Nicholson Baker vs. Secrecy
This week: a conversation with Nicholson Baker about Cold War bioweapons and living a literary life while confronting such horrors. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
It’s hard to think of just one writer to compare to Nicholson Baker; as Charles McGrath has written, Baker’s “career has unspooled in a way as unpredictable as one of his fastidiously meandering sentences.” He’s written novels about mundane life with the kind of attention that helps the reader’s brain access its own previously obscured chambers; he’s written literary erotica; and he’s written non-fiction studies of history’s calamities, including most recently Baseless, his new book about Cold War bioweapons. Through it all, something continuously Bakerian charges each sentence, and on this week’s show, you’ll hear that continuity when he elaborates on bouncing between day-to-day living and historical horror:
One of the things one studies if you’re working on a book about just really objectionable things is: what kind of fatigue does that involve? Does it wear you down? Do you reach a point of actual despair? And I found that I would sort of have to talk myself into remembering that life is not about weird Cold War science. It’s not about that at all. It’s about other things. I’m studying weird Cold War science because we’re dealing with the aftershocks of it, and I think it’s worth knowing more about. But if you study something as a historian, any depressing subject, if you go too deeply into it, it becomes paralyzing.
The battle is: how do you stay on an even keel, or even: how do you stay cheerful? How do I continue to be a good husband and a reasonable person to the cashier at the supermarket and do all the things that human beings have to do, and also be kind of swimming in all these half declassified, frustratingly imperfectly declassified documents about things that shouldn’t have happened?
Baseless considers the damage done by government secrecy surrounding Cold War bioweapons, in addition to the damage done by the bioweapons themselves. Baker says:
When secrets are kept for not one or two or three decades, but for five, six, seven decades, the secret itself—because it’s not allowed to seep out into public discourse—we don’t adjust to it. We don’t learn from it. But we also tell our narratives of the past without that particular thing being part of it.
He was researching the use of bioweapons by the US in the Korean War and beyond, and along the way, he charted the history of a radicalized CIA:
This is not the CIA of professorial people writing white papers about the economic conditions in Guatemala or something. This is the new CIA under George Kennan that is going to get down with the planet and really do things, really dig in to places, really do the unsettling, impermissible things that would destabilize and change regimes around the world.
Read: Maeve Brennan
Baseless has these heartbreaking moments when Baker pauses to consider what isn’t terrifying or wrong about the U.S. or about humanity in general. The list includes: “Saul Steinberg, Tracy Chapman, Nabokov, Maeve Brennan. Aretha Franklin.” And he describes “the New Yorker of Katherine White and E.B. White” as “one of the great achievements in America. No question.”
It’s easy to see how Maeve Brennan, of that mid-century New Yorker, could make Baker’s list. She brings a similarly relentless attention to daily life that can be both reassuring and startling. Here’s an example, from the New Yorker:
after the journey into town, it was very nice to walk into the little hotel on Washington Square where I used to stay at odd times and where I am staying now while I look for an apartment and to notice that everything there is just the same — a familiar face, Smiddy, running the elevator and carrying the bags and selling the evening papers and unlocking the door and turning on the lights and bringing the radio and admiring the waif cat, Minnie, who could not be left at the kennel with my own cats because she has just had kittens. It was something of a shock to find that someone had taken a spatter gun of white-and-gold paint to the walls and ceilings and even to the furniture of the two rooms I used to have and that I was accustomed to seeing in better, if battered, colors, but the stone balustrade outside the windows, which cuts off my view of the Square but makes a good perch for pigeons, was still hanging on, and when I looked out the bathroom window, which does not face the Square but stares straight across at the flat side of an apartment building, I saw with satisfaction that the tenants there still leave their shades up at night so that it is easy to see into all the rooms, and that the one room I like in particular, a high-up room that has a desk against the wall just inside the window with a green-shaded lamp on top of it, is still the same.
Watch: The Russians Are Coming
Here’s Olivia Rutigliano on another one of the bright sides of human history Baker lists alongside Maeve Brennan—the film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming:
It’s hardly a secret, but, for a land that bills itself as a land of freedom and opportunity, America can be inhospitable to just about anyone. Few films represent this fundamental hypocrisy so squarely as the uproarious 1966 Cold War satire The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, which depicts the panic sweeping a small New England island after a Russian military submarine accidentally runs aground on its shore at the height of the Cold War.
The beached Soviet sailors — terrified that their presence will be mistaken as an attack and trigger nuclear war — stealthily hurry to town to buy a boat in order to pull their sub off the sandbar. But their fears come true: a paranoid townsperson sees them, and the ensuing gossip leads to mass hysteria, hasty vigilantism, and threats of military intervention.
Support Us On Patreon and Ponder Existence
Join hundreds of other Open Source listeners and support us over on Patreon. There, you’ll find our ever-growing audio library, including, lately, Adam Colman’s ongoing miniseries of conversations about reading in a time of social distance. This week he’s talking about Søren Kierkegaard, proto-existentialist, with Clare Carlisle, author of an excellent new biography of the Danish writer, Philosopher of the Heart.
Carlisle’s book describes a philosopher dealing with a question that’s maybe always relevant, but that has a new urgency when you’re by yourself for long periods of time: “How to be a human being in the world?” Her book explains how, for Kierkegaard, the “personal and philosophical aspects of this question became entwined and entangled.” It’s a story of living philosophy, of thinking through experience about experience.
Next Week: Why America Feels Like a Mafia State
We’ll talk to Masha Gessen, Gary Hart, and Jamelle Bouie about this American thugocracy.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library
A Coronavirus Vaccine Can’t Come at the Expense of Fighting the Virus Now. On baseball’s return and “the gap between hope and hubris.” Jill Lepore: How the Simulatics Corporation Invented the Future. On the Bureau of Land Management and “overt racism” toward Native Americans. The poet Derek Walcott in New York. Helen MacDonald: The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down (an excerpt from her new book Vesper Flights). Kerry James Marshall’s Black Birds.
