(Nicholson Baker wrote a great book titled "Human Smoke: The Beginnings
of World War II, the End of Civilization". I imagine that this one will
be worth reading as well.)
NY Review of Books, March 11, 2021
The Bloodhound
Peter C. Baker
A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work:
anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how
they lie about it, anger at how we forget.
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of
Information Act
by Nicholson Baker
Penguin Press, 450 pp., $30.00
Nicholson Baker’s latest book, Baseless, is stuffed with examples of
just how inventive we humans can get when devising ways to harm one
another. Most of these are biological and chemical weapons cooked up by
the American military-industrial complex in the middle of the twentieth
century. They include diseases cultivated in laboratory conditions and
tools for spreading those diseases, like bombs filled with spore-coated
feathers or nozzles designed to be attached to airplanes, the better to
shower sickness on enemy cities. In one depressing chapter, researchers
at a Montana lab funded by the military exposed ticks and other insects
to highly infectious diseases, hoping to turn them into miniature
airborne weapons of war. Baker doesn’t always know which of these
weapons were deployed and which never left the laboratory. But he
despairs that these weapons ever existed in any form. He despairs that
they were government-funded. And he despairs that government secrecy
makes it hard to know their stories in greater detail. In some passages,
despair just about wafts off the page.
Baker starts with a specific historical question: “Did the United States
covertly employ some of its available biological weaponry—bombs packed
with fleas and mosquitoes and disease-dusted feathers, for instance—in
locations in China and Korea?” In the 1950s Chinese, North Korean, and
Russian authorities leveled this charge multiple times, most prominently
in a 1951 complaint from North Korea’s foreign minister to the United
Nations. Then and ever since, the US government has denied the charge,
dismissing it as Communist propaganda.
But Baker has his doubts. He admits early on that he can’t prove what
happened, so he’s not really arguing for any specific account of the
past. Instead, he’s insisting that doubt is well-founded—that he has
ample reason to question the official government line. After all, it is
easily established that we worked to develop dozens of weapons of
exactly the type the North Korean foreign minister accused us of using:
Is it really so implausible that, at least once, they were deployed?
This question becomes, along the way, part of Baker’s argument for more
government transparency and a more muscular Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA). We need better access to our own history, he suggests, to fully
know who we are. Otherwise all we have besides our known sins of
commission is a vague cloud of further poisonous possibilities. (In a
recent controversial cover story for New York magazine, Baker takes a
similar approach to the Covid pandemic, detailing his suspicion that the
outbreak began with a laboratory accident; he doesn’t seek to establish
that this is what happened, but rather that his suspicions are justified
and that further investigation of the question is vital.)
Baseless also features—jarringly, at first—lots of warm writing about
quotidian delights. Dinner and a movie at home with your spouse. Visits
with children. The recurring green of spring grass. Most memorably,
there are several passages about the small, intense pleasures of living
with dogs. Two specific dogs: Cedric and Briney, adopted by Baker and
his wife after she spotted them on a local Humane Society website. Here
is one example:
I was sitting on the bed in the dark, typing, when Cedric came over and
set his long nose down on my keyboard. He made wheezing, moaning sounds,
very human sounds, as if he wanted to tell me something
autobiographical. I held my hand for a long time on his small, warm
head. Every dog has a novel in him. Then he curled up nearby on the
covers and went to sleep.
Okay, another:
When I woke up whenever it was—hours ago now, I guess—I reached out with
my hand and found that Cedric had scooted up so that he was elongatedly
sleeping between M. and me. My hand found his paw. I held his paw for a
while and felt the braille of joy of his paw pads.
At first glance, the repetition of “paw” might seem clumsy, but to me it
wonderfully evokes what it’s like to put your human hand on a canine paw
pad, each pad distinct from yet also essentially the same as its
neighbors. And also: elongatedly! The word stretches out just like the
pup it’s describing.
But what are chemical weapons and canine cuteness doing together in the
same book? The more we hear about Baker’s journeys in government
archives and about Cedric and Briney, the clearer it becomes that Baker
isn’t just writing about cold war history and transparency. He’s also
implicitly posing a set of intertwined questions about life and art: How
are we to conceptualize the coexistence of the secrecy-shrouded horrors
of modern war with all of our world’s little delights? Can writing help
us feel our way toward some answers?
