B & Me Page 8

  “‘All you need for good porn is a pretty smiley woman who’s having fun, and a dude with a hard dick who isn’t fat.’”

  I didn’t look at Catherine as I recited this line. What if she didn’t find it funny? What if it didn’t plunge her out of her cloggedness? It was a moment that could go either way, when the struggling ember of our love might vanish into a wispy tendril of smoke.

  “That’s so . . . perfect!” she said.

  I kept reading and twisting in my seat and shrugging my shoulders until she couldn’t really concentrate on her work.

  “Well, are you going to share?”

  “‘She sat splaylegged on the blanket, and Dave brought out his massive, porn-maddened spunk-spewer.’”

  Before describing Catherine’s reaction to this, I should make the argument that even though House of Holes is mostly pornographic—in his splash of interviews Baker insisted that he didn’t mind it being labeled such—it does concern itself with a higher set of ideas. But even saying this in this way causes problems. Modern literature lacks a decent metaphor to describe works of ambition. “Higher purpose” smacks of elitism, and “deeper meaning” sounds about as thrilling as embalming a puppy. Other metaphors are contradictory. A work that “makes you think” forbids you the comfortable state of not thinking, just as a book you “can’t put down” denies free will. “Heavy-handed” prose annoys us even as we long for that which is “heavy” in significance. Even pornography turns you “on” to get you “off.” So what to do with a work subtitled “a book of raunch” that takes pains to align itself with the history of utopian thought? Baker himself called on Henry James—of course!—to describe the writing of the book. In his Paris Review interview, he claimed that certain scenes required the same gender-swapping talent James mastered in writing from the perspective of women. And it’s women, actually, who give voice to what wisdom House of Holes has to offer. Around page twenty or so, Lila, the House of Holes’s colorful madam (the Margaret Fuller of Brook Farm, the Zenobia of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance), warns a resident-applicant to “Be honest. So few people are able to tell the truth.” The book, then, and perhaps all works of ambition, may be said to be about the difficulty of telling the truth. I’ll go a step farther. These days, few people are able to hear the truth. That’s why sometimes we react to truth with both awe and disbelief, as though this true thing we’ve just heard is something we’ve long known but failed to recognize until now. The joy literature provides is the joy of discovering what was always inside us, à la Naipaul, a joy tempered by regret that we’ve lived this long denying it, just waiting for someone with the spirit and industry to say it. That pretty much describes Catherine’s reaction to Baker’s spunk-spewer. She laughed a laugh that slowly slackened to a look of fragile illness. She smiled involuntarily. Her eyes assented while her head wagged slowly back and forth. She turned back to her computer, but her attention was now divided. She was of more than one mind.

  That was just the beginning, the beginning that started when I brought home the Holy Grail of nonfiction book proposals and could no longer be said to be preoccupied with Nicholson Baker because now I was occupied with him. Catherine was too, in a way. One afternoon she gave me her particular look and said, “How about you read me a little Nicholson Baker?”

  Hallelujah! We’d weathered all the plagues and bad weather. “Sure, I’ll give you a little Nicholson Baker,” I said, which caused her only to stiffen and insist that we were not going to start referring to my cock as Nicholson Baker.

  Fair enough. The important thing was that we were reading together again. Which was itself a little dangerous, because was it wise, really, to share your literary arousal with an intimate partner? Buber would have been suspicious; Barthes would have said go for it. In any event, that was not my main concern once we climbed up to the bedroom. I hurriedly leafed through House of Holes, searching for a non-come-face scene. No easy task. It wasn’t like I’d been annotating for that the first time around. It didn’t matter, though, because we didn’t get to the end of the scene I chose before Catherine said okay, that’s enough, and got up to put on some nice music. And, in fact, the way we wound up reading House of Holes was not so terribly different from how Baker once said he reads: “I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.”

  17

  BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M GOING TO DO WITH NICHOLSON BAKER. Or at least I intend to do something more than use House of Holes as a healing sex manual. That said, it was a direct result of Catherine and me being in bed together that I started reading The Mezzanine.

  There’s a long-standing link between beds and storytelling—the bedtime story—and, at first glance, it might not seem particularly fruitful to ask how or why storytelling first came to be used as a sleep aid for children. Yet at the same time, we’ve all heard that the most familiar of bedtime stories, fairy tales, weren’t originally meant for children at all, and the dubious claim that most fairy tales are really about sex is practically a fairy tale itself. Reading bedtime stories to children is a curious practice in general, because stories require conflict, there needs to be something happening, and presumably this is the kind of thing you’d rather stick around and see resolved than nod off and miss. The mother of all fairy tales makes the point: Good stories kiss us awake. It would seem then that the art of the modern children’s story would be to produce a story that has a recognizable conflict but that does not risk being so arousing that a child would prefer listening to it to zonking out.

  Once we grow up we reject this completely. As adults, the worst thing we can say of a book is that it put us to sleep. But where do we keep books when they’re in queue to be read or consulted? On the nightstand—just as I’d done with my copy of U and I. Trained from youth to associate books with bed, even serious readers read with the hope that stories will ferry them from consciousness to unconsciousness. We thus stack the deck against books’ success. We’re ready for bed, we’ve called it a day, but heaven forfend a book should actually put us to sleep.

