Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  So in pursuit of the daily lunch your assistant called and made a reservation, or, as in this case, pleaded unsuccessfully. Then you panicked. Previously, in another lifetime, you would have called up your boss, Harold Stone, and asked him if he could put a word in, pride-wounding though it was to show him that you, his handpicked successor and an ostensibly happening guy making a name for himself out there in the big world, had not yet made enough of a name to get your own table. But now you doubted that he would get you a reservation at McDonald's. So instead you called Jerry Kleinfeld, the publisher of Cor-bin, Dern. Subsequently you called your lunchmate to confirm, then usually a cab in midday traffic ... a wait for the table, the question of whether or not to order a cocktail, a glass of wine with the meal, a bottle of wine... not wishing nowadays to appear a hopeless alcoholic or unconscious of the whole health issue while not wishing to look like a tight-ass or tightwad, either. Dining with the old martini-drinking boys of the business, and novelists in general, one had to be prepared to ruin the afternoon in an attempt to keep up. But Victor Propp was a one-glass-of-wine epicurean, so that part was easy. Victor didn't cloud his mind; he kept it clear for self-contemplation, syntax aikido, conspiracy theories and other forms of mind-fuck.

  Being entrusted the care and feeding of Victor Propp was presumably a mark of being chosen, although Russell sometimes wondered. Victor was a long-term, highly speculative literary investment, a sophisticated instrument—Corbin, Dern's most exotic holding. In 1961, Propp had published a delicate coming-of-age novel called New Haven Evenings. The story of a Propp-like second-generation American who goes to Yale to become a poet and falls in love with a duplicitous Daughter of the American Revolution, it collected respectful, encouraging reviews as well as a Prix de Rome fellowship for the young author. Since then Propp had entered an almost purely theoretical realm in which, as someone once said of E. M. Forster, his reputation grew with each book he failed to publish. The word "genius" was increasingly appended to his name.

  Propp's work-in-progress gained stature and renown with each passing year in which it failed to appear, while the fame of his contemporaries waxed and waned according to conventional market principles as they predictably published fifth, sixth and seventh novels. Fragments of the untitled novel infrequently found their way into literary journals, fraught with the Promethean labor of their own creation, somehow conveying the sense of samizdat: scratched on the damp rock walls of the author's prison cell, copied and recopied, memorized, swallowed, and discharged after a tortured routing via Baltic cities and tramp steamers to the sub-basement printing house. The subject of this long-anticipated work seemed to be the author himself, in every phase of his development from the embryo, one of the most famous passages to date being the heroic monologue of the embryonic protagonist recounting the tides, rhythms and developmental struggles of the amniotic world as he delivered himself from the womb by sheer force of will. One feminist critic, wondering about his mother's role in all of this strident creation, complained that, in Propp, "ontogeny recapitulates misogyny." What chiefly dazzled Propp's admirers was the language, reminiscent, as one commentator proposed, of "Henry James with bowel movements"—a Propp sentence being a colonic labyrinth of qualifications, diversions and recapitulations—another enthusiast declaring that Propp was the only American writer of this century who thoroughly understood the semicolon.

  Almost alone among allegedly major authors in the late century, Victor Propp was his own agent, and though the man who represents himself in court purportedly has a fool for a lawyer, Propp had outperformed every literary salesman in the business. In 1966, Propp had received a modest advance for this second novel. After five years, Corbin, Dern became impatient for delivery, at which point Propp published a piece of the novel in Esquire and let it be known to other publishers that he was available for lunch and dinner; under threat of losing the novelist, whose cult was growing, the young Harold Stone had revised the contract and enlarged the advance. This process had been repeated periodically over the years; to date Propp had collected nearly a quarter of a million dollars on the unfinished masterpiece.

  As if to compensate for the aloofness of his publishing stance, the semiblocked author was deeply involved in the intrigues of the literary world and liked to worry about the accomplishments, reputations and crimes of other writers, and particularly of his enemies, whom he imagined to be legion. Inevitably Harold and Victor had fallen out. Russell wasn't certain of the exact nature of the dispute, but these men of letters were no longer speaking, though Harold still wanted to publish the book. This crisis was resolved by naming Russell as Propp's official editor. Russell had admired Propp since college, when Jeff bequeathed to him, like a man imparting hieratic knowledge, a battered copy of the Paris Review containing the embryo's monologue.

  They talked frequently—Propp spent half his day on the phone and needed many ears into which to pour the torrent of his verbal overflow —and met for lunch once a month. They talked about Victor Propp and those he liked to consider his peers: Richardson, Flaubert, James, Musil and the later James Joyce. (Russell could have sworn he had on one occasion heard Victor refer to him as "Jim Joyce.") Propp wanted to talk with Russell about marketing and pop culture, whereas Russell wished to engage the great man on the subject of Literature. Russell was reminded of George Bernard Shaw's complaint about his meeting with Bennett Cerf—the American publisher wished to discuss art, while the great playwright wanted to talk only money. Now Russell wondered how much he could count on friendship and mutual self-interest. His relationship with Victor and several other authors gave him some kind of minimal job security at Corbin, Dern. If he got fired, he wondered, would Victor come with him?

