Baker dissolved. He glanced briefly in the woman’s direction, made only the tiniest of gestures toward josh and bluster, and then turned his head toward the wall and blocked his face with his hand, as though to throw up what shield he could against an avalanche of bullets and blows.
That’s when my heart just about melted for Nicholson Baker. It was a rude thing for him to have done, an incredibly rude thing, but more important was the fact that Baker loathed himself for his mind’s failure to have performed the very simple task of recalling the woman’s name. It was the mental stammer, it was the one thing about human interaction that literature truly can ameliorate, and it was the absolute worst thing, I realized, that Nicholson Baker, accused by turns of perversion and violent designs, was capable of doing to another person. That moment was a backward measure of Baker’s goodness. But instead of consoling him, or doing anything at all to help him recover, my mind reflexively called up a panel discussion I’d stumbled across a few months earlier, a public conversation in which Baker had participated along with several other writers. Baker responded to a question about interviewing people:
There’s always a moment when there’s some little piece of that person that sums him or her up completely. There’s some little moment of vulnerability often, or a mistake, or a piece of something that he or she had on the mantel that somehow sums the person up and that becomes the proxy of the whole individual.
68
AFTER LUNCH BAKER SURPRISED ME. HE SUGGESTED THAT WE GO to another restaurant for dessert. Two restaurants in one day! But when we got to the second restaurant it was unexpectedly closed. Baker shrugged at our misfortune. It was unclear what we should do next. A heavy rain had begun to fall, and for a moment we made a very odd couple there on the sidewalk, he quite tall and me dwarfed beside him, both of us crouched under undersized umbrellas in a downpour.
I had a realization and an idea. I realized that I was glad the second restaurant was closed because the first restaurant proved that I was never going to be able to be a simple friend to Nicholson Baker. I could stifle it, but in listening to him I was always going to be in the process of connecting whatever he said back to things he’d written six or fourteen or thirty years before, and even though that might honor him in a way, might even be a form of friendship, it also meant that in interacting with his less than perfect, unwritten self, I would forever be overlooking the simple courtesies of human intercourse.
But Catherine could be his friend! She could have good intercourse with him! That was my idea. A few days before, Catherine and I had said good-bye to the Maine beach rental and relocated to South Berwick’s lone bed and breakfast. It was a sad departure. Not long after we had consummated Maine in the beach rental, Catherine had downloaded Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” and we had happily danced to the tune and then spent the rest of our time at the beach walking, reading, and doing what the educated fleas, the romantic sponges, and the lazy jellyfish do. Leaving it behind made us realize that we absolutely had to leave behind the plague-ridden former bed and breakfast. In fact, maybe we were done with bed and breakfasts entirely. But nevertheless Catherine was now back at South Berwick’s bed and breakfast, waiting for me to be done with Nicholson Baker, and my idea was to invite Baker back there so that Catherine could be nice to him. Clearly I didn’t know how.
Of course all this put me in mind of a Baker story. “Subsoil,” from the midnineties, is set in a bed and breakfast. A man doing research at a railroad museum close to a quaint little inn becomes preoccupied with a small, desiccated potato he finds in his room’s closet. Why had the famous Mr. Potato Head toy, the man gets to wondering, shifted from using actual potatoes that were perfectly serviceable as playthings, to the turd-like plastic molds that forced all children to play with the same fake spud? “Subsoil” is a cautionary tale. The man’s growing obsession with needless innovation is symbolized by the desiccated potato, which begins to grow. First modestly with little nodules poking out its sides, and then monstrously as the lengthening tendrils creep out of the closet and slither all over the inn like the tentacles of a Lovecraft squid god. The moral? It’s possible to get so caught up in a troublesome idea it overwhelms you.
That’s true of authors too. You can get to the point where you’ve simply had enough of them. I don’t mean me. I mean Catherine. That was the risky part of my plan. For two years now Catherine had been listening to me prattle on about Nicholson Baker. It had gotten to where she didn’t even flinch when I stormed out of my office, tossing my hands in the air, and blurted out things like, “Nicholson Baker is fucking brilliant! He should win a goddamn Nobel Prize! The Peace Prize!” In other words, even before we got to Maine, Nicholson Baker had become the spooky tater slinking all over the former bed and breakfast, like one more plague upon us. I couldn’t get enough of him even though I’d clearly had enough already, and Catherine had had more than enough before she’d had any at all.
I invited Baker back to the bed and breakfast anyway. He was happy to oblige. It was midday and the overly decorated living room was vacant, and as Baker took a seat I rushed up to our room. “Baker’s here,” I gurgled out. “Holy shit!” Catherine said, and she bounced off the bed. We descended the staircase together. The ace up my sleeve was that Ben of Checkpoint had taken up photography as an emotional balm. Photography is yet another medium that has been subjected to needless digital innovation, and the techniques Ben preferred—which Baker himself employed for the book he produced with his wife—were kin to the processes that Catherine had perfected in our bathrooms. I introduced them and watched them talk. We had a lovely chat that lasted until the rain stopped. It wasn’t a threesome, but it was excellent human intercourse, and I do think that for a moment Nicholson Baker forgot that all this might one day wind up in a book.
After Baker left, Catherine went back upstairs for a sunhat, and we walked into South Berwick, toward the Sarah Orne Jewett House, which stood on a prominent corner. We stopped at the restaurant where I’d first thought that Baker and I might do the restaurant thing. But we didn’t do the restaurant thing—we did the bar thing. We had a jubilant drink, and we toasted having had a lovely visit with Nicholson Baker, and even though I hadn’t yet read all of his books it did feel as though something was now complete. We made a pact then and there to move to New York, and toasted again, to our less plague-ridden future.
Something fortuitous happened on the way back to the bed and breakfast. We were walking, hand in hand, along the street, and Catherine paused to smell some flowers planted below the windows of a house, one of those New England homes whose front wall extends all the way to the sidewalk. We were both smelling those amazing flowers when a woman—the owner of the house—came around the corner in gardening clothes, carrying a pair of shears. I recognized her at once. It was the woman who had called out to Baker in the restaurant. She recognized me too.
We complimented her flowers, her house, her town. What was remarkable about the woman was how very happy she seemed to be. She loved living, she said, in a town where Jewett had lived, and where Baker lived, and where, she revealed, Robert Pirsig also lived, though he was rarely seen. But that didn’t matter, and nor did it seem to matter that Baker had been unable to acknowledge the woman’s innocent greeting with anything like aplomb. She had absolutely refused to be made unhappy by it, perhaps because she had known that she would be headed home to tend these wonderful flowers. The woman did not invite us into her garden, but she did voice a preference for Baker’s sex trilogy—and this reminded me that no matter how dark Baker’s career had become, there had always been this hap
py nugget at work in the back of his mind. House of Holes was perhaps the happiest note of Baker’s career, and it had been published in close proximity—jumbled up with—some of his darkest work. Before we walked on, the woman told us that we looked happy too. And we were happy—and being told we looked happy made us happier still. We bade the woman farewell, and we walked back to the bed and breakfast, remarking repeatedly on those amazing flowers.
69
AND NOW IT’S THE BEGINNING OF 2013. CATHERINE AND I ARE IN Brooklyn. We’ve been visiting through the holidays, and we have finalized our plans to move, come summer. Guess who else is here. Martin Amis! A few months after I met Baker, Amis publicly broke with the London literary scene and decamped for Brooklyn. He’d had enough of it. Or maybe the scene had had enough of him. I learned of the move when I stumbled across a blog post headlined, “Martin Amis Moves to Brooklyn, Sounds Like Jerk.” Amis is now an Englishman who has mistaken himself for an American.
Nicholson Baker hasn’t ever sounded like a jerk. Even when responding to unjust criticism, he has always been a model of politeness. Nevertheless it’s possible to have had enough of him too, and this seems especially true if you’ve lived with him for most of your adult life. That’s what The Anthologist is about.
Paul Chowder is a Maine poet who lives in a house with a nearby barn to which he occasionally retreats to sing to himself. He’s not an insignificant figure—he’s had poems in The New Yorker, he won a Guggenheim, and he has published at least three books—but he’s come to have doubts: “My life is a lie. My career is a joke.” The problem is poetry itself. Paul argues that literary modernism, having taken its cue from the technological advances of the late nineteenth century, forgot the brief and cheerful thing that animated poetry in the first place: rhyme.
In other words, there was something wrong with the state of modern literature. It too had been subjected to needless innovation, and Paul’s problem is compounded by the fact that he himself is not a rhyming poet. He has, however, managed to convince a publisher to let him edit an anthology of rhyming verse. The basic conflict of The Anthologist stems from Paul’s inability to write the book’s introduction. More pointedly, Paul’s resistance to finishing the task has made him so insufferable that Roz, his girlfriend of eight years, has had enough of him. She has moved out.
There’s a lot that ties Paul to Nicholson Baker. Many years before, Baker had claimed in “Reading Aloud” that the clumsy and off-putting cadences of modern poetry readings are a result of “the absence of rhyme.” And The Anthologist was published eleven years after Baker moved to Maine with his wife.
But there are differences between Paul and Baker too. And just as I had expected, the things that made Paul less Baker-like made him more like me: He’s edited an anthology; he doesn’t want children; he complains that teaching undergraduates has ruined literature for him; and he even longs for a moment of finally reading a writer of whom he’d frequently heard but had never sat down to read. What I didn’t expect was my reaction to all this. I didn’t really care. The Anthologist was about me in almost every possible way, yet my reaction was about as far as you could get from Naipaul’s claim about reading to confirm what we already know. Naipaul, I realized now, was completely wrong. Or perhaps I’d misunderstood him. If we only read for what we already know, Naipaul went on, then “we can take a writer’s virtues for granted. And his originality, the news he is offering us, can go over our heads.”
