B & Me

by J. C. Hallman

  And now there’s a slightly weird part, because Baker calls his diagram a picture of the “recently christened, pre-Joycean ‘stream of thought.’” Well it’s certainly pre-Joycean because William James contracted to write The Principles of Psychology, in which the diagram appears, in 1878, and James Joyce wasn’t born until 1882. But when Baker says “recently christened,” it’s a bit misleading because he means really recently—like, a few pages ago. In my copy of William James’s collected works, one of those Modern Library editions with ultrathin onion skin pages, the diagram above appears on page 165, and “stream of consciousness” is christened on page 159. It’s William James’s phrase. I wondered, even as I happily felt found in Nicholson Baker, why “stream of consciousness” had not popped up on Baker’s shorthand list of remembered James phrases. More important, it was here that William James insisted that “such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ . . . do not describe [consciousness] fitly.” Of course this made me think back on Baker’s “train” of Updike quotes. James would have disapproved. Rather, James wrote, we should go to metaphors like “river” or “stream” to convey the action of the mind. “In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.”

  Here I had to stop reading. Catherine called my name. I snapped myself out of my déjà vu and recognized the sound from the bathroom: the electric razor. I felt a deep testicular stir at this. She needed my help. I still had Nicholson Baker’s naked ego throbbing in my mind when I got to the bathroom. Or maybe it was me throbbing. I loved the quiet intimacy of grooming Catherine. It was evening in our dinky apartment now, a nice spring evening with a faint chill and the air’s invisible impregnation of pollen, an atmosphere of things coming alive. Catherine handed me the razor, and we did the necessary contorting.

  “You won’t believe who just popped up in U and I,” I said.

  “Barthes?”

  “William James.”

  This was an old game. Whenever I’m working on a subject, I’m always looking for ways to introduce it into conversations, probably because I’m no good at small talk. I did this all the time with William James. Know who first introduced student evaluations to university courses? William James. Know who invented those frog-ear stickers to cure seasickness? William James. Know who woke Gertrude Stein up to the occult possibilities of mangled prose? William James. Catherine only nodded. She was probably thinking whole estuaries of other things as she reared her head, adjusting her stance and swinging her great chunk of hair out of the way like a puma twitching its tail. I started thinking about other things too. For example, I came to appreciate Baker’s sly stream of consciousness realization that stream of consciousness was the answer to his dilemma, his stuckness. A whole theory, an equation of Nicholson Baker, suddenly flooded into my mind:

  As well, I was thinking about the work that I wanted to do on Nicholson Baker, how rather than getting the B-and-Me stuff out of the way, as Martin Amis had prescribed, I wanted to put it in the way, I wanted it to become the way. But if I did that, or if it occurred to me to do that while Catherine and I stood awkwardly posed in the bathroom and I was feeling a sense of having gotten past at least some of my confounding negativity, then probably even an oblique reference to the highly intimate and often unremarked-upon activity in which we were now engaged would seem irrelevant to some, maybe even immature and indulgent, even as it seemed absolutely essential to me. And that was sort of the whole point. We never read outside the context of ourselves—we’re forever finding our reading interrupted by dinners and phone calls and requests to assist with delicate hygienic tasks—yet the exploration of ourselves as we read is somehow off limits: You can’t talk about that when you write about books. This was so wrong that even a writer fated for canonization could find himself unsure how to proceed after he’d decided to go ahead and do it. But it’s not wrong. And the fact that some people think it’s wrong is exactly why it’s right. Literature must do whatever it’s not supposed to do, and literature about literature must do the same. Of course it mattered that Nicholson Baker sat down to start writing U and I on August 6, 1989, and of course it mattered that Catherine had not been trying to distract me with sex. Rather, she’d midwifed my rebirth from a crisis of faith. She hadn’t been moving U and I around our apartment, but she had identified my dilemma before I even knew I was in one, and it was she who had recognized that my glimmerings of familiarity with Nicholson Baker might well be my salvation.

  11

  BEFORE I BOUGHT U AND I, I HAD ORDERED AND STARTED READING Martin Buber’s I and Thou on another hunch I’d had that Baker had referenced it in the same way The Fermata seemed to reference Stop-Time. I didn’t finish it because I didn’t see a connection at first, but on continuing U and I the next day, at a park a couple blocks from our apartment, my head resting in the socket just above Catherine’s hip bone, the connections appeared and multiplied. Baker’s folded-mind metaphor is anticipated by Buber’s first line: “The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.”

  Buber sees the world as falsely dual, which means it is in a state of crisis. We all begin with a literal, umbilical, “I-You” relationship, but before long an accumulation of clutter—knowledge—transforms all our “Yous” into “Its.” Once we’ve shifted to “I-It” we’ve fallen into “modern man’s lack of relation.” Our goal should be to return to the “real duality,” the “I and You,” which, for me, was only a tiny step from U and I.

  A short time before, Catherine and I had been lying on our sides, executing a groggy spoon position that enabled me to secretly but publicly massage one of her breasts. So I was feeling pretty “I-You.” It was a sunny day, and I had a good book in mind and a good breast in hand. Then we shifted positions so that my head could rest in her hip socket and I could read Nicholson Baker. Catherine wasn’t reading in the park, she was just napping and being, and the new position enabled her to run her hand over my chest, slipping her fingers between the button gaps of my shirt and lightly strumming my chest hair. This was the background of my reading for some time.

  I didn’t care if others in the park saw this. I wanted them to, in fact. I had a strong desire to share my true relation with the neighborhood. I was already beginning to make the connection to writing about books, to criticism—that’s exactly what criticism should be, a public display of affection—but I was also thinking about how our neighborhood was the only neighborhood in which I’d ever witnessed someone draw a gun and discharge it, so maybe it could use a frank demonstration of good relations. Not that our neighborhood was awful. It wasn’t. It was a nice neighborhood, with tree-lined streets and a pleasing blend of early twentieth-century architecture, and it was even a literary neighborhood. Fitzgerald had spent time here. The bar where he used to get drunk was just down the street, though now it was open only once a month, a kind of monument to binge behavior. There were other bars in the neighborhood too—wine bars, vodka bars, and neighborhood bars—and Catherine and I frequented all of these, which I note because I’d heard that Nicholson Baker was a nondrinker, a complete teetotaler, didn’t take a drop. We did. We took drops.

  When I said that Catherine moved into my dinky apartment, what I really should have said was that Catherine and her books moved in. Immediately after her arrival we had to go shopping for shelves to hold her tidy archive of literature, criticism, and art books. I had my own library, of course, the many bookcases of my canon-dabbling, yet Catherine’s modest holdings intimidated me. Open any book of hers—and I did when she went for power walks—and you found practically a
s many annotations as words, important passages marked and prioritized, in light pencil, with a charming system of stars, one to four. Each book contained a galaxy of stars. Her bookshelf was a tightly packed universe of literary exchange.

  While globe-trotting between India, Paris, Berlin, and home, Catherine had sojourned intellectually from art history to high theory. She was no canon-dabbler. There were a number of authors she absolutely loved—Duras, Barthes, Didi-Huberman, Benjamin, Kristeva—and she had read not only their representative work, but most everything they had produced. I was proud of this in her, but I was also mortified. Catherine loved Henry James too. How could that be? I loved Henry James. It made me jealous of James because Catherine was supposed to love me, and yet here they were, the two of them, seeming to love each other, and in addition she loved all these other writers as well. She was downright promiscuous with literary relationships! Not that they had interfered with our relationship. As one might expect, the first few months after Catherine moved in were an unadulterated period of adulterating each other in all the ways we could think of.

  Which isn’t to say it was a perfect time, because we were also in the process of verifying that we were both certifiable. That’s what happens when you fall in love. Your sanity falls in love with your beloved’s sanity, and you adulterate each other. Then you move in together and realize there’s this whole other side to them—their Mr. Hyde, their insanity. My insanity was, as I’ve already suggested, a deep-rooted negativity that manifested as a tendency to do a whole lot of talking when there wasn’t anyone around to listen. I didn’t hear voices, I spoke them, revising conversations I’d already had, or preparing for conversations I’d not yet had, or, as during a particularly dark time in my life, repeating over and over the absurd phrase “I would like to be assassinated in a violent coup d’état!” The extent of this quirk—I sometimes turned off talk radio so it wouldn’t ­interrupt—didn’t become clear until Catherine moved in and I had to start whispering.

  Catherine’s insanity was intimidatingly literary. Like Madame Psychosis (Joelle Van Dyne) from Infinite Jest, which I read shortly after she moved in, Catherine was from Kentucky and had been a beauty queen and a cheerleader—and she was totally crazy. She had a perfect storm of perfectionism and workaholism and cockiness and insecurity that left her endlessly busy and productive but perpetually convinced that she wasn’t doing enough and wasn’t good enough. So as we wandered nights from the wine bar to the vodka bar, it became easy to think of Catherine as my Zelda as well, the neighborhood a kind of miniature Paris, ours less a moveable feast than a stumbling one. When we once watched a Dylan Thomas biopic in our dinky apartment—specifically, a scene in which Thomas and his wife, both certifiable, stumble through their front door drunk and laughing—we cried out because there we were, the scene could have been filmed a few feet from the television on which we watched it.

  But for the most part my read of U and I came during good times—there was spring, there was love—and the times were good because I was reading U and I. That being the case, I rather selfishly ignored the fact that my rebirth came at Nicholson Baker’s expense. “This essay is the test of whether I should bother being a writer or not,” he wrote, hinting at some deep-rooted malaise of his own.

  I finished the book in another day or so. It confirmed a host of suspicions: he was Barthelme’s student briefly; he did go by “Nick”; and he did attend Haverford College because of Frank Conroy. Several times I experienced the rare, out-of-time pleasure a reader can feel on glimpsing career-spanning themes that for the writer are just beginning to emerge. For example, when U and I fesses up to the young writer’s fetish of attempting to elegantly employ obscure words, it was, for me, like looking simultaneously through a telescope and a microscope. Baker resurrects “florilegia,” a medieval synonym for anthology (though he gets it slightly wrong: “florilegia” is the plural form, “florilegium” the singular), and in reading the passage in which the word occurs multiple times I thought I could spot The Anthologist on the distant horizon while at the same time peering in at minuscule spermlings of influence wriggling a beeline toward me. And even though I hadn’t read any of Baker’s “sex books” (as I’d heard them described by Baker readers)—Vox, The Fermata, and House of Holes (which wouldn’t appear until August 2011 but was already getting mentioned on websites for publishing insiders)—I thought I could see them beginning to take shape as U and I described the thinking of writers who incorporated sex into their work: “ ‘My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo!’ ” U and I references a canonical bevy of influences (e.g., Pater, Proust, Nabokov, Murdoch, Trollope, Arnold, etc.), but apart from the suggestive title it never even mentions Martin Buber. Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion. If Nicholson Baker hadn’t read I and Thou, then he’d been remotely influenced by it in the same way I’d been remotely influenced by U and I.

  The book’s pleasures aside, a couple things did bother me about U and I, and it was just when Baker turned to James’s water metaphor to guide his own meandering course—“the trembly idiosyncratic paths each of us may trace in the wake of the route that the idea of Updike takes . . .”—that I felt myself nudge up against a pair of logs jamming my own stream of Baker thought. First, his mother. U and I is as much about Baker’s mother as it is about Updike. It’s dedicated to her (“For My Mother”), and some of Baker’s earliest memories of Updike are of his mother laughing uproariously at Updike passages that the young Nicholson can’t yet appreciate. In fact, Updike becomes the apparatus that Baker’s mother uses to figuratively wean her son from the maternal bosom. Yet many years later, when Baker tells his mother that he’s going to write a book about Updike, he ignores her advice. She says that in order to do a respectable job of it, he would need to go back and reread all of Updike. Baker shrinks at this and claims that what “comes to mind” when he thinks of Updike is of more value than what he might “summon to mind.”

  That was log one. Log two was structure. Early in the book, Baker claims that he already thinks of Updike as an imaginary friend (“I am friends with Updike”), but that doesn’t stop him from structuring the rest of the book, everything after the stream of consciousness revelation, around three attempts to actually befriend Updike. None of these encounters is particularly satisfying, not even one late in the book that finds the charmingly boyish Baker attending an Updike book signing with his sweet mother on his arm. U and I ends with a suggestion that Updike based a fictional character on one of these clumsy Baker self-introductions. “And that’s all the imaginary friendship I need.” The end.

  Not for me. My gentle feeling of logjam eventually morphed into an impulse to level a criticism or two. And that, perhaps not coincidentally, is what U and I tends to do whenever Baker isn’t plotting to make sure that Updike knows that he and Baker are “fellow contributors” to The New Yorker. Indeed, what mostly “comes” to Baker about Updike is things that annoy him. For example, he has little affection for Updike’s “queasy adolescent heroes,” nor is he taken with Updike’s having signed on to the self-flattering notion that writers have a heightened “capacity to lie.” Baker forgives a palpable mean streak in Updike, but feels indicted when Updike complains that literary streams of thought are too often “clogged” with asides and diversions. “The only thing I like are the clogs,” Baker writes. He describes The Mezzanine as having been “a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers.”

  But most important is that the thing that comes to Baker’s mind most naturally when he thinks of Updik
e is not Updike’s fiction at all, but his writing about literature. And Baker does not laud Updike’s writing about literature. Quite the opposite. Even though it was Updike who offered the now-canonical advice that all prose should be written “ecstatically,” Updike’s writing about literature was anything but. “This pronouncement,” Baker writes, “ought to hold good for critical prose as well—and yet if I can force myself to utter a fixed doubt about Updike, it is paradoxically that he isn’t ecstatic and immoderate enough about the writers he loves.”

  U and I takes the Updike advice that Updike ignored. It’s an ecstatic, immoderate, even inebriated book. But in the end, I was left less drunk than clogged. Like me, Baker feels “scorn” for traditional literary criticism, and he feels compelled to chart a new course. He names his new critical method—the method of no method—memory criticism, and after his initial lists of partly recalled quotations he tries to remember a whole bunch more Updike passages. Once he finished the book, he looked up all the actual quotations and inserted the correct quotes, bracketed, in the text. So what you wind up reading, really, is Nicholson Baker discovering again and again that memory criticism fails. He flubs quotations, overlooks vast stretches of the oeuvre, and by the end he’s awash in bracketed self-doubt: