The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker
What I think of now, though, is a time more than twenty years ago, when I saw him in the Boston Public Garden. It was a cold, overcast late afternoon, and there was a man walking toward me on the path. I knew who it was. It was the famous John Updike. We were over past the statue of George Washington, in a part of the garden that has fewer trees, that’s always colder and windier than other parts—and I had to figure out what to do. He was wearing a tweedish jacket buttoned up and a scarf and a hat and he obviously had somewhere to go, as I didn’t, really. If I stopped and I said “Mr. Updike?” he would of course politely stop and we would have a brief conversation. I would maybe say that I liked his writing and that he’d signed one of his books for me once and that I’d sent him a fan letter once that I hadn’t put a return address on because I didn’t want to compel him to answer it and that in the letter I’d told him that my girlfriend, who had since become my fiancée, had dug out of a wicker basket of New Yorkers a story of his and given it to me to read and I’d read two-thirds of it and had decided, walking under the awning of a tuxedo shop in a moment of passing shade, that I wanted very much to write him and tell him about how happy it made me to know that he was out there working. But I couldn’t stop him on his path and tell him all that. He was on his way somewhere. So I decided instead that I would just nod. I would pack in everything I knew about him in my nod, all the memories I had of reading about packed dirt and thimbles and psoriasis and stuttering and Shillington, Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Lampoon and the drawing class at Oxford, and his little office upstairs in Ipswich—and the letters that he and Katharine White had exchanged when he was writing his early stories for The New Yorker that I’d seen behind glass in a display case at Bryn Mawr College—all that knowledge of him I would cram into one smiling, knowing nod. And that’s what I did. And he nodded back, a little uncertainly, I think. He wasn’t sure: Maybe he knew me?
And then later, in a letter, he said, Didn’t we meet once on Arlington Street? He remembered my nod.
What a memory on that man.
His very best book, I think, is his memoir, called Self-Consciousness. He was best when he was truest. And the most amazing thing about his truthfulness is its level of finish. Of polish. Because we all have thoughts. They’re slumped on the couch and they are not at their very best, in fact they aren’t completely shaven and they aren’t all that clean, necessarily. They’re living in the halfway house of what you have to say. What Updike does is he sends them an invitation—it’s tasteful, understated, but beautifully engraved. He says to his thoughts: the favor of your reply is requested—please accompany John Updike to the official writing of his next piece on whatever it is—on the car radio, on the monuments of the United States, on William Dean Howells, who, he said, “served his time too well”—please attend this essay. And then at the bottom it says, very quietly: black tie. Formal wear. That’s what you want from an essay, is you want these thoughts to have done their very best to at least rent their outfits and present themselves to the world in their best guises.
Don’t come as you are, Updike said, come in black tie, put on your best punctuational studs—and they, his ideas, obliged him, repeatedly. They said, Okay, RSVP, we will be there.
We had, I guess you could say, a correspondence over the years. He wrote Dear Nick and I wrote Dear John. I love his reserve. He didn’t really want to have a cup of coffee with me, in fact I think he’d much rather have written me a letter than have a cup of coffee—and who can blame him? But there was one thing I wanted to write him in a letter for years, and never did. One time I read one of his stories aloud to my daughter. She was then about thirteen. I read her a story called “The City.” It’s about a man who is on a business trip—and he has a spot of indigestion that then turns out to be excruciatingly painful—and he goes to the hospital and it’s his appendix and the whole story is just the very simple but well-described account of his hospital stay in a city that he never ends up seeing. And as I was reading it to my daughter, I came to the moment in the story that I remembered from when I first read it. The man is lying in his hospital room in the middle of the night and he hears people moaning on either side of him and then there’s a sound of “tidy retching,” and then comes the sentence: “Carson was comforted by these evidences that at least he had penetrated into a circle of acknowledged ruin.” The word ruin there was so amazingly good and well placed—“acknowledged ruin.” And maybe it was that I gave it a special inflection as I read it aloud, but I don’t think so. My daughter said, “Oh, that’s good.” Right at that moment. She liked and she was excited by the very same phrase in the story that I’d been excited by. It seemed so reassuring to know that there is sometimes an absolute moment in a story that many people will independently discover and remember, even across generations, and that this may have been one of those moments. I wished I had told him that in a letter. And now I’ll never get to tell him that. So I tell it to you. With sorrow. Thank you.
