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IN SEPTEMBER 2012, ABOUT THREE MONTHS AFTER I MET Nicholson Baker in Maine—to spill my beans here a bit—Baker was interviewed by the New York Times on the occasion of the release of his second collection of essays, The Way the World Works (in which he finally touched on his bassoon-playing days, though only briefly). In the interview Baker admitted to being so disheartened by the United States’ ongoing drone war in Pakistan that it made him want to quit writing. It was a strange thing to say in that he offered it in response to a question about whether he’d ever met any authors who impressed him. I held my breath reading his reply because I’d just met him and I’d hoped to be impressive myself. But Baker named no names—not me, not Updike—and instead offered a non sequitur about the “presidential administration,” assassinations, and how it all sickened him and made him “want to quit writing altogether.” Less than a month later, he posted online several protest songs he’d composed and written himself. A book he’d been writing, he explained on The New Yorker blog, had “stopped working,” so he’d started composing protest songs instead. He hadn’t played music for thirty years, but he bought a keyboard and set up a modest recording studio in his barn in South Berwick, and there he was—a musician once again.
I listened to the songs and liked them well enough—I thought I heard some lectio divina in there—but still I worried. It’s always a cause for concern when a mid- to late-career writer takes up a whole new medium. D. H. Lawrence’s paintings come to mind, and Eudora Welty’s photographs, and I was once able to finger through clippings in a collage studio in Mark Strand’s house when a friend who was housesitting for him gave me a tour. Writers like hobbies, of course, like stringing sticky strands of connection between literature and the adjacent arts, but when they go public with this work—even when prose writers publish their poetry, or critics try their hand at a novel—what sometimes looms even larger than the new work is the sudden recognition of the limitations on the genius that created the old work. Even worse, the new work may seem like a critique of the old work, as though the old work had failed in some way. This is particularly so when the writer in question has also been saying that he might well quit writing altogether.
But I didn’t really think Baker was planning on quitting writing. He also said he was listening to his songs while he wrote, so at worst he seemed to have suffered a sudden onset of ambivalence and dread. And, for me, what these latest appearances of Nicholson Baker in my life really did—appearances that now came while I was writing about him—was reveal the shortcomings of my critical methodology. I’d known for a long time that I was bending the rules by intending to read The Anthologist last: House of Holes came out two years later, and The Way the World Works a year after that (though it includes pieces published as early as 1994). But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that breaking authors’ careers into subject-themed subsections, as I’d been doing, as libraries and bookstores do, and even as Baker’s essay collections do, creates an artificially orderly impression of the mind at work, as though writers are like shrewd generals dispassionately dispatching regiments of intellectual resources, mentally sculpting passions and interests into the kind of neat colored rectangles used on battlefield maps to represent squadrons or battalions, blocks that get meaningfully nudged about as battles are planned and waged. Even the publishing industry feeds this false impression. Books themselves segment up passions and interests into rectangular book-shapes, and the fact that some books sell exceedingly well and come to stand for writers’ careers while others underperform and fall by the wayside throws off our bottom line of who a given writer is as a person. The methodology I had devised to combat this, reading all of Nicholson Baker’s books in the order of their publication, can be only a partial solution to the problem because by the time a book has been published, often a year or more after it has been completed, its author has moved on to other things, other books. Reading suffers from interest lag. Add to that the fact that a real writing life is nothing at all like being a callous general or admiral shifting regiments or fleets about like pieces in some ugly game—rather it’s like being one of the pieces, a lonely trench soldier charging into the no-man’s-land of each new project with scant sense of purpose and perhaps only a prayer for survival—and what you realize is that even a carefully devised system of reading overlooks crucial turns in a writer’s intellectual development.
True, I had sensed an emerging political conscience in Baker. There was that early, anonymous plea about the Gulf War, and I’d known from the beginning that there was a presidential assassination book coming, and there was still the mystery regarding Baker’s stance on the Holocaust. And actually by the fall of 2012, I’d read nearly all of Baker’s books. All but The Anthologist. But even reading Baker had turned out to be an obstacle to understanding him because as I set about writing I came to realize that my methodology had warped into the evil twin of memory criticism: I wasn’t struggling to remember books, as Baker had, I was struggling to remember what it had been like not to have read books I’d read months earlier.
