Nationwide, library administrators recognized that without a crisis like a recent earthquake to justify a massive reorganization, they would need a phantom crisis to explain why it was necessary. Hence Baker’s subtitular “assault on paper,” in which a range of forces conspired to depict ground-wood pulp paper as hopelessly flawed, as having “inherent vice.” Paper was doomed, administrators claimed. High acid content meant that everything printed after 1870 was slowly eating itself up. Whole collections of books would spontaneously crumble before the year 2000. Not only was this false, it wasn’t hyperbolic enough. An extremely influential 1987 documentary, Slow Fires, stoked fears with a metaphorical description of a catastrophe that wasn’t happening: “These precious volumes are burning away with insidious slow fires.” Following suit, the chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities made books sound like victims of a firebombing: “As we speak, the war continues, and every day . . . 6,000 more bodies [are] brought into the Library of Congress.”
The only way to save books was to use them, like the Egyptian mummies, as fuel for the engines of progress.
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IT GOT WORSE FROM THERE. A FEW YEARS LATER, THE CHAIRPERSON of the NEH resigned and joined the board of directors of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Who was the chairperson? Lynne Cheney. Double Fold barely mentions Cheney, probably because at the time she was merely the wife of former congressman and President George H. W. Bush Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. In Checkpoint, however, published just three years later, she’s the subject of an ugly gush of vitriol.
“That woman,” the book’s would-be assassin claims (note the Clintonian echo), “is the real obscenity.”
Cheney resigned from Lockheed Martin when her husband was elected vice president and she became Second Lady, but what was Lockheed already pioneering while she was on the board? Drones. These days, among many other nefarious things, Lockheed makes assassin drones like the scary flying wing–style RQ-170 Sentinel (nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar”), and they make cute little drones like the Samurai, which is about the length of your forearm and flies by imitating the most elegant flight design ever stumbled across by nature: the maple seed. Lockheed doesn’t get mentioned by name in Baker’s work until Checkpoint (“‘Lockheed! The vileness of what they do. It fucking buggers understanding’”), but the company, along with a sustained interest in aeronautical engineering, is a peculiar common denominator in Baker’s work:
1939: Human Smoke documents Lockheed’s activities in the years before World War II, doing business with all sides of the coming conflict and delivering planes and parts to Japan as late as May 1939.
1967: Mike of Room Temperature recalls playing with plastic warplanes as a boy and attests to a “fierce appreciation of [a] plane’s swept-back airfoils and cockpit canopy.”
1989: Of the many models Baker purchased for “Model Airplanes,” only one was a Lockheed design, but the exact plane is of interest: the F-117A Stealth Fighter was first built by legendary Lockheed R&D outfit Skunk Works in the 1970s, but the plane’s existence did not become common knowledge until its high-profile deployment during the Gulf War.
1992: The SR-71 Blackbird that figures in Abby of Vox’s fantasy was also designed at Skunk Works. Baker’s use of the plane came after its initial retirement in 1989, but the Blackbird was recommissioned in 1993 and remained operational for another five years.
2001: “No Step,” in which Baker strives to retain an innocent appreciation of airplanes by fixating on fragments of language printed on wings, appeared in the Autumn 2001 issue of The American Scholar—that is, pretty much coincidentally with the first use of commercial aircraft as weapons of terror.
September 11 was a loss of innocence for Baker, as it was for everyone else, and for that reason among others the story of Baker’s career is really the story of all writers who came of age during the digital age. Baker was preoccupied by drones not because they were particularly heinous, though they may well be, but because they insulted his personal history, our collective history. We come innocently into the world, grow curious about how things work, and we explore that curiosity having faith that those who invented the latest machines did so because they too were curious and because they hoped to make the world an incrementally better place. If that’s how things ever worked, and perhaps it’s naïve to think so, then it wasn’t what was happening now, and what Baker gravitated toward in the work that ultimately led to Double Fold was those facets of modern life that trace back not to creative individuals working out of a benign spirit, but to government departments and think tanks following a heinous directive: The surest route to peace was war preparedness, mutual assured destruction. Human Smoke begins with Alfred Nobel’s 1892 claim that his explosive factories would lead to a more peaceful world.
How do libraries fit into all this? Baker had no trouble with that. Microfilm technology descended from techniques developed for use in espionage, and miniaturization was praised as a “secret military weapon” in 1942 by influential library administrator Vernon Tate. Tate’s career trajectory arced significantly from the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), to the National Archives, to head librarian at MIT. And he was just the beginning. Double Fold tracked down a whole crew of shifty “Cold War librarians,” administrators with ties to the intelligence community. The names read like a character list from Get Smart (e.g., Verner Clapp, Merrill Flood, Fremont Rider, etc.), and the whole thing would be funny if it didn’t add up to a plot to systematically exterminate books.