  Before I read The Mezzanine—and I should stipulate that it wasn’t when I was trying to go to sleep that I began reading it, it was in the middle of the night after I’d woken up and could not return to sleep—I’d already come to realize that sleep, children’s stories, and zipping in and out of consciousness were repeating themes in Nicholson Baker’s career. Beginning right around the time of his William James revelation, Baker had a period of working short, as they say. In the early eighties, he published a handful of stories and essays. This neat batch of work, which I’ve now read, wholly supports my thesis about Baker and the James brothers. For example Henry James’s early stories, which mine his era’s new thinking on thinking, display inordinate interest in altered consciousness and frequently depict characters moving in and out of ordinary consciousness—waking and falling asleep. Similarly, Baker’s early stories, one each printed in The New Yorker and The Atlantic (he received both acceptance letters on the same day, lucky duck), and one in a now defunct journal called The Little Magazine, kick-start his own interest in sleep and children’s stories. Most relevant to the moment when I was about to begin reading The Mezzanine, a moment in which I was lying with my head propped on a pillow, desperately not sleeping, is “Snorkeling,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1981 and begins like this: “Royal woke up feeling expansive, his head comfortably stabilized between two pillows.”

  Happenstance? No way, because the whole story, even the title, is about sleep. “Snorkeling” is a fabulist tale about a man who stu
mbles onto a bizarre corporation that facilitates sleep outsourcing by way of some arcane technology. Royal contracts to have “drones” do his sleeping for him, and this enables a Walter Mitty–like fable in which a working stiff with barely enough time to live his life suddenly has the extra hours he needs to approach greatness. As it happens, Royal had been an insomniac as a child. But how did his mother, in a flashback to all those years ago, encourage him to sleep? With a bedtime story. Or rather, with a peculiar form of bedtime story. Royal’s mother burbled out a description of an underwater scene intended to plunge her son in the depths of unconsciousness. Sleepy sharks and groggy rainbow fish tumble sonorously through a hydrorama whose only noise Royal’s mother rendered as “Fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh . . .” The trick doesn’t work, but “fwoosh” reappears in the present moment of “Snorkeling,” when Royal, having discovered the downside of artificial sleep deprivation (he will become a “drone”), mesmerizes his girlfriend with a similar bedtime lull: “fwoosh . . . fwoosh.”

  Hence the first shaky claim of my study of Nicholson Baker: These fwooshes, the verbal equivalent of an attempt to stream someone else’s consciousness, are echoed by the “fwoosh” that thirty years later flushed characters to new “mind-zones” in House of Holes. A thematic hint planted three decades apart confirmed my suspicion that Baker was a writer of significant ambition, and the nature of that hint proved that U and I was not the only time Baker recognized that consciousness was better served by liquid, rather than mechanical, metaphors. (Incidentally, “Snorkeling” has an enticing typo: an open parenthesis that never closes. Given The New Yorker’s attention to detail and the fact that “Snorkeling” has never been reprinted, it’s tempting to wonder whether it’s actually not a typo, whether Baker is suggesting that we think of the rest of the story, the rest of his career, as contained within a parenthetical statement that will never end.)

  Baker’s early essays confirm all this. “Changes of Mind,” “The Size of Thoughts,” and “Rarity” all appeared in The Atlantic—the James brothers, too, published early work in The Atlantic—and they resemble William James’s essays in at least three ways: one, they each assume, as James always did, that introspection can lead to universal truth: “If your life is like my life . . .”; two, Baker borrows James’s tactic of italicizing entire phrases at pivotal moments: “. . . as irrevocably as the bus driver tossed out the strange sad man’s right shoe”; and three, he outright lifts James’s strategy of organizing arguments into numbered subsections: “(1) All large thoughts are reluctant”; “(2) Large thoughts are creatures of the shade”; “(3) Large thoughts depend more heavily on small thoughts than you might think.”

  It’s possible that it was these essays Baker was referring to when he told his Paris Review interviewer that he had written “a couple pieces” on an Olivetti electric typewriter in Paris (both Jameses spent formative early years in Paris, too), but frankly it’s hard to imagine these essays as the work of even a precocious twenty-year-old (he’d spent his junior year in college abroad), and the first of them wasn’t published until Baker was twenty-five. But regardless, it’s clear that Baker was already thinking a lot of the thoughts that would sneak in the back door of House of Holes. “Pursue truth, not rarity,” he writes, autodidactically. “(All that is untrue is small),” he self-advises. And less aphoristically, he screeches out a Jamesian aria:

  A thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

  Where do you find such thoughts? Henry James. Henry James appears either directly or indirectly in each of these William James–like essays. “I decided to think about Henry James’s sentence: ‘What is morality but high intelligence?’” Baker wrote. And in “The Size of Thoughts,” he claims that off the top of his head he can count only ninety-one people who have had large, original thoughts. Henry James is first on the list. William goes unmentioned, but he’s there too, percolating.

