Farther Away: Essays Read online

  I visited the site of the Sermon to the Birds with a Franciscan friar, Guglielmo Spirito, who is also a passionate amateur Tolkien scholar. “Even as a child,” Guglielmo said, “I knew that if I ever joined the Church it would be as a Franciscan. The main thing that attracted me, when I was young, was his relationship with animals. To me the lesson of Saint Francis is the same as that of fairy tales: that oneness with nature is not only desirable but possible. He’s an example of wholeness regained, wholeness actually within our reach.” There was no intimation of wholeness at the little shrine, across a busy road from a Vulcangas station, that now commemorates the Sermon to the Birds; I could hear a few crows cawing and tits twittering, but mostly just the roar of passing cars and trucks and farm equipment.

  Back in Assisi, however, Guglielmo took me to two other Franciscan sites that felt more enchanted. One was the Sacred Hut, the crude stone building in which Saint Francis and his first followers had lived in voluntary poverty and invented a brotherhood. The other was the tiny chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, outside which, in the night, as Saint Francis lay dying, his sister larks are said to have circled and sung. Both structures are now entirely enclosed by later, larger, more ornate churches; one of the architects, some pragmatic Italian, had seen fit to plant a fat marble column in the middle of the Sacred Hut.

  Nobody since Jesus has lived a life more radically in keeping with his gospel than Saint Francis did; and Saint Francis, unburdened by the weight of being the Messiah, went Jesus one better and extended his gospel to all creation. It seemed to me that if wild birds survive in modern Europe it will be in the manner of those ancient small Franciscan buildings, sheltered by the structures of a vain and powerful Church: as beloved exceptions to its rule.

  THE CORN KING

  [on Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers]

  The Hundred Brothers is possibly the strangest novel ever published by an American. Its author, Donald Antrim, is arguably more unlike any other living writer than any other living writer. And yet, paradoxically—in much the same way that the novel’s narrator, Doug, is at once the most singular of his father’s hundred sons and the one who most profoundly expresses the sorrows and desires and neuroses of the other ninety-nine—The Hundred Brothers is also the most representative of novels. It speaks like none of us for all of us.

  Midway through his narrative, Doug spells out the fundamental fact that drives it: “I love my brothers and I hate their guts.” The beauty of the novel is that Antrim has created a narrator who reproduces, in the reader, the same volatile mixture of feelings regarding the narrator himself: Doug is at once irresistibly lovable and unbearably frustrating. The genius of the novel is that it maps these contradictory feelings onto the archetypal figure of the scapegoat: the exemplary sufferer who recurs throughout human history, most notably in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, as an object of both love and homicidal rage, and who must be ritually killed in order for the rest of us to go on living with the contradictions in our lesser hearts.

  In modern times, the role of the exemplary sufferer has come to be played by artists. Nonartists depend on and cherish artists for giving pleasing form to the central experiences of being human. At the same time, artists are resented, sometimes even homicidally, for the dubiety of their moral character and for bringing to consciousness painful truths that nonartists prefer to remain unconscious of. Artists will drive you crazy, and The Hundred Brothers is a perfect instance of the work of art that seduces you with its beauty and power and then maddens you with its craziness. It’s often hilarious, but there’s always a dangerous edge to the hilarity. When, for example, Doug is describing the complicated seating chart for the dinner table at which he and ninety-eight of his brothers gather in a scene reminiscent of the Last Supper, he notes that his own name, unlike all the others, is written in “bright orange,” and that he’s “never been able to figure out the logic behind this.” The orange writing recalls the fire that several brothers are building in the book’s opening pages and the flames that illuminate the primitive ritual with which the book closes; the color targets Doug like a hunted animal. And the whole comedy of his situation—he simultaneously knows and resists knowing that he’s his brothers’ beloved and hated scapegoat—is encapsulated in his putative inability to “figure out the logic.” Is the logic that Doug is the family’s devoted genealogist, the former star quarterback of the family football team, the trustworthy listener to whom others turn with questions about God, and the brother who nurses his psychically and physically wounded brothers at the expense of his own needs? Or is it (as his narrative gradually and comically reveals) that Doug is a chronic liar and an unrepentant thief of his brothers’ drugs and money, has a penchant for drinking too much and misbehaving, nurtures a bizarre fetish for his brothers’ footwear, and once, as the quarterback in a crucial game, fumbled away the football in his own endzone? Or is it (as seems most likely) that Doug is the family artist, the outsider who is also the family’s deepest insider, the brother who has taken it upon himself to annually assume the role of Corn King and perform “the nocturnal dance of death and the life that grows out of death”?

  The Hundred Brothers speaks for all of us because we all inescapably feel ourselves to be the special center of our private worlds. It’s a funny novel and a sad novel because this natural solipsism of ours is belied—rendered both ridiculous and tragic—by our ties of love and kinship to private worlds that we are necessarily not the center of.

