The Soft Tonnage of Poetry: Part I
On the poetic novels of Nicholson Baker
This is America, land of bad poetry! Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim.
Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
This week, I re-read a novel that I knew I had mixed feelings about. It’s The Anthologist (2009) by Nicholson Baker, which tells the story of a “once-in-a-while-published” American poet, Paul Chowder, as he struggles to write the introduction to an anthology called Only Rhyme. You can probably tell from that summary that it’s a comic novel, which is possibly why I didn’t really get on with it first time around. As I wrote here last year, my own experience of trying to sift modern poetry into a big book didn’t feel very comic at the time:
I also came to The Anthologist with doubts about Baker’s ability to write character, having been unconvinced by his previous novel, Checkpoint (2004), a dialogue between two men, one of whom wants to — er — assassinate the Republican president.
But I persist with writers if there is at least one book by them that I love. In Baker’s case, I admired his debut, The Mezzanine (1988), which describes one man’s uneventful lunch hour in minutely footnoted detail. It is, however, the book he wrote a decade later — after a period of notoriety, thanks to two sexual-fantasy novels, Vox (1992) and The Fermata (1994) — that I return to most often: The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998).
Rereading The Anthologist this week, I 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. And this got me thinking about The Anthologist in a different way: not so much as a novel about poetry as one which is constantly making an implicit argument about the impure distinction in practice between “prose” and “verse”: as Paul Chowder says on the first page, “the kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now — the kind that I write — is slow-motion prose”. So I’m going to develop this reading of The Anthologist in a future post, and this week set it up by revisiting an appreciation of Nory that I wrote for the forgotten-books magazine, Slightly Foxed, in 2011.
Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998)
Nicholson Baker’s fifth novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory, was not, as its nine-year-old heroine might say, the world’s most raging success. I picked it up as a little pocket hardback in a clearance sale. A week later, I returned and bought the remaining stock at a pound a piece, to distribute to friends and family.
The book itself explains why I did this. In Chapter 39, “Reading Tintin to her Babies”, Eleanor (“Nory”) Winslow ponders the difficulties of communicating a literary enthusiasm:
Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give a person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?
Put simply, The Everlasting Story of Nory is an exploration of the origins of civilisation through the mind of a child. But that could, admittedly, be someone’s idea of a boring book. And so could this, from the dustjacket:
A nine-year-old American girl […] is spending a term at an English school. She thinks about teeth, tells herself stories, defends a classmate, has nightmares about cows, and generally does her best to make sense of life’s particulars as she encounters them.
Like the boys in Nory’s class who emit “low gurgles and snickers” when she has to read her story about a girl and a dog, not to mention the English teacher who bans the word “nice” (even though it’s “a very, very important word for kids”), the book’s reviewers were not impressed. “A thin, highly predictable narrative about a schoolgirl’s banal — and uneventful — life” (The New York Times); “a dull book” (The Guardian); “readers who are not relatives will wish [Baker] had edited and focused the book more stringently” (The Daily Telegraph).
This last piece of faint praise alludes to Baker’s dedication of the book “to my dear daughter Alice, the informant”. Spending a year abroad in the English cathedral town of Ely, the American writer would collect his daughter from school every day, “interview” her about her experiences, and write it up. Which sounds, of course, like the most sentimental self-indulgence. The endless story of one’s own children is best told to a select audience, and even then there are limits.
Baker’s account of Nory’s development in an interview at the time seems artless (“I didn't know how the book would end up because I didn’t know how her experience in this English school would end up”). But the art of the book is there, in miniature, in the title. Like a number of Nory’s epithets, “everlasting” doesn’t sound quite right at first. But turns out to be more accurate than its conventional synonym (“neverending”). This is not a fairy tale of eternal childhood. Growing up is at the heart of Nory’s story, which ends with a loose tooth and “a salty taste of blood in her mouth”. Yet her narrative is “everlasting” in that it depicts the deep continuities between child and adult mind, including the irrepressible desire “to be continued”, as Nory says at the end of her own stories. The word “everlasting”, she notes, comes from “the kind of things you say in Cathedral”, which is also the place where she learns about the neverending story she calls the “crucifiction”.