  18

  AS BAKER HAD, I’D BEEN KEEPING ALL THIS IN MIND AS I WENDED my way toward what for any critic is a crucial transition: reading his or her subject’s first book. It was a lot to keep straight, and maybe that was why it had been almost a five-year stretch from the appearance of the last of Baker’s early essays to the publication of The Mezzanine. Biographically speaking, Baker was juggling many balls during this stretch of his life. He himself was a working stiff, having resisted the academic writer career path, and his wife had given birth to their first child, a girl named Alice. (A couple references seem plausible here: All Alices measure themselves against precocious blond underworld travelers, surely, particularly when they are the daughter of a writer whose subsurface fascination with children’s stories is not hard to palpate; but William James is another possibility: both his famous sister and his wife were Alices.) Baker has spoken of a season of trouble, the spring of 1982, when he received a piece of “unwelcome news” that resulted in his smoking “nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana” at his portable typewriter (William James once famously took mescaline and stumbled through Harvard Square mumbling to himself). The results of this debauch, chronicled in “The Northern Pedestal,” printed in Esquire a decade later, “analyze his interior state” but offer no clue as to the bad news. Had a book proposal not sold? Was it his parents’ divorce, or somehow related to what he called his “growing paranoia about liquor”? In U and I, Baker’s mother encourages him to write a tell-all drama about their family, but Baker finds the material wanting: “‘But there is nothing to tell! Some money squabbles—so what!’” Sounds like the James family. In any event something troubled him during these years, something that delayed for almost half a decade the production of The Mezzanine, which tops out at a mere one hundred and thirty-five pages.

  But whatever bothered Baker didn’t bother me at all. I was thrilled because I could see what was coming. In “Rarity,” Baker writes of the “ecstasy of arriving at something underappreciated at the end of a briareous ramification of footnotes.” So Baker’s crisis, whatever it was, was not keeping me up nights. And it wasn’t why I was up in the middle of the night now, trying to imagine some way of making the time pass more quickly. That was Catherine’s fault.

  19

  LET ME EXPLAIN.

  Having used, at least once, House of Holes to relight the dual stovetop burners of our reading and intimate lives did not succeed in completely reheating the leftovers of our passion. It wasn’t going to be that easy. Metaphorical flames, like actual flames, do not always catch. Matches sputter before they touch the wick, campfire kindling proves too damp to ignite. Our predicament, marooned in the butcher-knife purgatory, left us struggling like primitive man to invent fire, and it’s no accident that the repetitive, friction-inducing strummings and strokings one might experiment with so as to generate the heat that might combust a knot of dried moss resemble the furious activities people engage in to bring themselves, and others, to a boil. The difficulty, of course, is that while the climax of a body must be followed by a period of repose, a fire will not tolerate rest. Flames need to be nursed, tended. Without careful attention, the result will be a cold smolder.

  Which is what happened to us. A glorious group encounter with Nicholson Baker took us temporarily to the House of Holes, but we fwooshed home again as soon as the chapter ended. And rather th
an the sustained tumescence of our love, we experienced a metastasizing growth of a territorial instinct that we each came to feel in regard to the total surface area of our mattress.

  To back up a smidge. Early in our relationship we had been quite insistent that we never go a moment, in bed, when we were not wrapped up in each other. But as time had gone on we began to unconsciously negotiate a sleep treaty that drifted us farther and farther apart, and divvied up our sleep paraphernalia into distinct stashes. I got three of the five pillows, Catherine got the side of the bed closer to the box fan. Because she was closer to the fan she tended to be colder at night, and what that meant was that her half of the bed required more covers. So each night before lights out she would spend several minutes piling and arranging a stack of extra blankets—a whole bolt of valuable Indian textiles accumulated during her yearlong study of sari production in rural India—for her side of the bed alone. This had the effect of creating a line down the middle of the bed, and, of course, before long, this line was no longer a mere line but a boundary. We had transmuted from sleeping like identical twins gestating in neonatal embrace to fraternal siblings cordoned off by a tough partition of tissue.

  The history of nation-states proves that once a line in the sand is drawn, it’s only a matter of time before battles over resources begin, before cultural identity becomes intertwined with irrational nostalgia for useless tracts of land, before annoying but harmless political saber rattlings become provocative and dangerous transborder excursions. So it became with us. Sometimes when Catherine thought I was asleep, I would feel her sit up in bed and lean over—violating my airspace—to gather intelligence as to whether I’d crossed the border illegally. In addition to being a light snorer, I sometimes fidget and kick at night, and so occasionally she was right, I’d not managed to remain on my side of the bed. And to be fully truthful, I did, once or twice, intentionally burrow an arm or leg under that warm frontier and take a trespasser’s pleasure in occupying space that did not “belong” to me. Other times, however, Catherine was completely out of her mind about all this, and I had remained entirely on my side of the bed, was falling off my side of the bed, even as she accused me of having punctured the citadel in which she slept less like a princess atop a pea than like the pea itself, smooshed beneath forty or fifty pounds of fragile Indian textiles.