About Charles Baxter: A Profile

Charles Baxter can't sleep at night. An insomniac most of his adult life, he takes comfort in Nabokov's claim: If writers don't stay awake thinking about their work, how are they going to make their readers stay awake?

Baxter -- the author of two novels and four collections of stories, as well as a book of essays -- is, if anything, circumspect about his work, and about pretty much everything else, for that matter. He is affable in many regards, famous for his gentle, dry wit, his modesty, his intelligence, and his generosity with his students. But he likes things to go his way, he likes his routines. As predictable as a clock, his college roommate had said. And when something goes awry, when something intrudes, Baxter will fixate on it -- not an altogether bad habit for his writing, he has discovered.

Baxter won't quite admit to being an obsessive-compulsive, but he'll allow that he's "conscious of pattern-making." He writes from eight to noon in a study built over his two-car garage in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and maybe once in a while he'll take his laptop computer to the back porch, but he'll always face east into the morning light. "I think if you are somewhat compulsive or habitual in your ordinary life," he says, "it gives you some latitude to be wild in your creative work."

His childhood, however, was anything but ordinary. Baxter was born in Minneapolis in 1947, and when he was fifteen months old, his father, who sold insurance, died of heart failure. Three years later, his mother married Loring Staples, Sr., a wealthy attorney she had met at the symphony, and Baxter and his two brothers were moved to a lakeside suburb, Excelsior, and plunked down on a forty-acre estate, improbably yet fittingly called World's End. They had a cook, caretaker, nannies, horses, and sheep, but no neighbors. Baxter was the youngest, and as soon as his brothers were old enough to drive, they escaped. "There often wasn't much for me to do except go out into these woods or fields or watch the sheep or read. So I did a good deal of that," Baxter says. Loring Staples, a forbidding, erudite man who modeled himself after English country gentlemen, had collected an enormous library of first editions. An entire shelf was occupied by a complete set of Nietzsche, about whom Staples would lecture during
dinner, which was strictly a coat-and-tie affair. Staples would also recite, by memory, long swatches of poetry, especially Swinburne. "It was
very disconcerting to hear him do this," Baxter says.

The other side of his family was literary as well. Before his father died, he and Baxter's mother had befriended many musicians and writers, including Sinclair Lewis. "My mother often told me of how she and my father would entertain Lewis late into the evening. He would come over, and my father would fall asleep on the sofa, and she would elbow him and say, 'You can't fall asleep. He's a Nobel Prize winner.' " His aunt Helen's confidants were artists and bohemians as well. Brenda Ueland, the author of
If You Want to Write, was among them. Whenever Baxter would visit his aunt, Ueland, who was quite deaf by then, would shout at him, "Charles! What are your great plans?" Baxter would mumble that he didn't have any, and she would yell, "You should be ashamed of yourself!" Baxter comments, "I lived, it seemed, in a set of anti-worlds. They didn't combust when they met each other, but this world of older people on my father's side who still lived in Minneapolis and fancied themselves to be artists, and this other strange world on the estate that was more like
The Turn of the Screw than anything else -- they were almost mutually exclusive. They must have affected the way I turned out."

Despite his denials to Ueland, Baxter did have plans: to be a writer, a poet. He went to Macalester College and was the editor of the literary magazine there (he once had to petition the head of the student council, Tim O'Brien, for funding) and reveled in the permissive, politically charged mood on campus. Hard to believe, but Baxter alleges he was a hippie-granted, "sort of a conservative hippie." But the Vietnam War, especially as graduation in 1969 neared, overshadowed everything. "I believed absolutely that it was a bad war, it was madness, and that I was not going to it." He discovered he could obtain an occupational deferment from the draft by becoming a public school teacher, so he taught fourth grade for a year in Pinconning, Michigan. "It was kind of an exotic experience for me," Baxter says, "and I came to feel it was one of the most important things that happened to me in my life. The area where I taught was absolutely flat. It's in the Saginaw Valley, where Theodore Roethke grew up. It
looks like the Great Plains out there. They're quite poor. Cash crops are sugar beets and pickling cucumbers. I was enraged at the war and was trying not to bring the war into the classroom and sometimes failed." Once, unprepared for class, he winged it, making up facts on the spot about ancient Egypt and irrigation -- an episode that inspired a short story called "Gryphon," in which a substitute teacher tells her fourth graders that angels live in the clouds over Venus and sometimes visit Earth to attend concerts.

At the end of the year, Baxter had a high enough lottery number to feel safe from the draft, and he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Donald Barthelme and John Barth were teaching there at the time, but Baxter never took a workshop with either of them, or anyone else. "I had a very thin skin and felt that it was very important for me, as a writer, not to be criticized," he says. "I think I felt that any criticism that I got from these people might have been lethal." In any event, Baxter was writing poetry then, with some success. He published two collections,
Chameleon and
The South Dakota Guidebook, through New Rivers Press before getting his doctorate in 1974.

For the next fourteen years, he taught at Wayne State University in Detroit, another eye-opening experience, his students mostly working-class and blue-collar. In 1976, Baxter married Martha Ann Hauser, who was a teacher at a children's psychiatric hospital in Ann Arbor and who now teaches remedial math and reading (they have one son, Daniel). But around that time, Baxter was having a crisis with his poetry. "I spent an entire summer trying to write poetry, and failing at it. It was as if the knowledge of how to do it had somehow left me, and I found myself ill-equipped to write. I was becoming more interested in sequences, characters, and characterizations, the rickrack of detail surrounding people."

He turned to fiction and churned out three novels, but they were disasters. "They were very abstract, these novels, very schematic, in some sense like bad postmodernism," he says. "Nothing in them felt particularly real, although I didn't realize that at the time. You rarely do when you're working. I thought they were great. I was utterly baffled by the indifference or loathing with which people read them."

One agent was particularly cruel. "I called her and said, 'Julie, what do you think of my novel?' And she said, 'I hate it.' And then she said, 'Tell me why I hate it.' And I said, 'Julie, I don't know why you hate my novel.' She said, 'Oh, you must, you wrote it. Tell me why I hate it. Is it the characters? Is it the setting? I just don't understand any of it. Help me out here. Why do I hate your novel?' It was an amazing phone call. And I kept having experiences like that. This person I knew on the West Coast read one of my novels and said, 'Well, maybe your imagination's poisoned right at the source.' "

Baxter decided to give up. He would just teach and write criticism. He had pounded out hundreds and hundreds of pages and wasn't getting any better, apparently, and he had only one fiction publication in an obscure anthology to his credit, "another sort of historical-postmodern-pastiche travesty." But before he quit, he tried one more thing: boiling down those three novels into short stories. "There was something I wanted to reach," he says, "but like many young writers, I not only reached the point, I kept going past it. That is, I had too much. And so what I took from those novels was a kind of core, and rather than overwriting it, I tried to underwrite it."

He took apart his baroque, experimental style and taught himself craft. In rereading Joyce, Chekhov, O'Connor, Woolf, Porter, and Evan S. Connell, he also learned something else: "that fiction didn't need to be about extraordinary things. It could be about ordinary things, ordinary lives that I had spent my adult life observing." It was a long apprenticeship -- his friend, the novelist Robert Boswell, has admitted him into a club called The Slow Learners -- but Baxter was disciplined and diligent, and eventually his work began receiving recognition.

His collection
Harmony of the World won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction, judged -- in a nice coincidence -- by Donald Barthelme, and was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1984. His stories landed in the hands of Charles Verrill at Viking, which swiftly released his second collection,
Through the Safety Net, in 1985, and his first novel,
First Light, in 1987. Then Baxter met Carol Houck Smith, an editor with W.W. Norton, which published his next two books, the collection
A Relative Stranger in 1990 and the novel
Shadow Play in 1993. Since then, Baxter has come out with
Believers, a collection of stories and a novella (Pantheon, 1997), and
Burning Down the House, essays on fiction (Graywolf, 1997).

Each book has produced better and better reviews, and each has further mapped out what could be called Baxter country, portraying, in luminous, precise language, solid Midwestern citizens, many of whom reside in the fictional town of Five Oaks, Michigan, whose orderly lives are disrupted, frequently by an accident or incident or a stranger. Baxter explains that he enjoys contradicting the notion that Midwesterners are not "story-worthy." In one of his poems, Baxter compared living in a landscape with no oceans or mountains to a woman who will not kiss you back. "There's something about the restriction, the glamour of the finality here, that fascinates me," he says. The limits of geography tend to elicit introspection, and when even a small calamity befalls Baxter's characters, they brood over surprisingly large issues of morality and theodicy, grappling with good and evil and the mysteriousness of existence.

A prototypical Baxter story might be "Saul and Patsy Are Pregnant." Saul Bernstein and his wife, Patsy, have lived in Five Oaks for two years, transplants from Baltimore. Saul teaches high school, Patsy is a secretary in an insurance office, and one night, Saul, a little drunk, falls asleep at the wheel and flips their car into a field. Miraculously uninjured, they walk to the nearest house, which happens to be occupied by a former student of Saul's, Emory McPhee, and his wife, Anne. At one point, Saul is left alone in their living room: "Having nothing else to do, he looked around: high ceilings and elaborate wainscoting, lamps, table, rug, dog, calendar, the usual crucifix on the wall above the TV. There was something about the room that bothered him, and it took a moment before he knew what it was. It felt like a museum of earlier American feelings. Not a single ironic sentence had ever been spoken here. Everything in the room was sincere, everything except himself. In the midst of all this
Midwestern earnestness, he was the one thing wrong. What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?"

