See this glass of water? This glass of water is an essay. Perfectly fine thing for it to be. A literary essay — a piece of “creative nonfiction.” But dip a spoon in that glass of water and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot fry pan so that a few drops fall and sizzle and quickly disappear. That’s a poem.
Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Last week’s post was an appreciation of my favourite novel by the American writer Nicholson Baker: The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998).
I shared it because I had been rereading Baker’s later novel, The Anthologist (2009), and
realised it had more in common with Nory than I saw before: both are books about the leaky circuit between literary activity and life in general.
Or — as Baker himself put it in his review of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star (1994) — they are books that “treat the relationship between art and life and the secrets they keep from each other”.
When I first read The Anthologist, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped I would enjoy a book about verse by one of my favourite writers of prose. In response to this, though, I did the worst thing I could have done: I tried to teach it. As Oscar Wilde said, “There are two ways of disliking art […] One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.”
My rationale for teaching The Anthologist, to first-year Literature students, was that it would allow us to discuss both poetic form and the realist novel. The book begins:
Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry.
The middle sentence is the important one, I think. The realist novel offers us entry into a shared world. The feeling that we “know” this world comes partly from the narrator, and partly from our own experiences. In the overlap between the two, the addictive game of fictional irony begins, as we try to work out what is really going on. There’d be no fun in reading Pride and Prejudice, for example, if we believed that
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife
was an opening statement to be taken at face value, rather than contested for the rest of Austen’s novel (the “-knowledge” of “acknowledged” is ironized in the next sentence: “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be”).
Baker’s opening sentences play the same game: what might we come to know about Paul Chowder that he doesn’t know about himself? But, unlike Austen, he’s set it up in the breezy, homely, first-person narration of the main character, establishing the talking-to-anyone tone which will carry the whole book. About halfway, Baker gently parodies this voice by having Chowder speculate “maybe I could do a weekly podcast”:
Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder’s Bowl of Poetry. And I’m your host, Paul Chowder, and this is Chowder’s Plumfest of Poems. […] And this is Chowder’s Poetry Cheatsheet, and I’m your host, Paul Chowder, from hell and gone, welcoming you to Chowder’s Thimblesquirt of Verse.
Notice the sourer turn this takes at the end, suggesting the unhappiness that’s never far away from Chowder’s frazzled outbursts of jocularity. The essential situation of The Anthologist is that Chowder’s partner has left him because he has repeatedly failed to write the introduction to his anthology, Only Rhyme. Nicholson Baker’s novels don’t really do plot: the action, and the characterisation, is all in the sentence-by-sentence attention to detail. But their thoughtfulness still lead us on to expect a discovery, in the form of self-realisation. Chowder’s narration is partly about his life, but frequently, for pages, about how poetry works. So why can’t he finish his book?
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