It’s Helen’s voice all right, and now she’s mad. They’re in the kitchen. They’ve made love and Rudy’s sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, looking through the Sunday Trib. The girls have been rampaging through the house. Now they’re at the toaster for the fourth or fifth time. Every time, the same drama plays itself out: three girls fighting over two pieces of toast. Meg holds one slice high over her head. Margot and Molly pull at her arms and simultaneously struggle with each other over the second slice. Helen is on the phone, talking to someone in Italian. Finally she loses patience, clamps her hand over the mouthpiece: “No more toast for the rest of the day,” she shouts.
Rudy puts the paper down and looks up. The girls are momentarily stunned. Their mouths open wide. There’s a moment of silence. Helen starts to laugh. Meg puts her fists on her skinny hips: “Mother,” she says, “you’re a woman of empty threats.”
Now Helen is laughing and trying to explain to the person on the other end of the phone what has just happened, and why its so funny, but she can’t remember the word for toast in Italian. “What’s the word for toast in Italian?” she asks. “I can’t remember.” But nobody knows.
And now the girls have gathered around her as she holds her adopted chicken in her arms. He hears her cluck and chortle to the chicken, hears the chicken cluck and chortle back, and then she’s turning to him, in a room on the eighth floor of the Drake Hotel. Helen turning to him. “I’ve never done this before,” she says. “You’ll have to show me the way.” And now they’ve undressed each other and she says, “How like you this? And this?” And she takes his erection in her hand and says: “O Rudy, this is going to be such a great adventure. Not just this”—squeezing him—“but this.” She lets go and holds out her arms. “This life, this everything.”
The noise of the crowd is deafening. He’s shooting two free throws with twenty seconds left on the clock, the last game of the season. The game will decide the league championship. Not the NBA, of course—only the old Midwest Industrial League. There’s a center jump after every basket; all the players shoot two-handed set shots because the jump shot hasn’t been invented yet; and at 6’ 2” Rudy is the tallest man on his team, the South Water Bluestreaks, which is down by one point—38-39. He shoots his two free throws underhanded, lifts the ball up toward the basket like a shaman releasing a bird into the air. He sinks both shots, and after the game, savoring the moment of victory, wanting it to last forever, he walks across the crowded floor of the gymnasium to speak to one of the refs, who’s talking to a beautiful girl in a chartreuse dress. “Rudy,” the ref says, “let me introduce you to my niece, Helen.” And Rudy says, “How do you do?” and holds out his hand. Helen shakes her long red hair and takes his hand in hers and smiles. Her voice is rich and deep. “Pleased to meet you,” she says. “You must be very happy.” The tape has come to an end long ago, the light has faded, the silence has thickened. If he doesn’t do something now, the silence will carry him down, just as the river carried Norma Jean down, down past Pepe’s, down past the international bridge at Hidalgo, on past Brownsville and out into the Gulf. But the phone rings. For a minute he thinks it might be Helen, calling to say she’s coming home, but then he clears his head. He loses count of the rings. The phone rings and rings, but he doesn’t answer it. Just as a passenger in an airplane that follows a certain parabolic arc will experience a brief period of weightlessness at the pinnacle of the arc, so at the pinnacle of his own parabolic arc Rudy experiences the cessation of willing, and for a brief moment he sees things as they really are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their hard work and good advice: my agent, Henry Dunow, and my editor, Pat Strachan.
For his hospitality in Mission, Texas and for sharing his knowledge of the region: Noe Torres.
For sharing his knowledge of Texas avocados and the Texas avocado industry: Medardo Riojas.
For their help with Hindu customs and words: Shalini Lulla, Shalini Krishan, Nandini Singh, Rachana Umashankar.
For their help with Spanish: Tim Foster, Jorge Prats, Robin Regan, Xavier Romano.
For his help with parallel universes: Chuck Schulz.
For his advice on Rudy’s heart condition: Dr. Robert Currie.
For his advice on flowers: David Graflund.
For their fund of general knowledge: Bill and Syd Brady.
For reading an early version of Philosophy Made Simple: Monica Berlin.
For proofreading the manuscript: Terry Jackson.
The Philosophy Made Simple that Rudy studies was written by TJ’s uncle Siva and bears little resemblance to the Philosophy Made Simple written by Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Hellenga received his BA from the University of Michigan and studied at Queen’s University in Belfast and at the University of North Carolina before completing a PhD in English Literature at Princeton University. He teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and is the author of three previous novels, The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, and Blues Lessons.
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Philosophy Made Simple
A NOVEL
Robert Hellenga
A conversation with Robert Hellenga
Philosophy Made Simple marks the return of the Harrington family, whom readers first encountered in your novel The Sixteen Pleasures. Why did you decide to bring back these characters?
In the original version of The Sixteen Pleasures, Margot’s father, Rudy, had his own chapters. These were ultimately deleted, because the editor and I agreed that they impeded the forward movement of the novel. I published these three chapters separately, as short stories, but I never got over the feeling that I still had some unfinished business with Rudy. So I just took up his story where I’d left off—on an avocado grove in Texas.
How did you first learn about elephants that paint, and at what point in the creative process did Norma Jean start to take shape?
Several years ago I heard a spot on NPR about elephants painting and thought immediately of a circus elephant named Norma Jean, who was struck and killed by lightning in Oquawka, an old Mississippi River town not far from my home in Galesburg, Illinois. Once a year or so we drive over to Oquawka to have a look at the river and to stop at Norma Jean’s grave, which is in a little park near the center of town, right where she died. I put this elephant information together with the fact that Rudy’s middle daughter was already, in The Sixteen Pleasures, engaged to an Indian, so Norma Jean appeared in Philosophy Made Simple, which was just a rough sketch at the time.
