B & Me

by J. C. Hallman

  Something odd happened when I read this line: I looked up from the book and saw Alice blue. Or rather, satisfied at having spied a subtle association camouflaged behind a scrim of plot, I paused my reading midsentence and laid the book down onto my chest and looked off into the distance. And there was Alice blue, neither the deep ocean navy at the top of the sky, nor the blurry perfect white along the jagged horizon, but between, a faint Eastery pastel just a few degrees up that even without prompt I might have likened to the color of Alice’s dress. (For the record, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland describes absolutely nothing as “blue,” and includes a reference only to Alice’s “skirt” in chapter twelve.)

  Room Temperature invites these sorts of intricate associations—from “For Alice” to “Alice blue”—as Mike, like “Howie,” is a voice whose main purpose is to claim that a book’s real adventure is the inward journey, to express a preference for the mind’s reflexive associations over selective memory. My jump from the book to the sky may itself have been a reflex triggered by an association Mike makes, a few pages in, from the flapping wings of several birds he can see out a window, to the imagined image of a dog’s floppy ears as it runs “excited zigzags across a field.” Even more than “Howie,” Mike is keenly interested in these sorts of thoughts, in the similes and metaphors that fwoosh us from one concrete thought to the next (he recalls his father encouraging him to nurse an instinct to attend to “transitions” between subjects of conversation), and his general contentedness during this randomly selected twenty-minute period is a function not only of nursing the Bug but of the outside world looking “unusually good and deserving of similes today.” Deserving? Precisely.

  On falling into the routine of afternoon reading in my hammock—I was now writing the early parts of B & Me in the mornings—I’d had my own run of outside-world associations. At one moment my reading was punctuated with the calls of a pair of hawks, and a lengthy aside Mike delivers on the history of punctuation, specifically a discussion of obsolete parentheses, caused me to see the swooping, veering birds as a set of ­brackets— { { —loosed from the page and hunting in tandem for something to splice. More consistently I listened behind my reading to the farty noises of a species of insect that, once I had settled into the hammock and remained still for a time, would continue their periodic bursts of happy flatulent propulsion. These inspired—and for this I hold responsible both Room Temperature’s Virgin-and-Bug milieu and the fact that a local insect, the Jerusalem cricket, was named for its peculiar resemblance to a tiny baby—a brief and perverse vision of the adjacent fields populated with thousands of miniature constipated six-month-olds, all perched on methane-powered jet scooters and all looking like gleeful little Nicholson Bakers.

  Now these are robust, fanciful associations, and my question is this: Would I have been having thoughts so layered and textured had I not been reading, had I just been lying there instead? I don’t think so. Emerson once optimistically noted that civilization and nature can make for perfect harmony, as when you stumble across Beethoven emanating from a deep woods cabin. And perhaps Whitman was trying to take the next step from there when he advised readers of his poetry: “I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.” Reading a book that is enthusiastically a book is a concentrated form of thinking, and when we read out of doors, when we put a book down and look up and see its image hovering before our paler reality like the phantom residue of a bright light or optical illusion, we are reminded of the most fundamental of associations: a book is like the world in which it is read. There is no Alice blue without the sky lurking behind the words. In this way reading, like sex and eating, is better al fresco: Literature is an airing out, and a story that dries on the line feels fresher and cleaner and paves the way for the associations that all Baker’s early works link to the raw intelligence that good books nurture.

  27

  AND WHERE DOES THAT IDEA COME FROM, THAT ASSOCIATIONS are a sign of intelligence? William James! It was James, of course, who suggested that the ability to form complicated analogies was what separated man from brute. His description of the process is as evocative of Wonderland as Room Temperature:

  But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.

  Given this, it should be no surprise that William James makes his first overt appearance in Nicholson Baker’s work about a quarter of the way into Room Temperature, in chapter three, in a passage in which Mike describes how he came to appreciate silence and negative space. Chapter three is an excellent example of a fizzling and bobbing consciousness: It skips from the mobile that Mike’s wife, Patty, had constructed from those colored inspection slips (turning in the room’s barely perceptible breeze, it’s the Alice blue–colored slip that “c[omes] into view” and gets the chapter rolling), to a recalled exchange in which Mike encourages Patty to write down her ideas for a mail-order business of finely crafted paper art, to Mike lying in bed trying to decode what Patty writes of their lives in a notebook by carefully listening to the “sniffing” sounds of her felt-tip pen, to a protracted meditation on just how much of our thinking ought to remain private, and then finally back to Patty’s writing in bed and Mike’s realization that what’s even more revealing than the sound of her pen is the hesitation between the noises, the pauses, the rests: it’s “more truthful to downplay the scribble and focus on the hand-slide in my own wife’s record of our life.”

  Of course all this fizzling and bobbing is only an illusion of the real thing. But chapter three is notable too, given both my incorrect belief that Baker was British and my newfound awareness that his first publisher was British, for its sustained note of Anglophilia. Mike suggests that the use of the subjunctive is an echo of British tyranny; he describes at length an obscure television show about a British spy; and he quotes one British poet, “Always true is always new,” commenting on another British poet. When Mike finally quotes a fellow American, William James, he does so merely to point out that James had failed to teach him what Patty’s pen noises have succeeded in teaching him, and what was notable about this moment, to me, was that the line of James he quotes, “James’s ‘intention of saying a thing,’” comes once again from The Principles of Psychology, this time a page and a half before James’s glorious stream of consciousness diagram. And given the fact that Mike spends a great deal of time describing his tenure as a “French horn major at the Eastman School of Music,” it’s worth observing that James, immediately after the diagram, likens its overlapping arcs to

  “overtones” in music: they are not separately heard by the ear; they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and alter it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-processes at every moment blend with and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes which are at their culminating point.

  In taking note of the fact that both Mike and Baker are Eastman students with an interest in William James, I’m coming very close to doing what I don’t think critics should do: infer a writer’s life from their work, mistake fiction for autobiography. The problem is, Mike calls
his own book an “autobiography,” just as “Howie” calls his escalator the “vehicle of this memoir.” Does Nicholson Baker even write fiction?

  His early stories feel fictional enough, but The Mezzanine and Room Temperature so mock the line between fiction and nonfiction that even referring to Baker-figures or Mike or “Howie,” as I’ve been doing, makes me feel like the butt of a private joke. (Paris Review interview: “I felt I had to be someone who would leap in from outside and do some nutty thing and then run away cackling.”) The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were each excerpted twice in The New Yorker, but that was in the eighties, when creative essays and short stories were printed side by side with no distinction drawn between them (the change came in 1992). As I read Room Temperature, Baker’s one-time self-description as a “pretty autobiographical” writer began to seem like a wild understatement. I found myself combing through the book for autobiographical hints:

  Room Temperature

  Nicholson Baker

  Mike’s birthday: January 5, 1957

  Baker’s birthday: January 7, 1957

  Mike has an infant daughter, nicknamed Bug (no given name supplied), presumably born late eighties.

  A 1993 Baker article describes his daughter, Alice, as a “barely literate five-year-old.”

  Mike transfers from the Eastman School of Music to Swarthmore College.

  Baker transferred from the Eastman School of Music to Haverford College.

  Mike once hoped to become a composer, and played the French horn.

  Baker once hoped to become a composer, and played the bassoon (more on this shortly).

  Mike suggests that Patty launch a mail-order business for finely crafted paper art.

  Margaret Brentano has a mail-order business for finely crafted paper art.

  Mike recalls meticulously constructing model airplanes as a child and describes the process of model construction at considerable length.

  Baker’s “Model Airplanes,” published in Esquire a year before Room Temperature appeared, describes the process of model construction at considerable length and refers obliquely to Baker’s youth in that he admits to having “never liked building model cars as much as building model airplanes.” (The notorious pot-smoking incident reappears here: Baker reports that his interest in model building flared anew after “a time of professional disappointment,” and the goal was to use the construction of a model to “pull [him]self together.”)

  Mike confesses an ambition to write “some sort of concentrated history of the comma” featuring the thesis that the “comma, in short, was alone responsible for the passage of civilization north from the ancient world into the modern.”

