[padg] Nicholson Baker update from today's NY TIMES

["Barbara B. Eden" <beb1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

March 4, 2008

A Debunker on the Road to World War II

By CHARLES McGRATH

SOUTH BERWICK, Me. ­ Nicholson Baker no longer collects old newspapers. For the last decade or so he has lived in an old farmhouse in this little southern Maine town, and he now accepts that Maine winters and the quirks of his local news agent do not make him a person ideally situated to assemble a complete archive of The New York Times.

In 1999, pillaging his own savings, Mr. Baker purchased some 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library, which was trying to unload them. Included were extensive runs of The Chicago Tribune, The New York Herald Tribune and Joseph Pulitzer?s World. He stored this ?majestic, pulp-begotten ancestral stockpile,? as he called it, in a warehouse in nearby Rollinsford, N.H., until 2004, when it moved to Duke University.

?I went a little over the edge,? Mr. Baker said recently about some of his newspaper-gathering efforts, and he added that being able to send his bound volumes to Duke was ?a blessing.?

?I don?t have to lie awake at night worrying about them,? he said. ?But it was also like sending your kid off to college ­ a terrible blow.?

To research his new book, ?Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization,? which comes out next week from Simon & Schuster, Mr. Baker read old newspapers online and on microfilm, and he also borrowed hundreds of books from the library at the University of New Hampshire, about 20 minutes away in Durham, which had granted him professorial privileges. Until just recently, when he began to cart them back, they were all stacked in Mr. Baker?s barn: piles of Churchill; of Herbert Hoover?s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters, diaries.

?I felt a little guilty at first,? Mr. Baker said about borrowing so many books. ?But once you get past 100, the rest is easier.?

?Human Smoke? is an unusual book even for Mr. Baker, now 51, whose career has unspooled in a way as unpredictable as one of his fastidiously meandering sentences. For a while he was known as a sort of Proustian miniaturist, an elegist of the quotidian, fascinated by, say, the weave and design of a paper towel, the symmetry of an ice-cube tray, or the miracle of Jiffy Pop. His first novel, ?Mezzanine,? was about a man riding an escalator on his way to buy a shoelace; his second, ?Room Temperature,? was about a father feeding a bottle to his 6-month-old daughter.

Then Mr. Baker acquired a reputation for literary erotica; a copy of his novel ?Vox,? about phone sex, was one of Monica Lewinsky?s gifts to Bill Clinton. He also wrote a novel, ?A Box of Matches,? about a man who gets up in the dark every morning, lights a fire and broods about things like toe-holes in socks and self-service gas pumps. While researching a books of essays about, among other things, the fingernail clipper and the movie projector, he discovered that many libraries were purging their shelves of old books and newspapers, and he became so concerned about rescuing them that he wrote ?Double Fold,? an impassioned exposé.

But ?Human Smoke? is like these other books only in its attempt to slow down time and look at things carefully. Mr. Baker himself and his Nabokovian style are largely absent. The book is a collage of sorts, a series of short, documentarylike moments from August 1892 to Dec. 31, 1941. Most of them are punctuated by the refrain ?It was ... ? followed by a date.

He had intended to write a book about the Library of Congress during World War II, Mr. Baker said, but then realized he ?didn?t understand the war itself ­ it made no sense.? So he began reading the newspapers of the 1930s and early ?40s, just as someone living through those events would have, and the papers in turn led him to books, and to contemporary letters and diaries especially.

?The papers gave me a sense of what it must have been like for people back then,? he said. ?The simultaneity of everything ­ the sense of being a little bit at sea.?

He added: ?Over and over again I would take out the five most important books on X subject, and then I?d go back to The New York Times, and by God, the story that was written the day after was by far the best source. Those reporters were writing with everything in the right perspective. Sometimes I think historians are a little like sauté chefs: they cook everything up and soften the edges.?

An early draft of ?Human Smoke? was a sort of quest narrative, he said ­ a book about a Nicholson Baker-like figure trying to learn the truth about World War II ­ until his wife talked him out of it.

?My own little chirpings turned out to be completely irrelevant, and once I took out the first-person pronoun, the book really started to move,? he said. ?What people actually said was far more interesting than anything I could address, so I ended up being a juxtaposer, an arranger, an editor more than a writer. The satisfaction is winding up with something a little messier and less pat than what you thought.?

?Human Smoke? deliberately has no argument, but Churchill appears as more of a warmonger than he is usually portrayed, and there is far more than in most textbooks about pacifist opposition to the war in the United States and Britain and to Britain?s pre-Blitz bombing campaign of German cities.

?I came to the Second World War with a typically inadequate American education.? Mr. Baker said, ?and I was surprised to discover that Churchill had this crazy, late-night side. He was obviously thrilled to be in the midst of this escalating war. This is a man who wanted Europe to starve ­ he wanted to starve it into a state of revolt.?

He added: ?I?ve always had pacifist leanings, and so one of the things I wanted to learn was how do you react to the Second World War if you?re a pacifist. That war is always held up as the great counterexample, the one that was justified. And I got hungrier and hungrier to answer the question: Did the Allies? response to Hitler really help anyone who needed help? One of the things I discovered, for example, was that the most impressive opponents of the war were also the people most actively arguing that we had to help the refugees. There was a complete overlap.?

Talking about starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the British blockade, Mr. Baker became so worked up that he had to pause, take off his rimless glasses and rub his eyes, and then he went on: ?What are you going to do when Europe is threatened by Hitler, this paranoid, dangerous person? My feelings about the war change every day. But I also feel that there is a way of looking at the war and the Holocaust that is truer and sadder and stranger than the received version.?

On a wintry afternoon last month, Mr. Baker, with the help of a visitor, reluctantly took back his first load of books. The volumes, including biographies of Hoover and Vera Brittain, the English writer and pacifist, and the letters of Helmuth James von Moltke, the German resistance fighter, filled the entire back seat of the visitor?s rented Nissan Sentra. During the ride to and from the University of New Hampshire, Mr. Baker sighed a couple of times and said, ?Oh, man.?

He is a tall, gangly man with long arms and was able to ferry the books 12 at a time from the parking lot to the library. The visitor fumbled and allowed Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp. At the counter Mr. Baker had to leaf through a number of the books, removing torn slips and Post-it notes he had used as bookmarks, and every now and then he paused to glance at a passage.

?The trouble with doing this is I?m seeing some stuff I wish I had used,? he said.

Barbara B. Eden
Director        
Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance
Cornell University Library                        
B15 Olin Library
Ithaca, NY 14853

email:  beb1@xxxxxxxxxxx                  
phone: 607-255-5291
fax:    607-254-7493
http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation

Barbara B. Eden
Director        
Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance
Cornell University Library                        
B15 Olin Library
Ithaca, NY 14853

email:  beb1@xxxxxxxxxxx                  
phone: 607-255-5291
fax:    607-254-7493
http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation