Farther Away: Essays Read online

JF: I’m really sorry I kept you waiting.

  NEW YORK STATE: I’m sorry, too. It cuts into our already very limited time together.

  JF: I’ve been here since eight-thirty this morning, and then, in the last half hour—

  NEW YORK STATE: Mm.

  JF: Anyway, it’s great to see you. You look terrific. Very, ah, put-together.

  NEW YORK STATE: Thank you.

  JF: It’s been so long since we were alone, I don’t know where to begin.

  NEW YORK STATE: We were alone once?

  JF: You don’t remember?

  NEW YORK STATE: Maybe. Maybe you can remind me. Or not. Some men are more memorable than others. The cheap dates I tend to forget. Would this have been a cheap date?

  JF: They were nice dates.

  NEW YORK STATE: Oh! “Dates,” plural. More than one.

  JF: I mean, I know I’m not Mort Zuckerman, or Mike Bloomberg, or Donald Trump—

  NEW YORK STATE: The Donald! He is cute. (Giggles) I think he’s cute!

  JF: Oh my God.

  NEW YORK STATE: Oh, come on, admit it. He really is pretty cute, don’t you think? . . . What? You truly don’t think so?

  JF: I’m sorry, I’m . . . just taking it all in. This whole morning. I mean, I knew things were never going to be the same with us. But, my God. It really is all about money and money only now, isn’t it?

  NEW YORK STATE: It was always about money. You were just too young to notice.

  JF: So you remember me?

  NEW YORK STATE: Possibly. Or possibly I’m making an educated guess. The romantic young men never notice. My mother even came to find the Redcoats rather handsome, back in the war years. What else was she supposed to do? Let them burn everything?

  JF: I guess it runs in your family, then!

  NEW YORK STATE: Oh, please. Grow up. Is this really how you want us to spend our ten minutes?

  JF: You know, I was back there last month. The hillside where I got married—her grandparents’ house. I was driving up through Orange County and I went back to try to find it. I remembered a green lawn spilling down to a rail fence, and a big overgrown pasture with woods all around it.

  NEW YORK STATE: Yes, Orange County. A lovely feature of mine. I hope you took some time to savor the many tracts of spectacular parkland around Bear Mountain and to reflect on what an extraordinary percentage of my total land area is guaranteed public and “forever wild.” Of course, a great deal of that land came to me as gifts from very rich men. Perhaps you’d like me to be pure and virtuous and give it all back to them for development?

  JF: I wasn’t sure I ever actually found it, the land was so altered. It was all hideous sprawl, traffic, Home Depot, Best Buy, Target. Next door to the town’s old brick high school there was this brand-new pink aircraft-carrier-size building with signs at the entrance that said please drive slowly, we love our children.

  NEW YORK STATE: Our precious freedoms do include the freedom to be tacky and annoying.

  JF: The best I could do was narrow it to two hillsides. The same thing was happening on both of them. Building-size pieces of earth-moving equipment were scraping it all bare. Reshaping the very contours of the land—creating these cute little fake dells and fake knolls for hideous houses to be sold to sentimentalists so enraged with the world they had to inform it, in writing, on a road sign, that they love their children. Clouds of diesel exhaust, broken full-grown oak trees piled up like little sticks, birds whizzing around in a panic. I could see the whole gray and lukewarm future. No urban. No rural. The entire country just a wasteland of shittily built neither-nor.

  NEW YORK STATE: And yet, in spite of it all, I am still rather beautiful. Isn’t it unfair? What money can buy? And trees do have a way of growing back. You think there were oak trees on your hillside in the nineteenth century? There probably weren’t a thousand oak trees left standing in the entire county. So let’s not talk about the past.

  JF: The past was when I loved you.

  NEW YORK STATE: All the more reason not to talk about it! Here. Come sit next to me. I have some pictures of myself I want to show you.

