B & Me Page 13
Classic early Baker, I saw now. Sly acknowledgment of a canonical predecessor, and an extension of the literary line with an even more exhaustive description of a recent advance in mechanical engineering. Plus Baker helped me understand the first line of “Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” which I’d never quite fully grasped: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” The line reflected back to Baker in that the descriptions we get of the Baker-figures encourage us not only to picture the Baker of his jacket photos, but to imagine a precocious and prematurely aged Baker. Mike of Room Temperature goes out of his way to describe an early loss of hair on his head and the early appearance of hair on his cheeks, as though, despite the pleasure he takes in the Bug, he too had only ever been disguised as a child. That led to another question: Why all these allusions to children’s stories in books so clearly intended for adults, in books chock-full of references to philosophy, poetry, and the social sciences?
In Baker and Agee both, I came to think, there was a defiance of categories, a defiance of the modern library and bookstore practice of dividing books up by age (children’s, young adult, adult) or genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry). Of fiction and nonfiction, Baker once said that “one kind of writing feeds your head and one empties it,” though he didn’t specify which was which and his early “novels” pretty clearly aspire to both. Agee argued that “a certain kind of artist, [could be] distinguish[ed] from others as a poet rather than a prose writer,” but he did so only after “Knoxville: Summer, 1915” proved even that to be an artificial division. The ever-expanding project of literary taxonomy (e.g., language poetry, historical fiction, literary journalism, etc.) is a gauge that measures an erosion of modern literature: modernity’s lurch toward hyperspecification has fractured even the literary arts, and terms of fusion like “autobiographical novel” now seem problematic. Classification by age is even more insidious. The effect of categorizing some literature as “children’s literature”—as books that children can use to prolong their childhood, as opposed to books that children can use to introduce themselves to the adult world—is that books wind up as little more than toys: writers become birthday clowns, and readers, after finally escaping artificially extended youths, become brats only disguised as adults. As I passed the midway point of Room Temperature, I began to see how it acted as a logical extension of The Mezzanine. The Mezzanine is the story of Nicholson Baker cracking open his egg from the inside, climbing out full of enthusiastic chirps. Room Temperature is a missive from the other end of the same gestation, in which Baker, holding the Bug, acts as incubator and nest. To be sure, there are moments when Room Temperature risks reading like Daddy porn (“She was a remarkable, remarkable daughter”; or, less innocently, “her captivating little coffee bean of a pudendum . . .”), but I needn’t have worried over whether the book would apply to me, whether I could find myself in it. The real infant of the book is neither Baker nor the Bug—it’s us, the reader. The book swaddled me just as I swaddled it two-handed in my lap, slowly rocking in my hammock. Those who lead a literary life seem old when they’re young and young when they’re old, but they’re never actually either. Like a good book, they are bound by neither category nor time.
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FOR AN AUTOBIOGRAPHER, IF THAT’S WHAT HE IS, NICHOLSON Baker had a pretty boring life to draw upon, unlike those writers who seemed important to him—Frank Conroy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and James Agee—each of whom, for a variety of reasons, had spectacular lives, perfect for literary renderings. Room Temperature acknowledges as much when a real jar appears in the book, on page five. Mike notices that the Bug’s milk bottle has raised measurement marks molded along its flanks, and he associates this with glass peanut butter jars that were once manufactured with similar markings so that they could be used as measuring cups once the peanut butter was all gone. These older jars he associates with his mother, who once told him stories of eating peanut butter “straight from the jar” while she was pregnant. As a boy, Mike performed an act of radical empathy:
Perhaps because of her own maternal craving she didn’t mind later when I took a full jar and a silver spoon upstairs with me while building my plastic models.
Hence, by association, Nicholson Baker was born with a “silver spoon” in his mouth. And “silver spoon” reappears in its more common figurative usage three pages from the end of Room Temperature.
Peanut butter jars go on to play a crucial role in the book. Late in the action, Mike recalls having once imagined composing an experimental symphony that would begin with the puffy, vacuum-suck sound of a peanut butter jar being opened for the first time. That he didn’t compose the symphony, that instead he gave up music to become a reviewer of television commercials who dreams of one day writing a book about commas, perhaps begins to hint at why Baker left music for a writing career.
When Baker told the Paris Review, “I’d exhausted the whole musical side of myself with the trombone story,” or, to be more accurate, when I read this line in the interview before reading any of Baker’s early stories, I had two simultaneous thoughts. First, I thought, “Well, that’s patently false.” I hadn’t even read Nicholson Baker yet and I knew it wasn’t true. The Mezzanine begins with a musical simile. The Fermata is titled after a symbol of musical notation. The Anthologist includes actual printed bars of music. Not only had Nicholson Baker not exhausted his musical side with the “trombone story,” music might be the only note that echoes throughout his entire career.
Second, I thought, “Trombone story? I play the trombone.”
To back up a bit. I don’t recall exactly when I learned that Baker’s instrument was the bassoon, but I do know that I laughed when I heard it. Why? Musical instruments, as everyone knows, form a sort of hierarchy of sexiness, with strings at the top (guitars and violins), assorted combinations in the middle (Miles Davis on trumpet, pursed-lip girls playing flute, breathy jazz ballads on tenor sax), and double reeds firmly and inexorably on the bottom (oboe, bassoon). The bassoon, sort of a piccolo didgeridoo, is quite simply the most preposterous of orchestral instruments. Despite a late twentieth-century surge in sonatas written for the instrument, its history is almost like its sound, a background buzz, a bit harsh, forgettable. The bassoon is exactly what you’d choose if you’d been drawn to music but hoped to project an air of ironic tragicomedy, and it’s tempting to speculate that the young Nicholson Baker’s choice of instrument demonstrated the same sort of raise-the-bar chutzpah that would later compel him to try launching a literary career with plotless novels. A careful read of Room Temperature, however, suggests something even more revealing.
Chapter eight begins with quick, capsule descriptions of the sleeping habits of the Bug, of Mike’s father, and of Mike himself, and before long the stream of thought curls back to Patty writing in bed. For a moment, Mike thinks he can make out the quick, swishy sound of a comma dicing up her thoughts. This immediately puts him in mind of the oversized commas (“enormous, elaborately typographical”) of one of his professors at Eastman. In music a comma is a breath mark, but breaths are not indicated by composers, as not everyone has the same lung capacity. Rather, individual musicians (and their professors) punctuate their own music. Mike proceeds to tell a lengthy story—the longest continuous narrative in Room Temperature—about his professor erasing a comma breath mark that Mike had carefully inserted in a “Flight of the Bumblebee”–style étude, and then demanding that within a week Mike master the play of the piece using only a single breath. Harrowed, Mike employs his preternatu
ral ability with similes to grow his lungs, filling his mind during practice sessions with
images of bullfrog pouches, bagpipes, dolphin blowholes, the surplus neoprene meteorological balloons that were advertised in the back of Popular Science, the floating spheres in toilet tanks, and the children’s book about the Chinese kid who inhaled the sea.
It’s the second of these, “bagpipes,” that stood out to me because in the long aside that follows—before we learn how Mike’s étude assignment turns out—we hear how he came to be interested in music in the first place: via an impressive performance of a bagpiper at a party thrown by Mike’s parents when he was in the fourth grade.
What’s so hot about bagpipes? To be honest, bagpipes (also a double-reed instrument) make a fairly grating noise, like a motor running at dangerously high revolutions per minute. Still, they tend to be associated with occasions of great solemnity, even grief. By contrast, the bassoon is associated with no occasions at all, yet its alien sound is similar enough to a bagpipe that it would be entirely reasonable for a child drawn to music by a rousing bagpipe performance to choose the bassoon as its orchestral equivalent. But that’s not what happened. “The next day I told my father that I had to learn the bagpipe,” Mike recalls, and it’s his father who steered him to the French horn instead.
Regardless of whether the bagpipe story is true, why not the bassoon here? Why fiction now, when the bassoon would have been the more logical choice? Could it be a holdover of Baker worrying over his image, as all writers do? Baker’s early author notes omit the bassoon detail, but the cat had actually been out of the bag since at least 1982, when the New York Times cited Baker’s “trombone story” (published in the March 1982 issue of the Atlantic: his contributor’s note specified that he had “played bassoon with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra”) in an article about musical composition and the creative process. What that meant, because there were likely far more readers of the article than readers of the story, is that at the very dawn of Nicholson Baker’s career, more people came to know him as the “bassoon writer” than as the precocious and talented author of a “trombone story.” It didn’t stop there, either. Most feature articles about Baker that have appeared in the years since have gone out of their way to make hay of what was really a brief, inconsequential career as a fourth-chair bassoonist. Even though Baker appears to have resigned himself to a quirky, schticky persona—Hemingway has rifles; Baker has a long, unwieldy tube of an instrument—early on it must have been terribly frustrating for a writer of significant ambition to have let slip such fodder for light, comic interview questions.
Or maybe it’s even more interesting than that, as the word “bassoon” (the near-homonym “buffoon” is practically unavoidable) appears in exactly none of the books that Baker had published when I began reading him. (I know because I’d also downloaded searchable versions of all of them.) Music is everywhere in the books, as is an interest in the action of the brain, and I find it very unlikely that a writer who thinks often of music and who closely attends to the mind’s reflexive associations would have never, while writing, reflexively thought of the instrument to which he dedicated a formative decade. He must be avoiding writing about bassoons. In contrast, bagpipes appear in Baker’s work regularly. In The Everlasting Story of Nory, which I hadn’t yet read, but which is about a young girl and is again dedicated to his daughter, Alice (“For my dear daughter Alice, the informant”), a peculiarly loud microwave oven sounds “like the humming note of a bagpipe.” More recently, an article that Baker published about violent video games noted that one game’s virtual deaths were attended to by “a tactful moment of funereal bagpipery.” And more fancifully, but also more suggestively, the pornmonster of House of Holes, a creature that “masturbates constantly” and is the living embodiment of bad pornography, looks like “a bizarre bagpipe.”
