few appearances proved to be only the first wet mists of an approaching Nicholson Baker wave. There were further mentions of Baker in online forums, he sneaked into my hometown to give a reading while I myself was doing a reading in another city, and he wrote a piece for the New York Times, a review that was accompanied by one of those pencil-sketch caricatures that high-end publications produce so that you have at least some sense of what a writer looks like, and that are probably the very best indicator of when a writer has reached the absolute brink of canonization:

  Credit: Joseph Ciardiello

  When this image made its appearance in my life—via my handheld electronic device—I was struck by two things. First, I was struck by Nicholson Baker’s Santa Clausian mien and the fleeting thought that if Nicholson Baker were actually canonized he would literally be St. Nick. Second, I was struck again—truly whacked this time—by the fact that Nicholson Baker was still only ten years older than me. To illustrate this whackedness, here’s a picture that Catherine took of me with her Hasselblad just after we shared an on-the-fly cheese and sausage lunch in the Italian market in Philadelphia, right around the same time Nicholson Baker was sneaking around our hometown:

  It was also during this period that I received an additional reminder of my own writerly status, as compared to that of Nicholson Baker. I received a review—a remarkable review. Wonderful! But what was most remarkable about it to me, beyond my being flattered and affirmed by all the flattering, affirming things it said, was that it began with a preamble about the state of modern literature that only too well captured my professional predicament: I had failed to establish my writerly significance.

  In this age of perpetual presence . . . it’s all too easy to lose track of those writers who appear only when they have something particular and finished to share. Strangely, my two best examples of this kind of writer both go by their initials. The first is journalist D. T. Max, who will appear in The New Yorker or elsewhere once or twice in a blue moon, always leading me to think: oh yeah—that guy! I love that guy! Where’s he been? The other writer is J. C. Hallman, whose work always excites and intrigues me—whenever, that is, I am reminded he exists.

  Ouch. The most remarkable thing about me, it seemed, even according to those who remarked on me, was that I was not more remarkable.

  Which left me sort of sad and overcome. The in-all-other-respects-positive review wreaked havoc on my ego, but it did wonders for my pent-up resistance to Nicholson Baker. I could feel myself steeling, heart-hardeningly, against him. Which was timely because I was soon awash in a whole new tide of Nicholson Baker appearances, a breached-levy flood of praise and events that made him seem less alluring and necessary than kind of tiresome, like a down-on-his-luck uncle who doesn’t know when to quit sleeping on your couch. What had initially struck me as a sweet and seductive campaign to murmur the sweet nothing of Nicholson Baker’s name in my ear now seemed like a pharaoh’s effort to chisel the glyphs of Nicholson Baker’s entire itinerary into the sandstone of my brain. This led to a grim conclusion: These days, books are not only imprisoned, readers righteously monitor the cell doors. If once upon a time we happily waited for books, stood vigil for their arrival, then what we did now was stand guard against their escape. Even worse, I had begun to conspire against myself. No longer was I merely waiting for Nicholson Baker to appear in my life. One night I actually broached the subject of Nicholson Baker, mentioned that I’d put together a few rambling pages about him and had begun to toy with some kind of vague plan.

  Catherine and I were at a bar that night, having a beer with a close friend, one of those meaningful, hugely substantial friends you have who reads not just from the canon, but even writers like Nicholson Baker, simply because he loves writers and books. He agreed that Nicholson Baker might soon be canonized, but he nonetheless claimed that Baker was an underappreciated writer. Certain literary innovations, our friend said, often attributed to other already canonical authors, had first been introduced by Nicholson Baker. For example, a recent trend in using footnotes to create parallel narratives echoing the mind’s layers of consciousness (e.g., David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz, etc.) had initially been employed in Nicholson Baker’s first book, a novel called The Mezzanine, which our friend said was about a man going on a short escalator trip after purchasing a pair of shoelaces. I admit it: I enjoyed hearing this. I was entirely tickled, in fact. I was tickled because I pregot the clever jokes: escalators and levels of consciousness, shoelaces and footnotes. It was evidence that Nicholson Baker was not just an underappreciated innovator, he was a writer perfectly primed for me.