Saul becomes obsessed with Emory and Anne, envious of their seeming happiness: "They lived smack in the middle of reality and never gave it a minute's thought. They'd never felt like actors. They'd never been sick with irony. The long tunnel of their thoughts had never swallowed them. They'd never had restless sleepless nights, the urgent wordless unexplainable wrestling matches with the shadowy bands of soul-thieves."

Yet at the end of the story, Saul, while making love to his wife, has a tiny moment of grace. A vision floats in, but quickly drifts away, still ineffable -- a non-epiphany epiphany: "He understood everything, the secret of the universe. After an instant, he lost it. Having lost the secret, forgotten it, he felt the usual onset of the ordinary, of everything else, with Patsy around him, the two of them in their own familiar rhythms. He would not admit to anyone that he had known the secret of the universe for a split second. That part of his life was hidden away and would always be: the part that makes a person draw in the breath quickly, in surprise, and stare at the curtains in the morning, upon awakening."

Baxter is acknowledged as a brilliant craftsman whose greatest gift is the compassion with which he reveals his characters, especially his women. He has received countless awards, including fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. His work has been selected for
The Best American Short Stories five times. Yet Baxter still has doubts about his writing. Occasionally he even feels "the fraud police" knocking on his door. He doesn't have writer's block, per se. If he's stuck on a piece of fiction, he'll focus on a book review or an essay or a lecture. "I love that phrase from William Stafford: 'I don't suffer from writer's block; I just lower my standards.' I'll try to get something done, but because of my experiences as an apprentice writer, I do still worry about the fraud police. I think a lot about how evanescent success in writing can be."

Novels in particular still give him fits. "I find them a terrible stretch normally," he says. "What seems apparent to every other novelist is never apparent to me: that is, how to get from one chapter to another. I've rigged up various formulations for myself: Short stories are more often about people acting impulsively. Novels are more often about people making decisions and plans. But it's never scrupulously clear to me that the overarching line of narrative in a novel is available to me." Nonetheless, he has just finished his third novel,
The Feast of Love, which begins with a "somewhat shadowy character" named Charlie Baxter who meets a friend in a city park late at night. This Charlie Baxter is an insomniac.

He wrote the novel without an advance contract: "They make me feel compulsive, of course, about meeting the deadline." (
The Feast of Love has just been sold to Pantheon, with a tentative release date of May 2000.) And, to further loosen his schedule, Baxter is giving up the directorship of the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1989, to go on adjunct status. In the past, he could never teach and write at the same time, too engrossed with his students. At Michigan and also at Warren Wilson College's low-residency program, Baxter has always been careful about what he can promise to workshop participants. "You can't make anybody into a writer. It can't be done. I like the metaphor of tools. You offer people some tools, you show them how to use them, but having the tools isn't the same thing as building the structure. I think teachers have to be very clear about that."

Those tools are sometimes delivered in the form of provocative lectures on craft, many of which were published in
Burning Down the House. Baxter eschews how-to tutorials on fiction writing -- "I mean, that's very American: self-help," he says -- and prefers instead to examine what animates certain types of stories, like fictional inventories. "Lately I've been thinking about the relations between inventories and traumatic experiences and how the Book of Job starts with an inventory. Novels are full of inventories. When you think of three of the most anthologized stories of our time, Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl,' and Susan Minot's 'Lust,' they're inventories. They're essentially about trauma in the form of lists. I've been thinking about that. I'm not telling anybody to do anything. I'm just saying, Notice this."

Baxter isn't always so analytical. He has his playful side, too, such as agreeing to write lyrics for his son's rock band, The School of Velocity, an unlikely but perfect outlet for the ex-poet. (Baxter's last volume of poems,
Imaginary Paintings, was published by Paris Review Editions in 1990.) He uses the nom de plume of Ponosby Britt, itself a fictitious name for the executive producer of the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows. Some sample lyrics, from the song "Victim of Fashion":
"You're from Banana Republic / You look like J. Crew / You're a victim of fashion / I'm a victim of you."

And now, especially since he is no longer teaching, Baxter is sleeping better. "I've found the best cure for insomnia," he says, "is thinking there isn't anywhere I'd rather be than in bed. And my other cure is one that I first heard from Stanley Elkin, which is to imagine and then to start reading an endlessly large memorandum from some functionary in the English department."