B & Me Page 4

  Or I lay down. It was 4:12 in the afternoon on May 27, 2010, and I lay down on the small couch in my small office, one edge of it beginning to fray from the claws of the cat that climbed onto my chest to sleep while I read. The room smelled fresh. I could hear the complicated business of birds in the trees outside, and beyond them the sounds of lawn mowers and occasionally obnoxious interstate traffic. There was music and sizzling in the kitchen, where Catherine, ever patient, was making us a rice and zucchini dish.

  I opened the book to the epigraph. I almost never read epigraphs, even though I sometimes use epigraphs. Who has time for epigraphs when there’s a whole canon of books you haven’t read? But this time I did. U and I begins with a quote from Cyril Connolly: “It may be us they wish to meet but it’s themselves they want to talk about.”

  Precisely, I thought. I was in love.

  9

  U AND I BEGINS AT 9:46 AM ON AUGUST 6, 1989—IT’S IN THE FIRST line—and that’s important. Nicholson Baker settles into a comfy chair with his keyboard on his lap, trying to ride the momentum of the book he just finished—Room Temperature, which I hadn’t read and didn’t own—but he doesn’t have any idea of what he wants to write now. He’s following his gut. What he winds up typing, he writes, something about the pleasure of writing in the morning (I write in the morning too, but find it hair-pullingly torturous), reminds him at once of something from Updike. He got it from Updike, he realizes. It’s not original. He abandons the line, but his plan basically works, because what he realizes is that for some time he’d been thinking of writing something about Updike.

  Something else worked too. A few minutes before I had been anxious and agonizingly impassioned, and I’d reached for U and I, oddly near at hand, with all the deadly import of a legionnaire lunging for his gladius. I had lain in the calm room with the calm cat on top of me, but inside I was boiling away. That all began to dissipate as soon as I started reading. Now I was still in the first paragraph, but already I could feel something happening. To be sure, I was acting on the book—I was reading it—but it was acting on me too, making something happen, the beginning of a convulsion. Finally, I couldn’t hold it back any longer: I laughed, slobbered a bit. It was a funny book. Not guffaw funny, but giggle funny, which maybe just means it was a human book.

  More important, I suddenly knew why I’d been unable to read U and I until now.

  Many years before, I’d been thrown for a loop when my canon-dabbling brought me around to Henry James’s famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw. I loved this book. But I was equally troubled by it because there turned out to be a wide discrepancy between what I read and what I’d expected to read. I hadn’t ever read anything at all about The Turn of the Screw, but I had an expectation of the book—repressed spinster driven mad by class angst—because some of the scholarly theories about it had crept out of their academic tomes and clawed their way into my mind. This troubled me greatly. I wound up producing a small study of The Turn of the Screw lamenting the fact that a far more commonsense read of the book, indicated by James himself, had been quashed: It is an allegory of how literature works, a depiction of powerful literary relationships in which the minds of writers and readers commingle, à la Emerson, to create a story.

  James would have been stunned, as I was, that his view of his story went almost completely ignored. “What we call criticism,” he once wrote, “its curiosity never emerging from the limp state, is apt to stand off from the intended sense of things, from such finely-attested matters, on the artist’s part, as a spirit and a form, a bias and a logic, of his own.” It’s only gotten worse since then. These days, not only is it permissible for academic critics to “stand off from the intended sense of things,” they’re more or less required to consider stories from the perspective of someone else, someone not themselves, someone whose views could not possibly have anticipated the work under consideration because those views had been formed only after the work was produced. The cart before the horse, in other words. That’s what institutional literary criticism tends to be these days, a whole caravan of carts before horses, all lined up but not going anywhere because putting the cart before the horse renders the cart useless and confuses the horse.

  Clearly, criticism had gotten under my skin—like ringworms. The weirdest part was that it meant The Turn of the Screw had been canonized for all the wrong reasons. And what if it wasn’t alone? Or worse, what if there were other really good books out there that had not only been misread, but had simply disappeared? This marked the beginning of my crisis—but also my mission. I began canvassing all the serious writers and readers I knew for a better writing about reading. There turned out to be a whole range of such work, a covert tradition, and almost every serious reader I knew had some book, or some essay, that wasn’t criticism in the traditional sense but had cemented their view of how literature ought to work in the world. Almost all of this work emphasized that the most important “context” in whatever we read was us, the self that literature was supposed to help us fathom.

  And that’s why I’d been unable to read U and I. U and I was firmly planted in the tradition I had studied. What I now recognized, even as I happily read through the first few pages, building up a head of steam, was that on first appearing in 1991 U and I had been the first book-length contribution to the covert tradition of creative criticism to have been published in quite some time. So not only should I have read U and I, I should have anthologized it.

  That’s when life intruded—for both me and Nicholson Baker. Before Baker can decide what to write about Updike, Donald Barthelme dies, and Baker has to take his young family to the zoo. He’s about nine pages in, and the book’s plot, such as it is, pauses. On my end of things, Catherine’s rice and zucchini dish was ready, and I sprinkled on a whole bunch of shredded Parmesan and scarfed away while Catherine noted without comment the open, facedown copy of U and I next to my plate, its now-doubly twisted covers giving it the aspect of a bird taking flight.