When Catherine and I had first arrived in New York, just before Christmas, I went to the Strand Bookstore to buy a copy of The Anthologist. They had a first edition—it was the only first edition of Baker’s books on the shelf. Then I went down to Wall Street to try to find the building where Baker had worked during his yearlong stint in the financial world. The firm was long defunct, but I’d found an address for their offices. I was hoping to ride the escalator of The Mezzanine. But the building had no escalator. These days it’s all elevators in New York, which I suppose makes it easier to track comings and goings in a post–9/11 world. Anyway, the escalator was in my satchel. The “steeper escalator of daylight” from the first paragraph of The Mezzanine repeats on page two of The Anthologist:
So I’m up in the second floor of the barn, where it’s very empty, and I’m sitting in what’s known as a shaft of light. The light leans in from a high window. I want to adjust my seat so I can slant my face totally into the light. Just ease it into the light.
I read this a few days ago, on January 1, 2013, in the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, a cathedral-like space laid out with a huge washboard of sturdy and impossibly long wooden tables. I had taken a seat across from an old, shaggy-haired, warlocky fellow with several large thesauruses stacked in front of him. The man made a repetitive lip-smacking noise as he scribbled in a notebook, as though his thoughts were tart. He was either a crank or a mystic. That’s where I was when I first leaned into Paul’s shaft of barn light, and for a while, for me, The Anthologist worked just like that: by seeming to cite all the little tricks that have leapt from book to book throughout Nicholson Baker’s career.
When I had first spoken to Baker on the phone, as Catherine and I hurtled toward her groping incident in Portland, I tried setting him at ease by revealing that I’d reread “The Figure in the Carpet” just that morning. This was true. I’d been convinced that Baker wasn’t going to call, but I knew that if he did call, it would probably be that morning, and I imagined it would set his mind at ease about me if he thought of me as the kind of guy who occasionally dedicated mornings to reading nineteenth-century fiction. Baker got the suggestion of the reference but denied its validity: “Well, I assure you, there is no figure in my carpet.” Hogwash! I knew it then, and I confirmed it when I read The Anthologist and discovered that “The Figure in the Carpet” was one of the figures in Baker’s carpet.
About two-thirds of the way through, Paul tries to win Roz back by making her a bead necklace:
I started to bead. The verb made sense. I was beading. What you do is pick up a bead and . . . turn it until the shadow of the hole, or the light appearing through the hole, comes into view, and then you know where to insert the end of the wire. As soon as it’s on, you lose interest in it and let it slip down and away and you’re on to the next one. Revising is difficult. . . . I could string beads for a living. I kept thinking of the phrase “beads on a string.”
Beyond the reappearance of the Baker hole theme, this passage describes how a writer’s little tricks add up over the course of a career. “The Figure in the Carpet” offers two metaphors for this. One comes from James’s narrator-critic: The tricks form “something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.” But the famous writer offers a better analogy: “It’s the very string . . . that my pearls are strung on!”
So Baker was indulging in a bit of Jamesian evasiveness. And The Anthologist turned out to be a veritable gumball machine of tricky beads. Paul addresses his audience in Vox’s virtual arena: “You’re out there. I’m out here.” His description of poetry strikes a familiar orgasmic note (“the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry”), as do his darkest thoughts (“What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just—fffshhhooooow”). Appearances by Updike and Gosse link the book to U and I, Isherwood and Auden link it to Human Smoke, and Pound and MacLeish link it to Double Fold. There’s even a reference to Tolkien in a passage on the difficulty of writing: “It’s a terrible struggle; you fight with the Balrog through flame and waste and worry and incontinence and tedium. The Balrog of too-much-to-say.” In this way the book cleaves
itself in half for two different readers. For the casual reader Paul must write his introduction, and long before he confirms it, you suspect that the book itself is the introduction. But for the committed Bakerite another read emerges as Baker’s many pearls line up along the book’s taut string: It’s not an introduction to an anthology, it is an anthology, and all a writer can ever hope to be is an anthologist of his or her self.
There’s more. In the Rose Main Reading Room, a great sucking sinkhole of concern opened up in my chest as I realized what was at stake in The Anthologist: Baker’s wife may have had enough of him. Maybe she had moved out like Roz, or maybe she hadn’t, but either way the book seemed to chronicle a period of marital strife.
What was interesting about this, for me, was not whether Baker and his wife went on living together. I knew they did. It was my reaction to the proposition that they might not. When was I ever, outside of a book, so moved for a stranger that my emotions triggered physiological reactions no less profound than had I been struck or stroked? Never. The Anthologist was entirely agitating as Paul began to flirt with his neighbor and Roz went out on a date. I did not want that to happen. I wanted them back together, right this instant. I tried talking to the two of them, out loud. That story is not you guys, I said. That’s Updike. Evil, evil Updike, and even though Updike is a wonderful writer to whom I’ve dedicated many hours of satisfying reading, I don’t want real people to be like Updike. Not even Updike wanted people to be like Updike. You know this from his story “Gesturing,” which is about how unhappy an Updike-figure is with his Updikian life, and when you consider the implications of Updike having chosen this story for self-anthologization in The Best American Short Stories of the Century—well, tears just fill your eyes. Don’t go that way! Roz, Paul is obviously a challenge. He’s a monomaniac with delusions of grandeur and loads of negativity, and it’s probably no garden party putting up with him, day after day. But he loves you, and he does good work. Please go back to him. And oh, by the way—Updike was an anthologist too!
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