(2009)
David Remnick
David Remnick is fifty-two. He’s got all of his hair, which is black, and he’s got an office with quiet brown carpeting and a desk made of a slab of grainy black wood and a fat-rimmed yellow ceramic cup that holds his pens and his pair of scissors. He’s smart and quick to laugh, and if you sit in one of the square soft chairs in his office, he remembers things about your life that you barely remember. He likes baseball and The Wire and A. J. Liebling and spaghetti with squid ink sauce. You might feel jealous of him except that he works too hard and nobody else would want that kind of constant hellish weekly pressure. His wife, Esther Fein, is a writer, and he’s got three kids. He’s the fifth editor of The New Yorker, which may be the best magazine ever published.
I’ve met Remnick a few times, briefly. Once was at a party where he was chatting about boxing to the novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Another time was in 2001, at the National Magazine Awards. That year his magazine won four awards, including the award for general excellence. Remnick kept striding up to the podium as we applauded him, wearing an impeccable blue suit and David Mamet-style glasses, and each time he found some new way to be abashed and thankful, as he was handed yet another copper-colored trophy designed by Alexander Calder, the mobile-maker. (It’s called an Ellie and it looks like several modernist boomerangs glued together.)
The awards are deserved, but they don’t convey how consistently good his magazine is. Remember, it’s a weekly. Every Monday it’s in the mail, or in the newsstand, or on a little flat screen, reassuring a million subscribers that things are still pretty much under control in the transatlantic world of letters. There are always at least a few funny cartoons, and one absorbing piece about something or another, and perhaps a brilliantly dismissive movie review by Anthony Lane, who sharpened his pencil at the Independent before Tina Brown, Remnick’s predecessor, lured him away. I confess I don’t read it all—few can—but let me just say it right now: The New Yorker is one of the three great contributions the United States has made to world civilization. The other two are, of course, Some Like It Hot and the iPhone. Maybe you have your own list. But it’s likely The New Yorker will be on it somewhere, because the magazine has been sharp and witty since the 1920s, angling unexpected adjectives in place with winning exactitude.
Its tone, from the outset, was, as John Updike described it in an onstage interview with Remnick, “big-town folksy.” E. B. White was one of the early sources of the style—along with James Thurber and Joseph Mitchell, and an alcoholic named John McNulty, who wrote stories about regulars at a bar on Third Avenue. Later there was Maeve Brennan, from Ireland, who wrote beautiful unfurling paragraphs about living in cheap hotels in the city, using as her byline “The Long-Winded Lady.” Brennan was evidently a little crazy toward the end, as writers tend to be, but in her “Talk of the Town” prose she is extremely sane and full of kind attentiveness.
And there were the cartoonists—Peter Arno, who liked drawing high-breasted showgirls, and Saul Steinberg, who made
I was in the New Yorker offices, on the twentieth glass-sheathed floor of the Condé Nast building in Times Square, one Friday in April. The week’s issue had just closed, and the place was quiet. People stared at their screens, catching up with all the things they had put off during the recent editorial flurry. Remnick was having his picture taken, so I said hello to Pam McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor, whose office is next to Remnick’s. What is he like to work with? I asked her.
“He’s easygoing, and he’s not,” said McCarthy. “He likes to keep his finger on every detail. He really pushes until it’s right. He’s a great floorwalker. He circles the floor several times a day and talks to people.”
Just then Remnick came in with Alexa Cassanos, the director of publicity, and the four of us talked about earphones and earplugs. “In Maine why would you need earplugs?” Remnick asked me. (I live in Maine.) “When I’m out of the city,” he continued, “I’m up till four in the morning because it’s so damned quiet. I think somebody’s going to jump in and strangle me. It’s not relaxing.”
We walked a few blocks to a seafood restaurant, Esca, on Forty-third Street, where Remnick goes once in a while. Mark Singer, one of the magazine’s best-known writers of profiles, wrote a piece on Esca’s owner, Dave Pasternack, who does his own fishing around Long Island and knows how to cut mahi-mahi into raw tidbits.
Pasternack himself came by the table soon after we’d sat down and told us that he’d opened up a new business—a seafood concession in center field of the Mets’ baseball stadium, where he sells crabcakes, fish sandwiches, lobster rolls, and chowders. Jeff Wilpon, the general manager of the Mets, lost a lot of money several years ago to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but, according to Pasternack, Wilpon was upbeat about his life. “I was at a party the other day,” Pasternack said, “and I go, ‘How’re you doing?’ Wilpon goes, ‘I was rich and miserable and now I’m poor and happy.’”
“Are you sure about the latter?” asked Remnick.
Suddenly I had a strange and not unpleasant sensation. I’d entered the printed pages of The New Yorker; I was physically inhabiting a Mark Singer profile, as edited by David Remnick.
Pasternack said, of Wilpon, “This is a guy who came to me to ask if I wanted to do a concession. I said, ‘I’ll make a couple of things for you.’ I bring a lobster roll down—beautiful lobster roll, toasted bun, nice and buttery the way it’s supposed to be. He looks at me and he says, ‘I don’t like toast.’ All I could think about is: when you’re born they give you toast, and on your deathbed they give you toast. Who in this world doesn’t like toast? When you’re sick they give you toast!”
“I get cartoons about toast every week,” said Remnick.
“Yeah?” said Pasternack.
“I got a cartoon,” said Remnick, “it was a toaster the size of the restaurant.” He turned to me. “Do you waste your time watching baseball?”
I said no, not really, I’m out of it.
Remnick said, “I’m sure that when I’m on my deathbed . . .”
“You’re going to have toast,” said Pasternack, with finality. Then he went away to fillet more fish.
I asked Remnick what his dining room was like when he was a kid. “Lots of mirrors,” he said. “We didn’t eat in the dining room.” He grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey—“Springsteen Jersey, without the shore”—and his mother got multiple sclerosis when he was six. Some years later, his father, a dentist, became ill with Parkinson’s disease. “To be a Parkinsonian dentist is like a Buster Keaton movie,” Remnick told me. “It’s funny unless you’re living it.” In high school he edited the school paper, The Smoke Signal, writing articles for it under several pseudonyms. He wasn’t a devoted New Yorker reader then. “Guitar Player magazine meant more to me in high school than The New Yorker,” he said. “There were no chord diagrams in The New Yorker.”
He studied comparative literature at Princeton and took a class with the New Yorker writer John McPhee, who taught him that you have to be willing to seem stupid when you interview people. He spent a semester in Japan, teaching English and feeling lonely. He also went to Paris, where he wore a Leon Russell T-shirt and nine-dollar Converse sneakers and made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the Metro. His Princeton classmates were all getting jobs as investment bankers; he got a job at the Washington Post, as the night crime reporter. He covered boxing for a while, and then, as he limbered up, he interviewed celebrities in their hotel rooms. He was good, something of a prodigy in fact—a natural reporter, nimble and prompt with copy.
The Washington Post sent him to Russia in 1988, with his new wife, where he covered, with astonishing fecundity, every phase of the disintegration of the Soviet empire. He wrote somewhere between three hundred and four hundred stories a year, watching and learning from Bill Keller, the fast-fingered Russian correspondent for the New York Times, later its editor-in-chief. Framed in Remnick’s office is the front page of the Washington Post for August 24, 1991, which has two Remnick stories. The top one begins: “Communist rule collapsed tonight in the Soviet Union after seven decades as President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Communist Party general secretary and ordered the government to seize all party property.”
Out of that heady period grew Remnick’s first book, Lenin’s Tomb. There’s a characteristic scene early in the book where he is trying to interview the last living member of Stalin’s cabinet—an old man named Kaganovich. Remnick finds out that Kaganovich, by a strange coincidence, lives downstairs from him, and he knocks on the door. He knocks for a long time. There’s no answer. Every day he knocks. He finds Kaganovich’s number and calls it. No answer. He lets it ring for dozens of rings. Finally he reaches Kaganovich’s wife, who says her husband isn’t going to talk. He keeps calling; he wants to see, he says, “what an evil man looked like.” He learns there’s a secret telephone code: let it ring twice, then hang up and call again. Kaganovich answers. Remnick identifies himself. Kaganovich says, “No interviews! That’s it!” He dies soon after. But Remnick had at least heard the voice of the last of Stalin’s inner circle. There are dozens of scenes of poignancy and loss and upheaval in Lenin’s Tomb; it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
By then Remnick was freelancing for Esquire and Vanity Fair, and then staff-writing for Tina Brown’s New Yorker, writing one telling profile after another—on Don DeLillo, on Mike Tyson, on Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s father, Remnick wrote, “has little white tufts of hair and weary, narrow eyes, the eyes of a Chinese scholar.” On Tyson’s fight with Evander Holyfield: “Incredibly, Tyson once more nuzzled his way into Holyfield’s sweaty neck, almost tenderly, purposefully, as if he were snuffling for truffles. He found the left ear and bit.” Remnick is modest about these writing successes, which he attributes chiefly to “sitzfleisch”—the capacity to sit in a chair until the work is done. “A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence,” he told me.
In 1998, Remnick published his second book, King of the World, about one of the heroes of his youth, Muhammad Ali. Then something momentous happened: Tina Brown suddenly left her job in order to found a new magazine, Talk. (“Tina is more of a comet than a planet,” said Remnick. “She shines brilliantly and moves from thing to thing.”) S.I. Newhouse, The New Yorker’s owner, asked David to take over. When the staff heard the news they stood and applauded for five minutes. “It was an applause of relief,” according to Remnick. “It
Actually, though, he’s the real thing: a great, omnivorous editor. He takes The New Yorker’s history seriously—he’s edited a series of anthologies of themed New Yorker pieces from earlier eras—but he is just as determined that, in the era of iPads and bloggery, he won’t be the last of the magazine’s masters of ceremonies. One of his biggest hits came in 2004: Seymour Hersh’s reporting on abuse in Abu Ghraib. He also brought Ian Frazier, a comic genius, back into the fold—Frazier had been on strike, more or less, during Tina’s tumultuous tenure—and he found and encouraged some good new writers, among them Ben McGrath, who can write deftly about anything, including football concussions and theorists of dystopian collapse.
After 9/11 Remnick had an odd (to me) burst of militancy, as so many did, writing with approval on the attack on Afghanistan, and, in a famous comment piece in “Talk of the Town,” endorsing the invasion of Iraq. “I was wrong,” he told me, about Iraq. He wants his magazine to get truths out. I asked him what he would have done if Julian Assange had offered him a basketful of WikiLeaks documents. Of course he would publish them, he said—he’d let the courts sort it out later. “I think the world is better off knowing than not knowing.”
Last year he published an enormous book about the civil rights movement and the rise of Barack Obama. He wrote it early in the morning, before leaving for work, and late at night. “Sitting next to him, if I hadn’t known he was writing a book, I wouldn’t have been able to tell,” Pam McCarthy told me. “I don’t mean to sound hagiographic, but actually he really is quite amazing. And exhausting.”