Stuff
Interview with Nicholson Baker
Interview with Nicholson Baker
A Conversation with Nicholson Baker, Author of The Anthologist
Q: Your new novel, THE ANTHOLOGIST, offers a veritable crash course in poetry. Have you always read a lot of poetry or did you just engage in some intensive research before writing the novel?
NB: Like a lot of people I’ve gone through several bursts of poetry reading in my life, and also long periods where I didn’t read any at all. I always think better when I read poetry, and I wonder now if maybe I learned to write fiction by reading poems. No, that’s an exaggeration. But I used to carry around The New Yorker Book of Poetry, which is a huge yellow anthology with the poems arranged alphabetically by title, edited by a poet named Howard Moss. That is a fantastic book. I read it on my lunch hours. I’ve also always been curious about why rhyme died out for a while in the 20th century, and I’ve quested after explanations over the years.
Q: The poet-narrator of the novel prefers poems that rhyme—do you share that predilection?
NB: Paul Chowder, the narrator, is confused and conflicted about many things, as I am. I’ve always basically wanted poems to rhyme, and to have a recognizable metrical thump to them. When I look at a poem in a magazine I do a quick check to see whether it’s a rhymer or not by skimming down the ragged right edge. I grew up on A.A. Milne, Edward Lear, the Beatles, and Dr. Seuss, and they were all tremendous jinglers, and I was scandalized in fourth grade when our very nice teacher said “It doesn’t have to rhyme.” Of course it does! And yet there’s no question that a lot of the writing that really helps us to see the strange beauties of the world is unrhyming poetry. When it’s good, a rhyme is a miracle. When it’s bad it’s really bad.
Q: What does Paul mean when he says, “Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.”
NB: Many—most?—brilliant traditional versifiers are people with a depressive streak. Tennyson, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, Auden, Edward Fitzgerald. The audio card in their brain has a different set of solenoids. Rhyme helps them even more than the Times crossword does because they assign themselves a sound-lump, like “fringe,” and then have to spend a frowning hour or a day coming up with a matching sound lump, like “hinge” or “impinge,” that is part of something piercingly true. It’s difficult and when it works you don’t just have a square puzzle with letters filled in, you have a string of words that people want to sing to themselves.
Q: In the novel, one of Paul Chowder’s favorite poets is Sara Teasdale, a largely forgotten American writer of passionate, romantic verse from the beginning of the twentieth century. Is this admiration sincere, or intended as a dose of irony?
NB: No irony there, she was a true balladeer and much better than most of the self-promoting male poets of the era. Yes, she has her overly tinkly moments but she wrote about love in good ways. She was fascinated by stars. “And a heaven full of stars / Over my head, / White and topaz / And misty red.” She was a hypochondriac and killed herself in the bathtub with morphine, leaving her best poems to be published posthumously. Meanwhile Ezra Pound, the crazy bigot, banged the drum for free verse.
Q: Paul Chowder also says: “One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you’re at a beginning….And that’s what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.” Might one argue that your narrative style, with its multiple digression and affection for the minutiae of the world, attempts to achieve this quality in prose form?
NB: Yes, I was probably shooting for that same feeling. I love the “Chapter One” sensation of starting a novel—the drop capital of the first letter, the non-indented first line, the sensation of late breakfast in a sunny foreign cafe. When I’m fifty pages or eighty pages in I begin to miss the beginningness.
Q: Is THE ANTHOLOGIST intended in any way to be a spoof on the vagaries of literary celebrity?
NB: Sure, although my hero is maybe more of a self-doubter than a spoofer. Why did Archibald MacLeish win three Pulitzer Prizes? The literary universe is full of sudden bursts of glory and self-importance, and on the other hand, some people go through decades of obscurity and quiet merit, and it’s all very confusing. I’m amazed sometimes by how potent a force avant-garde snobbery and crowd-sentiment is. People want to be in the know. They want to be wearing black at the Venice Biennale.
Q: Paul Chowder is so self-effacing and self-deprecating. And readers only see a snippet of one of his poems. Are we meant to believe he is himself a good or bad poet? Does it matter?