  "How famous is Jeff," Victor asked, not long after he alighted at the table, his raptor eyes and tall white forehead putting his lunch companion in mind of a ravenous bald eagle (Falconiformes Accipitridae, Audubon, plate 107).

  "Compared to what?"

  "I mean, do people recognize him on the street? Do girls send him scented panties in the mail? I find it fascinating when a writer crosses over into the field of consciousness of tabloid readers and television viewers. How does this dynamic actually work?"

  Russell never quite became accustomed to the suction grip of Victor's gaze. When Victor turned interrogatory eyes and italicized eyebrows upon you there was a sense of hanging on to your seat and everything else, the force of his curiosity threatening to suck the inner organs out through your gaping mouth. Semicolons aside, Russell thought he was a master of the question mark. You really wanted to find the right answer for Victor, even when, as now, the question didn't seem particularly interesting. Unlike most writers of Russell's acquaintance, whose corporeal selves seemed mere pasty shadows of their Platonic essence, Victor had a powerful, space-displacing physical presence, which accounted in part for the proportions of his myth.

  "Jeff's not famous," Russell responded, almost testily, as if he were tired of this subject. "He's been on a couple of morning shows—but the guy who reads his electric meter doesn't know him from Adam."

  Victor seemed disappointed, but undeterred. "I've been thinking about the uses of fame, about the tension between the private imperatives of creation and the imperative of the artist and the finished art object to force itself upon the world at large, to assume a public dimension. For two-thirds of my life now I've cultivated the private at the expense of the public."

  "But you've made a legend out of it."

  "Do you think so," he asked eagerly. "But I doubt whether people your age know who I am."

  "The literate ones do."

  "Does anybody outside of New York or, not to put too fine a point on it, outside the subscription list to The New York Review of Books know who I am?"

  Russell suffered the momentary illusion that he was sitting across from an aging beauty who has called her charms into question in order to hear them defended. It disturbed him that this man he admired fo
r his uncompromising commitment to writing had lately developed such a keen interest in the mechanics of publicity.

  "Look at rock and roll," Propp continued, "the visceral, direct communication with an audience. How many records do the big acts sell? For that matter, who are the big acts?"

  This was exactly the sort of thing that Harold Stone could not tell him.

  Russell explained that rock and roll had in his opinion been subverted by commercial imperatives and that hits were now created by studio producers using canned formulas. "There's so much money at stake they've oligopolized the industry. It's all product, Victor. That's what's good about books. There's hardly any money involved."

  "John Irving makes money, Doctorow makes money."

  "Not compared to Madonna."

  Victor persisted, wanting to know what music Russell listened to. When he mentioned Dire Straits, who performed a song called "Money for Nothing," Victor's eyes lit up. He asked Russell to recite the lyrics—a handy little text—and took out his notebook to write them down under the No Free Lunch heading, failing to note, however, that the band was British.

  "What if I gave a reading," Victor asked, stroking his strong, cleft chin contemplatively. "Do you think we could purvey it as a major literary event? I haven't given one in New York in seven years."

  "I think there'd be a lot of interest," Russell said. "Do it up at the East Side Y. Could be big."

  "What if Jeff introduced me?"

  "Jeff? That wouldn't have been my first pick."

  "It's precisely the unexpectedness of it that appeals to me, the disjunctive conjunction. Pierce and Propp. What if we were to do a joint reading? Combining our constituencies, so to speak?"

  "I'll see what I can do."

  "But do you really think it's a good idea?" Victor demanded, as if Russell had been responsible for generating the notion, and proceeded to enumerate the drawbacks and potential dangers of the plan. After fifteen minutes of solo dialectic he agreed with himself that they would proceed cautiously. In the meantime he had spread out in front of his plate a battery of pills and capsules—nine in all, to be taken in a predetermined sequence. "Bellow put me onto these," Victor explained, popping two. "Saved his love life," he confided. "Lowered my cholesterol twenty points. You send away to this company in Connecticut."

  "You should talk to Jeff," Russell muttered. "He has a keen interest in pharmacology."

  "What does your wife say about the market," Victor asked later, upon the arrival of his cuttlefish risotto—a dish associative, he suggested, of Ionic poets and scribes: white rice stained in a broth of black ink. Victor had his own broker, but he second-guessed him as he second-guessed the weatherman and the conventional wisdom, as he would second-guess Russell Calloway. Nothing was simple, nothing what it seemed to be.

  "She's cautious."

  "Women are cautious," Victor said, cutting, in his trademark fashion, from this highly specific observation directly to the realm of the universal. "Men are the great romantics, the dreamers and fools. Women are realists. Like Jane Austen."

  "What about Jane Eyre?"

  Victor waved a large, definitive hand as if at an invisible buzz. "A product of sexual repression," he said impatiently. "Brontë me no Brontës, that's kid stuff. But I'm interested in Corrine's perspective. This could be the first business cycle in history where we have a female perspective, a feminine influence in the financial community. Will it introduce moderation, flatten out the testosterone surges of the market, as the introduction of girls at an old New England prep school reduces the incidence of broken glass and food fights... overlay some other kind of lunar, tidal, menstrual rhythm? Somebody should be working on a computer model for this, or at least a monograph."

  "The market hasn't shown much restraint the last couple years. Even though there are plenty of women around."

  "Everybody's getting rich, Russell," Victor confided, leaning forward and engaging him with that toilet-plunger gaze, which was unsettling and flattering in equal measure. "Every remotely sentient being except for you and me. If you were in any other business right now, you'd be making twice, ten times what you do now. You're clever. And I know what they pay you..."

  This was Russell's cue to blush. He probably did know, the son of a bitch.

  "A mind like yours, at the top of your field for your age. Look at the books you published last year. You're practically famous. And me. It gives me more pain than pleasure to contemplate the fact that I am perhaps the only writer of my era who has the capacity to reinvent the novel. Do you realize the kind of responsibility that entails? All the while thinking—I don't have to tell you—that if I'd gone into business I would be a millionaire many times over. Why should I live in poverty? I understand the stock market better than my broker. But I don't have capital. I need more money. I deserve more. So do you."

  "Are you telling me you want to renegotiate your contract?"

  "I think we should both renegotiate our contracts," Propp said flatly, popping down three orange pills in quick succession.

  "I don't think Master Harold and Company are going to appreciate that idea," Russell said, not unhappily.

  "I want more money. You know I can get more if I go elsewhere. You want to publish this book. It's going to make our reputations, yours as well as mine. I flatter myself that you're my natural ally, Russell. Harold is the, if you will forgive the cliché, stumbling block. I want to go around Harold. Harold's tired, for him everything has already happened. He believes he is at the end of the whole Hegelian daisy chain of history. He seems to think he is the end. The old bastard can't get it up for anything new."

  "I wouldn't go quite that far," Russell said, recalling Harold on the couch with Carlton. But he was pleased to hear Victor expressing the same doubts that he'd been eager but unable to introduce into the conversation.

  "You should be running the house."

  "If wishes were Porsches, poor boys would drive."

  "My dear boy, at this point in American history I daresay that wishes are Porsches. I feel that we in this insane city are living in an era in which anything can happen. Do you remember what Nick Carraway said as he was driving into Manhattan in Gatsby's big car and the skyline of the city came into view over the Queensboro Bridge? As they cross into the city, Nick says, 'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge... anything at all.' "

  Russell nodded on cue, though he wasn't sure he exactly remembered, word for word; but "sort of" was not a phrase one wanted to use with Propp. One presumably had Gatsby and other key texts committed to memory.

  Victor rubbed his chin in contemplation. "My sources tell me that your star is falling at Corbin, Dern. Perhaps it's time for a youthful coup d'état," he said, his dark eyebrows rising like the shadows of twin hawks on the sheer cliff of his forehead.

  "As someone once said about the pope—I have no army."

  "Do you have a banker?"

  "Only a cash machine."

  "Why don't you buy the company?" Propp said suddenly, as if it were the obvious solution, which had inexplicably eluded them till now.

  "I can't even afford to buy an apartment, Victor."

  "That doesn't matter. Look around you, Russell. All you need is ambition, imagination and leverage."

  "So far as I know, the laws of nature have yet to be revoked."

  "You haven't been reading the papers recently." In fact, the idea was not so wild or remote that it had not occurred to Russell, but he was surprised, almost embarrassed, to hear the older man describe his fantasy.

  Victor leaned across the table and put his huge hand on top of Russell's. "Credit, Russell, the philosophers' stone of our era. You can turn the lead of wage slavery into golden destiny—if you have the courage."

  "Could I count on you, Victor?"

  "My dear boy, haven't I made that clear already?" said the older man, the sharp blades of his lips pressed together in a co
nspiratorial smile.

  8

  "I always dream about winning the lottery, man, but I don't never buy no ticket."

  "That's like the ad says—you gotta play to win."

  "I know I gotta play to win. All you need's a dollar and a dream, like the man says. Well, I got the dream, all right. Now I just need the damn dollar."

  "'Sail I'm saying. Got to lay down your one dollar."

  Waiting in line outside the mission, the two conversants exhibited the moist camaraderie of new drinking buddies, temporarily at ease after jointly solving a conundrum of logic. Both were underdressed for the cold, hunched into themselves as if around the embers of fading internal combustion. One sported a knit hat with a tassel and the legend "Ski Mad River Glen," the other a baseball cap inscribed "Drexel Burnham Lambert Bond Conference '86," which he had insulated and waterproofed with an inner lining fashioned from a green plastic garbage bag.

  A voice down the line said, "The lottery's a regressive tax foisted on the classes that can least afford it by the fascist state."

  Like athletes conserving energy, the two winos turned slowly and economically to regard the speaker—a pimpled face and neck sprouting from a fringed buckskin jacket with an "Eat the Rich" button on the lapel; the long hair, drawn back in a ponytail, conveyed the impression of a coonskin cap.

  "It's a trick of the ruling classes to hide the economic realities of the fascist state from the paling masses. You think rich people play the lottery? You think Donald Trump buys lotto tickets?"

  "He don't need to," said the man in the Drexel cap. "His ship already