Baker’s critics tended to regard the book as a sort of Everlasting Gobstopper, the endlessly sweet sweet invented by Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The novel’s gentle blending of third-person narration with Nory’s own thoughts resulted in a “veneer of cutesiness” that made it “almost unreadable”. Never judge a book by its veneer, though. As in Dahl — but with more subtlety — the salty taste of the uncute cuts constantly through Baker’s storytime style, which is not really for children.
Nory’s own tales are fantasies of self-reflection. “The Story of the Deadly Rain”, for example, follows its “eight or nine years old” heroine, Mariana, on one of her regular trips to the Sahara Desert. She soon finds herself having to rescue another little girl, “about the age of four”, from an unexplained onslaught of boiling raindrops. “Her face started bubbling it was so hot. Her sweat turned red with blood. […] Mariana spoke softly to the girl. ‘Do not cry dear, do not cry, it takes blood from your precious body’.”
These are the true melodramatic imaginings of childhood, prompted by the previous chapter’s waking experience of school fire drill and drama class (“they were learning to die in various ways”). Through stories, Nory finds a way of transforming her small, unconnected observations into grand, meaningful chains. To quote Henry James, the ventriloquist of another naïvely perceptive little girl in What Maisie Knew:
Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance […] and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
There is no substitute for the process of art in Nory because it is everywhere. The little girl who wants to be a dentist or a popup-book maker, who has a plan to curate “a museum of fake food from all different lands”, and who uses stories to avoid bad dreams and to deepen friendships, is an instinctive improver of the world. I hesitate to say that she embodies Baker’s theory of fiction, because that makes it sound like a boring book again. But there is undoubtedly a nod towards this in the self-portrait of Nory’s father, whose contribution to the world is “writing books that help people go to sleep”.
Nory is a bedside book in the best sense: it comforts, it calms, and it translates the world with dream-like lucidity. Another of the book’s fortuitous malapropisms is Nory’s friend who becomes “totally emerged in the page” when she reads. Like Alice entering Wonderland, becoming immersed in a story leads to emergence in another world. When Nory has a nightmare that recalls Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole — becoming a white rabbit who burrows into the corpse of a monk in the cathedral grounds — she wakes up, reads a book, and regains imaginative control:
Ah, yes, she saw her mistake… the dead monk was not really dead — it was just sleeping deeply, wearing a frightening mask […] the black tongue was made of papier maché and had a little spring that made it pop out.
It is Nory’s interest in the workings of everything, cute or disgusting, that makes her an artist in waiting. She is equally fascinated by the idea of doll’s egg with rubber insides that would “goosh out” when cracked and the blood that would “coosh out” from a pig’s bladder used by an Elizabethan actor. (Her scene-stealing little brother, “Littleguy”, whose head is filled with the technical vocabulary of trains — a doughnut with icing is “mixed-traffic” — also shows promise.) By adopting this naturally attentive view of the world, Nicholson Baker writes about his year in Ely in a way that corrects all the abstraction of adult life, for which the book has little time (“Nory’s father had to go in to London… to look something up”).
Every other page in my copy has a pencil-marked moment of pleasure. My favourite chapter follows Nory’s thoughts in Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel, its skeletal windows and walls stripped bare by the Reformation. Performing her own restoration, she arrives at one of the book’s many associations of art with care:
Right now the Lady Chapel definitely had problems, in Nory’s opinion. It smelled very coldly of stone. Probably that was because the stone powder was always falling, since there were so many places that the stone was broken open, and over the years it kept falling from them, like pollen […] Long ago it would have been a much, much more Mary-Mother-of-Goddish sort of building when the stained glass was there, because the colours would be red and blue and you might feel you were in a humongous stone kangaroo pouch.
I hope that gives you a glint.
Ordering myself some Baker right now, thanks for this - and I miss Slightly Foxed.
Well, you've certainly made me want to read it (love the "mixed traffic" doughnut).