B & Me

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  For Catherine

  Am I becoming a critic? Fine, I don’t mind.

  Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

  1

  WHAT SEEMS ODD NOW, AT A REMOVE, IS THAT I FELL IN LOVE AT pretty much the same time I forgot how to love books. Or maybe that makes perfect sense. Several months after my photographer-girlfriend, Catherine, and I seduced each other with sexy letters bridging the three-hundred-mile gap between our homes, she came to join me, packing her belongings into a U-Haul and moving into my dinky apartment in a small city where for the few years previous I had worked toward building a “life of the mind,” reading many books and producing a couple of my own, and to pay the bills working as a “tenure-track” instructor of undergraduate literature and writing.

  On the relationship side, this was a glorious time. The transition from our racy scribblings to real life was imperceptible at first, and when Catherine and I weren’t living out epistolary fantasies, people stopped us in the street to tell us how happy we looked together. As though we needed to be told! On the book side, however, I experienced a dark turn of mind. This actually began before Catherine hauled her life north, even before we began our portentous correspondence, and it’s probably more accurate to say that a sickly, preexisting blot on my soul had begun to grow. What happened—I think—is that immersion in teaching and publishing exposed me to the literary world’s dark, institutional inner workings, and truth be told even a quick dip into those inner workings would have been enough to trigger a crisis of faith. The exact nature of my dilemma had remained opaque, but it was clear that an essential innocence had been lost.

  I got my first glimpse into the nature of this crisis one night a few months into that happy but troubling time, when Catherine and I went to a nearby university to hear James Salter read from his work. Many years before I’d read and greatly admired A Sport and a Pastime, Salter’s homage to sex and France, and Catherine had read the book just recently, and she loved it too, and so while Salter can’t be said to have inaugurated our intimate life—that was sui generis—it is fair to say that he was there right from the start, bobbing in our imaginations as we laid the foundational bricks of our union.

  This had as much to do with France as with sex. After graduate school I had almost moved to France—I picked New Jersey instead, a sore point still—and Catherine had lived in Paris any number of times: to this day France is essential to her identity and aesthetic. Neither of us particularly enjoys hearing writers read from their work—far too often the physical presence clashes with the on-page self—but when we heard that James Salter was coming to town we knew we had to go. Because of sex and France, yes, but also because Salter had just recently written a blurb (kind words intended for use in publicity materials) for a book I had edited, an anthology of “creative criticism,” published about a month earlier. It seems obvious now that editing this anthology was among the earliest expressions of my crisis. No one edits anthologies for money, and I had edited mine in a spirit of gasping desperation. Salter’s blurb was auspicious for two reasons: one, because I’d never met him, not once, not even to shake his hand; and two, because he was widely known as a writer who didn’t blurb. Not ever. When you get a blurb from a writer who doesn’t blurb, well, that’s a particular treat, because he or she has selflessly sacrificed a kind of hallowed status. That meant that Salter’s blurb for my anthology really meant something. So of course we had to go to his reading.

  Sadly the event was underattended: sixty or so undergraduates and teachers spread thin through a lecture hall built for three hundred. Salter was unfazed by this. Standing there reading, he was the precise opposite of fazed: a model of calm serenity. I realized that I enjoyed Salter’s on-page and off-page presences equally well. He had had an amazing life, full of adventure and literature and amazing dinners—before the reading began, Catherine and I stopped at the vendor table and bought a copy of Life Is Meals, a book of days Salter had produced with his wife, Kay—and you could see all of it on him: Mustached and dapper, he looked like a seasoned explorer holding court at an adventurers’ club. When he finished reading and the time came to answer a few questions, Salter let the initial awkward silence pass for a moment, and then pivoted theatrically on his feet to present us with a flattering three-quarter portrait of himself. He elbowed the lectern, and huffed a swaggering Dean Martin impersonation into the microphone: “Well—here I am.”

  I loved that. I loved that he said that, and for me that was all he needed to be. But other people actually wanted to ask questions. For a time, Salter batted away the usual student queries about influences and work habits, but then he stumbled—and this was the crucial moment of the evening—when a man off to our right stood up and posed a question into a wireless microphone, speaking in an Eastern European accent.

  “What is the purpose of literature?”

  “What?” Salter said. “What’s the question?”

  “What is the purpose—of literature?”

  Salter squinted and shook his head, stepped away from the lectern. He cupped a palm by his ear. “What? I can’t—”

  The man was young, dark-haired, thin to the point of emaciation—he might have walked out of Kafka—contrasting in every way Salter’s sturdy, octogenarian vigor. There was some additional back-and-forth, and after the young man repeated his question two or three more times he began to grow embarrassed: Perhaps his English was not as good as he thought. But it was. Everyone in the audience understood the question, and that began to look suspicious. Might Salter’s inability to even hear the question indicate that it was a particularly penetrating question? Could he have been dodging the question, like a politician, because it was the only good question? In any event, the audience wasn’t going to let the miscommunication stand. A couple of helpful people sat up in their seats and repeated the question in raised, insistent voices, and were you to have walked into the lecture hall at just that moment, you might have thought they had an interest in the young man’s cryptic query, that they were converts to his cause.

  “What is the purpose of literature?” “What is the purpose—purpose—of literature?”

  To be fair, the young man’s accent was fairly thick, and Salter’s ears were probably not what they once were. As well, Salter had been going on for more than an hour by then, and what is sometimes true of reading even enjoyable books—there comes a time when you simply want them to be over—had long since become true of the event. So most people didn’t mind when Salter, having finally grasped the question, flicked it away with the back of his hand and mumbled something about his pay grade.

  “You need an expert for a question like that,” he said. And of course he meant a literary critic.

  I nearly leaped out of my chair at this. Which was fine, because that was what everyone else was doing, leaping out of their chairs. It was the final question Salter took, and it was time to head for the doors. But I was raging inside. An expert? James Salter, you’re the expert! Quite unwittingly, and entirely accidentally, I’m sure—because recall he’d just blurbed my anthol
ogy of writers writing about literature, the anthology that had inadequately addressed my blooming crisis—Salter had lent public support to one of the most deeply rooted problems of modern literature, namely that we leave it to scholars to preside over its most vexing question: what it’s for. Catherine, holding my hand, could tell that I’d wandered off into a mental snit. As happy as we were in those days, she knew that some part of me was suffering, and her response so far, and this was simply lovely of her, had been to buy me books. Once, during a visit before she moved in, she left me two books by Roland Barthes on the kitchen table: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse. I needed the latter more than the former, but I read the former right away, immediately incorporating it into something I was working on.

  As we got in line to have Salter sign Life Is Meals, Catherine gave my hand a few quick squeezes in that way that newish couples have of communicating understanding during moments of stress. These squeezes offer a wise piece of advice: Hold it together until we’re out of earshot. I was grateful for that. But there was also something Catherine didn’t know. In response to my inward rage, a name reflexively popped into my head, in the way that solutions to puzzles appear suddenly in the mind, that kind of organic unveiling. I thought, Nicholson Baker.

  I kept thinking this over and over—Nicholson Baker, Nicholson Baker—as we edged toward the front of the line. Catherine, my ballast, my rudder, kept squeezing my hand—Hold it together, hold it together—and when we finally reached Salter he was incredibly charming, a truly dashing off-page presence. I reminded him about my anthology, which he politely recalled. We handed him Life Is Meals, but before he signed it, in the nick of time, Catherine spotted Salter’s wife a few steps away and asked her to sign the book as well. I practically burst into tears at this. Catherine had been thoughtful and quick-witted at a moment when, for all practical purposes, I was stunned and thoughtless. And for a moment after that, for just a flash of an instant, the four of us stood there over the now doubly signed book, Catherine and me and the Salters, like friends.

  2

  WHO IS NICHOLSON BAKER? THAT’S AN EXCELLENT QUESTION, AND I can honestly say that at that moment I didn’t know. Which isn’t to say I hadn’t heard of Nicholson Baker. Of course I had. Obviously he was a writer, and that’s why his name came to me on hearing a plaintively posed question about the purpose of literature. But that’s all I knew. And that’s perfectly normal. I’d heard of Nicholson Baker, and hearing of writers has always been essential to the experience of being a reader.

  I can remember being a very young reader—not actually a child, as I came to the world of literature late (sometimes the institutions of literature appear to work like the institutions of chess or math or music: Unless you’ve had professor parents force-feeding you books from the age of four, you’re forever behind in your ability to intuit the fundamentals of language)—and thinking of it in just this way: you begin to read, you become a “reader,” and you begin to hear of writers, to discover the writers you must take in. The essential writers. A close friend, a near mentor, explained further: You don’t have to read everything by those writers of whom you’ve heard and must take in; you just have to read their representative work. Kafka? The Trial and The Castle will do you fine. Nabokov? Lolita, and you’re done. Woolf? Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and toss yourself into the river! Opinions differ on precise texts, but that’s the basic theory behind what’s commonly referred to as “the literary canon.”

  I had started my reading—my canon-dabbling—and I loved it. I loved reading the greatest hits of the essential greats. But I also became aware of another category of writer, those of whom one has heard but need not necessarily read. The noncanonical. This, I knew, was not the category that most writers aspired to when they took the vows of the writing life, yet it was by far the more populated field. And truth be told you can’t completely ignore the noncanonical category of writer, as a critical facet of modern literary life is participation in awkward cocktail party conversations about obscure authors. For the most part, a cursory investigation into these writers’ careers will suffice: passing acquaintance with a few book titles, a plot summary for emergencies. There are many, many nonessential writers, and for me Nicholson Baker was one of them.

  I don’t even remember the first time I heard the name “Nicholson Baker.” The world works like this. We hear new names, every day we are more or less inundated with new names, some of them belonging to writers we haven’t heard of. From a book-marketing perspective, this is probably science. The whole goal, I’m sure, is to provide exposure for the names of writers we haven’t heard of, to plant names subconsciously into the minds of populations of potential readers (because we’re forever unconsciously recording the names of writers we haven’t heard of so that we don’t appear underread during awkward cocktail party conversations), in the hope that someday, after the planted names have taken root, after some saturation point has been reached, at least one of them—one name—will make the magical leap from being a writer we’ve heard of but need not necessarily read to being a writer we’ve heard of and must read.

