B & Me

by J. C. Hallman

  It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So naturally it’s the thing for the critic to look for.

  The critic does look for it—by doing just what I’d been doing: reading directly through all the writer’s books. To “meet” a writer, in “The Figure in the Carpet,” is to meet a challenge. It’s an occasion that musters dormant energies. And that’s what I mustered when I finally decided to meet Baker, and I didn’t care that the “little trick” in James’s story, when someone finally glimpses it, becomes a sort of pharaoh’s curse, killing off critics and destroying marriages.

  I should admit that by this point, after about a week at the beach rental, I’d driven over to South Berwick a couple of times. I had Nicholson Baker’s phone number and address—he wasn’t listed, but it wasn’t hard information to find—and I’d even driven past his house to a little park just down the road, where I sat for a while on a bench thinking that it might be nice if Baker were to take a midafternoon stroll and stumble across me reading Human Smoke. That obviously didn’t happen. And after I decided to out and out approach him it took me several days to figure out how to do it.

  “Should I just knock on his door, do you think?” I asked Catherine. “Catch him flat-footed? Get the real, unscripted Baker?”

  “No, don’t do that,” she said. “Just call him. You’re being weird.”

  “And say what? What would I say?”

  “Jesus! Say what you always say when you’re writing about someone. You do this all the time. Quit whining.”

  Poor Catherine. Here she was trying to have a vacation, probably beginning to regret that she’d done anything at all to help bring about this whole Nicholson Baker thing, and when I wasn’t bothering her with silly questions I was periodically bursting our beachside idyll with shocking bits from Double Fold, Checkpoint, and Human Smoke. “Those motherfuckers!” I’d say. “You can’t imagine how bad it is—listen to this!” Every afternoon we were taking long walks on the beach that were restful and rejuvenating until I started to use the time to mull what I’d read, sink back into negativity, and plot how to meet Baker. To spare Catherine, whenever I sensed that a particular stream of thought needed to be voiced aloud, I let go of her hand and told her that I wanted to walk in the surf. Then I made long, mumbling speeches about how bad things had gotten or tried out what I might say if I called Baker and he simply picked up the phone.

  That didn’t happen either. When I finally called, his voice mail picked up. Strange as it seems, I hadn’t anticipated this. I froze because I realized that what I had prepared to say if he picked up would sound completely stupid on a voice mail message. I panicked and hung up. I hate doing this, these days, because you know that if you call once and hang up and then call back and leave a message, the person you called will be able to tell that you called twice and will assume you panicked. But there was nothing to be done. Before I called back I wrote out a quick script of what I would say to Nicholson Baker’s voice mail, a thing I never do, and then I called and read my script and hung up the phone. Done!

  Baker didn’t call back right away, which made me nervous and insufferable. I often get nervous when people don’t call me back, but this was much, much worse. I kept having to remind myself—or rather, Catherine kept reminding me—that for all I knew, Baker was off on a research trip or he was visiting family somewhere and might not get my message for several days. That didn’t help. Staring at my phone didn’t help either, but that’s what I did. I stared at my phone and tried to will an incoming call. I’d left my message at ten o’clock in the morning, and by five o’clock I was a despondent mess. He wasn’t going to call. I wondered aloud whether I should leave another message—maybe the first had vanished into the digital ether—but Catherine talked me out of that and the next morning she wisely suggested that we drive to Portland to get our minds off Nicholson Baker.

  That’s when he called. The phone rang while I was driving, and Catherine and I looked at each other in a way that made me think of the last scene in Bonnie and Clyde, that moment of locked eyes before they’re riddled with bullets. Should I answer while driving? I answered the phone. “This is Nick Baker,” the voice said, and that was the last coherent thing Baker said for quite some time.

  We generally use the phrase “words fail” for those moments when we’re so overcome by emotion that we are reminded of the inability of language, even artfully constructed sentences, to do justice to the full breadth and texture of human experience. But there really ought to be a “words fail”–like phrase for moments when even simple thoughts like “Hello!” or “Nice to speak with you!” or “Of course I’d like to meet you, come over at four o’clock!” get all screwed up in transit from our neurons to our vocal chords. Baker didn’t have a speech impediment like Updike, but he did seem to have something like a mental stammer, which actually we all have from time to time and which is maybe the real reason written language evolved from recording data—warehouse inventories, I once read—to forming complex thoughts. When you write down your thinking you can edit out all those mental hesitations—or scratch that, misfirings—and project a version of yourself that isn’t more intelligent than you are, exactly, but is a self strained clean by the puffy gauze of prose. I listened to Baker for a moment and thought, He really should have written down a script before he called! That set me at ease. I realized I had an advantage. I had read almost everything Baker had written, and what that meant was that in communicating with me he was in competition with his more perfect written self. As far as I knew Baker hadn’t read anything I’d written, so I had nothing to live up to. All of which is to say that Nicholson Baker didn’t have any idea what to say to me, and that calmed me down. I got the sense that he was willing to meet with me, though, and after he offered to drive to wherever we were staying—he said he liked to travel—I tried to be gracious and suggested a restaurant near his house that I’d reconnoitered when I drove to South Berwick. Baker said he would prefer to avoid “the whole restaurant thing.” I thought, What restaurant thing? But no matter, he was being incredibly gracious with his time. When he said, instead, that I should come to his house for an hour or so and started in on a fairly complicated set of directions, I interrupted in a slightly ominous voice, “I know where you live.” “You idiot! You sound like a stalker!” Catherine hissed beside me, loud enough so that Baker might have heard, but if he did he let it go and told me to come at four o’clock.

  61

  CATHERINE WAS GROPED BY A STRANGE MAN ON THE STREET IN Portland—this happened once in Paris too—but apart from that we had a fine time in the city. Nicholson Baker had called! Even Catherine was relieved because it meant she would have some time to herself, and after lunch I drove her back to the beach rental and then set out for Baker’s house in one of those curious moods that descend when you realize that you are living out a sequence of events that might become a story you will later tell, when the usually crumpled tapestry of life unfurls and for a time you can make out figures and patterns that otherwise remain unintelligible. This was true even though I was not at all sure that I would tell the story of meeting Baker—I planned not to write about meeting him, in fact. When I spoke with him on the phone, I specifically said that I hoped our meeting would be as far from an “interview” as was humanly possible, given the fact that I was writing a book about him. I didn’t record our conversation—it was the first of two; for the second we did the restaurant thing at a diner—an
d I didn’t take down any notes about it either. I was a memory journalist.

  Mostly I remember what I said. I told Baker that I thought there was a connection between his work and Martin Buber’s. Baker hadn’t read Buber, as I had feared but expected, but he liked the idea of remote influence. We chatted about chess and trombones and bassoons and ampersands and my father, who as a young physicist had worked for a company that subcontracted for University Microfilms, the organization whose role in the history of miniaturization Baker had skewered in Double Fold. The truth, my father had told me, was even darker than Baker suggested. Poor microfiche image reproduction quality was not a result of University Microfilms having failed to invest in better technology. They had the technology, they just chose not to use it; it wasn’t greed, it was neglect. Baker was duly shocked at this, but he had clearly left all that behind him; he’d taken his hill and earned his medals, but he’d been left wounded and the war would be won by some other general. He shrugged shyly when I flitted out a few names of writers even more contemporary than Buber. He hadn’t read them, and he admitted this as though it were a flaw, as though he’d not gotten around to them yet, but I knew it was probably more complicated than that, that there were writers he hadn’t read because, for him, literature seemed to have taken a wrong turn sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, and if you were a writer picking up the threads of one of the wrong-turners, then you weren’t likely to be of interest to a reader like Nicholson Baker. But Baker gave no sign of this, seeming to wish not to weigh anyone down with unhappy knowledge, at least not in this context, a noninterview that was beginning to seem a whole lot like an interview.

  To change the tone of our chat, I told Baker than while I’d been in Maine I’d thought about driving around to look for Stephen King. King had lived in Maine for years, and my plan, I said, was to finish the job of the careless driver who had once struck King on a country road but failed to kill him. Earlier I allowed that people don’t generally get hurt as a result of popular storytelling genres. Let me qualify that, because I do. I get hurt every time I hear that Stephen King has served up yet another regurgitation of the same meal he’s been scarfing down and puking up for decades, with nary a moment between feedings. There is probably no better measure of how low the literary world has sunk in recent years than the desperate attempts that have been made to bring King into the canonical fold, not for his writing but on the hope that a few of his zombie army of readers might be tricked into buying the books of any other writer. It hasn’t worked. And it wasn’t an entirely random subject to have broached with Nicholson Baker, because King had once lashed out at Baker, likening his first two books to “fingernail parings,” an unprompted and unjustified attack to which Baker calmly replied with his essay on fingernail clippers (“Clip Art”), which turned out to have a very interesting history that traced back to Baker’s hometown, Rochester. Baker chuckled at my murderous fantasy, and said that he’d once tried to read King only to find him too frightening. King must be “some kind of genius,” Baker said, at which I scoffed until I recognized it as a moment of lingering Bakerian duplicity. Of course a writer steeped in so much Victorian thinking would slyly use “genius” in its nineteenth-century sense! It had been a while since William James popped up in Baker’s work—I had bolted upright when Double Fold gave one of its paper villains the three-name serial killer treatment, William James Barrow, though there was no connection, I checked—but clearly Baker meant “genius” in the sense that William James had meant it when he included it in a series of lectures on abnormal states of mind alongside “Demoniacal Possession,” “Witchcraft,” and “Degeneration.”

