All of this was more or less confirmed eight months or so later, after we’d moved to New York, and a draft of B & Me was complete, and Catherine had read through the book to exercise her veto power over passages that were too explicit or revealing, when Nicholson Baker published Traveling Sprinkler, a sequel to The Anthologist. Even more than The Anthologist, Traveling Sprinkler is characterized by its jumbled delivery, its associative progression of thought to thought, and it too is a compendium of Baker thought: Paul tells us about his penis (“My penis is soft and it doesn’t make a scraping sound”); he reveals that he had an early career as a bassoonist; he has an intimate male friendship with Tim, a drone protestor; the hole theme reappears (“ . . . the moon naked like a white hole in the sky”); a lengthy metaphorical scuba sequence ties the book all the way back to “Snorkeling”; and the “traveling sprinkler” of the title is another simple tool driven by water and centrifugal force, the sort of thing, Paul admits, that he was greatly interested in “before [he] got distracted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Most important, Traveling Sprinkler ends with the happy suggestion that Paul and Roz will reconcile.
“Do you want to take a ride in my boat?” she asks him.
70
BUT LONG BEFORE I READ THAT, I DIDN’T READ ALL OF The Anthologist in the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library. I stopped about a third of the way through and read the rest of it on the subway, not because trains are good cognitive analogies—they’re not—but because of something I noticed early one morning, during rush hour. The car, headed into Manhattan, was packed. What was striking was the pure silence of the crowd. Of course many people were wearing earbuds, subjecting themselves to private cacophonies. But that’s a little like reading, isn’t it? That was like me in the Rose Main Reading Room, sitting still but spasming with concern for a person I may never meet, a fictional character I can’t meet. Our libraries may be vanishing, but there are still a few quiet spots left in the world, and a crowded train may be one of the last places left, outside of books, where it is possible to feel the warmth of a stranger, to literally have their thigh rub provocatively against your own, without anyone’s feeling groped. Ours are accursedly interesting times, but we can still touch each other.
Baker taught me that. And perhaps it’s that kind of moment, when you’ve finally realized what it was you were looking for in an author, that signals when you’ve had enough of them. One day headed back to Brooklyn, before I’d even finished The Anthologist, I realized I’d had enough of Nicholson Baker. I’d moved on. Curiously, I was thinking of Martin Amis instead. It occurred to me, who knows why, that I’d been thinking a whole lot about Martin Amis these past couple years. He’d kept popping up, making appearances in my life. Once when I went to a library to find an obscure Baker story, there was Martin Amis on the next page, hanging ten on the media wave he’d churned up for The Information. And when I went looking for reviews of Human Smoke, there was Amis again, getting reviewed right alongside Baker because he’d written a similar book at just about the same time. And when I finally went digging around for Vintage Baker, a premature Baker anthology published in 2004, there was Vintage Amis, published the very same year.
Maybe I had done wrong by Martin Amis. I’d been cruel. And wasn’t that what I now understood literature to be about—cultivating an ability to transcend our ugliest emotions, the ones that can turn us against ourselves and those we love, that can result in horror and even slaughter? Maybe I was wrong about Martin Amis. Maybe he was a nice but misunderstood fellow, like Nicholson Baker. I wouldn’t know until I read him. That was my thought, even before I finished The Anthologist. Perhaps I should read Martin Amis. Perhaps I should anthologize him.
* * *
* Some time later, as I was writing this portion of B & Me, I stumbled across another uncollected story of Nicholson Baker’s—I almost missed it completely—that shed more light on all this and demonstrated just how easy it is to slip into the weeds of an author’s life. In 1995, Baker published “My Life as Harold” in The New Yorker, a short contemplative piece in which a Baker-figure named Harold, married to a woman named Margaret, wanders Boston during a three-day period of uncertainty. Harold is a writer, and his funk begins a day after he falls “asleep while reading [Harold] Nicolson’s ‘Peacemaking 1919.’” Peacemaking 1919 is Nicolson’s account of the forging of the Treaty of Versailles, and the book is worth noting because it reveals that Baker’s family line did converge with Harold Nicolson. Baker’s great-grandfather was Ray Stannard Baker, who had already become a successful author of books for young boys when he launched a career as a muckraking journalist. He went on to become a trusted adviser of President Woodrow Wilson during the treaty negotiations. Ray Stannard Baker later dedicated much of his career to repairing Wilson’s tarnished reputation, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his biographical work in 1940. Ray Stannard Baker appears a number of times in Peacemaking 1919 (Nicolson attended the negotiations too), but I found no account of friendship between the two men. Nicolson allows that Ray Stannard Baker’s depiction of the negotiations is closer to the truth than others produced at the same time, but he laments Baker’s more emotional appeal.
Notably Ray Stannard Baker also produced a brief narrative history of one of his, and hence Nicholson Baker’s, more colorful ancestors, a man with the perfectly unusual name of Remember Baker. Ray Stannard Baker’s “Remember Baker” tells the story of Remember’s life as a captain in Ethan Allen’s Vermont militia unit, the Green Mountain Boys. Recalled as “a tall, slim fellow with a sandy complection,” Remember Baker was known as intrepid and courageous, and was among the first to volunteer for service at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. He was also one of its earliest casualties. Serving as a scout in the far north, Remember Baker was shot dead by Indians and beheaded. Ethan Allen later said that his death “made more noise in the country than the loss of a thousand men towards the end of the American war.” Remember Baker was thirty-five years old.
In my frenzied research into all this, I couldn’t help noticing, given the direction Nicholson Baker’s career had taken, that a number of both Harold Nicolson’s and Ray Stannard Baker’s books were among those that had been discarded after having been scanned and made available digitally.
About the Author
Photograph © Catherine Michele Adams
J. C. Hallman grew up in Southern California. He studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of The Chess Artist, The Devil is a Gentleman, The Hospital for Bad Poets, In Utopia, and Wm & H’ry. Hallman has also edited two anthologies, The Story About the Story and The Story About the Story II, which propose a new school of literary response called “creative criticism.” Among other honors, he is the recipient of a 2013 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
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ALSO BY J. C. HALLMAN
The Chess Artist
The Devil Is a Gentleman
The Hospital for Bad Poets
In Utopia
Wm & H’ry
The Story About the Story (editor)
The Story About the Story, Vol. II (editor)
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Copyright © 2015 by J. C. Hallman
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2015
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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-8200-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-8202-1(ebook)
IMAGE CREDITS
22, 85: Courtesy of the author; 42: Permission of Jimmy Cohrssen; 84, 106, 133: Permission of Abelardo Morell
B & Me Page 29