  After the Salter reading, that’s about where things stood in regard to Baker and me. I did, in fact, wait until we were out of earshot to rant to Catherine for a while about how it simply couldn’t be left to literary critics to decide what the purpose of literature was. But I didn’t say anything at all about Nicholson Baker. And actually it wasn’t the first time, of late, that Nicholson Baker had popped into my head. A number of times in the weeks before the Salter event, I’d wound up thinking about Nicholson Baker, usually in response to seeing his name in an advertisement or hearing it on the radio, but sometimes, as at the reading, experiencing a spontaneous outbreak of Nicholson Baker in my mind. This was curious. Wouldn’t it have been wise for me to have already acquired at least a passing Nicholson Baker familiarity? It would—yet I hadn’t. Why not? The obvious answer was that Nicholson Baker had not yet been canonized. Baker was a quite popular writer—that’s why I’d heard of him—but he was not a writer whom everyone had heard of, a writer whom everyone must read. Rather, he was a writer many people had heard of, a writer whom people should read. That’s why I hadn’t read him.

  Then, maybe a month after the Salter reading, something changed. I began to worry that somewhere along the line I’d made a mistake, that some part of me had prevented another part of me from doing what I should have done a long time ago: read Nicholson Baker. These sorts of moments (e.g., epiphanies, inspirations, revelations, etc.) are often described as a kind of biological “click,” followed by a sensation of “release.” That’s what happened. I clicked and released. And suddenly I began to feel a certain literary attraction to Nicholson Baker, an attraction that, viewed from the perspective of my crisis, loomed with the promise of an antidote. A salvation. In other words, Nicholson Baker had become a writer I needed to read. He had entered my personal canon. And in response to that, I did what I’d always done when I realized there was a writer I needed to read. I ordered one of his books, U and I, which I realized I knew a little bit about: it is a fretting, hand-wringing exploration of John Updike. I’d learned of this book while editing my anthology, but here’s the thing: I hadn’t read it then, and I didn’t read it now, either. I stopped myself. Or wait, that’s not quite right. Here’s what really happened.

  The book arrived in the mail—as is all too frequent these days—and I unsheathed it with Christmas morning verve. The paperback had a happy blue cover—the blue of French artist Yves Klein, Catherine observed—and I passed my fingers over t
he slick, glossy surface and placed the book on my nightstand. One night I opened it. I liked it. I thought it was great, in fact. I didn’t know if it was Nicholson Baker’s greatest hit, but I thought it was very funny and good. Then, for some reason, I stopped reading. The next night I started again—and stopped again. Because I liked it. This is what happened. I clenched. Then I seized. I clenched and seized. So the real truth is less that I stopped myself from reading Nicholson Baker than experienced, every time I picked up U and I, a mysterious cycle of clenching and seizing. It seemed I was torn on the subject of Nicholson Baker. I had some kind of pent-up resistance. From somewhere came the fleeting thought that I had ordered the book not because I was genuinely attracted to it, but because some clever marketing campaign had succeeded in planting in my brain a desire to read it. How could I know whether my attraction was true? I was stuck. I couldn’t read Nicholson Baker because I had to. It seemed to me that Nicholson Baker might be a writer on his way to canonization, and where once this would have triggered in me a desire to read him, it now left me paralyzed, unreading. I was forced to ask myself anew: Who is Nicholson Baker?

  3

  I HAD NO IDEA! HE WROTE U AND I AND SOUNDED ENGLISH, IS ALL I could have told you. “Nicholson Baker” sounded to me like an English writer, and for some reason that repelled me. This made no sense at all. There were, it’s true, a number of English writers I studiously avoided (e.g., Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, etc.), but there were also a number of English writers I absolutely cherished (e.g., George Orwell, Bruce Chatwin, Geoff Dyer, etc.). So why had I lumped Nicholson Baker into the category of English writers to avoid? Probably because of his name. It sounded to me like an heirloom name, and no one but the stiff-upper-lipped En­glish (those with names like Julian, Graham, and Martin, as opposed to George, Bruce, and Geoff) would pass along a name virtually guaranteed to earn black eyes in prep school quadrangles. The impulse to name a child “Nicholson” could belong only to a sentiment dangling from the last frayed threads of empire, a sentiment that perceives such suffering as character building and therefore healthy (in other words, fascist), and what, I asked myself—now that I seemed to be on the brink of actually reading Nicholson Baker—could such a gene pool really offer me by way of wisdom, particularly when that sad, beat-up, Harry Potter of a writer (or, to allude to another thin British allegory, “Nicholson” is the name of a hobbit!) eventually chose to put his full name, as opposed to “Nick,” as he was surely known to his friends, on the front of his books? The humble-sounding surname aside, it seemed I had been wise in thus far avoiding all work by Nicholson Baker because even a fool could tell he was snotty.