Really the whole chronological reading thing broke down not long after Catherine and I returned from Paris. We crash-landed back at the former bed and breakfast and stumbled out from the wreckage to the heavy workloads of our non-Parisian lives. I was about halfway through reading Nicholson Baker at that point, and I vaulted back into the work system I’d devised in the fall, writing about Paris and Baker’s sex books in the mornings and then reading books from later in his career in the afternoons. Now, though, the balm and refreshment of Baker’s midcareer essays produced craving for more, particularly when I had just woken up and was preparing to sit down to write, and reading a little Nicholson Baker seemed like the perfect tool to use to poke a hole in the dike of my imagination. One day this longing won out, and after that I read Nicholson Baker indiscriminately, at all times of day, sampling pieces from throughout his career on a whole range of subjects. For a while I was concerned about this because Baker’s many interests got all jumbled up in my mind. It’s just this kind of jumble that triggers in critics the taxonomical reflex—jumbles must be ordered and cataloged—and I did not stop being concerned until I realized that it was just this sense of jumbledness, of books seeming to clamber all over one another, that was the best possible portrait of Nicholson Baker’s, or any writer’s, mind. If Baker’s run of books, taken as a whole, tells the story of how he untangled his own jumble, like a man painstakingly unknotting a giant wad of Christmas lights, then a reader’s job, I thought, should be less to assist with the straightening and hanging of the wire than to undecorate the tree and rewad the string back into its original, brain-shaped clot.
Writing about him was even better than reading him. I loved the struggle of moving slowly through the books, massaging out trajectories and associations the early reviewers had overlooked. It was a fine time, for a time, and I reveled in a renewed sense of purpose that held all the way through my meeting Baker in Maine and my writing about his sex trilogy. It may have been precisely because the sex trilogy ends on such an upbeat note that I was surprised—even though I knew it was coming—to discover that all along Baker had been having dark thoughts. And even though I’d set out to use Baker as a savior—meaning that on some level I knew he would have to make a sacrifice in the end—I experienced a sad lull as my joyous renewal came at just that moment when Baker was considering abandoning writing, when he appeared to have been left spent.
I felt even guiltier when I realized that apotheosizing an author does not render all their books gospel truth. You’ll never believ
e who helped me understand this. Martin Amis! In a review of Don DeLillo published in The New Yorker just before Catherine and I went to Paris, Amis claimed that when we say we love a writer what we really mean is that we love about half their work. I’d quibble with “love”—lust and arousal are more natural metaphors—and I’d argue too for somewhat more than half, with the added observation that we cannot reject books by writers we admire simply because they do not inspire in us fawning emotions. If books fail, they must fail in response to muscular attempts to help them succeed. That is, or ought to be, what it means “to read.”
In any event, it was Amis who gave me license to depart from my critical methodology by deciding not to write about two of Baker’s books, both of which failed despite my muscular attempts to help them succeed. The Everlasting Story of Nory and A Box of Matches failed to my mind because they did not rise to the standard Baker himself set for the critic of a poem. The critic, Baker once wrote, must present “hard evidence that [he] has really grunted and sweated over this single lump of poetry.” The Everlasting Story of Nory, a third-person account of a young girl with literary ambitions spending a year in England, written in a narrative voice that to all appearances is the same girl, and A Box of Matches, a series of early-morning meditations in a Maine farmhouse by another Baker-figure, Emmett, a forty-four-year-old editor of medical textbooks, are not “grunt and sweat” books. They are books that could have been written, and perhaps even needed to be written given that Baker was now raising two children, but they were not books that needed to be written in the sense that they stemmed from a burning core of passion and interest. They read like books written in Baker’s spare time. As well, they attempt a return to innocence—The Everlasting Story of Nory defends Baker’s literary aesthetic, and A Box of Matches strives to complete the trilogy begun with The Mezzanine and Room Temperature—but they’re too late: Baker is no longer an innocent. In fact he’s begun a private passion. In The Fermata, Arno only toys with thoughts of suicide (“I immediately realized how laughably far I was from actual suicide”), but for Emmett of A Box of Matches, it’s a steady ominous thought (“It isn’t a subject I take up every day, but it does recur”).
The larger goal of B & Me demands a caveat here: Nicholson Baker is not, and has never been, the true subject of this book. If I’ve been correct in suggesting that there’s something wrong with the state of modern literature, that the state of modern literature is like an aberrant state of mind, a state on the brink of breakdown and despair, then the problem is not simply that Nicholson Baker’s work has gone overlooked, however celebrated it might be. It’s that the whole world is slowly going mad and forgetting writers like Nicholson Baker, writers whose books truly need to be books. Nicholson Baker need not serve as savior for anyone other than me. It is not that all readers should be of one mind in choosing the writers they read. Rather, what needs to be said is that the literary world has set itself on fire, and as a result it has become more and more difficult for any reader to find their Nicholson Baker, to find the writer who will become Nicholson Baker for them. A world without Nicholson Bakers is a scorched world. And that, more or less, is the trajectory that runs through the rest of Nicholson Baker’s books—the ones I took with me to Maine.
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THE FIRST LINE OF THE PREFACE TO NICHOLSON BAKER’S Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper—published, it’s worth noting, just a few months before the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center (and a further note: The Everlasting Story of Nory was the last novel Baker published before 9/11, and A Box of Matches was the first after it)—lies twice:
In 1993, I decided to write some essays on trifling topics—movie projectors, fingernail clippers, punctuation, and the history of the word “lumber.”
Okay, maybe “lie” is too strong a word. But “decided” is definitely misleading. It implies that Baker, in the lag period preceding the publication of The Fermata, simply turned his attention to other things. That’s not really true. He’d been toying with the history of punctuation at least since Room Temperature, and his essay “Lumber,” which charts a shift in the word’s definition from “junk” to “raw material” as it sailed from England to America, traces back to an interest that began percolating in the early eighties. “Trifling” too is a bit of misdirection. Movie projectors and fingernail clippers may seem like trifling subjects to an audience that hasn’t read Nicholson Baker, but anyone familiar with his work—like Nicholson Baker—knows full well that one of its central tenets is that trifles hint at truths. Trifles are not trifling at all.
The preface goes on to explain that at around this same time, 1993, Baker suggested to The New Yorker a piece about card catalogs (“Discards”) that he at first thought would be “brief [and] cheerful,” but which grew less brief and less cheerful once he threw himself into the work. This is misleading too, however, in that too tight a focus on this one piece, crediting it with generating the angst that resulted in Double Fold a number of years later, overlooks a whole set of pieces, “The History of Punctuation,” “Discards,” “Lumber,” and “Books as Furniture,” that all grew out of a single motive and rubbed up against one another with enough friction to nick to life an ambitious ember in Nicholson Baker’s mind.
What’s this motive? In short, a good chunk of Baker’s career has been dedicated to assessing the damage that has been inflicted on the literary endeavor by the advent of the digital age. Or wait. Because now it’s me being misleading, or at least getting ahead of things. Like pretty much all writers these days, Baker was and is hardly a Luddite. And particularly early in his career, perhaps because he so spectacularly leaped from writing on a typewriter to writing on a screen, his initial impulse was to regard computers as helpful tools, a bit of progress no different from a better drinking straw. This is most apparent in “Lumber,” which employs neonatal search engine technology to semiotically sift through a couple centuries’ worth of uses of “lumber,” and Baker goes out of his way to agree with one critic’s claim that literature databases offer “the most significant development in literary scholarship since xerography.” Reading “Lumber” was critical for me in that it revealed that I might have been wrong to criticize U and I for undervaluing research. When “Lumber” quotes Jonathan Swift using “florilegias” in 1704—meaning U and I repeats an error rather than makes one of its own—I got my first glimpse of the true jumble of Baker’s mind: Memory criticism and what might be called “Random Access Memory criticism” emerged at the same time.
“Lumber” is a mostly cheerful work, but “Books as Furniture” is vastly more so. Early in 1995, having noticed that home décor mail-order catalogs had begun to display furniture provocatively decorated with books—rows of books neatly shelved in blurry backgrounds, or books left open on coffee tables, forgotten by interrupted readers—Baker did what he’d always done when he found his interest piqued. He began an investigation. He amassed a small library of mail-order catalogs and devised a forensic system to identify the books in the pictures. The fact that big-box megamarts using books as props amounts to a kind of book pornography did not bother him at all. Indeed, still drunk on Vox and The Fermata, Baker’s attention fixated on a single image of two books positioned on a bed, one called Tongues of Flame and the other A Rose for Virtue, the latter “leaning fondly, or even ardently” against the former. The “catalog’s clinch” was a shot of the virtuous rose deflowering the tongue of flame with an act of “fleeting flammilingus.”
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