Does all this bagpipe imagery speak to residual feelings Baker had about his bassoonist career and the world of professional music? Does it explain the absence of bassoons in his work? If so, then it’s worth noting that the bassoon-to-French-horn shift in Room Temperature was not the first time that Baker, in writing about music, scuttled his own instrument for one slightly higher on the sexy instrument scale. The first time, of course, was the uncollected “trombone story,” which is unimaginatively titled “Playing Trombone,” but which is actually a quite wonderful story—and one that does, in fact, make a glancing reference to a bassoon.
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WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO ME.
In 1978, the same year that Nicholson Baker has claimed to have finally sold his bassoon, I was in the sixth grade, entering my first music classroom. When the time came to choose instruments I picked the flute because I’d noticed the pursed lips of girls taking their first crack at the instrument and I wanted to radically empathize with them. But I couldn’t do it—no matter how much lip pursing I did, I couldn’t make a flute make a noise. This being an obstacle to a musical career, I had to choose another instrument, and this time I went with something that looked easy: the trombone. The trombone has only one moving part, but this fact alone meant it wasn’t easy. The “slide” is effectively an elongated tuning slide, and what this means is that in order to be a good trombonist you need an ear capable of distinguishing variations of sound resulting from even minuscule movements of the slide. I did not have a good ear.
There were other problems as well. I couldn’t triple-tongue to save my life. I understood in the abstract that triple-tonguing was a tongue-twisting trick that trained your tongue to trickle out trills of notes, but that taught me nothing at all about how people actually managed to triple-tongue, and triple-tonguing turned out to be a terribly important trombone talent. Also, I panicked whenever I was expected to improvise in afterschool jazz band. I froze. I improvised silence. Worst of all was sight-reading, playing music without ever having practiced it or studied it beforehand. Then I did improvise. I gave up the trombone at twenty, having played for most of the previous summer with a youth orchestra and having, as a result, a simultaneously horrifying and triumphant experience that now stands for my entire tenure as a trombonist.
I was the orchestra’s ringer, but only for my age. At nineteen, I was five or six years older and far less talented than most of that ensemble’s near prodigies. In the early part of the summer we played Strauss waltzes for gatherings of elderly people and rehearsed for a youth orchestra competition to be held that August in Scotland. Our program abroad included An American in Paris, a Sibelius violin concerto, and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, this last being the work that would test my mettle. The final movement of Shostakovich No. 5 calls for the principal trombone to hit a high A, along with the principal trumpet and the principal French horn. High A is close to the top of the trombone range, and in practice I hit the note badly every time, which is to say I didn’t hit it at all. Our conductor, an Italian named Mr. Caniglia, who was not a particularly good communicator (conductors are notoriously language-challenged Italians), berated me mercilessly over that high A. Once, when he realized that I couldn’t tell him whether I’d been sharp or flat in my most recent attempt at the note, he turned for help to the violins, a row of pompous, preadolescent girls. “He’s sharp!” they shrieked in unison. Another time he instructed me to remove my mouthpiece from my instrument and place it on my music stand: this was the only way to ensure that I would not play it wrong. I didn’t take this treatment lying down. I went to the library and researched Shostakovich. Yes, Stalin had claimed that the climactic high A of Shostakovich No. 5 embodied the Soviet ideal, but hadn’t Shostakovich l
ater called Stalin an oaf? He had, I informed our conductor. It’s supposed to be out of tune, I explained. That’s irony. Mr. Caniglia was unmoved, and he pestered me until we left the continent. My one glorious moment as a musician came at the festival’s final performance, when I knew that I’d hit the note correctly only because of the expression on Mr. Caniglia’s face as I played it.
I describe this scene because “Playing Trombone,” a fanciful, miniature Künstlerroman that tracks the education of a young trombonist from the recognition of his genius to the moment when his genius has been quashed by the institutions of professional music, contains one almost exactly like it. The prodigy is assigned a solo that calls for him to hit a high E. He’s singled out in rehearsals for criticism by a remarkably inarticulate conductor, and though he comes through in the clutch (“[He] reached for the note, willed it forth. In a bulb-flash of sound it lit the hall for an instant of blue perfection”) what the note truly sounds is the end of his passion for music. So perhaps with Baker. “Playing Trombone” not only contained what to that point was the lone bassoon cameo in Baker’s career (there’s a reference to a fermata, too), it also established the children’s story motif. The story begins with a fairytale lilt (“There once was a miner who lived . . .”), and soon enough the trombonist’s episodic education and career approximate Alice’s series of nonsensical encounters in Wonderland. The speech of a music teacher, quite mad, ensures that we make the association:
Ah, have you ever felt the absolute power of, say, an A-flat major triad when it is played on a good piano in the context of absolute silence? Wait! Felt! ‘Felt’ is a partial clue. Who gave a famous tea party in a children’s book? The Hatter. And why was the Hatter mad, people? Because felt was used in hat manufacture, and mercury was essential in making felt, which caused brain damage. But here’s the key: felt is what tips the hammers of every good piano in the world—the felt hammer is the mediator between my hands and the piano wires—those prison bars, that slanting, silver-gray rain. Once again, mercury and the piano, the piano and mercury. Our instrument is our universe.