In 1991, novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker published U and I, an idiosyncratic little book premised on his envy of John Updike. Baker never actually turns back to Updike's pages in U and I. Instead, he confines himself to the shreds of Updike that lie in his memory, “cherished independent inhabitants of my private florilegia.” The result is a wickedly funny and astute study of how we shape what we read and how we're shaped by it.
I opened The Anthologist eagerly, hoping it would be along the same lines, and I was not disappointed. Where U and I is a long personal essay, The Anthologist is a meditation on poetry framed as a novel. The main character (Baker's alter ego, it seems pretty clear) is Paul Chowder, a poet seized by self-doubt, so blocked that he can't even deal with his fallback job: writing the introduction to a poetry anthology. His girlfriend, Roz, is fed up and has moved out and he wants her back: We have the premise of a plot. But it's not the story that makes The Anthologist such a page-turner. It's Baker's fabulous gift in parsing a thought entertainingly.
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker, Simon & Shuster, 256 pages, $32.99
Baker's first subject is how a poet lives. Who can write poetry eight hours a day, even when the juices are flowing? In Paul's case, it's a matter of filling the day with subterfuge: organizing the office, combing the dog for fleas. He takes on a flooring job in an effort to hold the wolf at bay (“Death is my health insurance,” he observes). He labours over his e-mail, working in typos to give the impression of spontaneity. He's disarmingly honest, touchingly eager to make himself into the sort of person Roz will come back to. But the self-absorption – what a pesky occupational hazard for the poor poet, all that scrupulous attention to every flicker of sensation and thought!
To add to the stress, the essay Paul is supposed to be writing is on that most derided of poetic elements, rhyme. Paul Chowder, a free-verse poet himself, feels passionate about rhyme. He deplores the fact that it was relinquished to amateur poets, who write such “intolerable dogwaste.” At heart, we all love rhyme, and his essay will explain why. What is it about the simple repetition of end sounds that entrances us? As an admiring reader of The Globe and Mail's own John Allemang every Saturday, I was keen to know.
Baker (a.k.a. Chowder) disputes the old theory that preliterate people used rhyme because it helped them remember the words. Rhyme is innate, he argues. It's the essence of a baby's babbling. It's the essence of song; rhyme is what carries the most banal of lyrics. The appeal is sensory and also psychological: the joy of anticipation and the little rush of pleasure at its fulfilment.
This book is an apology for an essential and sadly disparaged aspect of language
Baker acknowledges rhyme's narcotic effect: “Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.” But as for the argument that rhyme forces poets into contrivance, well, Baker goes back to Renaissance poet Samuel Daniel: If a poet has the chops for it, Daniel argued, rhyme “carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight.”