NB: Paul is gnawed at by the self doubts that a lot writers have, including me—and I’ve noticed that when good poets write about poetry they seldom quote their own work. It seems unseemly. I thought it would be more interesting to leave the nature of his poems to be inferred. But I myself wrote a whole bunch of Paul Chowder poems—had a great time one night—and then left them out of the book. They weren’t Chowder’s best work, that’s for sure.
Q: Some novelists, like Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, and even your acknowledged influence, John Updike, also write poetry. Do you write poems?
NB: I’ve only had one poem published—it came out in The New Yorker more than ten years ago. It was called “From the Index to First Lines.” First lines—again the desire for the new beginning.
Q: It’s been said that the only audience for poetry today is among those who themselves write poetry. Do you agree with this assessment? Is poetry a dying art form?
NB: No, the strange thing is that poems are huge, because every pop song is a poem—we just don’t call it that. “Men’s shirts short skirts, oh oh oh.” (Some of it’s bad and some of it’s good, just as is true of “real” poetry.) Everyone who listens to the radio has a large anthology of couplets in his or her head. Ad jingles are poems. A lot of what we think of as the best English poetry—for instance Elizabethan verse—began as song lyrics. They strummed the lute and sang “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” It was sung before it was printed. Who knows who we will think are the great metrical geniuses of 2009 a hundred years from now? Could be names we don’t even think of now. That’s what makes the history of anthologies so interesting.
Q: The last book you published, Human Smoke, was a highly acclaimed, exhaustive nonfiction work about the roots of the Second World War. Do you prefer writing fiction to nonfiction?
NB: It’s good to go back and forth—one kind of writing feeds your head and one empties it.
Q: Your books have been praised for “the defamiliarizing charge [they] bring to a familiar subject.” Is that one of your primary objectives as a writer—to see old things in a new way?
NB: I have the basic writerly urge to tell the truth. I want it to be really big truth but I’m a realist. Some of the biggest truths have already been said—for instance, “Life is short”—and so you have to take circuitous routes. You have enter the heart via the leg artery, the way surgeons do.
Q: Your new novel, THE ANTHOLOGIST, offers a veritable crash course in poetry. Have you always read a lot of poetry or did you just engage in some intensive research before writing the novel?
NB: Like a lot of people I’ve gone through several bursts of poetry reading in my life, and also long periods where I didn’t read any at all. I always think better when I read poetry, and I wonder now if maybe I learned to write fiction by reading poems. No, that’s an exaggeration. But I used to carry around The New Yorker Book of Poetry, which is a huge yellow anthology with the poems arranged alphabetically by title, edited by a poet named Howard Moss. That is a fantastic book. I read it on my lunch hours. I’ve also always been curious about why rhyme died out for a while in the 20th century, and I’ve quested after explanations over the years.
Q: The poet-narrator of the novel prefers poems that rhyme—do you share that predilection?
NB: Paul Chowder, the narrator, is confused and conflicted about many things, as I am. I’ve always basically wanted poems to rhyme, and to have a recognizable metrical thump to them. When I look at a poem in a magazine I do a quick check to see whether it’s a rhymer or not by skimming down the ragged right edge. I grew up on A.A. Milne, Edward Lear, the Beatles, and Dr. Seuss, and they were all tremendous jinglers, and I was scandalized in fourth grade when our very nice teacher said “It doesn’t have to rhyme.” Of course it does! And yet there’s no question that a lot of the writing that really helps us to see the strange beauties of the world is unrhyming poetry. When it’s good, a rhyme is a miracle. When it’s bad it’s really bad.
Q: What does Paul mean when he says, “Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.”
NB: Many—most?—brilliant traditional versifiers are people with a depressive streak. Tennyson, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, Auden, Edward Fitzgerald. The audio card in their brain has a different set of solenoids. Rhyme helps them even more than the Times crossword does because they assign themselves a sound-lump, like “fringe,” and then have to spend a frowning hour or a day coming up with a matching sound lump, like “hinge” or “impinge,” that is part of something piercingly true. It’s difficult and when it works you don’t just have a square puzzle with letters filled in, you have a string of words that people want to sing to themselves.