If you are familiar with Baker’s work, the idea of his mulling
weaponized chemical atrocity might be surprising. In his first decade as
a published writer, he established himself with short, elegant novels
that were much less concerned with plot, or at least any conventional
definition of plot, than with the rhythm and texture of everyday
American life. These novels’ first-person narrators aren’t the type to
obsess over government secrecy. They’re happily absorbed by the
real-time whorls and eddies of their own largely unexceptional—which is
not the same thing as boring—experiences.
Baker’s debut, The Mezzanine (1988), unfolds entirely during its
narrator’s lunch hour, during which he does little but buy a new pair of
shoelaces and a carton of milk. He keeps his eyes open, wonders at the
mysteries of life, and takes a childlike pleasure in the existence of
escalators and toilet seats, the sheer abundance of experience that is
available to an observant passerby, all the obscured history embedded in
every second of perception. His second novel, Room Temperature (1990),
followed a similar conceit, unfolding entirely during a new father’s
attempt to feed his infant daughter a bottle of milk. Along the way the
father ponders the philosophy of picking your nose, the role of secrets
in marriage, and Robert Boyle’s General History of the Air. There is no
real conflict; instead, Baker’s prose attempts to evoke the fluid
musicality of interior time.
This mode—lyrical appreciation not just of the world but of how it feels
to be an individual capable of perceiving it—is probably what Baker is
still best known for. Some subset of readers might associate him more
with his three sex novels (for lack of a better term), which together
celebrate the limitless potential of sexual fantasy, whether private or
shared. Vox (1992), the best of the lot, takes the form of a transcript
of a phone-sex call between strangers with Baker-esque skills for using
language both to capture pleasure and to create pleasure for someone
else (your sexual collaborator, your reader). In 2011 The New York Times
called Baker “the mad scientist of smut,” but I doubt many readers
actually see him that way. In truth he’s a mad scientist of the
everyday, which at times includes some sexy bits.
Because we like to associate our authors with just one quality (their
brands, dare I say), it is easy to overlook that Baker has for some time
had a distinct thread of moral and political anger running through his
work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at
how they lie about it and cover their tracks, anger at how we forget.
This anger is closely connected to his lifelong passion for accessible,
high-quality archives.
Baker’s Double Fold (2001) is an incensed polemic that accuses American
librarians and archivists of complicity in a collective crime against
history: the reckless destruction of valuable original copies of
newspapers and books in favor of inferior, sometimes unusable microfilm
and digital facsimiles. Human Smoke (2008) is a collage of historical
snippets—many of them culled, it seems likely, from the same newspaper
archives valorized in Double Fold—arranged to suggest that the American
and British pacifists who opposed their countries’ involvement in World
War II were correct to do so, and that our cultural sense of the war as
a thoroughly just one functions to obscure the racism and imperial greed
of the Allies. This review is not the place to consider the merits of
that argument, which drew harsh criticism at the time; I mention it to
remind us that Baker is interested not just in celebrating human
potential but also bemoaning its misuse.
By the time Baker published Human Smoke, he had already explored
political rage in his fiction. Checkpoint (2004), like Vox, consists
entirely of a fictional telephone conversation, this one between two old
friends. Ben and Jay both loathe President George W. Bush, viewing just
about every practical aspect of the so-called war on terror—occupations,
torture, drones—as a moral stain. The friends disagree, however, about
what to do with their rage. Ben, an academic who researches cold war
secrets, wants to attend protests and wave signs and vote Bush out of
office. Jay wants to put a bullet between the president’s eyes. He
already has the gun, he says, and he has no patience for his old
friend’s moderation. “No, Ben,” he says, “this guy is beyond the beyond.
What he’s done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the
prisons. It’s too much. It makes me so angry. And it’s a new kind of
anger, too.”
I remember reading Baker’s first post-Checkpoint novel, The Anthologist
(2009), shortly after its publication, during the first autumn of the
Obama administration, and wondering if the transition of power had freed
him to return to his original, and perhaps preferred, mode: life-awed
celebrant-in-chief. The book’s narrator, a poet named Paul Chowder, is
in a rut: low on cash, way behind schedule on the introduction he’s
supposed to be writing to a poetry anthology he edited, and living alone
since the departure of his frustrated girlfriend, Roz. We listen in as
Chowder muses on the nature and potential of poetry—and all the other
poignant shards of beauty and grace an average day offers, even when we
procrastinate and make a mess of things. The pleasurable rituals of
laundry. The fun of washing our dogs. The reflection of sunlight off a
mountain in the distance. The closest thing to politics (conventionally
defined) that pops up is a single glancing mention of fraud and waste at
the Pentagon. But it doesn’t send Chowder reaching for a protest sign,
let alone a gun.
Four years later, though, when Chowder returns in Traveling Sprinkler
(2013), something has changed. His style of narration is basically the
same. He’s still trying to get Roz back, and still working on poems. But
he’s also stewing, like Jay in Checkpoint, about the war on terror—about
torture and drones and classified kill lists. Like Jay, the Chowder of
2013 especially loathes the CIA, viewing the agency as a prolonged,
tragic lie: a dank cesspool of bad actors fundamentally uninterested in
the ideals of democracy they claim to defend. He wants to pour his
anti-CIA, anti-torture, anti-drone sentiments into a poem, or maybe even
a song. (Before the book came out, Baker posted videos of himself
performing several original protest songs on YouTube.)
But Chowder is often dissatisfied with his musical compositions, and
sometimes wonders if putting on a “misery hat” to write songs and poems
about the evils of history is pointless. “I don’t want to spread the
knowledge of evil,” he says. “I just want to know about love.” But he
can’t take the misery hat off, at least not all the way, or all of the
time. Toward the end of the book, he finishes—with help from some music
production software—a protest song that he is more or less satisfied
with. It’s about a young Afghan woman named Roya he learned about
online. In 2002 her house was hit by a drone strike; she and her father
survived, but her mother and two brothers died. Chowder thinks:
I can’t keep from wearing the misery hat sometimes…. Roya lived through
something inconceivable. She survived, but barely. And my job was to
think about her, right then, because we were responsible. We did this to
Roya—with our missiles, our taxes, our Air Force, our targeters, our
elected government. We exported a war into her young life. I thought,
What can I possibly do to help Roya and her father? And the answer was:
Nothing. There was nothing I could do…. I went outside and sat in my car
for twenty minutes, and then I drove home and began making a song out of
piano and Turkish oud and the Alchemy plug-in and percussion. The only
thing I could do that had any possible meaning was to write a short,
inadequate piece of music about the missile attack that destroyed Roya’s
life.
And that’s what I did. I wrote a two-minute song with one word in it:
Roya. I put fear in it and panic, and I sang Roya’s name several times
at the end. I tried to put the imagined insanity to a beat. The song
will not help her. It’s not a comforting song. It’s not a good song. But
it is a way of remembering. It’s a way of paying attention to a single
event by surrounding it with many notes. The notes point like arrows to
the wrong.
And then I took off the misery hat and gently put it away in a box.
It would be easy to dismiss this passage as yet another embarrassing
example of a white American author borrowing pain from abroad to give
his lyrical musings a splash of geopolitical relevance. But I feel the
presence of something more honest: an artist pushing up against the
outer limits of his own habits and reflexes—then reporting back on what
happens, because that’s what artists do.
In the introduction to Baseless, Baker recalls that he started trying to
write about cold war chemical weapons in 2012, but was stymied in ways
that will be familiar to any researcher who has tried to piece together
a story involving information hidden in our national patchwork of
underfunded, slow-moving, and byzantine record-keeping bureaucracies.
Time and again, Baker failed to get access to important documents that
he knew existed—or, when he got them, they were redacted to the point of
unintelligibility, the pages covered with the visual equivalent of, in
his words, “loud, crackly static.” At the same time, Baker was always
learning more:
Because I carried around with me one unanswered question, all these
repositories came alive. Newspaper collections spoke to me in a new
way…. One question broke open and led to another and another, and
formerly dull-seeming tidbits of history glowed like fresh cherry
tomatoes in the picnic salad of the twentieth century.
For years, Baker kept the book on hold, trying to gather all the
strands, hoping certain documents would come his way, turning to other
projects in the meantime. Rereading Traveling Sprinkler with this in
mind is fascinating: we see the research from one project seeping into
another, forcing Baker/Chowder to wear the misery hat. For seven years
Baker waited on the CIA, the air force, and the army for documents he
knew might never arrive. He worried that he would die without learning
what he needed to write the book he wanted to write. (Reviewing Baseless
for The Nation, the New York Times national security reporter Charlie
Savage wondered why Baker never initiated a lawsuit against any of the
agencies stonewalling his FOIA requests, the way the deep-coffered Times
often does; Savage also admitted that such lawsuits are “exceedingly
difficult” to win.)
In March 2019 Baker decided to start writing anyway, not the
chronological history he had originally planned but instead a more
Baker-esque project: a series of daily diary entries. “I abandoned
chronological succession,” he writes, “and just wrote, every day, about
what I knew, and didn’t know, and what I needed to know.” He also
resolved to let some of his own experience seep in: “Dreams, the
weather, dogs, food.” The hope, clearly, was that setting up an
arbitrary unit of time—like the lunch hour of The Mezzanine or the
bottle-feed of Room Temperature—as a boundary would keep the material
from spiraling digressively out of control, while also giving it the
feel of life. In the end, he wrote a total of ninety entries, and edited
them only lightly before publication.
It’s a defiantly odd book about history and about waiting, about
learning and about knowing that you’ve failed to learn. In one entry,
Baker describes some real or proposed midcentury US chemical weapons
program. In the next, he fulminates against the Kafka-esque failures
(failures by design, some might say) of the Freedom of Information Act.
Or he sketches miniature portraits of people he admires because of their
devotion to protesting bioweapons or wresting classified information
from government clutches. He suggests possible solutions, some more
sober than others: a smooth path to declassification for all documents
over thirty years old, automatic declassification for those over fifty,
more money for government archives, banning the CIA outright. He muses
about mortality. He bemoans all the malice and hypocrisy coursing
through American history. He tells us about the movies he’s watching,
what’s for dinner, the dogs.
It is not always the most entertaining or absorbing read. By Baker’s own
admission, he is simply unable to tell one unified story, and he doesn’t
impose fiction’s sense of harmony over his material. (At one point, he
reflects that he is “pushing myself past what I can do”; rereading his
entries toward the end he finds himself “wondering what I was thinking”
and feels “a great misery and a physical shivering coldness.”) As a
result, there is much of interest along the way, but no strong current
to carry it all along. On my first read, I experienced this as a
fundamental flaw. The second time through, though, I approached things
differently. Each day I read just one or two entries, often over a cup
of tea, sometimes with my own dog, Enzo, nestled on or near me, paw pads
in reach. This is the method I recommend. Read all at once, the book’s
facts threaten to dissolve into a depressing gray porridge. Absorbed
just one or two entries at a time, they stand a higher chance of keeping
their shape.
When they do, the effect achieved is an important one. This is where
Cedric and Briney really shine. Most stories about unsavory state
secrets fall into one of two categories. Category 1: carefully
researched and written works of history and journalism. Category 2: spy
thrillers featuring characters who—unlike well over 99 percent of
Americans—live and operate in the “intelligence community,” giving them
some literal proximity to either the wrongdoing or the coverup. These
are both perfectly sensible, valuable strategies for talking about
government secrets and crimes.
But I worry that, by virtue of repetition, they have the unintentional
effect of making the “secret world” feel like a distant planet:
undeniably important, perhaps, but unreachable by the likes of you and
me. The more unreal government secrets feel, the less able we are to
reckon with them. Every time Baker swerves from government-funded,
classification-shrouded dreams of mass infection to his dogs, he creates
a visceral reminder of what should be obvious: that all these phenomena
exist in the same world. Our world. This modest-sounding payoff is
actually quite startling in practice; again and again, reading Baseless,
it hit me like a little electric jolt. This is about more than pointing
toward wrongs: there’s a suggestion, too, that we often file these
wrongs—and our longstanding uncertainty about them—in the incorrect
psycho-cultural boxes, where they become impossible to truly process.
In the 1986 film The Whistle Blower, an idealistic British linguist
(played by Nigel Havers) working as a Russian-to-English translator for
his country’s intelligence service comes to loathe institutionalized
secrecy, with its reflexive and self-perpetuating preference for
mistrust, suspicion, and skullduggery. He learned Russian because he
loved Russian novels and art, but using the language for spy work has
sucked the joy out of it. Talking to his father (played by Michael
Caine), he glumly delivers the movie’s most memorable line: “Their
secret world has put out the light of the ordinary world.”
Baker is determined to rail against a similar dying of the light—to
teach us not just how to put the misery hat on, but how to set it aside
as needed, before it sucks dry our ability to see all the good left in
the world: the lunch breaks and bottle-feeding and sexual improvisation,
the dogs and flowers and family life.
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