  Then the unthinkable happened, in the sense that it happened and I thought about it: I heard something else about Nicholson Baker. Something downright troubling. It was a couple months later, and I was back in Philadelphia, at another bar, having another beer with another friend, a writer friend. For a good twenty minutes I had been musing openly about Nicholson Baker, musing about all the things that I’d been musing about to Catherine for months now. I wanted to write about Nicholson Baker, and what needed to be done, I’d been saying, what no one had ever done, was tell the story of a literary relationship from its moment of conception, from that moment when you realize that there are writers out there in the world you need to read, so you read them. My friend was an excellent audience for all this because he’d heard of Nicholson Baker too, but hadn’t read him either. Perfect! He couldn’t tell me anything at all about Nicholson Baker apart from his private store of cocktail party trivia. Which included the troubling tidbit. My friend made preparations to reveal what he knew, leaning forward and glancing from side to side at a jolly team of barhoppers that had taken tables all around us. He sized them up for threats—you never know. Then he spoke in a sort of discreet whisper-scr
eam, so I could hear him over the hammering percussion of the bar’s eighties dance music. Some time ago, my friend said—a book or two ago, say—Nicholson Baker had plopped himself in literary hot water by writing something that seemed to deny or apologize for the Holocaust. An infernal electric scrape surged along my spine at this news. My torso shivered and jiggled in a way that might have appeared elegant had it been set to any other kind of music. The Holocaust! No wonder Nicholson Baker had been hiding behind the bars of his book covers—hiding so well I couldn’t seem to avoid him. My friend sat back in his chair with an expression of sickly glee. He had no further details. It was a cruel rumor, pure and simple. My eyes twitched, following a whole new round of mad inner musings. Did Nicholson Baker have a dark side, as is sometimes found in writers on the canonical brink? Or was this nasty rumor an expression of some kind of collective pent-up resistance to Nicholson Baker?

  It didn’t matter. Something cleared in that moment, and the rough outline of my inner musings instantly became a trajectory, a mystery—a story. Even though the marketing whisper campaign had come to seem more like war drums echoing deep in the jungle, and even though I had begun to worry that I would wind up smothered under an avalanche of Nicholson Baker appearances in my life, there had arrived a kind of literary “tipping point,” and all at once I could feel myself tipping. I was hanging off the cliff of Nicholson Baker, I’d grabbed the last sapling trunk growing out of the cliff wall above the falls of Nicholson Baker, and I was staring down into the abyss of Nicholson Baker, into the spray and the mists, ready for the release, the plunge. Who is Nicholson Baker? At that moment, I had only a few scant facts, some ads and rumors. But I was ready to begin my long journey, my boomerang quest. And isn’t that the only way a literary study ought to begin? Isn’t that—honestly, now—the only way to begin a study of how studies of literature ought to begin?

  8

  APPARENTLY NOT, BECAUSE NOTHING HAPPENED. WHAT WAS I doing all the while my plan for a Baker study threatened to take shape? I was sitting in our dinky apartment, not reading Nicholson Baker. A tipping point wasn’t enough to make me tip.

  That said, my collection of Baker books grew rather dramatically in the coming months. I found a number of first editions (The Fermata, The Everlasting Story of Nory, and Checkpoint) at a used bookstore. I didn’t read any of them. I came close to reading them, I had scrapes, but I never succumbed. For example, I picked up The Mezzanine, which Catherine had sweetly given to me for my birthday (now so long ago that its cover had begun to curl too), and I read its first sentence:

  At almost one o’clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top.

  I enjoyed this sentence because it was one o’clock when I read it and because I was reading the book in paperback (a gold-colored Vintage edition, from 1990), even though The Mezzanine had first been published in hardcover (in 1988, by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which must have seemed wonderfully fortuitous). I had to believe that in writing this sentence Nicholson Baker had specifically hoped that a reader would one day do what I’d done: sit down at about one o’clock and read it in paperback. So my reading felt fateful, foreseen. And I felt no pent-up resistance. But I stopped anyway. What happened this time was that even before I got to the book’s first footnote, Catherine stepped into the room. She shouldered the doorjamb, cocked her hip, and looked at me in a particular way. I did not return to The Mezzanine.

  On another occasion I glanced at The Fermata. I’d been nursing a hunch about this one. By now I had access to multiple author’s notes from a whole range of Nicholson Baker books—notes that were surprisingly redundant in their caginess—and from them I learned two enticing things: one, Nicholson Baker was a musician (he didn’t list his instrument, but he studied at the Eastman School of Music); and two, he attended Haverford College. The latter caught my attention because Haverford College was the alma mater of Frank Conroy, my most beloved teacher when I was in graduate school. That was the first clue: Conroy, who died in 2005, was also a musician. Conroy’s canonical autobiography, Stop-Time, tells the story of his hardscrabble childhood and the initial steps he took toward becoming a semi-professional jazz pianist. So not only had Conroy and Baker both attended Haverford College (they both went to experimental high schools, too), they were both musicians who launched significant literary careers at Haverford.

  My hunch was that The Fermata and Stop-Time had something to do with each other, and because I was a musician too—more on that later—I was able to recognize that “stop-time” and “fermata” were both musical terms. They were different kinds of pauses. A stop-time is an illusion of a rest, a break in a piece’s time signature, and a fermata indicates that a note should be held longer than its written value. By itself that might still be happenstance. But what clinched a connection for me was that The Fermata, like Stop-Time, was an autobiography. Or rather, its first sentence, which is what I glanced at, reveals that it’s a novel about a young man struggling to write his autobiography. More pointedly—and you can infer this from the first paragraph—it’s about a young man telling the fantastic story of his having somehow developed the ability to stop time.

  There’s more! A little flipping and scanning through The Fermata revealed that it is largely about sex and masturbation. Ah, I thought, fingering the book’s peach-fuzzy deckled page edges, I see you, Nicholson Baker! You got that from Conroy, too! In the most charming and famous chapter of Stop-Time—a scene in which the young Conroy masters the yo-yo—the older Conroy speculates on the toy’s likely psychological analog:

  That it was vaguely masturbatory seems inescapable. I doubt that half the pubescent boys in America could have been captured by any other means, as, in the heat of the fad, half of them were. A single Loop-the-Loop might represent, in some mysterious way, the act of masturbation, but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw, trick, and return representing erection, climax, and detumescence seems immoderate.

  Not to Nicholson Baker. And not, it should be clear by now, to me.

  So what can be made of a connection between The Fermata and Stop-Time? Admittedly, not much. It was interesting that Nicholson Baker might in some way be responding to Frank Conroy, and it was interesting that Baker and I, each in our own way, followed in the footsteps of a canonical author: Baker by studying where Conroy studied, me by studying with Conroy. But it didn’t explain everything. It did absolutely nothing to explain why I now owned half of Nicholson Baker’s books but couldn’t read any of them.

  That’s how life remained for a while. Nicholson Baker books lay scattered all over our dinky apartment, effectively in lockdown, and I found myself dodging them as they strived for my attention, which I wanted to give them, but couldn’t, just couldn’t. Worst of all was my copy of U and I. It was inescapable. With its now spookily twisted cover, my copy of U and I was forever creeping into my peripheral vision, mysteriously migrating from the nightstand, to the coffee table, to the radiator next to the toilet. I entertained the possibility that Catherine had been moving the book around, trying to entice me to read it, but that was pure fantasy. The truth was that my interest in Nicholson Baker, my resistance to him, represented dual pathologies resulting from publishing and teaching, and I had been moving the book around all on my own. Calm in the face of crisis, Catherine had given me A Book of Books and The Mezzanine to yank me out of the whirlpool of negativity that had already began to eat at our love. But that’s not what I saw. Rather, it seemed to me that Ca
therine had grown secretly jealous of the potentially all-consuming relationship I might wind up having with Nicholson Baker, and she was planning to lure me away with sex. Madness! My copy of U and I wouldn’t allow it. I continued on unconsciously picking the book up and putting it down in places where I might find it again, and then forgetting that I had picked it up and put it down. As a result I began to fear the book, as a soldier fears ambush on poor ground. Our entire apartment was poor ground. My copy of U and I was an unrelenting guerrilla warrior.

  And that’s when it happened. That’s when I learned why I’d been experiencing an endless rush of Nicholson Baker appearances in my life, and the reason made all the difference. He was promoting a book. I was surprised at this, but I shouldn’t have been. Of course he was promoting a book. He was a writer. He was on an impossibly long promotional tour, first for the book’s hardcover, then for the paperback, and what had happened was that while I’d managed to remain ignorant of the nature of his newest production, I’d been unable to avoid hearing his name almost everywhere I went. Then, only months after I published my anthology of “creative criticism,” I learned the title of the book that Nicholson Baker had been vaulting around the country promoting. The Anthologist. It’s about a teacher of undergraduate literature and writing who edits an anthology in response to a series of crises in his life.

  I felt no click or seizure at this, no queasy sense of tipping. I simply flushed with awe, and felt a painful passion, a passion that was passionate. Yet I couldn’t reach for The Anthologist because I didn’t own it. I did own a copy of U and I. I finally sat down to read U and I.