MARCH 16, 1992 BY MARTIN AMIS
MASTER OF THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE
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, Mr. Baker attends a literary party in Boston, hoping Mr. 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 Mr. Updike. “I was of course very hurt that…Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien as his golfing partner,” writes Mr. Baker, although he doesn’t know Mr. 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, Mr. Baker’s book chat will soon have Mr. 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 recognize the truth of these childish desires. It took Nicholson Baker to own up to them, and to realize 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 capitalized success—is on offer. I arrived in New York for our meeting, and there it all was: the Hiltonic hotel room, 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.
Stark Naked
Mr. 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 Mr. 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 nonsmoking floor; Mr. Baker doesn’t drink, either), then in this very hotel, and I was a stupefied veteran of the writer’s tour that Mr. Baker now contemplated with such disquiet. He was, on the other hand, inadmissibly young (36), 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 Mr. 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. Mr. Baker was duly devastated and the interview began.
Pointlessly Tall
Those who know and therefore love his books might expect Mr. 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 Mr. Baker’s physical appearance; a balding, four-eyed, pinheaded 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 his inner ironies, as they ceaselessly search for intricate delight. Mr. Baker, it turned out, was both droll and personable. I might even have glimpsed a quiet charisma behind his barbered beard, his messianic spectacles. Or was that just Manhattan and the dawn glow of celebrity?
“There are a lot of numbers now,” said Mr. Baker when I asked him about his current ascendancy. “The fact that success is quantified is very exciting.” After just three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, Vox has already moved 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 forever? “Actually, I thought The Mezzanine was going to be a best seller,” said Mr. 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 best sellers, and golfed with John Updike, and lost sleep (as Mr. Baker has) over acceptance speeches for prizes they haven’t even been entered for, let alone won.
“I felt as famous as I ever wanted to be with U and I. And I thought when you wrote a best seller you were…rich. It isn’t the case. But there are prices for ideas, for certain bits of information. Like a piece of software. You can design a good Argyle sock or a bad Argyle sock.” So perhaps Vox can be seen 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 Mr. Baker admits to being less interested in fashion and accident than in the firmness of the merit-value equation. “You can get very fired up about these things. It’s what drew me to the stock market.”
* * *
The writer may scheme and dream, but the words on the page are always free of calculation. He lingered 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”).
* * *
Ordeal Readiness
“Don’t let Nick fool you,” Mr. Baker’s editor had said. “He wants to be rich and famous.” Perhaps Mr. Baker should be grateful that this remark came from his editor rather than someone really central, like his publicist. In any event, I sat in the audience at the Manhattan Theater Club where Mr. 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, Mr. Baker explained, he told his publishers he would not do “any public performances of any kind.” There was evidently some discussion at Random House, though, because when the proofs arrived, Mr. Baker saw on the back the following italicized promise: National Author Reading Tour. His stance at the lectern was impressively rigid and spavined, but the performance felt assured and effective. In conclusion Mr. Baker offered to field comments on Vox, and a tentative Q-and-A session began. Performing writers can usually count on at least one strong-minded holdout in any silent audience, and finally an elderly lady (a stranger to this author’s habitual indirection) came up with: “How can you ask for questions when you haven’t read from it? What are we supposed to do? Guess?” Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Updike, who “had one unfortunate fictional representative vacuuming out the bed every morning”). Mr. Baker was, in addition, percolating anxiety about a 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?”
This is from U and I: “When excessively the shy force themselves to be forward, t
hey are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and over-direct and even rude; they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradation 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, Mr. Baker stares with the clean eyes of a child, and speak with a child’s undesigning but often terrible honesty.
JUNE 1, 1992 BY ELISE O’ SHAUGHNESSY
Johnny? Jay? Heeere’s…Charlie!
RIGHT NOW, CHARLIE ROSE IS LIKE KIPLING’S OLD MAN KANGAROO: “Very truly sought after.” His eponymous public television talk show is being hailed as the way to spend the hour between 11 P.M. and midnight; Mrs. Astor has asked him to dine with the Reagans; the glossy magazines have called about profiling him. Mr. Rose says he doesn’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. He makes lots of references to himself as a country boy—a sort of “Charlie in Wonderland,” Wonderland being the wonderful world of New York’s glitterati—and claims that “I’m sort of bewildered by New York.”