Q: In the novel, one of Paul Chowder’s favorite poets is Sara Teasdale, a largely forgotten American writer of passionate, romantic verse from the beginning of the twentieth century. Is this admiration sincere, or intended as a dose of irony?
NB: No irony there, she was a true balladeer and much better than most of the self-promoting male poets of the era. Yes, she has her overly tinkly moments but she wrote about love in good ways. She was fascinated by stars. “And a heaven full of stars / Over my head, / White and topaz / And misty red.” She was a hypochondriac and killed herself in the bathtub with morphine, leaving her best poems to be published posthumously. Meanwhile Ezra Pound, the crazy bigot, banged the drum for free verse.
Q: Paul Chowder also says: “One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you’re at a beginning….And that’s what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.” Might one argue that your narrative style, with its multiple digression and affection for the minutiae of the world, attempts to achieve this quality in prose form?
NB: Yes, I was probably shooting for that same feeling. I love the “Chapter One” sensation of starting a novel—the drop capital of the first letter, the non-indented first line, the sensation of late breakfast in a sunny foreign cafe. When I’m fifty pages or eighty pages in I begin to miss the beginningness.
Q: Is THE ANTHOLOGIST intended in any way to be a spoof on the vagaries of literary celebrity?
NB: Sure, although my hero is maybe more of a self-doubter than a spoofer. Why did Archibald MacLeish win three Pulitzer Prizes? The literary universe is full of sudden bursts of glory and self-importance, and on the other hand, some people go through decades of obscurity and quiet merit, and it’s all very confusing. I’m amazed sometimes by how potent a force avant-garde snobbery and crowd-sentiment is. People want to be in the know. They want to be wearing black at the Venice Biennale.
Q: Paul Chowder is so self-effacing and self-deprecating. And readers only see a snippet of one of his poems. Are we meant to believe he is himself a good or bad poet? Does it matter?
NB: Paul is gnawed at by the self doubts that a lot writers have, including me—and I’ve noticed that when good poets write about poetry they seldom quote their own work. It seems unseemly. I thought it would be more interesting to leave the nature of his poems to be inferred. But I myself wrote a whole bunch of Paul Chowder poems—had a great time one night—and then left them out of the book. They weren’t Chowder’s best work, that’s for sure.
Q: Some novelists, like Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, and even your acknowledged influence, John Updike, also write poetry. Do you write poems?
NB: I’ve only had one poem published—it came out in The New Yorker more than ten years ago. It was called “From the Index to First Lines.” First lines—again the desire for the new beginning.
Q: It’s been said that the only audience for poetry today is among those who themselves write poetry. Do you agree with this assessment? Is poetry a dying art form?
NB: No, the strange thing is that poems are huge, because every pop song is a poem—we just don’t call it that. “Men’s shirts short skirts, oh oh oh.” (Some of it’s bad and some of it’s good, just as is true of “real” poetry.) Everyone who listens to the radio has a large anthology of couplets in his or her head. Ad jingles are poems. A lot of what we think of as the best English poetry—for instance Elizabethan verse—began as song lyrics. They strummed the lute and sang “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” It was sung before it was printed. Who knows who we will think are the great metrical geniuses of 2009 a hundred years from now? Could be names we don’t even think of now. That’s what makes the history of anthologies so interesting.
Q: The last book you published, Human Smoke, was a highly acclaimed, exhaustive nonfiction work about the roots of the Second World War. Do you prefer writing fiction to nonfiction?
NB: It’s good to go back and forth—one kind of writing feeds your head and one empties it.
Q: Your books have been praised for “the defamiliarizing charge [they] bring to a familiar subject.” Is that one of your primary objectives as a writer—to see old things in a new way?
NB: I have the basic writerly urge to tell the truth. I want it to be really big truth but I’m a realist. Some of the biggest truths have already been said—for instance, “Life is short”—and so you have to take circuitous routes. You have enter the heart via the leg artery, the way surgeons do.