  Baker’s “The History of Punctuation,” published in The New York Review of Books, in 1993, is ostensibly an overview of several grammar histories, most prominently Dr. Malcolm Parkes’s Pause and Effect, and while Baker is a generally kind reviewer, he admits to being puzzled as to “how casual Parkes is . . . about his commas.” The discussion of commas that follows appears informed by long-standing interest and copious research.

  Mike notes several times—it’s one of Room Temperature’s few recurring motifs—that he, Patty, and the Bug had recently attended his sister’s wedding. His sister requests that Mike “read a little biblical something at the ceremony.”

  Baker attended the wedding of his sister, Rachel, on July 11, 1987. The date is included in “Wedding,” the otherwise unpublished remarks he delivered on the occasion. We can infer that July 11, 1987, precedes the period in which Baker composed Room Temperature from the already cited claim that The Mezzanine was being written after this time.

  Noteworthy: When I read “Wedding,” I suspected at once that Baker included it in The Size of Thoughts, his 1996 essay collection, as a kind of homage to “A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell,” which Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1943 while awaiting execution for having participated in a plot to murder Hitler. Baker doesn’t cite Bonhoeffer directly, but I think a similarity in tone is unmistakable:

  Bonhoeffer: It is right and proper for a bride and bridegroom to welcome and celebrate their wedding day with a unique sense of triumph.

  Baker: In a few minutes, Rachel and Bob are going to be pronounced husband and wife. These are excellent words, husband and wife—they lean toward each other, they exist in reference to each other, they link arms.

  What to make of this? I wasn’t sure yet. In noting a link between Baker and Bonhoeffer, I’m doing what I’m doing a lot of in these pages, compiling notes upon notes, waiting for themes or melodies to emerge (consider the faint notes of “Ode to Joy” that an attentive listener hears in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), planning the echoes for both Checkpoint, which I’d learned was about the attempted assassination of President George W. Bush, and Human Smoke, Baker’s book about World War II. Even without “Wedding,” it would be hard to believe that a writer of Baker’s caliber could produce these books without Bonhoeffer in mind, and all together it added up to the first hints that spoke to the malicious rumor I’d heard that Baker had somehow denied the Holocaust.

  28

  AND WHAT TO MAKE, IN TURN, OF ALL THIS? I WASN’T SURE ABOUT that either, except to say that I didn’t think The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were simple romans-à-clef using a façade of invention as inoculation against scandal and liability. What they made me think of, what my reflexive association was, was James Agee’s A Death in the Family, a book also ostensibly about fatherhood that won Agee a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958, even though he died before it was published and there’s really no way of telling whether he would have ultimately labeled the book fiction or nonfiction (while he was alive he called it an “autobiographical novel”). Even more problematic is “Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” the short Agee piece that editors slapped onto the front of A Death in the Family, as prologue, in preparing the book for posthumous publication. “Knoxville: Summer, 1915” is a brief, lyric portrait of middle-class idyll famous for its protracted description of the hiss of garden hoses that “fathers of families” use to water lawns in the evenings. The hose sound is joined by other like noises—children pissing, locusts—so that for a time “Knoxville: Summer, 1915” becomes an orchestral arrangement of hissings, and it’s the only piece of writing I’m aware of that has been alternately labeled fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Once, it was even set to music by Samuel Barber.

  Given Mike’s and Baker’s backgrounds as would-be composers, I probably would have needed only this last to start thinking that it might be a good idea to keep James Agee in mind while reading Room Temperature. And sure enough, about halfway through, Mike fizzles out a suggestive association of an airplane air-conditioning vent with a garden hose:

  I wondered for the first time whether the shape of the nozzle’s inner cone was in fact more than decorative, whether it functioned aerodynamically . . . even at the hissiest stage near shutoff, to offer a palpable incumbency of coolness—unlike the gun-sprayers on garden hoses, whic
h just before the flow of water was completely cut off created instead a Panamanian circular fan of mist [Agee: “ . . . the water was just a wide bell of film”] on a plane perpendicular to the direction you were pointing the hose.