  We chatted at a table just outside Baker’s house. Baker had put out a couple plates of snacks for us, and two warm beers. I drank one, he ignored the other. We talked for more than an hour beyond the time he allotted for the meeting. Baker sighed a lot. When he spoke, his sentences came out in long slow tumbles that were probably designed to let someone who was writing down what he was saying keep up, but since I wasn’t writing anything down, their only effect was to slow down my thought process in listening to him. This, actually, confirmed the first flash of thought I’d had when I drove up his driveway. And it was this thought that was all I really needed to come to an understanding of Baker’s own murderous fantasy, Checkpoint, which I’d finished reading a week earlier. Baker was waiting for me outside when I pulled up the driveway. He was a quite tall man, as I’d read, but he hid it by slouching his shoulders, and the wall of trees that served as backdrop gave him an ancient, gnarled look.

  That was my thought: Nicholson Baker looked far less like a hobbit or a wizard than an ent.

  62

  TOLKIEN, AS A SUBSET OF THE CHILDREN’S STORY THEME, IS ANOTHER thread woven through the carpet of Baker’s career. Mike of Room Temperature admits that all he’d ever learned about coziness came from descriptions of Bag End. Arno of The Fermata lists Gollum among the literary monsters he might be said to resemble. “Lumber” notes that Gandalf used “lumber” in its original sense, and as a cognitive analogy to boot. And in “Thorin Son of Thráin,” Baker tells the story of his mother having once read aloud to him the entirety of The Hobbit. It was Baker’s “most emotional early reading experience.”

  But Tolkien is a betrayal too, isn’t he? If Baker had felt that a rug had been yanked from beneath him when his long-standing love of libraries was upended by the actual history of libraries, and if a boyish fascination with fighter planes had transposed into horror as remote-control toys evolved into amoral robots, then wouldn’t he have felt similarly juked as Tolkien shifted from the childish innocence of The Hobbit to the more adult vision of The Lord of the Rings, in which disdain for all peoples east of the Promised Land is only too apparent, in which the simplistic duality that characterizes Western thought is uncritically celebrated, and in which the sturdy resilience of the “Englishman” is heralded as being of ongoing importance to world history despite Britain’s marked reduction in global stature? In other words, The Hobbit is an adventure story and The Lord of the Rings is a war story, and this might be relevant if you were a writer suffering a prolonged period of disillusionment and you had begun to contemplate violence even as you were on course for publicly professed pacifism.

  What are the ents if not the pacifists of Middle Earth? Like Baker, the tree shepherds have a preference for slow and careful progress, and it takes some tricky tactics to even convince them to sign up for Middle Earth’s latest conflagration. It’s the hobbit Pippin who does the convincing (in “Kindle 2” Baker compares himself to “Pippin staring at the stone of Orthanc”), and the way he makes his case fits nicely with Baker’s career. Double Fold briefly turns its lens upward to the iconic Holocaust imagery of a horrible smoke rising from an infernal chimney, and this image returns in Human Smoke, the book itself named for concentration camp ash. Likewise, Treebeard refuses to intervene in the war for Middle Earth, and so Pippin turns him south, toward Saruman. “There is always a smoke rising from Isengard these days,” Treebeard says.

  I’m relying a bit more on Peter Jackson’s film trilogy here than on Tolkien himself, but even that fits because the release dates of all three films nestle snugly between the publication dates of Double Fold and Checkpoint. What else was happening during these years? The Two Towers was released a little more than a year after the Twin Towers fell. The Patriot Act, signed into law six weeks after 9/11, turned every electronic device with an Internet connection into a stone of Orthanc: You could remotely view the world, and the world could peer back at you, legally. The Retur
n of the King pleased audiences in December 2003 with a wide range of spectacles, among them the carbuncly Orc captain Gothmog, who at the beginning of the siege of Minas Tirith barks, “Release the prisoners!” an order to catapult into the city the severed heads of several dozen Men of the West. Just six months later the ongoing occupation of Iraq produced a series of beheading videos, insurgents recording the gruesome crimes and catapulting the footage onto the Internet, though it was widely considered wrong to watch for free what had only of late been sold as entertainment. And finally, the ultimate message of The Lord of the Rings—civilization is weak without a strong monarch—aligned perfectly with the concerted effort to expand executive power in the world’s mightiest nation.

  Of course, it’s easy to dismiss this kind of parallel drawing between world events and the worlds of books and stories, and this has become only easier as storytelling has plummeted to the status of entertaining diversion. And in a way, that’s what happened to Baker, too. In 2002, not long after Double Fold appeared, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences published a hostile book-length response (so poorly written it seems less an earnest rejoinder than a piece of hastily produced propaganda) that criticized Baker for having pointed out that many influential library administrators had ties to the intelligence field. Baker was out of his depth, the book suggested. He must be a conspiracy theorist. Baker denied the charge. There was no conspiracy, he insisted, only collective incompetence. Nevertheless, even before the critical work was published, the darker suggestions of Double Fold began to echo in the Bush administration: the use of private companies to digitize public card catalogs foreshadowed the rise of military contractors in the so-called War on Terror; the seductive algebra that made book dumping look profitable reappeared as the claim that the invasion of Iraq would pay for itself with oil revenue; and 9/11, like the Loma Prieta earthquake, was an atrocity used to justify a wholesale reorganization of society, the blueprint of which had been sketched long before the attacks occurred.