If that’s hyperbolic, then that’s the point of Double Fold, which responded to the duplicitous argument that books were burning themselves up with a radical extension of the same fiery metaphor Baker had already deployed once. He noted that the Library of Congress experimenters who tried to deacidify books by exposing them to a chemical more commonly used in flame throwers thought of themselves as “book burners,” and Baker described the cabinets in which books were treated as “gas chambers.” He spoke to a microfilmer who happily accepted the moniker “the butcher of books” (filmed books needed to be “guillotined”), and he corresponded with a former Kansas State Historical Society employee who told him that a great quantity of the society’s post-1875 newspaper collection had once been made to “disappear.” Baker’s informant “saved a small stack and tried to avoid looking at the column of smoke rising from the sawmill.”
This last surely explains what Baker did when he heard, four-fifths of the way through the research and writing of Double Fold, that complete runs of a number of very rare newspapers were on the chopping block in England. Literally. The newspapers had been offered up to other libraries, but if none accepted them, then twenty to thirty tons of newspapers that were supposed to be spontaneously crumbling would be auctioned off, sold probably to a “book breaker,” who would market individual pages as novelties, profiting from the purchase precisely because the newspapers were not crumbling spontaneously. The news of the endangered papers came just as administrators were telling Baker that the worst was over, that the great purges of catalogs and the wanton dumpings of rare holdings were things of the past. That was a lie. And maybe that made writing a book about the whole thing seem like an incomplete response. Baker had been drawn into a conflict and so far his response had been limited to a valiant attempt to demonstrate that pens were still as mighty as swords. The future pacifist became a figurative soldier, and Double Fold is the story of fighting one metaphorical fire with another. What he discovered was that in order to battle duplicity you had to become a bit duplicitous yourself. Yet
when the English newspapers went up for auction—actually American newspapers held by the British—he couldn’t let pass a chance to save what could be saved. He and his wife drained their retirement accounts, put their futures and the futures of their children at risk, and bought all the rare newspapers and stored them in a mill. And Baker meant the echo: The time had come to put his money where his metaphor was, and if it was an insult to victims of the Holocaust to liken himself to those who had risked life and limb to rescue the few who could be saved, then so be it.
But why was it happening at all? Mystified by administrators’ antagonism toward books, Baker ventured a guess here and there: blind faith in progress; inept former spooks trying to profit from obsolete skill sets; and, most disturbing, digitizers who knew full well that searchable electronic databases would make it easier to monitor who looked at what.
But the newspapers themselves were the most compelling motive. At first it seems odd that a writer who had placed such a high premium on truth would invest so much in a medium prone to inaccuracy and propaganda. Did it matter that newspapers frequently lied? “No matter what is in a newspaper, even if every word is untrue,” Baker writes, “we know for sure that these particular words and drawings and pictures happened . . .” Why was that important? Because even their “exaggerations now have truths of their own to tell us.” Can’t you get that from a scanned copy? No, because “their oldness and their fragility is part of what they have to say.” It was a rough draft of history argument. Newspapers were the record of what people believed was happening while whatever was happening was happening. A history of lies was an even more important truth to never forget. And if you were an intelligence operative, and what you really wanted to do was control history, control the narrative of your society if only to cover your ass, then what you just might attempt to engineer, long before that society’s intellectuals have begun to suspect that anything was amiss, was a system that would let you dispose of whatever evidence of your malfeasance had managed to trickle out into the mainstream, burn it all up before some fascinated-by-minutiae nerd went picking around the ground-wood pulp lumber yard of a library. In other words, erase history before it became history.
Only one thing could go wrong: If just one meddlesome bookworm slipped between the cracks and figured out what you were up to, figured out that pens weren’t as mighty as swords anymore, then what he just might do is give up his pen and paper and reach for a sword of his own.
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SOMETHING ELSE NAIPAUL SAID: “TO TAKE AN INTEREST IN A writer’s work is, for me, to take an interest in his life.” Yes, I agree, but there’s a danger there too. A critic who slips from being an interpreter of texts, in which what gets depicted is the mental process by which stories come to have meaning (and what stories do in the minds of readers is what they mean), to a surveyor of biographical facts risks sidestepping the only reason a writer’s life is interesting in the first place. All the things I’ve been doing with Baker’s life since he turned to the vulgar utility of history—summarizing complex arguments, manipulating incomplete information, struggling to further compress a life already compressed once—are the things that make biography a minefield of perils. As a general rule the shortcuts that biographies take to make incompletely recorded lives seem whole are the reasons they’re not. Or more elegantly put, biography is but the clothes of the man, a phrase generally credited to Mark Twain, though that too may be a tie or a hat—or better, an accessory: a cuff link—with which Twain has been outfitted by an exuberant critic-haberdasher.
Which maybe explains why Henry James once refused when he was asked to write a biography of Hawthorne:
It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the purpose of the biographer.
What life data there are of Hawthorne offer a perfect example of the kind of mistake James hoped to avoid. In 1850, a young and enthused Herman Melville descended on Hawthorne in Massachusetts, not long after he had expressed admiration for the older writer’s work with some particularly suggestive language:
I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germanous seeds into my soul. . . . He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.
I’d had this passage in mind—for reasons that are probably clear—ever since Catherine and I arrived in Maine, and the problem, James’s problem, is what biographically minded critics had tended to do with these lines in the years since. These days it’s common to find tedious scholarly works with titles like “‘The Ugly Socrates’: Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience” and “Alienated Affections: Hawthorne and Melville’s Trans-Intimate Relationship.” Preposterous. Naipaul may be right, but to take an interest in a writer’s life answers a siren’s call in that there’s a temptation to leap to wild conclusions that accidentally say more about a critic’s state of mind than they do about the writer under consideration. This, actually, is the idea behind Tommaso Landolfi’s wonderful short story “Gogol’s Wife,” which I’d also had in mind as Baker’s wife kept turning up in his work (e.g., “How I Met My Wife”). And speaking of Baker’s work—or rather, speaking of not speaking of it—it may be that I was now guilty of having hung out the shingle of my own critical haberdashery, but I don’t think it’s entirely my fault. Baker’s early work had always stood in defiance of that old saw “Boy, have I got a story for you!” He didn’t. Nicholson Baker had desperately tried to avoid having a story for us—and that was the best story of all. But now, in this later part of his career, he really did have a story to tell, and at the risk of seeming a little unhinged myself, it started to drive him a little crazy.
His wife was the first to notice.
The title of Double Fold came from a page-folding paper test, repetitive dog-earing, that library administrators dreamed up to measure the “brittleness” of books. It was more absurd duplicity. A book was deemed “unusable” when a concerted effort to break one of its pages succeeded in breaking it. Baker’s madness began to poke through when he tried the test himself:
Late one night, after the children were in bed, I began some random experimentation at the household bookshelves. My wife asked me what I was up to.
“I’m—I’m performing the fold test,” I said.
“Please stop breaking the corners off our books,” my wife said. “It can’t be doing them any good.”
If a stammer (“I’m—I’m . . .”) in an otherwise non-speech-impaired person indicates psychological duress, then it wasn’t doing Baker any good either. He went on to devise his own readability test, repeatedly turning page 153 of an 1893 edition of Edmund Gosse’s Questions at Issue to determine whether it could survive the rigors of simple reading. He began to enjoy this repetitive action—surely a sign of mental buckle—and he topped out at eight hundred turns. The upshot? A one-hundred-year-old leaf of ground-wood pulp paper, the same piece of paper that failed a double-fold test, could be read many times over.
I thrilled at the next bit. Baker noted that “one root of the word ‘duplicity’ is duplicitas, ‘doublefoldedness.’” This sent me vaulting back to connections I’d anticipated more than a year before: the unfolding mind metaphor in U and I, and I and Thou as well. Baker was less thrilled. A fissure had opened up in the middle of his psyche, and though it seemed light and funny at first, it stopped being funny two years later with
the suicidal ideations of A Box of Matches: “This morning I woke up writing an impassioned petition in my head, but impassioned petitions do nothing.”
Was Baker sad that Double Fold had done nothing? The book wasn’t a best seller but it did win the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, to date Baker’s only major literary prize. Even critics who panned his other books lauded Double Fold. But praise didn’t heal the wound, and a certain doublefoldedness would be palpable in Baker even years later. On the one hand, “The Charms of Wikipedia” (2008) would celebrate the oft-maligned web resource for its communal nature and resuscitate a favorite allusion: “I clicked the ‘edit this page’ tab, and immediately had an odd, almost light-headed feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass . . .” And on the other, “Kindle 2” (2009) would lash out at Amazon’s unnecessary invention of Vizplex, electronic paper: “The problem was that the screen . . . was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.”
But does duplicity alone explain why an otherwise polite, law-abiding writer would soon fantasize at length about murdering the president of the United States?
60
THAT’S ABOUT WHEN I DECIDED TO BREAK MY IRONCLAD resolution and meet him. Not to plug the holes in his biography—the 1982 professional crisis, the year in England: these were more enticing as mysteries, I decided—but because I thought he might be the only person in the world who could understand the crisis I was now in. I had followed his exact footsteps, and I’d hoped to write a brief and cheerful account of renewing my literary faith, but now it was all darkening again. Plus, I’d rejected my original assumption that it was better not to meet a writer as you read him. The whole point was that it was important to be reading living, noncanonical writers, and wasn’t the main difference between a living writer and a dead writer the fact that the living writer was still around and might be willing to talk to you? That was the suggestion of Henry James’s prefaces, I thought, and that was the premise of “The Figure in the Carpet,” too. The story’s narrator-critic is hermeneutically aroused when he meets a famous writer at a party, and the writer baits him with a suggestion that there is something in his work that no reviewer has ever seen:
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