  At the level of technique, the book is a marvel: has to be a marvel, for, without supreme authorial control of scene and sentence and detail, it would collapse under the weight of its preposterous premise. In the opening sentence, Antrim manages to name and specify, through the magic of his commas and semicolons and dashes and parentheses, all ninety-nine of the brothers who have come together for drinks and dinner, bad masculine behavior, and avoidance of the work of giving their father’s funeral ashes a proper burial. (This opening sentence also contains the book’s first and last reference to a particular woman, Jane, who is responsible for the disappearance of the hundredth brother; it’s as if, according to the novel’s logic, the mere naming of a Significant Other is enough to exclude a brother from the narrative.) The story takes place entirely in the enormous library of the family’s ancestral mansion, from the windows of which the campfires of homeless people can be seen in the “forlorn valley” outside the property’s walls, and the action is confined to a single night, punctuated here and there by glimpses of the family’s history of brother-on-brother cruelty and violence. (Doug’s recollection of the childhood game of Kill the Man with the Ball, a game that embodies the love/hatred between siblings and prefigures their latter-day scapegoating ritual, is particularly inspired.) The incidents that occur on this single night are often farcical, often frustrating to Doug and to the reader, and always intensely vivid and specific. Taken together, they amount to a dexterous feat of choreography, in which Doug, the self-appointed Corn King, is the lead dancer who engages all the others as he makes his way around the library.

  The novel is a feat of exclusion and inclusion, too. Left out of it are women (including, especially, the brothers’ mother or mothers), children, any reference to a particular place or year, and any realistic accounting of how there came to be so many brothers, how they all fit into a single house, and what their lives outside the house are like. Within these fantastical confines, however, can be found a remarkably complete catalogue of the things that men do and feel among men. Football, fisticuffs, food fights, chess playing, bullying, gambling, hunting, drinking, pornography, pranking, philanthropy, power tools (“Doug, I need my belt-sander back,” the brother Angus says in passing), homosexual cruising, anxieties about incontinence and penis size and middle-age weight gain: it’s all there. The book also, despite its brevity, contains a deftly telescoped genealogy of human knowledge and experience, reaching from prehistory up through a very belated present day in which civilization seems to be teet
ering at the brink of collapse. Just as a vast collection of books and periodicals on every subject and from every era is housed in a single leaky and neglected library, so the totality of human archetypes (“the primeval aspects of the Self,” in Doug’s phrase) are gathered together in the single heroic, failing consciousness of the narrator.

  When the brothers are all seated at the dinner table, one of them makes a call for better maintenance of the library: “As some of you may know, a slow drip, directly over Philosophy of Mind, has recently waterlogged and destroyed seventy to eighty percent of Cognitive Theory.” As in some kind of nightmare of paralysis, however, the brothers are able only to notice the library’s decay, not seriously combat it. Chandelier lights flicker, rainwater pours in, bats fly around, furniture is broken, food scraps are ground into once-valuable carpets. The entire novel is shadowed by the insight, or fear, or premonition, that postmodernity doesn’t lead us forward but backward to the primitive: that our huge and hard-won sum of knowledge will ultimately prove useless and be lost. Already in the book’s early pages, describing the eighteenth-century pornography that some of the married brothers are huddled over, Doug has intimations of this loss. “The Age of Enlightenment’s inattention to hygiene is well documented,” he remarks. “A certain syphilitic degeneracy lurks in these bookplate etchings of rheumy aristocrats making doggy love with their hats on.” In the latter half of the novel, the intimations of decay become a drumbeat, culminating in the brilliant scene in which Doug himself ecstatically, with his urine, amid the shelved works of Liberal Theologians, Antiquaries, and Bibliographers, “hoses down, as they say, a few literary masterpieces.” In the despair that grips Doug after this ecstatic moment, the dissolution of the library becomes increasingly indistinguishable from what’s happening to him. The man has become the world, the world has become the man; the solipsism is complete; the narrative has gone fully mad.

  The craziness of The Hundred Brothers derives from its willingness to embrace, even celebrate, the dark fact that an individual’s life consists, finally, of an accelerating march toward decay and death. The novel is a Dionysian dream in which nothing, not even sanity, can escape the corrosive chaos of this circumstance; but its form is bravely Apollonian. It renders lonely solipsism universal and humane by way of rite and archetype and artistic excellence. What Nick Carraway says about his friend Jay Gatsby could also be said of the scapegoat Doug: he turns out all right at the end. The rest of us, his brothers and sisters, awaken from the harrowing dream refreshed and better able, as Doug says with equal parts of irony and hope, to “prosper and thrive.”

  ON AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

  [lecture]

  I’m going to begin by addressing four unpleasant questions that novelists often get asked at an event like this. These questions are apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public. They’re maddening not just because we’re asked them so often but also because, with one exception, they’re difficult to answer and, therefore, very much worth asking.

  The first of these perennial questions is: Who are your influences?

  Sometimes the person asking this question merely wants some book recommendations, but all too often the question seems to be intended seriously. And part of what annoys me about it is that it’s always asked in the present tense: Who are my influences? The fact is, at this point in my life, I’m mostly influenced by my own past writing. If I were still laboring in the shadow of, say, E. M. Forster, I would certainly be at pains to pretend that I wasn’t. According to Mr. Harold Bloom, whose clever theory of literary influence helped him make a career of distinguishing “weak” writers from “strong” writers, I wouldn’t even be conscious of the degree to which I was still laboring in E. M. Forster’s shadow. Only Harold Bloom would be fully conscious of that.

  Direct influence makes sense only with very young writers, who, in the course of figuring out how to write, first try copying the styles and attitudes and methods of their favorite authors. I personally was very influenced, at the age of twenty-one, by C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Louise Fitzhugh, Herbert Marcuse, P. G. Wodehouse, Karl Kraus, my then-fiancée, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For a while, in my early twenties, I put a lot of effort into copying the sentence rhythms and comic dialogue of Don DeLillo; I was also very taken with the strenuously vivid and all-knowing prose of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. And the plots of my first two novels were substantially borrowed from two movies, The American Friend (by Wim Wenders) and Cutter’s Way (by Ivan Passer). But to me these various “influences” seem not much more meaningful than the fact that, when I was fifteen, my favorite music group was the Moody Blues. A writer has to begin somewhere, but where exactly he or she begins is almost random.

  It would be somewhat more meaningful to say that I was influenced by Franz Kafka. By this I mean that it was Kafka’s novel The Trial, as taught by the best literature professor I ever had, that opened my eyes to the greatness of what literature can do, and made me want to try to create some literature myself. Kafka’s brilliantly ambiguous rendering of Josef K., who is at once a sympathetic and unjustly persecuted Everyman and a self-pitying and guilt-denying criminal, was my portal to the possibilities of fiction as a vehicle of self-investigation: as a method of engagement with the difficulties and paradoxes of my own life. Kafka teaches us how to love ourselves even as we’re being merciless toward ourselves; how to remain humane in the face of the most awful truths about ourselves. It’s not enough to love your characters, and it’s not enough to be hard on your characters: you always have to try to be doing both at the same time. The stories that recognize people as they really are—the books whose characters are at once sympathetic subjects and dubious objects—are the ones capable of reaching across cultures and generations. This is why we still read Kafka.

  The bigger problem with the question about influences, however, is that it seems to presuppose that young writers are lumps of soft clay on which certain great writers, dead or living, have indelibly left their mark. And what maddens the writer trying to answer the question honestly is that almost everything a writer has ever read leaves some kind of mark. To list every writer I’ve learned something from would take me hours, and it still wouldn’t account for why some books matter to me so much more than other books: why, even now, when I’m working, I often think about The Brothers Karamazov and The Man Who Loved Children and never about Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. How did it happen that I did not learn anything from Joyce or Woolf, even though they’re both obviously “strong” writers?

  The common understanding of influence, whether Harold Bloomian or more conventional, is far too linear and one-directional. Art history, with its progressive narrative of influences handed down from generation to generation, is a useful pedagogical tool for organizing information, but it has very little to do with the actual experience of being a fiction writer. When I write, I don’t feel like a craftsman influenced by earlier craftsmen who were themselves influenced by earlier craftsmen. I feel like a member of a single, large virtual community in which I have dynamic relationships with other members of the community, most of whom are no longer living. As in any other community, I have my friends and I have my enemies. I find my way to those corners of the world of fiction where I feel most at home, most securely but also provocatively among my friends. Once I’ve read enough books to have identified who these friends are—and this is where the young writer’s process of active selection comes in, the process of choosing whom to be “influenced” by— I work to advance our common interests. By means of what I write and how I write, I fight for my friends and I fight against my enemies. I want more readers to appreciate the glory of the nineteenth-century Russians; I’m indifferent to whether readers love James Joyce; and my work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game playing, overt d
idacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on. Indeed, much of what might be called actual “influence” is negative: I don’t want to be like this writer or that writer.

  The situation is never static, of course. Reading and writing fiction is a form of active social engagement, of conversation and competition. It’s a way of being and becoming. Somehow, at the right moment, when I’m feeling particularly lost and forlorn, there’s always a new friend to be made, an old friend to distance myself from, an old enemy to be forgiven, a new enemy to be identified. Indeed—and I’ll say more about this later—it’s impossible for me to write a new novel without first finding new friends and enemies. To start writing The Corrections, I befriended Kenzaburo Oe, Paula Fox, Halldór Laxness, and Jane Smiley. With Freedom, I found new allies in Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Alice Munro. For a while, Philip Roth was my new bitter enemy, but lately, unexpectedly, he has become a friend as well. I still campaign against American Pastoral, but when I finally got around to reading Sabbath’s Theater its fearlessness and ferocity became an inspiration. It had been a long time since I’d felt as grateful to a writer as I did when reading the scene in Sabbath’s Theater where Mickey Sabbath’s best friend catches him in the bathtub holding a picture of the friend’s adolescent daughter and a pair of her underpants, or the scene in which Sabbath finds a paper coffee cup in the pocket of his army jacket and decides to abase himself by begging for money in the subway. Roth may not want to have me as a friend, but I was happy, at those moments, to claim him as one of mine. I’m happy to hold up the savage hilarity of Sabbath’s Theater as a correction and reproach of the sentimentality of certain young American writers and not-so-young critics who seem to believe, in defiance of Kafka, that literature is about being nice.