  LOVE LETTERS

  [encomium to James Purdy on the occasion of his receiving the Center for Fiction’s Fadiman Award for Eustace Chisholm and the Works]

  I don’t know if anyone here remembers last year’s college football game between Stanford and the University of California. But just to remind you: Stanford had a much smaller and weaker team with, like, a 2–7 record, but during the first half of the game it looked as if Stanford might actually beat Cal, because its defense was so pumped up that its players had entirely lost their fear of injury. There were young men running at full speed, as hard as they could, with their arms open wide, and flinging themselves against stronger young men who were running just as hard in the opposite direction. There were spectacular, gruesome collisions—it was like seeing people run full tilt into telephone poles—and sickening numbers of Stanford players were getting seriously hurt and carted off the field, and still they just kept flinging themselves at Cal. The experience of watching their doomed effort, these repeated joyous, self-destroying collisions of young people who desperately wanted something, all of this chaos in the context of a larger suspenseful, formally gorgeous game whose outcome was nonetheless pretty well foreordained: I haven’t been able to find a better analog for the experience of reading Eustace Chisholm and the Works.

  Mr. Purdy’s novel is so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring, in comparison. Certainly, for example, The Catcher in the Rye, which Mr. Purdy once described as “one of the worst books ever written,” will betray its sentimentality and rhetorical manipulations as it never has before. Richard Yates, whose ferocity sometimes approaches Mr. Purdy’s, might do a little better, but you’d have to wipe away every vestige of Yates’s self-pity and replace it with headlong love; you’d have to ramp Yates’s depression up into a fatalism of such bleakness that it becomes ecstatic. Even Saul Bellow, whose love of language and love of the world can be so infectious, is liable to seem wordy and academic and show-offy if you read him directly after Eustace Chisholm. One of the darker chapters in Augie March ends with Augie accompanying his friend Mimi to the office of a South Side abortionist. While Bellow draws a curtain over what happens inside this doctor’s office, Mr. Purdy in Eustace Chisholm delivers—famously, unforgettably—on the horror. (It is an unbelievable scene.) The extreme margins of the stable, familiar world of Saul Bellow (and of most novelists, including me) are at the extreme normal end of Mr. Purdy’s world. He takes up where the rest of us leave off. He follows his queer boys and struggling artists and dissolute millionaires to places like

  This out-of-the-way ice-cream parlor near the state line, a favorite stop for truck drivers hauling smuggled merchandise, ladies committing adultery with local building and loan directors, where a preacher was shot to death by a widow who was losing his love, where the local fairies used to come late afternoons . . .

  and he instills these locales with a weird kind of Gemütlichkeit. You miss having been there yourself the way you miss having ridden on a sleigh with Natasha Rostov. Near the end of Eustace Chisholm, two characters walk out onto the rocks piled up alongside Lake Michigan:

  They sat down there, remembering how less desperate and much happier, after all, they had used to feel when they sat here the year before, and yet how desperate they had been then too. A few gulls hovered near some refuse floating on the oil-stained water.

  What constitutes in extremis for most of us is the daily bread of Mr. Purdy’s world. He lets you try on desperation, and you find that it fits you better than you expected. His most bizarre freaks don’t feel freakish. They feel, peculiarly, like me. I read about the humiliation and incest and self-loathing and self-destruction in Eustace Chisholm with the same lively, sympathetic, and morally clear-eyed interest with which I follow the broken engagements and bruised feelings in Jane A
usten. You can be sure, when you begin a Purdy novel, that all will most certainly not end well, and it’s his great gift to narrate the inexorable progress toward disaster in such a way that it’s as satisfying and somehow life-affirming as progress toward a happy ending. And when Purdy finally does, as in the last three pages of Eustace Chisholm, toss you a tiny scrap of ordinary hope and happiness, you may very well begin to weep out of sheer gratitude. It’s as if the book is set up, almost in spite of itself, to make you feel what a miracle it is that love is ever requited, that two compatible people ever find their way to each other. You’ve so reconciled yourself to the disaster, you’ve been so thoroughly sold on his fatalistic vision, that a moment of ordinary peace and kindness feels like an act of divine grace.

