Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  Things went pretty well until I got to a place near the middle of the last paragraph, where I began to feel that I was going to cry. I wouldn’t have minded crying, or at least pausing to swallow down a discreet silent sob, if what I’d been reading had been in any obvious way sad. When people on TV documentaries tell their stories, and they come to the part where the tragedy happens and they have to say over again what, in silent form, they adjusted to years earlier, and they choke up, that’s fine, they should choke up. And I’ve heard writers read autobiographical accounts of painful childhood events and quaver a little here and there—that’s perfectly justifiable, even desirable. But the sentence that was giving me difficulty was a description of a woman enclosing a breakfast muffin in bakery tissue, placing it in a small bag, and sprinkling it with coffee stirrers and sugar packets and pre-portioned pats of butter. Where was the pathos? And yet by the time I delivered the words “plastic stirrers” to the audience, I was in serious trouble, and I noticed a listening head or two look up with sudden curiosity: Hah, this is interesting, this American is going to weep openly and copiously for us now.

  Why that sentence, though? Why did that image of a succession of small white shapes, more stirrers and sugar packets and butter pats than I needed, and in that sense ceremonial and semi-decorative rather than functional, falling, falling over my terrestrial breakfast, grab at my grief-lapels? There were a number of reasons. In college I had once competed for a prize in what was called the “Articulation of the English Language,” for which the contestants had to read aloud from set passages of Milton and Joyce and others. I got to the auditorium late, having bicycled there while drinking proudly from a shot bottle of Smirnoff vodka that I’d bought on an airplane, and, as planned, I read the Milton in a booming fake English accent and read the Joyce excerpt—which was the last paragraph of “The Dead”—first in a broad bad Southern accent, then in a Puerto Rican accent, and then in the Southern accent again, and to my surprise I’d found that the Joyce suddenly seemed, in my amateur TV-actor drawl, extremely moving, so that the last phrase, about the snow “faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead,” was tragic enough to make it unclear whether my rhetorical tremor was genuine or not—and my voice box may have remembered this boozy Joycean precipitation from college as I read aloud from my own sugar-packet snowfall.

  Also, a version of the chapter I was reading in Edinburgh had appeared in The New Yorker, and I’d had a slight disagreement, a friendly disagreement, with a fact checker there over the phrase “tissue-protected muffin.” She’d held that the word “tissue” implied something like Kleenex, and that it should be a “paper-wrapped muffin,” and I’d said I didn’t think so. On the way home from work the next day I’d stopped in a bakery and spotted a blue box of the little squares in question and I’d seen the words “bakery tissue” in capital letters on the side; and, exulting, I’d called the manager of the store over, a Greek man who barely spoke English, and offered to buy the entire box, which he sold me for nine dollars, and I called my editor the next day and said, “It’s tissue, it is tissue,” and as a compromise it became in their version a “tissue-wrapped muffin”—but now, reading it aloud in Scotland, I could turn it into a “tissue-protected muffin” all over again; right or wrong, I was able in the end to shield the original wordless memory from alien breakfast guests with this fragile shroud of my own preferred words. It had turned out all right in the end. And that might have been enough to make me cry.

  But it wasn’t just that. It was also that this tiny piece of a paragraph had never been one that I’d thought of proudly when I thought over my book after it was published. I’d forgotten it, after writing it down, and now that my orating tongue forced me to pay attention to it I was amazed and moved that it had hung in there for all those months, in fact years, unrewarded but unimpaired, holding its small visual charge without any further encouragement from me, and, like the deaf and dumb kid in rags who, though reviled by the other children, ends up saving his village from some catastrophe, it had become the tearjerker moment that would force me, out of pity for its very unmemorableness, to dissolve in grief right in the midst of all my intended ironies. That was a big part of it.

  Contrition, too. Contrition made its contribution to the brimming bowl—for these Edinburgh audience members didn’t know how much pure mean-spirited contempt I had felt back in my rejection-letter days for writers who “gave readings,” how self-congratulatorily neo-primitivist I’d thought it was to repudiate the divine economy of the published page and to require people to gather to hear a reticent man or woman reiterate what had long since been set in type. Ideally, I’d felt, the republic of letters was inhabited by solitary readers in bed with their Itty Bitty Book Lights glowing over their privately owned and operated pages, like the ornate personal lamps that covertly illuminate every music stand in opera pits while the crudest sort of public melodrama rages in heavy makeup overhead. There was something a bit too Pre-Raphaelite about the regression to an audience—I thought of those reaction shots in early Spielberg movies, of family members gazing with softly awestruck faces at the pale-green glow of the beneficent UFO while John Williams flogged yet more Strauss from his string section. And there were the suspect intonation patterns, the I’m-reading-aloud patterns—especially at poetry readings, where talented and untalented alike, understandably wishing in the absence of rhyme to give an audible analogue for the ragged right and left margins in their typed or printed original, resorted to syllable-punching rhythms and studiously unresolved final cadences adapted from Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, overlaid with Walter Cronkite and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. These handy tonal templates could make anything lyrical:

  This—is a Dover—edition—

  Designed—for years—of use—

  Sturdy stackable—beechwood—bookshelves—

  At a price you’d expect—to pay—for plastic—

  And yet, despite all this sort of easy, Glenn-Gouldy contempt in my background, there I was physically in Edinburgh, under that tent, among strangers, finishing up my own first reading, and, far from feeling dismissive and contemptuous before my turn came, I’d been simply and sincerely nervous, exceedingly nervous, and now I was almost finished, and I hadn’t done anything too humiliating, and the audience had innocently listened, unaware of my prior disapproval, and they had even tolerantly laughed once or twice—and all this was too much: I was like a crippled unbeliever wheeled in and made whole with a sudden palm blow to the forehead by a preaching charlatan. I’m reading aloud! I’m reading aloud! I was saying, my face streaming with tears—I was cripple and charlatan simultaneously. Evidently I was going to cry, out of pure gratitude to myself for having gotten almost to the end without crying.

  And then, as the unthinkable almost happened, and the narcissus bulb in the throat very nearly blossomed, I recognized that if I did break down now, the intensity of my feeling, in this supposedly comic context, would leave the charitable listeners puzzled about my overall mental well-being. At the very least I would be thought of as someone “going through a stressful time,” and it would be this diagnosis they would take home with them, rather than any particular fragment from what I’d read that they liked, and whenever I tried to write something light ’n’ lively thereafter I would remember my moment of shame on the orange couch and to counteract it I’d have to invent something bleak and brooding and wholly out of character. I couldn’t let it happen; I couldn’t let reading aloud distort my future output. I started whispering urgent ringside counsel to myself: Come on, you sack of shit. If you cry, people will assume you’re being moved to tears by your own eloquence, and how do you think that will go over? That was frightening enough, finally, to stabilize the nutation in my Adam’s apple, and I just barely got through to the last word.

  Since that afternoon in 1989, I’ve read aloud from my writing a number of times, and each time I’ve been a little more in control, less of a walking cripple, more of a charlatan. I’ve reacquai
nted myself with my larynx. When I was fourteen I used to feel it each morning at the kitchen table, before I had any cereal. It was large. How could my throat have been retrofitted with this massive service elevator? And what was I going to say with it? What sort of payloads was it fated to carry? First thing in the morning I could sing, in a fairly convincing baritone, the alto-sax solo from Pictures at an Exhibition—and as I went for a low note there was a unique physical pleasure, not to be had later in the day, when the two thick slack vocal cords dropped and closed on a shovelful of sonic peat moss. Sometimes as I sang low, or swung low, it felt as if I were a character actor in a coffee commercial, carelessly scooping glossy beans from deep in a burlap bag and pouring them into a battered scale—the deeper the note I tried to scoop up, the bigger and glossier the beans, until finally I was way down in fava territory. I was Charles Kuralt, I was Tony the Tiger, I was Lloyd Bridges, I was James Earl Jones—I too had a larynx the size of a picnic basket, I felt, and when you heard my voice you wouldn’t even know it was sound, it would be so vibrantly low: you’d think instead that your wheels had strayed over the wake-up rumble strips on the shoulder of a freeway. Just above the mobile prow of the Adam’s apple, just above where there should properly be a hood ornament, was a softer place that became more noticeable to the finger the lower you spoke or sang, and it was directly into this vulnerable opening, this chink in the armor of one’s virility, that I imagined disc jockeys secretly injecting themselves with syringes full of male hormones and small-engine oil, so that they could say “traffic and weather together” with the proper sort of sawtooth bite.

  And though my own voice has proved to be—despite my high secondary-sexual expectations, and even though I was pretty tall and tall people often have voice boxes to match—not quite the pebbly, three-dimensional mood machine I’d counted on, I do occasionally now like reading aloud what I’ve written. I get back a little of the adolescent early-morning feeling as I brachiate my way high into the upper canopy of a sentence, tightening the pitch muscles, climbing up, and then dropping on a single word, with that Doppler-effect plunge of sound, so the argument can live out its closing seconds at sea level. I feel all this going on, even if it isn’t audible to anyone else. And sometimes I know that my voice, imperfect medium though it may be, is making what I’ve written seem for the moment better than it is, and I like playing with this dangerous intonational power, and even letting listeners know that I’m playing with it. It’s not called an Adam’s apple for nothing: that relic of temptation, that articulated chunk of upward mobility, that ever-ready dial tone in the throat, whether or not it successfully leads others astray, ends by thoroughly seducing oneself.

  (1992)

  LUMBER

  (part I)

  Now feels like a good time to pick a word or a phrase, something short, and go after it, using the available equipment of intellectual retrieval, to see where we get. A metaphor might work best—one that has suggested itself over a few centuries with just the right frequency: not so often that its recovered uses prove to be overwhelming or trivial, nor so seldom that it hasn’t had a chance to refine and extend its meaning in all kinds of indigenous foliage. It should be representatively out of the way; it should have seen better days. Once or twice in the past it briefly enjoyed the status of a minor cliché, but now, for one reason or another, it is ignored or forgotten. Despite what seems to be a commonplace exterior, the term ought to be capable of some fairly deep and marimbal timbres when knowledgeably struck. A distinct visual image should accompany it, and yet ideally its basic sense should be easily misunderstood, since the merging of such elementary misconstruals will help contribute to its accumulated drift. It should lead us beyond itself, and back to itself. And it should sometimes be beautiful.

  The mind has been called a lumber-room, and its contents or its printed products described as lumber, since about 1680. Mind-lumber had its golden age in the eighteenth century, became hackneyed by the late nineteenth century, and went away by 1970 or so. I know this because I’ve spent almost a year, on and off, riffling in the places that scholars and would-be scholars go when they want to riffle: in dictionaries, indexes, bibliographies, biographies, concordances, catalogs, anthologies, encyclopedias, dissertation abstracts, library stacks, full-text CD-ROMs, electronic bulletin boards, and online electronic books; also in books of quotations, collections of aphorisms, old thesauruses, used-book stores, and rare-book rooms; and (never to be slighted, even if, in my own case, a habitual secretiveness limits their usefulness) in other living minds, too—since “Learned men” (so William D’Avenant wrote in 1650, when the art of indexing was already well advanced) “have been to me the best and briefest Indexes of Books”; or, as John Donne sermonized in 1626, “The world is a great Volume, and man the Index of that Booke.”

  Boswell, for example, said, in the last pages of his biography, that Johnson’s superiority over other learned men “consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking,”

  the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.

  Logan Pearsall Smith, in an essay on the sermons of John Donne, asserts that the seventeenth-century divines, “with all the lumber they inherited from the past, inherited much also that gives an enduring splendour to their works.” Michael Sadleir, in his The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen (1927), writes: “There are probably no items in the lumber-rooms of forgotten literature more difficult to trace than the minor novels of the late eighteenth century.” One of those minor novels was Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760–65), in which a bookseller named Mr. Vellum stores surplus copies of books by a dead self-published author for seven years in the “lumber garret” so that he can pass them off as new creations. Laurence Sterne mentions “the lumber-rooms of learning” in Book IV of Tristram Shandy (1761).

  Goethe revered Sterne, and he might have read Chrysal (which was translated into German in 1775); and Goethe’s learned yearner, Faust, calls the spirit of the past, as it is reflected in the minds who study it, a Kehrichtfaß and a Rumpelkammer, in a line that has been variously Englished as a “mouldy dustbin, or a lumber attic” (Philip Wayne), “a junk heap,/A lumber room” (Randall Jarrell), “Mere scraps of odds and ends, old crazy lumber,/In dust-bins only fit to rot and slumber” (Theodore Martin, revised by W. H. Bruford), “A very lumber-room, a rubbish-hole” (Anna Swan-wick), “A heap of rubbish, and a lumber room” (John Stuart Blackie), “A rubbish-bin, a lumber-garret” (George Madison Priest), “A trash bin and a lumber-garret” (Stuart Atkins), “An offal-barrel and a lumber-garret” (Bayard Taylor), “a trash barrel and a junk room” (Bayard Quincy Morgan), “A lumber-room and a rubbish heap” (Louis MacNeice and E. L. Stahl), and “A mass of things confusedly heaped together;/A lumber-room of dusty documents” (John Anster). Lord Francis Leveson Gower’s early translation (John Murray, 1823) may be, for this particular passage, the best:

  Read but a paragraph, and you shall find

  The litter and the lumber of the mind.1

  Master Humphrey has lumber dreams in the first chapter of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop:

  But all that night, waking or in my sleep, the same thoughts recurred and the same images retained possession of my brain. I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms—the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air—the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone—the dust and rust, the worm that lives in wood—and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.

  Hazlitt does not refer to the lumber of scholarship where you would expect him to, in his Montaignesque “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” but he does so, affectionately, in “On Pedantry,” an essay that also contains his helpful circ
ular definition of learning as “the knowledge of that which is not generally known.” Of a character named Keith in South Wind, Norman Douglas writes, “He had an encyclopaedic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information.”

  Norman Douglas’s “somebody” was probably Lord Chesterfield, who in 1748 advised his son that “Many great readers load their memories without exercising their judgments, and make lumber-rooms of their heads, instead of furnishing them usefully.” Sir Thomas Browne, though he was one of the greatest of readers, and of indexers, claimed to have avoided this pitfall: “I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge,” he writes, in Religio Medici (1642), finding no use here for the word “lumber,”1 but getting some mileage instead out of the Greek root of thesaurus—“treasure-house”—a word associated with dictionaries long before Roget,2 and employed in passing in an eighteenth-century Latin oration written by Johann Mencken (and edited by a collateral descendant, H. L. Mencken) called The Charlatanry of the learned:

  The bookshops are full of Thesauruses of Latin Antiquities which, when examined, turned out to be far less treasuries than fuel for the fire.