B & Me

by J. C. Hallman

  It wasn’t until Human Smoke that Baker turned his gaze to a broader history: the use of atrocities for ideological ends. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Baker has to say about these usages, as the book, which I finished a day before I met him, is a collage of clippings, partial vignettes only slightly molded into narrative shape. Human Smoke includes bits from obscure memoirs and histories but is mostly composed of borrowed newspaper accounts of the long, slow buildup to war, all of it arranged chronologically and each snippet outfitted with a flatly stated date marker, as though the book has a pulse: “It was March 1, 1938,” “It was September 3, 1939,” “It was October 21, 1941.”

  Baker appears not at all in Human Smoke, but as I read the book—his longest—I felt him constantly in the background, on the lookout for facts cut from history books, facts that without him might have wound up in a landfill. I imagined him sitting alone in his rented mill, a little cold and his breathing audible in the cavernous room’s acoustics, paging slowly and horrifically through his twenty to thirty tons of newspapers (all of which, actually, had been moved to Duke University by 2004), and as I took in what amounted to a lost draft of history I caught myself turning the leaves of the book as I might have turned that old newsprint, pinching up the corner of a page and sliding my palm beneath it, faceup, cradling the paper and lifting it gently and spilling it into my other open palm, which caught and laid the page in place and then smoothed over its surface to nudge out the air between it and the sheet beneath it. Despite Baker’s absence, Human Smoke is an extremely personal document. The extensive citing of Harold Nicolson links it to the earliest stages of Baker’s career, and its embedded history of a mostly forgotten pacifist movement reaches back even farther: The pacifists whose stories Baker tells either taught at Haverford or prominently visited his alma mater. The book completes a forward evolution as well. During the minor media tempest generated by the publication of Checkpoint—Knopf originally planned the book release for the eve of 2004’s Republican National Convention—Baker described himself, in an interview, as “practically a pacifist.” This contrasts with his author’s note on Amazon in 2012, written in refreshing first person and completely lacking caginess or guile:

  I’ve written thirteen books, plus an art book that I published with my wife, Margaret Brentano. The most recent one is a comic sex novel called House of Holes, which came out in August 2011. Before that, in 2009, there was The Anthologist, about a poet trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse, and before that was Human Smoke, a book of nonfiction about the beginning of World War II. My first novel, The Mezzanine, about a man riding an escalator at the end of his lunch hour, came out in 1988. I’m a pacifist. Occasionally I write for magazines. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and went to Haverford College, where I majored in English. I live in Maine with my family.

  63

  SO DID HUMAN SMOKE DENY THE HOLOCAUST? NOT IN ANY WAY. The rumor I’d heard was a measure of collective human crassness. The book did deny a range of accepted facts, however. It denied that Hitler was bent on war any more than were Churchill or Roosevelt. It denied that the slaughter of Jews was unavoidable, and that no one saw the Holocaust coming. Most of all it denied that World War II was a war that had to be fought, which is the foundation for the widely held, oxymoronic belief that World War II was a “good war.” Perhaps Baker’s point was that as long as this remained acceptable, as long as we allowed that any war had been good, a door would be left ajar for other wars on the chance that they too might be judged to have been good. But haven’t we ever since borne witness to a long series of conflicts, all of benign intention, each demonstrating that war is not so very good? Until we’ve gone back and demonstrated that World War II wasn’t particularly good either, or even necessary, we offer aid and comfort to those who would employ atrocities, even atrocities they saw coming, to push through that door once more, to justify another indulgence in humanity’s most grotesque instinct. These days, in the face of mounting evidence, it’s not too shocking to point to Pearl Harbor or the bombing of Coventry, as Baker did, and suggest that the powers that were had some intimation of what was coming, didn’t do much to stop it, and planned to use the aftermaths to sculpt public opinion.

  It’s probably clear by now that I’m suggesting that Human Smoke has a ghost subject: the Bush administration, the ignored forewarnings of imminent attack, and the predrawn plans to exploit the heady nationalism that would erupt in the wake of some new atrocity. Notably only a few of the early reviewers of Human Smoke even mentioned that it followed on the heels of Checkpoint. No one bothered to wonder whether there was a “little trick” stretching from book to book. And only one interview I found took the time to ask Baker why he’d written Human Smoke at all. It wasn’t puzzlement at the West’s reaction to Hitler, Baker claimed, though that was part of it. “Then I had the Iraq war,” he said. “I was in Washington when the Pentagon was flown into. I said, ‘I just hope we’re not bombing some place any time soon.’”

  I love this quote—the tortured sentence structure of a man suffering genuine pain.

  64

  NOW I REALIZE THAT IN HAVING “GONE THERE,” AS IS FREQUENTLY said these days, that even in having entertained the idea that the accepted history of the time leading up to and following 9/11 is, at best, conveniently incomplete, what I’ve done is jack into the worldview of Jay, the would-be assassin of Checkpoint, one of two characters who make up the short novel’s Vox-like all-dialogue structure. Jay really is a conspiracy theorist—he says only a little about 9/11, but claims that “all the totally off-the-wall conspiracy theories, all of them, are true”—and that makes my “going there” totally appropriate. It is, or should be, the job of readers to exuberantly tap into the worldviews of whatever characters they read about. “If you read a book and let it work upon you,” wrote Goethe, “and yield yourself up entirely to its influence, then, and only then, will you arrive at a correct judgment of it.”

  I’ll go even farther. A critic aspiring to conspiracy theory makes complete sense because readers and writers have always conspired to create what books are “about.” More broadly, writers conspire, as I’ve already suggested, with editors and jacket designers and interior designers, to create the “book,” and particularly with first editions it’s fair to assume, at least with a writer of Baker’s caliber and interests, that an author has at least offered input on everything that makes up a book—hence what I’ve been doing in this book, mining just about any of a book’s features for its meaning. Is there a danger to this? Of course. In the analysis of books, as in the analysis of complex world events, we hover between two kinds of error: ascribing too much meaning where there is little, if any, to be found, and ignoring meaning that stares us right in the face.

  What stares us in the face when we pick up a first edition of Checkpoint? Admittedly the red, white, and black target motif of the dust jacket didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It’s not a book about archery. But a little weirdly the book has two title pages, both of which precede the front matter and the dedication (“For Carroll, and in memory of Bob,” Baker’s parents-in-law—Robert Brentano died in 2002), and that’s where it starts to get interesting. On the first of these the title is printed across the top in extra wide–spaced letters, and a little ways down there is a single black dot, like this:

  C H E C K P O I N T

  •

  This is a recto, a front page, on your right-hand side as you hold the book. What this means is that the next page, a verso, is the same piece of paper. Actually it’s more complicated than that because mos
t books are really stacks of large sheets of double-folded paper called quartos, each of which, counting fronts and backs, become eight pages of a book. But you know what I mean. Our tactile experience of a book is that each of its “pages” has a front and a back, and these fronts and backs, somewhat confusingly, are also called “pages.” The next page of Checkpoint, or rather its next two pages, is another title page, though this time the title, much larger, begins on the left-hand verso (“CHECK”), hops the gutter in the middle like a Playboy centerfold, and continues on the right-hand recto (“POINT”), which also lists Baker’s name, the publisher, and the year of publication.

  Back on the verso, though, something tugs at your attention. There’s another black dot. It appears like a floater on the surface of your eye until you focus on it. And when I focused on it I felt a chill, as on reading an unexpected rhyme, because I realized at once that this dot aligned with the dot on the reverse face of the same piece of paper. I was sitting in the sun on a plastic chaise longue on our deck in Maine, happy to be about to dig into Baker’s most controversial book, and I was already applauding myself for taking in all of its one hundred and fifteen pages in a single draught. But I stopped before I started. I held that page up to the sun, which revealed not a perfect eclipse of dots, but it was close enough that the suggestion was clear. It was a hole. Another Baker hole, a hole that I hadn’t stumbled across since Vox, but that I knew was lurking in Baker’s mind because in a few years’ time it would reappear in force in House of Holes. And of course this was a very specific kind of hole: a bullet hole.

  On a hunch I flipped to the end, to the page after the last page of text. Aha! Here was the same black dot on another recto, but not, this time, on the corresponding verso. What did that suggest? The hole-making bullet had not penetrated all the way through. It was still lodged inside the book. Next I removed the ugly dust jacket and found a similar clue. The book’s black, blank front cover board was cool to the touch and had a vague pattern of faint, squiggly lines evocative of the surface of Mars, broken only once by a circle in the middle, half an inch across, a perfect hole revealing a glossy polished disk. As with the black dots there was no corresponding hole in the book’s rear board. I held Checkpoint out at arm’s length and looked at it anew. Before you even begin reading it, you know that this is not a book that fires a bullet. Instead, like a book that has been stuffed into a breast pocket and miraculously foils an evil design, it stops one.

  Which means that almost right away I was forced to conclude that I’d been way off base in thinking that Baker was falling away from literature. Now that I thought about it, I had to admit that a book that only contemplates violence—Checkpoint is less about assassinating Bush than failing to assassinate him—has not yet given up the pen for the sword.

  Not that any of this went discussed in Checkpoint’s early reviews. The mud once slung at Vox and The Fermata turned out to be only a primer for the ordnance that would be launched at Checkpoint: “A quickie polemic that masquerades as a novel”; “This odd, abortive, short yet desperately rambling little playlet . . .”; “This scummy little book . . .” Again and again in the dozen or so notices I later read, reviewers refused to yield an inch to its influence, even reviewers who claimed to admire Baker’s “trifling” work. It’s commonplace enough to note that book reviewers often get it wrong. Books that reviewers ignore or malign go on to be classics, and books for which reviewers toot joyous kazoos fade into silence. Even before Checkpoint, Nicholson Baker’s career had stood as a kind of high-water mark in the history of reviewers getting it wrong. Baker books, whose hearts were pincushioned with the wooden stakes of zealous, self-consecrated book slayers, rose up uncannily from their premature tombs and batwinged their way to audiences. But the reaction to Checkpoint was something new. Reviewers noted that it was a smart and funny book, but nevertheless judged it laced with an unspeakable serum. It wasn’t just a bad book. It was a book that, good or bad, it was wrong to have written. Even before Checkpoint was published, when feature writers were putting in calls to the Secret Service to see what they thought of it (wiser than most, the agency spokesman reserved judgment: He hadn’t read it yet), it was clear that the book might not have a chance to stand up on its own. Baker fought back for a while. “Checkpoint is an argument against violence, not for it,” he told one interviewer. And when “scummy little book” started to get quoted in other articles—when, that is, the story of the book began to overwhelm the book’s story—Baker tried reversing the barb’s trajectory with the argument that “scummy” was a perfect adjective to have chosen, because wasn’t recent history an agitation of the cultural pond, and what rose to the surface when you agitated ponds? If this was a coy reference to Baker’s muckraking great-grandfather, no one heard the echo. The verdict: literature oughtn’t rake muck. And maybe Baker agreed, ultimately. By the time of his Paris Review interview, he’d given up. The book was a failure, he allowed. He wished he hadn’t published it. “It was an argument for nonviolence that people took to be an assassination fantasy,” he said.

  But that’s a false distinction, I think. It is a fantasy. And maybe even more than Vox, Checkpoint is about the role and purpose of fantasy in the world. How do you get there? You read the book.

  65

  IN QUICK ASIDES, A FEW OF CHECKPOINT’S EARLY REVIEWERS DID note that its all-dialogue structure linked it to Vox. That’s true and important, but distinctions between the two books appear right from the start. Checkpoint begins:

  May 2004

  Adele Hotel and Suites

  Washington, D.C.

  JAY: Testing, testing. Testing. Testing.

  BEN: Is it working?

  JAY: I think so. [Click . . . click, click.] Yes, see the little readout? Where’d you get it?

  BEN: Circuit City.

  What do we already know from this? Two men, Jay and Ben, are fiddling with some kind of recording device, and before we know anything about them we can tell they are sort of hapless types, men unsure of how to operate a simple machine. We probably know, in approaching Checkpoint, that it is a book that will meditate on the assassination of a president—when was the last time you started a book having no inkling of its contents?—and if that has been of concern to us, if that has steeled us against the book because we generally agree that there are just a few things that nobody ought to be allowed to say, then even these few lines should offer reassurance. This is no straight-faced intrigue story. This is no wishful thought trying to smuggle itself into an impressionable mind. These guys can barely turn on a tape recorder.

  More important, they’re not alone. Like Vox, Checkpoint is only mostly dialogue, and right away, if we hope to avoid Martin Amis’s error, we must ask who it is that has affixed a date to the front of this document. Actually the fact that it’s a document, a transcript, is the first thing we should register, and this makes it totally unlike Vox. And that, in turn, should get us wondering about who’s typing inside the brackets (“[Click . . . ]”), brackets being the way that context, commentary, or, in this case, ambient noises are introduced to all kinds of records of human interaction. Who does the introducing? Authors or editors. So there’s an invisible author/editor of Checkpoint, and just why would anyone go to the trouble of typing up this conversation? There’s no indication that Checkpoint is a post–successful assassination story in which the killers’ plotting has become part of some morbid historical record. No—the more natural conclusion, which you can and probably should draw in your first ten seconds of reading, is that Jay and Ben have been apprehended. Vox had become evidence in the Lew
insky Affair. Checkpoint is evidence.

  Or maybe that’s being too literal, as the whole thing is pretty absurd. Jay announces that he plans to murder the president on page two, and Ben’s immediate response is to assume that this is one of Jay’s “little flippancies.” What does this tell us? Ben knows Jay well. This is confirmed over the next forty pages or so, as we get hints as to the nature of their relationship. Ben and Jay are middle-aged men who once attended high school together. They’re like-minded souls, and they are mostly in concert as the conversation drifts to Lynne Cheney and Lockheed Martin and the current political climate, but their lives have diverged in the years since their friendship was formed. Both men have worked as college professors, but while Ben makes casual reference to the “honors seminar” he coteaches every spring, Jay can look back only on an aborted career as an adjunct. Ben is a successful historian and the author of several books; Jay “get[s] jittery” whenever he tries to write. Ben is a family man, happily married and father to a fourteen-year-old son; Jay can’t sustain a relationship and admits that his personality tends to drive women away. The men no longer live in the same town, and that’s important to the basic occasion of the book. It’s been several years since Jay and Ben have spoken—pivotal years, politically speaking—and out of the blue Jay has contacted Ben with an urgent request that Ben meet him, at once, at a hotel in Washington, D.C. And please bring a tape recorder. It’s testimony to the depth of their friendship that Ben drops everything and makes the journey, stopping at a Circuit City along the way.