  Mr. Purdy shouldn’t be confused with his late contemporary, William Burroughs, or with Burroughs’s many transgressive successors. Transgressive literature is always, secretly or not so secretly, addressing itself to the bourgeois world that it depends on. As a reader of transgressive fiction, you have two choices: either you can be shocked, or you can shock other people with your failure to be shocked. Although Mr. Purdy, in his public utterances, is implacably hostile to American society, in his fiction he directs his attention inward. There isn’t one sentence in Eustace Chisholm that could care less about whether some reader is shocked by it. The book’s eponymous nonhero— a cruel, arrogant, freeloading, bisexual poet who is writing an epic poem of modern America with a charcoal pencil on sheets of old newspapers—is an obsessive reader of the letters and diaries of other people:

  Unlike small towns, cities contain transient persons . . . who carry their letters about with them carelessly, either losing them or throwing them away. Most passers-by would not bother to stoop down and pick up such a letter because they would assume there would be nothing in the contents to interest or detain them. This was not true of Eustace. He pored over found letters whose messages were not meant for him. To him they were like treasures that spoke fully. Paradise to Eustace might have been reading the love-letters of every writer, no matter how inconsequential or even illiterate, who had written a real one. What made the pursuit exciting was to come on that rare thing: the authentic, naked, unconcealed voice of love.

  Chisholm eventually becomes so addicted to other people’s real-life stories that he abandons his own work and devotes his attention entirely to the book’s central love: a crazy, unconsummated relationship between a young former coal miner, Daniel Haws, and a beautiful blond country boy named Amos Ratliffe. Purdy is a vastly bigger and tougher and more protean figure than his creation Chisholm—he is the author of forty-six books of fiction, poetry, and drama—but, as an author, he is palpably driven by the same kind of helpless fascination and identification with human suffering. However high Mr. Purdy’s authorial opinion of himself may be, however much of a son of a bitch he may appear in his public pronouncements, when he sits down to tell a story he somehow checks all of that ego at the door and becomes entirely absorbed in his characters. He has been and continues to be one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America. Among his many excellent works, Eustace Chisholm is the fullest-bodied, the best written, the most tautly narrated, and the most beautifully constructed. There are very few better postwar American novels, and I don’t know of any other novel of similar quality that is more defiantly itself. I love this book, and it’s a great honor to be able to select it for the Fadiman Award.

  OUR LITTLE PLANET

  In 1969, the drive from Minneapolis to St. Louis took twelve hours and was mostly on two-lane roads. My parents woke me up for it at dawn. We had just spent an outstandingly fun week with my Minnesota cousins, but as soon as we pulled out of my uncle’s driveway these cousins evaporated from my mind like the morning dew from the hood of our car. I was alone in the backseat again. I went to sleep, and my mother took out her magazines, and the weight of the long July drive fell squarely on my father.

  To get through the day, he made himself into an algorithm, a number cruncher. Our car was the axe with which he attacked the miles listed on road signs, chopping the nearly unbearable 238 down to a still daunting 179, bludgeoning the 150’s and 140’s and 130’s until they yielded the halfway humane 127, which was roundable down to 120, which he could pretend was just two hours of driving time even though, with so many livestock trucks and thoughtless drivers on the road ahead of him, it would probably take closer to three. Through sheer force of will, he mowed down the last twenty miles between him and double digits, and these digits he then reduced by tens and twelves until, finally, he could glimpse it: “Cedar Rapids 34.” Only then, as his sole treat of the day, did he allow himself to remember that 34 was the distance to the city center—that we were, in fact, less than thirty miles now from the oak-shaded park where we liked to stop for a picnic lunch.

  The three of us ate quietly. My father took the pit of a damson plum out of his mouth and dropped it into a paper bag, fluttering his fingers a little. He was wishing he’d pressed on to Iowa City—Cedar Rapids wasn’t even the halfway point—and I was wishing we were back in the air-conditioned car. Cedar Rapids felt like outer space to me. The warm breeze was someone else’s breeze, not mine, and the sun overhead was a harsh reminder of the day’s relentless waning, and the park’s unfamiliar oak trees all spoke to our deep nowhereness. Even my mother didn’t have much to say.

  But the really interminable drive was through southeastern Iowa. My father remarked on the height of the corn, the blackness of the soil, the need for better roads. My mother lowered the front-seat armrest and played crazy eights with me until I was just as sick of it as she was. Every few miles a pig farm. Another ninety-degree bend in the road. Another truck with fifty cars behind it. Each time my father floored the accelerator and swung out to pass, my mother drew frightened breath:

  “Fffff!

  “Ffffffff!

  “Fffff—fffffffff!—Oh! Earl! Oh! Fffffff!”

  There was white sun in the east and white sun in the west. Aluminum domes of silos white against white sky. It seemed as if we’d been driving steadily downhill for hours, careering toward an ever-receding green furriness at the Missouri state line. Terrible that it could still be afternoon. Terrible that we were still in Iowa. We had left behind the convivial planet where my cousins lived, and we were plummeting south toward a quiet, dark, air-conditioned house in which I didn’t even recognize loneliness as loneliness, it was so familiar to me.

  My father hadn’t said a word in fifty miles. He silently accepted another plum from my mother and, a moment later, handed her the pit. She unrolled her window and flung the pit into a wind suddenly heavy with a smell of tornadoes. What looked like diesel exhaust was rapidly filling the southern sky. A darkness gathering at three in the afternoon. The endless downslope steepening, the tasseled corn tossing, and everything suddenly green—sky green, pavement green, parents green.

  My father turned on the radio and sorted through crashes of static to find a station. He had remembered—or maybe never forgotten—that another descent was in progress. There was static on static on static, crazy assaults on the signal’s integrity, but we could hear men with Texan accents reporting lower and lower elevations, counting the mileage down toward zero. Then a wall of rain hit our windshield with a roar like deep-fry. Lightning everywhere. Static smashing the Texan voices, the rain on our roof louder than the thunder, the car shimmying in lateral gusts.

  “Earl, maybe you should pull over,” my mother said. “Earl?”

  He had just passed milepost 2, and the Texan voices were getting steadier, as if they’d figured out that the static couldn’t hurt them: that they were going to make it. And, indeed, the wipers were already starting to squeak, the road drying out, the black clouds shearing off into harmless shreds. “The Eagle has landed,” the radio said. We’d crossed the state line. We were back home on the moon.

  THE END OF THE BINGE

  [on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler]

  To be all mea
t and raw nerve is to exist outside of time and—momentarily—outside of narrative. The crackhead who’s been pushing the Pleasure button for sixty hours straight, the salesman who’s eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner while glued to a video-poker terminal, the recreational eater who’s halfway through a half gallon of chocolate ice cream, the grad student who’s been hunched over his Internet portal, pants down, since eight o’clock last night, and the gay clubber who’s spending a long weekend doing cocktails of Viagra and crystal meth will all report to you (if you can manage to get their attention) that nothing besides the brain and its stimulants has any reality. To the person who’s compulsively self-stimulating, both the big narratives of salvation and transcendence and the tiny life-storylets of “I hate my neighbor” or “It might be nice to visit Spain sometime” are equally illusory and irrelevant. This deep nihilism of the body is obviously a worry to the crackhead’s three young children, to the salesman’s employer, to the ice cream eater’s husband, to the grad student’s girlfriend, and to the clubber’s virologist. But the person whose very identity is threatened by such abject materialism is the fiction writer, whose life and business it is to believe in narrative.

  No novelist ever wrestled with materialism more fiercely and intelligently than Dostoyevsky. In 1866, when his short novel The Gambler was first published, the stabilizing old narratives of religion and a divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment; already the way was being paved to the brutal materialism of the Communists (which, in Russia and China and elsewhere, would produce body counts in the tens of millions) and to the morally unchecked pursuit of personal pleasure (which would produce more subtle consumerist corruptions and melancholies in the West). Dostoyevsky’s mature novels can be read as campaigns against both kinds of materialism, which he had identified as a threat not only to his vodka-soaked, politically intemperate motherland but to his own well-being. His intemperate youthful idealism, for which he’d done five years of hard time in Siberia, provided the impetus for Crime and Punishment and The Devils; his sensualism and compulsive nature and caustic rationality were the personally destabilizing forces against which he subsequently erected the fortress of The Brothers Karamazov and lesser redoubts like The Gambler. Creating narratives strong enough to withstand materialist assault was at once a patriotic duty and a personal necessity.