Despite the hoots of laughter that should, and do, greet that last statement, there is indeed a country boy named Charlie Rose, albeit one on fast forward. The man TV Guide has dubbed “the stealth bumpkin” is tall, a bit disheveled and rather charmingly manic as he dashes about from the library (where he’s boning up on his prospective guests), to “this thing for Mike Nichols,” to the Channel 13 studios on West 58th Street. He grew up in Henderson, N.C., retains a Southern accent, and owns quite a bit of land in the next county over, including a farm of which he is clearly very fond of and to which he repairs on the weekend whenever possible. “I have my purest thoughts there,” he says at one point during an interview, picking up the theme later with a hymn to the sounds of a birdsong. And yet, when he’s taken to lunch at Arcadia, one of the Upper East Side’s more exquisite restaurants, he has been there before—and knows the chef, Anne Rosenzweig, who appears at the end of the meal to chat. She’s been on his show.
JUNE 29, 1992 BY TERRY GOLWAY
In Albany 10 Years, Cuomo Has Failed to Leave His Mark
WHEN THE CITIZEN’S BUDGET COMMISSION PROPOSED SEVERAL months ago the New York’s ailing state government adopt a series of budget reforms, including such fiscal mom-and-apple-pie stuff as elimination of risky short-term borrowing and adoption of a truly balanced budget, the reaction in Mario Cuomo’s Executive Chamber was telling.
“Impossible!” the State Budget Office replied in not so many words. “Can’t be done! Nobody else does it!” An almost reflexive reaction against change, for better or for worse, has been a hallmark of the Cuomo administration, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next January. Ten years is hardly an insignificant amount of time for a political chief executive, yet New York political insiders (except for those employed by the Cuomo administration) often remark that so little has changed in Albany since that January day in 1983 when Hugh Carey retired from office, his interest in his job having lapsed some time short of its official termination. Making note of the gap between the governor’s words and their implementation has become journalistic boilerplate—two years ago, New York Newsday’s endorsement of Mr. Cuomo contained the following subtitle: “Gov. Cuomo talks like a man with a vision. Now he must turn it into a reality.” This after the Governor had been in office for eight years.
OCTOBER 5, 1992 BY JIM WINDOLF
Off the Record
AS PREDICTED, THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD HASN’T BEEN entirely smooth at The New Yorker. Someone at the magazine, clearly a loyalist to long-deposed editor William Shawn, pinned two notes to the bulletin board just outside the temporary office of the new editor Tina Brown during her first week. One was the February 1987 farewell to the staff written by Mr. Shawn: “We have done our work with honesty and love,” Mr. Shawn wrote. “The New Yorker, as a reader once said, has been the gentlest of magazines.” The second message pinned to the board was a 1985 Notes and Comment written by Mr. Shawn after the magazine had been acquired by S.I. Newhouse for Advance Publications. In the note, Mr. Shawn affirmed his vision of the magazine, emphasizing the independence of the editorial side from the business side: “The idea of The New Yorker…cannot be bought or sold.” The two notes were removed soon after Ms. Brown and her crew showed up for work.
Ms. Brown has caused murmurs among staff members with her habit of wearing sunglasses in the West 43rd building, especially when she keeps them on during art meetings. And an anecdote making the rounds of New Yorker writers has not helped the new editor’s cause any: Ms. Brown, it seems, asked George W.S. Trow to write a profile of the diminutive Hollywood agent Irving (Swifty) Lazar. Mr. Trow said he wasn’t interested. Ms. Brown next asked fashion writer Kennedy Fraser to write it, making the special request that she write the profile “in the George Trow style.” Ms. Fraser politely declined.
Bootlegged galleys of parts of Ms. Brown’s first issue were circulating in the publishing world several days before the official publication date. The galleys contained editors’ comments set off in brackets. At the end of a particularly roiling sentence in James Wolcott’s piece about the marketing of the novel Suicide Blonde was the following: “[QA: Huh?]”. The last chunk of sentence, which included the phrase “wicky-wacky ball of wax,” did not make it into the debut issue.
Finally, some staff members felt insulted the morning of Sept. 29 upon finding that The New York Times’ review of Ms. Brown’s first issue appeared under the byline of Walter Goodman, the television critic.
AUGUST 17, 1992 BY CHARLES BAGLI
NEW YORKER, NATION EDITORS BATTLE FOR A DREAM (RENT: $375) APARTMENT
IN THE MEATPACKING DIStrict, where lifeblood flows each day into the gutter, two members of the literati are battling over Manhattan’s seemingly most precious commodity: real estate. Rick Hertzberg, the incoming executive editor of The New Yorker, is wrestling with Andrew Kopkind, an associate editor of The Nation magazine, over a rent-controlled apartment at 67 Gansevoort Street, in the drab West Side neighborhood below 14th Street.
There is already some literary history behind Gansevoort Street, where workmen still trundle sides of beef, corned briskets and bologna across the cobblestones at the edge of the Hudson River. In the late 1800’s, Herman Melville labored as an outdoor customs officer on the once-bustling dock, inspecting incoming goods to be hauled away to the area’s meat markets and warehouses. At night, he trudged home to work on his last novel, Billy Budd.
Both Mr. Hertzberg and his wife, Michelle Slung, from whom he is separated, are planning to move back to New York from Washington, D.C., where Mr. Hertzberg was editor of The New Republic. And they want the apartment they sublet to Mr. Kopkind in 1979, which still contains the couple’s 4,000 books, Mr. Hertzberg’s collection of Mad magazines and Ms. Slung’s 1970’s wardrobe.
In what is perhaps a variation on the anarchist slogan, Property is Theft, Mr. Kopkind and his roommate, John Scagliotti, refuse to budge. Mr. Kopkind accuses Mr. Hertzberg of profiting from his tenancy by over-charging for a rent-controlled apartment. He has not paid any rent since sometime in 1988, but he believes he has some unassailable right to what has been his home for the past 13 years. Mr. Hertzberg, who continues to pay rent on the apartment, said he feels betrayed by a journalist he once admired. “I think it was an outrageous abuse of trust,” Mr. Hertzberg said of Mr. Kopkind. “They’ve deluded themselves into thinking this is a fight for truth and justice against mammon and evil.”
SEPTEMBER 28, 1992 BY CLARE MCHUGH
Let’s Go to the Video Journalist! Stellar Month for New York 1 Debut!
IF THERE’S A GOD
WHO RULES THE FATE OF TV NEWS EXECUTIVES, he, or she, chose to smile upon Paul Sagan for two weeks during the middle of September. Mr. Sagan, 33, is the vice president for news and programming at New York 1, the 24-hour, all-news, local cable television station that made its debut Sept. 8 on Channel 1. During the station’s first fortnight, Mr. Sagan was blessed with several meaty stories to cover, stories well-suited to the continuous news format and sexy enough to attract the attention of a wide spectrum of New Yorkers.
Just as covering Operation Desert Storm played to CNN’s strengths, the continuing tension between police and residents of Washington Heights, a suspenseful election night, the nasty police demonstration on City Hall’s steps and the subsequent daylong City Council hearings on the all-civilian review board provided rich fodder for New York 1 and its team of 20 “video journalists” who are deployed across the city, carrying their own cameras on their backs.
“When I first saw how easy it was to go live for a decision on the Washington Heights case, I was blown away,” said Mr. Sagan. “Even though we’d been practicing for months, I didn’t realize how it would feel—what ability we’d have to respond to the big stories immediately.”
OCTOBER 19, 1992 BY PETER KAPLAN
TV DIARY: BUSH’S VALEDICTORY, CLINTON’S SELF-HELP
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
I. PREGAME WARM-UP
What a morning! On Meet the Press, the mad caricaturist’s match-up between the strangely feline James Carville, an R. Crumb creation out of Fritz the Cat, and, from the Bush camp, a gum-drop-eyed man named Charles Black who evoked Dondi as a 45-year-old. Between them was beaming Tim Russert, watching as Mr. Carville pistol-whipped Mr. Black, who just kept blinking. Next door on Face the Nation, we had a made-for-TV movie in which Bush spokeswoman and Carville girlfriend Mary Matalin mud-wrestled Clinton spin-mistress Mandy Grunwald, who kept smiling and calling the Bush campaign “sad.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 9
