As John Livingston Lowes proved better than anyone in The Road to Xanadu, there is exquisite intellectual pleasure—combining the satisfactions of scholarship, mystery, and the chase—to be found in tracking down exactly what an author was reading at the time they composed their works. And if anyone is likely to provide enough textual clues to complete the task, it is Nicholson Baker. Here's why:
Baker's novel Room Temperature—from which the above photo is taken—is, like its equally delightful and lovable predecessor The Mezzanine, a uniquely minute description of the mental processes that occur in a single human consciousness in a brief span of time. (Baker's narrator at one point describes the rationale behind this method as follows: "with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, there was enough content in that single sequence of thoughts and events [...] to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest [...] could be at least glancingly covered.")
By this approach of relentlessly cataloguing the minutiae of the human mental process, these richly-creative novels succeed in raising to intellectual awareness the parts of life that are usually omitted and taken for granted in literary narration. Thus, many novels will portray a character as erudite and well-read, without telling you how they got to be that way; or at most, they will say briefly that the character "was reading" at a particular moment, but seldom give you any insight into what they were reading, or in what bodily position, and so on (an oversight I've complained about before, in a previous post on the cursory treatment of reading in literature—a topic in which one might think authors of all people would take a professional interest).
Baker, thankfully, would never allow such airy lacunae to pass. His twinned first novels dwell precisely on the sorts of details most authors tend to pass by—and in so doing they give us the delightful thrill of constantly rediscovering things with which we are all intimately familiar, but had seldom thought about consciously or expected to find in the pages of fiction: such as the fine artistry required to extract the last few globs of peanut butter from a nearly-empty jar to make a final sandwich, or the strange little cones in the middle of those adjustable vents that they place above seats in airplanes, and which really do—as Baker may have been the first to point out—resemble miniaturized versions of the GE jets on the plane's wings without.
Baker surely won't just tell us that a narrator is "reading," therefore—he is certain to give us clues as to how and under what conditions he is doing so. And, here as elsewhere, he does not disappoint. His narrator is described specifically as reading Mark Pattison's life of Isaac Casaubon on the plane: and so, one looks it up, and there is indeed a nineteenth century biography of the scholar by a writer of that name. Perhaps Baker was reading this as well.
This, however, is not the end of our investigation, for it raises the next question: the Livingston Lowes in us wants to know not just what book the real-life author was reading that may have prompted a given passage, but what book led him to that book in turn, and so on as far back as we can pursue the chain.
Why, of all people, would Isaac Casaubon be on Baker's mind? I was, confessedly, unfamiliar with the full name—though the surname immediately stood out to me. I had, by an odd coincidence, just finished reading Middlemarch the day before (a classic I probably should have read long ago), and the failed scholar in that novel of course shares the same last name. Could he have been inspired by the historical Casaubon? I looked it up, and yes, it seems that Eliot had Isaac C. in mind in creating her Edward C., whose long-awaited Key to All Mythologies materializes with all the haste of the historical Casaubon's own prospective masterworks, or of Joe Gould's notorious planned volumes of the Oral History of Our Time, which E.E. Cummings aptly suggested might be subtitled "a wraith's progress."
What's more, it makes sense that, given what Baker tells us later on in the novel, Isaac C. would have come to stand in—in subsequent literary tradition—as an image of sterile and constipated scholarship—of abortive creative efforts—for, as Baker reveals—quoting Pattison—the historical Casaubon was allegedly so devoted to his studies that he developed a diseased second bladder—believed to have been formed due to the scholar's "inattention to the calls of nature, while the mind of the student was engaged in study and contemplation." Here was a writer who was literally blocked up, making a fitting emblem of the figurative inability to purge oneself of the great scholarly work one was forever planning, but never quite bringing into actual existence.
But none of this answers our question as to what Baker was reading that put Casaubon on his radar in the first place, for there are no textual references to Middlemarch or Eliot in the novel. The source must lie elsewhere. And, in perusing Casaubon's Wikipedia page, we find another hint. This page, after all, makes no mention of the full-length Pattison biography that Baker's narrator was reading on the plane. But Pattison's name does appear in the bibliography—next to a 1911 work on the scholar. This turns out to be a reference to the entry on Casaubon, Isaac in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which Pattison also wrote, and from which some original text, being in the public domain, has been incorporated into the Wikipedia entry.
And this we have good reason to believe Baker was reading, since the same specific edition of the great reference work is mentioned multiple times in the novel. At one point, for instance, Baker's narrator is describing the fevered search he makes as a preliminary to each trip to the bathroom, when he feels the need to defecate coming on. He is always hunting, he tells us, for the ideal bathroom reading matter—which is never the same as whatever else he happens to be reading, but must be a distinct kind of edifying work of reference. One of his favorites for this purpose, he tells us, is precisely "a volume of my grandfather's 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica." Though, he then adds, he seldom had the chance to read more than a sentence of the volume, before the work was done, because of the pressure building in his bowels while he was dawdling over the selection.
And so our minor scholastic mystery is solved. Shandy would be pleased. The reading of the Pattison biography was undoubtedly prompted by the reading—drawn out over innumerable trips to the bathroom—of its capsule version in the 1911 edition of the Britannica. And there is a kind of fittingness and resolution in the fact that the linkage should be made precisely in this manner: through having found, that is to say, that the famously-constipated author (literally and metaphorically),* would—generations later—return to the printed page as an aid to purging the bowels. Perhaps this makes a kind of literary redemption for him, and even for Eliot's sad-sack defeated scholar of the same cognomen and authorial infertility.
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*I spotted this typo upon review, but I have decided to leave it in, in deference to another passage in the novel which discusses the virtues of preserving eccentric punctuational practices in the English language.
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