  After dinner I returned to my reading to find Baker returned from the zoo, back at work, but paralyzed, unsure how to proceed. Barthelme’s death has thrown him for a loop. Nicholson Baker had studied with Donald Barthelme for a time—a two-week course, I read somewhere; it was the closest he’d ever come to academic instruction in creative writing—but he makes no mention of it here. His ego intrudes. That is, his initial thoughts, on hearing of the death, are of himself: first, no one from the literary world had called him with the unhappy news, so he feels remote; and second, how can he use the death to his advantage? What’s interesting here, beyond it being already clear that Nicholson Baker is going to be one of those writers who draws you in by fessing up to uncomfortable facts about himself, is that the self-promoting uses of Barthelme’s death he then comes up with—one, writing a fiction about the passing of an important literary figure; and two, writing a commemorative essay—both derive from Henry James. Baker’s idea for a “neo-Jamesian story” is clearly a reference to “The Figure in the Carpet” or The Aspern Papers, both of which had been critical to my small study of The Turn of the Screw, and I’d also read a number of the commemorative essays that Henry James had produced and that Baker thinks to use as a model.

  But both ideas trigger shame, and before long Baker abandons his plan to write about Barthelme’s death. “I abandoned Barthelme completely,” he writes. It’s at this moment, in its abandon, that the basic conceit of U and I becomes clear: Not only is it the story of an underappreciated writer attempting to appreciate a more appreciated writer, it also chronicles a writer trying to decide what to write. He ha
s an inkling that he might like to write about literature in some way, perhaps to acknowledge his debts, reaffirm his mission, and chart a literary future for himself. But how should he do that? It’s a conundrum. On the one hand, he admits that writing a fiction about Barthelme would be “crudely opportunist.” On the other, a commemorative essay would not be enough like fiction, would not do what fiction does. Not plot-driven fiction, he specifies, not fiction whose only suspense is “first-order plot anxiety,” but fiction that “capture[s] pieces of mental life as truly as possible as they unfold.” The intended effect of these lines is that you realize that this is exactly what you’ve been doing since the morning of August 6, 1989: watching a mind unfold.

  And this, to my mind, was the more or less foundational characteristic of creative criticism: writers depicting their minds, their consciousnesses, as they think about literature. So when Baker returns to the reflexive inspiration of his unfolding mind—Updike—I was right there with him, in the sense that he was right there with me, agreeing with everything I’d been saying for years. But that made no sense. U and I had appeared long before many of the writings about literature I had anthologized: Nicholson Baker wasn’t agreeing with me, I was agreeing with him. “We read, really,” V. S. Naipaul wrote in an essay about his literary relationship with Joseph Conrad, “to find out what we already know.” Quite right—and that’s one of the more underappreciated pleasures of reading. Reading may sail us into terra incognita, but it’s also a means of exploring and fathoming where we’ve come from. U and I was an influential book, and a steady stream of creative criticism had followed after it, the very stream I’d panned for lustrous nuggets. It confirmed what I already knew. It shaped me without my even having read it.

  Which made me anxious. Not first-order plot anxiety, but an anxiety that approximated the anxiety that Baker himself begins to feel in regard to his subject matter: he’s immediately convinced that Updike could have done better at age twenty-five what Baker is attempting at thirty-two. And here I was, at forty-three, looking laterally to the Baker of right then, fifty-three, but also backward to the much younger Baker who had helped shape my worldview. This shouldn’t have bothered me. We’re always reading important books from the distant past written by long-dead writers who produced what they produced when they were younger than we are. But it did bother me—it did. Oh, if Nicholson Baker had only been a dead writer! That would have solved everything. You cannot slander the dead; you don’t have to worry about hurting the feelings of the dead; you cannot be jealous of the dead. You’ve always got that on them, as it were. But Nicholson Baker was not dead, and neither was Updike, at least when Baker was writing about him. We both had the same problem, Baker and me. Our egos were in the way. Maybe that’s why we traditionally wait until writers die to write about them. The dead are older than we are even if they died young. And the not-dead younger writer—even when they’re now older than we are—presents the greatest problem of all.

  This was illustrated perfectly in the months after my tipless tipping point, when I found an essay about Nicholson Baker written by Martin Amis. I was reading Amis (rather than studiously avoiding him) because I’d started thinking about editing another anthology. I’d found a remaindered copy of some of Amis’s literary writings, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, but there wasn’t much in it I could use—perhaps a piece about Philip Larkin, in which Amis relinquished a bit more of his Amisness than was generally the case. That was the problem with him. Martin Amis had an ego, a self, but he wasn’t at all interested in plumbing it, or unfolding it, and that’s why he was one of those writers often described with crass synonyms for male genitals. In his essay “Nicholson Baker”—I almost didn’t read it—Amis is a total dick to Nicholson Baker. He’s even, preemptively, a dick to me. The piece is mostly the story of Amis pitching a fit over having been asked to interview a “literary junior.” Baker is “inadmissibly young” (thirty-six at the time), and Amis makes a point of taking him down a peg by pointing out that a neologism that Baker had coined in the then newly published Vox—“strum,” a synonym for masturbation—had been, Amis wrote, “casually tossed out by [Amis] two novels ago.” What a prick! Furthermore, Amis characterizes his need to charge Baker with petty plagiarism as “get[ting] the B-and-Me stuff at least partly out of the way.” Cocksucker! That’s exactly why I hated Amis and all the English writers like him. He was far less interested in ideas than he was in making sure you knew he was more interesting than his subject. This was true throughout Visiting Mrs. Nabokov. His commemorative essays all commemorated himself.

  In fact, he wrote exactly the kind of essays Nicholson Baker explicitly worries about writing at the beginning of U and I—immature, indulgent—and rather than depicting his unfolding mind, Amis tended to depict his mind folding itself farther and farther in, in a kind of horrid origami. I realized that maybe I’d thought Nicholson Baker was English not because of his name, but because I’d stumbled across this awful essay years before and had associated Baker with Amis’s Englishness and dickishness. Of course there was also the fact that Baker had lived in England for a year—I’d read that too, by this point—and perhaps he had done so, I thought now, because Henry James was a role model. Henry James mistook himself for an English writer. “I aspire to write in such a way,” he once wrote to his brother, William, “that it wd. be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America.”

  10

  NICHOLSON BAKER ISN’T THINKING ABOUT ANY OF THIS IN U AND I—he couldn’t be, he hadn’t granted the interview yet—but he does fret for a while over how to proceed once he decides that writers writing about literature must depict their unfolding minds. That’s what he’s trying to get at, I think, when he admits that he has never “successfully masturbated” to any image or scene from John Updike. I loved the fact that he revealed this. The image of a grown man failing to arouse himself with a book is funny, sure, but more important, it underscores that the common denominator of good writing is passionate incursions into those regions of human experience we refuse to discuss in any other precinct of human discourse. The subject matter changes, but the basic task is always the same: careful attention given to that which is mostly left folded, creased, hidden. That might mean anything from the slums of London, to the frustrating abstractions of cosmology, to the uncertain mind of a fretful critic.

  But how do you be fretful and critical at the same time? Nicholson Baker’s unfolding mind has no idea, at first. Throughout the first part of U and I—fifty pages, a full quarter of it—he struggles to invent what he thinks criticism ought to be. He starts out trying to remember a line, any line, from Updike. “Vast, dying sea” is what comes to him: Updike’s sad description of one’s leaky inner reservoir of remembered literature. From there Baker goes on to produce a list, a “train” of images from his internal Updike reservoir. The list doesn’t help. It’s fading and dying. So he produces another list, a more Thoreauvian accounting of what Updike he’s read, but that’s not particularly helpful either. Nor is it vast. Still he sticks to this idea of remembered literature. Henry James, he tells himself, hadn’t reread every dead writer’s work he commemorated, had he? Of course not. And this is pivotal, because it’s now that Baker turns away from Henry James to consider his brother, William.

  By this point I’d gotten used to the idea that in executing my Baker study I was going to be encountering a range of points of contact between his life and my own. After all, it had been an accumulation of such points that finally got me to sit down and start reading him, now about an hour ag
o. So this time I was ready for it. Long before Baker turned away from Henry James to consider his brother—or rather, after it, but before I read it—I had turned away from my short study of The Turn of the Screw and written an entire book about William James.

  This profoundly affected my read of U and I’s most pivotal passage. Rather than the usual, pleasing trance state of reading, a heightened state in which an arbitrary activity triggers flurried consciousness, this was more like a prolonged period of déjà vu. Because I had just then been saying to myself, as I read—had just then been conducting a separate, internal dialogue as I mindlessly stroked the warm cat on my chest and absently registered Catherine doing something in the bathroom (she was always doing mad scientist stuff in the bathroom, mixing dangerous chemicals for her ancient photographic processes, though what I was hearing was some kind of buzzing noise . . . )—I had just then been saying to myself, Poor Nicholson Baker, he wouldn’t be struggling to figure out how to proceed if only he’d read a little William James! And that’s exactly what happens in the book. Baker applies his what-do-I-remember routine to William James (“‘Hey, what about Henry’s brother, old William James—what do I think of him?’”), and after he gets past the impulse to reduce writers to lists of quotations spooned out of the tureen of his failing memory, he remembers a scene instead.

  It’s New York, 1981, a McDonald’s on the Upper East Side. He’d gone in to collect a free Big Mac, some kind of promotion, and he’d taken along a little William James to read while he ate. He got embarrassed while he was there—McDonald’s is an embarrassing place—and he tried to hide his shame in the book. He opened it to a random diagram. Reading this, I thought I knew exactly what diagram it would be once he described it. Indeed, his description felt like the description I would have written, the description I am writing. It was the diagram, I thought, that William James had used to illustrate his theory of consciousness, each thought depicted with a graphy wave like a story arc: the work of the mind was best illustrated with overlapping story arcs. Nicholson Baker wrote that the diagram he flipped to was a “glorious sight” when he saw it, and it was a glorious read when I read it. U and I doesn’t reprint the diagram Baker was looking at, but here is the diagram I was certain he meant: