Visiting Mrs Nabokov

by Amis, Martin

  This was the third grammar school in my peripatetic school career. I had flirted far more successfully with expulsion at the other two, while always avoiding the final disgrace. On balance, I suppose the worst thing I ever did was to steal the diary of a fat, speechless classmate and fill it with a year's worth of bestial, obscene and quite imaginary antics. The only reprintable entries, I remember, were as follows: 'June 8: Got my new supply of Durex from the Chemist' and 'June 9: Stole £5 from Mum.' The father of this unhappy boy found the diary, brought it to school and confronted the headmaster with its contents. The headmaster, as he flexed his cane, told me that he would not permit 'the sewer vocabulary' to gain currency at his school. I got six of the best, and they hurt a lot; but I was allowed to stick around.

  So how did I contrive my expulsion from the Battersea rough-house? Through good behaviour, or conspicuous achievement? In a loose sense, that is what happened. Quite fortuitously and out of the blue, I was offered a part in a film, which involved four months' work, two of them in the West Indies. There was some kind of semi-illegality involved in taking children abroad for work, and 20th Century Fox thought it prudent to wait until we were out of the country before notifying the school. Accordingly, my mother and I composed a letter and duly dispatched it from Runaway Bay.

  The headmaster's reply never reached us. This was unfortunate. Four months later I returned to school, becomingly tanned, sporting a brand-new blazer, and readying myself for a fresh round of playground chastisements after my exotic long vac. The form master seemed surprised to see me. I was sent to the headmaster's study. He seemed surprised to see me, too. His letter to Runaway Bay had been a letter of expulsion. He summarised its drift, pointing out that in any case I had been an 'unusually unpromising' pupil. The head was an intelligent, scathing character; he enjoyed this interview, and I now suspect that he too might have been doing his bit in the class war.

  'Sacked', 'sent down', 'slung out' - these are public-school phrases. There are no euphemisms for state-school expulsion: it is a disgrace, a disaster, the beginning of the end of everything. I walked towards the school gates, stunned, bitter, intensely embarrassed about my new blazer. I had been 'expelled', and felt all the heaviness of this rejection. My playmates formed their usual gauntlet; I expected to be helped on my way with a taunt and a kick, but now the boys looked my way with respectful sympathy. Halfway across Chelsea Bridge I cheered up dramatically. I took off my cap and skimmed it into the Thames, comforting myself with the obvious thought that I had far less to fear than those who remained.

  Observer, 1981

  NICHOLSON BAKER

  Writers' lives are all anxiety and ambition. No one begrudges them the anxiety, but the ambition is something they are supposed to shut up about. The two strains are, of course, inseparable, and symbiotic. Early on in his autobiographical meditation on John Updike, U and I, Nicholson Baker considers some likely responses from the great man:

  Updike could react, feel affronted, demolish me, ignore me, litigate. A flashy literary trial had some fantasy appeal, except that I knew that I would burst into tears if cross-examined by any moderately skillful attorney. But it probably wouldn't come to that.

  No, it probably wouldn't come to that. A few pages later, Baker attends a literary party in Boston, hoping Updike will be there. His 'foolish beaming pleading' gaze eventually seizes on an acquaintance, the novelist Tim O'Brien, who quickly reveals that he 'goes golfing' with Updike. 'I was of course very hurt that . . . Updike had chosen Tim O'Brien as his golfing partner,' writes Baker, although he doesn't know Updike and can't play golf. Perhaps the golfing friendship will solidify at some later date? (Out on the fairway, as he masters the game, Baker's bookchat will soon have Updike thinking, 'Hm, I guess that Nick Baker is not to be underestimated.')

  But that's not good enough: 'I want to be Updike's friend now!' All writers will recognise the truth of these childish desires. It took Nicholson Baker to own up to them, and to realise their comedy. Writers want to disdain everything, yet they also want to have everything; and they want to have it now.

  Well, everything - in the form of a capitalised Success -is suddenly on offer. I arrived for our meeting in New York, and there it all was: the Hiltonic hotel room, the dilatory and much-encumbered photographer, the appalling schedule, the tuxed waiter bearing the club sandwich on his burnished tray, the soothing prospect of a public reading (that night) and a transcontinental plane ride (the next morning), and, finally, another interviewer coming through the door, with all his dreams and dreads and character flaws . . . The cult author of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature has now come cruising into the commercial mainstream. Baker's third novel, Vox, is the season's hot book, sexually explicit, much promoted, ambivalently received; for the moment it seems to stand there, stark naked, in the primitive fever of scrutiny and demand.

  Although I was of course very hurt that Vox was doing quite so well, it should be said — to get the B-and-Me stuff at least partly out of the way — that I entered Baker's domain with an air of some knowingness. I myself had granted many an interview, if not in this very hotel room (it was a nonsmoking room on a non-smoking floor: Baker doesn't drink, either), then in this very hotel; and I was a stupefied veteran of the writer's tour that Baker now contemplated with such disquiet. He was, on the other hand, inadmissably young (thirty-six), and never before had I interviewed a literary junior. This imagined hurdle turned out to be a liberation and a pleasure, but I somehow found it necessary to pre-devastate Baker with the news that one of Vox's supposed coinages (a synonym for masturbation) had been casually tossed out by me two novels ago. Baker was duly devastated, and the interview began.

  Those who know and therefore love his books might expect Baker to prove barely capable of sequential thought, let alone rational speech. The novels suggest a helpless egghead and meandering pedant whose mind is all tangents and parentheses. His radical concentration on the mechanics of everyday life - the escalator, the shoelace - prepares one for a crazy professor, even an idiot savant. One is also steeled, by his own self-mockery, for Baker's physical appearance: a balding, four-eyed, pin-headed drink of water. He is, to be sure, fabulously and pointlessly tall, tall beyond utility, and waveringly plinthed on his size 14 shoes. But these impressions soon fall away, just as the cold surface of his prose is warmed by the movement of its inner ironies, as they ceaselessly search for intricate delight. Baker, it turned out, was both droll and personable. I might even have glimpsed a quiet charisma behind his barbered beard, his mesmeric spectacles. Or was that just Manhattan and the dawn glow of celebrity?

  'There are a lot of numbers now,' said Baker when I asked him about his current ascendancy. 'The fact that success is quantified is very exciting.' Vox has entered the bestseller list at number eight. We already know that it will move on to number six, and then to number three. 'But that's not good enough. Only number one will do.' But then — how long will it be number one (there is, after all, the very worrisome example of Stephen Hawking) ? Perhaps two years. But why not three? Why not for ever? 'Actually I thought The Mezzanine was going to be a bestseller,' said Baker. The writer's mind is always leaping forward.' So in that sense he is fully prepared, as all writers are - even the most obscure, even the unpublishable. In their minds they have all been bestsellers, and golfed with John Updike, and lost sleep (as Baker has) over acceptance speeches for prizes they haven't been entered for, let alone won.

  'I felt as famous as I ever wanted to be with U and I. And I thought that when you wrote a bestseller you were ... rich. It isn't the case. But there are prices for ideas, for certain bits of information. Like a subtle piece of software. You can design a good Argyle sock or a bad Argyle sock.' So perhaps Vox can be viewed as a 'needed' or gap-filling product. The Mezzanine, in particular, reveals a sober respect for market forces, as one commercial process succeeds another; and Baker admits to being less interested in fashion and accident than in the firmness of the merit-value equation. 'You can get ver
y fired up about these things. It's what drew me to the stock market.'

  Baker was drawn to the stock market. But he didn't stay there very long. Nor, as we see, did he go on to write portly financio-sexual thrillers about junk-bond dealing and highroller love affairs. His background forms the kind of directionless hotch-potch which, in retrospect, seems to have been exactly what was needed: quietly classy university (Haverford), musical training (bassoon), Wall Street (research reports), writing workshop (Berkeley), then temping, then technical writing (network-management software manuals). His spell as a stockbroker came about halfway through: a fortnight of dramatic but salutary disintegration. 'It's called "smile and dial". You call up complete strangers and try to be their investment analyst. The first day I was very intrusive. The second day I was increasingly damaged and tentative. The third was marked by hysteria and weeping. After two weeks I was engulfed by psychosomatic illness. Then I decided to be a writer.'

  There now follows a digression or a 'clog' in which I shall pounce on the fact that Baker, at university and on Wall Street, flirted with philosophy.

  Philosophers are said to be condemned to one of two strange relationships with the world of objects: either indifference or near-crippling obsession. Twenty years ago I drove the late A.J. Ayer to White Hart Lane, to support Tottenham Hotspur. On the way Ayer smoked three cigarettes. For his first butt he disdained, or did not see, the obvious - and butt-infested - ashtray, favouring the naked tape-deck with the fiery remains of his Player. (The tape-recorder itself had been stolen, true, but the empty console had the word PHILIPS clearly stamped on it.) His second butt he squeezed into the base of the handbrake, his third he ground out on the speedometer. The high point came with his third spent match, which, with incredible skill, he balanced on the bare ignition key, where it wobbled for at least three seconds before dropping inexorably to the floor.

  When I recall this now I imagine the bespectacled Nicholson Baker, at fifteen, doubled up on the Mini's back seat, already as tall as Ayer and me put together, staring in anguish at these forgetful violences, and fully immersed in the car's flange housings, its quarter-window release nodules, its galvannealed dash frame flute slopings . . .

  Baker is the poet of all the things we call thingies and thingamajigs, all the things we don't know the name for: nubs and tines, spigots and sprockets, roller-cookers and tone-arms and pull-tabs and slosh-caps. The French call it choseistne — but Baker is very far from the po-faced stocktaking of, say, a J.M.G. le Clézio. The 'corporate setting' of The Mezzanine gives way, in Room Temperature (oh, the soaring dullness of that title!), to the domestic landscape and the sacraments of marriage and parenthood, in a prose full of cadences and free of false quantities, beneath which the engine-room of English Literature confidently thrums. Baker's perceptual style is both gleefully perverse and wantonly sunny: throughout his corpus there is barely an ordinary sentence or an ungenerous thought.

  So now we move on to Vox, a single-issue novel (sex), also a single-mode novel (dialogue), and further disembodied by the fact that the two protagonists never touch or meet, communicating only by party line. The object, the thing, in this case, is the telephone - that friction-

  less technology. Vox is frictionless too, and thus meets a contemporary demand: it asks nothing of you. Modern tendencies — safe sex, pornography, human dwindling — are present as accepted guests, not as intruders. Sunniness and perversity are smoothly joined in the monotonous vacuum of long-distance.

  'Don't let Nick fool you,' Baker's editor has said. 'He wants to be rich and famous.' Perhaps Baker should be grateful that this remark came from his editor rather than from someone really central, like his publicist. In any event, I sat in the audience at the Manhattan Theater Club, where Baker was to read that night, trying not to let Nick fool me. As he loped up on to the stage his neck and knees were bent in what might have been ordeal readiness, or simple height-effacement. And of course he didn't read aloud from Vox (which would have tested anybody); he read aloud a piece about reading aloud.

  After handing Vox in, Baker explained, he told his publishers that he would not do 'any public performances of any kind'. There was evidently some discussion at Random House, though, because when the proofs arrived Baker saw on the back the following italicised promise: National Author Reading Tour. His stance at the lectern was impressively rigid and spavined, but the performance felt assured and effective. In conclusion Baker offered to field comments on Vox, and a tentative Q-and-A session began. Performing writers can usually count on at least one strongminded hold-out in any audience, and finally an elderly lady (a stranger to this author's habitual indirection) came up with: 'How can you ask for questions on it when you haven't read from it? What are we supposed to do? Guess?' Baker hesitated. 'This book is in its fifth printing,' he said. 'Someone is reading it.'

  When I breakfasted with him the next morning, before he flew out to Los Angeles, Baker confessed that this unguarded remark had supplied the grist for the previous night's insomnia. He suffers from insomnia, also arthritis, also psoriasis (a link with Updike, who 'had one unfortunate fictional representative vacuuming out the bed every morning'). Baker was, in addition, percolating anxiety about his trip to England. 'They're going to be disappointed by Vox. Why should I be there while they're being disappointed? Why should I fly into disappointment?' And then there were the worries about the presentational style of the British publishers, Granta Books. The subtitle: 'A Novel about Telephone Sex'. The blurb: 'a classic of bedside reading'. The bookshop dump-bin: 'Great Art Or Just A Good Dirty Read?'

  Sometimes I think I am not cut out for literature. A true writer would have been much more pleased that a novel as successful as Vox was indeed an artistic disappointment. I found I was genuinely sorry as opposed to hypocritically sorry, that the book wasn't better (but its slightness is inbuilt. It has no room to manoeuvre. It has no prose). And I certainly didn't care how humble/ambitious/ascetic/greedy Baker 'really' was, because I know that writers are all these things at once; and have to be. The writer may scheme and dream; but the words on the page are always free of calculation. Lingering to chat, and to defend his book, ('I meant it to be human and touching'; 'I like it more than any of the others — I... love it'), Baker left for the airport sophisticated-ly and daringly late — and even managed to telephone before embarking, to moderate his mild grumblings about Granta.

  This is from U and I:

  When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count. . . The same goes for constitutionally ungross people who push themselves to chime in with something off-color - in choosing to go along they step into a world so saturated with revulsions that its esthetic structure is impossible for them to discern . . .

  One would like to apply the above, not so much to Vox (where a sortie of this kind is attempted; and nothing much actually happens), but to the standard Baker prose paragraph, where scarily delicate senses are exposed to the Brobdingnag of workaday life. So placed, Baker stares with the clean eyes of a child, and speaks with a child's undesigning but often terrible honesty.

  Independent on Sunday, 1992

  SHORT STORIES, FROM SCRATCH

  In 1985 I judged the Whitbread Prize for the best short story by a writer aged between sixteen and twenty-five. My co-judge, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, then edited a selection of the entries (twelve out of 150), The Whitbread Stories.

  The heat was stiffling. Moodly he looked out of his bedroom window. Yes, the day was far too hot to be sleepy. He had to chose. To win, to suceed would be incredulous. But to fail, to loose, would be contemptuous!

  This string of illiterate cliches is of my own making; but it fairly reflects the style of the least promising entries. Whenever the writing hit this level, I assumed that the story had been submitted in a serendipitous or lucky-dip spirit, l
ike a bingo card. Send the thing in: you might pay that gas bill with the winnings, or settle the rent. Anxiety about the future -the stories' great common theme — had here found its most basic form.

  Before one got to the good stuff, of which there was plenty, one had time to be amply scandalised by the lawlessness of the prose. The apostrophe and the hyphen proved to be especially confounding. Many stories featured a had'nt or a ca'nt in the first sentence; turning with some wariness to the last page, one saw that the writer was still contentedly tapping out his would'nts and wo'nts. There were similar difficulties with its and it's, as in cut it's losses and its raining: and many hybrids along the lines of no-body, bow ever and anymore ('noway,' he growled). Idiosyncrasies of spelling one tended to overlook (any publisher's reader will tell you that most of our leading writers are afflicted by near-dyslexia). But the aura of an otherwise well-worked paragraph can be instantly frittered away by some callow phoneticism like pitty (for pitty's sake!), hatered or dezire.

  It is hard to say whether standards of literacy have actually declined. Certainly a morbid fear of dictionaries would seem to be abroad. What has changed, perhaps, is the attitude to linguistic law. Thirty years ago the would-be writer might at least concede that correctness was something worth aiming at. Now the edifice of syntax is regarded with impatience, almost with aggression. Of course, no new freedom will ever be found by this route. One writer, however, did contrive to create something out of chaos, developing a post-punk anti-style ('a cup of t', and so on) which none the less struck me as distinctly literary. Perhaps the effectiveness of this piece owed a little to chance and will not be repeatable; but it had plenty of sullen power.