There are elements of King Lear in Rudy Harrington, and you’ve mentioned that, like Lear, you have three daughters. Is he a favorite classical character of yours?
It’s really the archetypal situation of the Lear family that I’m drawn to—the king and his three daughters who are the staple of fairy tales. After The Sixteen Pleasures and The Fall of a Sparrow, I decided it was time to write a novel that was not about a father and three daughters. So I wrote Blues Lessons. But then I was drawn right back to the fairy-tale archetype in Philosophy Made Simple. Fortunately, the parallel is not exact: my wife is very much a part of the real family constellation, and our two older daughters are not nearly as wicked as their fairy-tale counterparts.
Rudy works in produce, as did your father. Are there other elements of your father—or other people you have known—in Rudy, or do the similarities end there?
My father was also a professional basketball player, though in those days there was no NBA. It was all semipro industrial leagues. The fact is, Rudy is much more easygoing than my father was, but now that I think of it, all sorts of things from my father have a way of sneaking in. For example, Rudy refers to a boatload of black-market avocados from the Cayman Islands. The men who worked for my father told me that he once had a boatload of black-market cement, something he always denied.
Your novels are generously peppered wi
th references to works of art—books, songs, poems, paintings. How important is the role of art and literature in your life? And how do you think that’s expressed in your novels?
Literature has always played a very important role in my life. My grandmother read the King Arthur stories to me when I was little; my mother read Dickens to me; and I read to my three daughters every night for years. And of course I read on my own. That’s what I do. I feel that I understand literature. I don’t have to ask myself, do I like this story or this novel? Art and music are more difficult, probably because they’re nonverbal. I don’t know how to deal with them. But in a way that’s an advantage: they are mysteries that I don’t understand, so I keep pecking away at them, trying to get a foothold.
What works of art and what other writers have inspired you and shaped your journey as a novelist?
My favorite novel is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I always have a copy nearby. I especially like the momentum of the novel. There’s an urgency in the narrative voice, something that tells me that story is so important that I don’t need to fool around with narrative tricks or verbal fireworks. Let me just set things down as clearly as possible.
Three contemporary novels that I often return to are Gail Godwin’s Finishing School and Father Melancholy’s Daughter and Sue Miller’s Family Pictures.
In both Philosophy Made Simple and The Sixteen Pleasures, your characters find solace—and guidance—in hooks. As you mapped out these novels, which came first: your characters or the books that save them?
I’ve always been a Gutenberg Man, a person whose life has been shaped by books, so it’s only natural that my characters are, too. What Woody, in The Fall of a Sparrow, finds in the great Homeric poems is a way to affirm the goodness of life without lying or deceiving himself, without affirming spiritual beliefs that he’s not sure about. On the other hand, I like to test the wisdom of the ages against my own personal experience, and that’s the task I set for Rudy in Philosophy Made Simple.
What’s your favorite part of the writing experience?
My favorite part is revising. I think that insight, inspiration, creativity—whatever you want to call it—is more likely to strike in the fifth or sixth draft than in the first.
Are there any persistent themes in your novels?
All my protagonists are torn between the desire to affirm that this world is enough and the sense that there’s some spiritual realm that calls to them from beyond this world. They all like to sing “Mr. Jelly Roll Baker,” and they all write with expensive fountain pens.
Questions and topics for discussion
1. Do you think Rudy’s decision to make a radical change in his life is motivated mainly by his daughters’ having left the family home? Or is his move from Chicago to an avocado farm in Texas more self-motivated, sparked by his first reading of the great philosophers?
2. Is it suprising to you that Rudy a high school graduate in the wholesale produce trade, would be interested in the wisdom of the ages, searching for something beyond the day-to-day? How is his level of education reflected in both his speech patterns and his skepticism about abstraction? Is his age a factor in his attitude? Is his being a Midwesterner? Is the way he addresses life attractive to you?
3. Is Rudy seriously attracted to any of the formal religious traditions that he is confronted with in the course of Philosophy Made Simple—the radio evangelicals who predict the Second Coming, or Father Russell and his nonexistent congregation, or the Hindu priest (the pandit)?
4. Maria is a prostitute who becomes a florist; Siva Singh is a philosopher who requires the best in food and wine. Do you think that Robert Hellenga is making a point about the universality of human nature, beyond class and profession? Are both Maria and Siva, as well as Rudy and other characters in the novel, in thrall to “the mysterious tug of beauty on the human heart” (page 3)?
5. Do you agree with Rudy’s assessment that “for the pandit, everything meant something; for Siva, nothing meant anything” (page 196)?
6. How does Rudy show that he is devoted to his three daughters even though he has moved far away from them? Does his thought “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child” (page 63) strike a chord with you? Do you find his acceptance of his married daughter’s affair justifiable?
7. Norma Jean, an elephant, saves Rudy’s life. Like Lord Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, she seems to be able to remove all obstacles. What are some of Norma Jean’s human characteristics? Do you believe that elephants can cry? How is Norma Jean’s death by a bolt of lightning an extreme example of the workings of fate in the lives of the human characters in Philosophy Made Simple?
8. Early in the novel, Rudy realizes that he is a Platonist and that his wife was an Aristotelian who had no use for a Platonic realm beyond the world of the senses. How is Rudy changed and comforted by the Hindu idea that all life is illusion? How is he affected by the existential notion—embodied in his wife’s blank tapes—that the meaning of our lives is not something we discover “out there” but something we create for ourselves?
9.What is the significance of Rudy’s daughter’s wedding having been carried out in the end by a justice of the peace, rather than by the pandit?
10. Do you think Rudy’s attraction to Nandini, his daughter’s Hindu mother-in-law, is spurred more by her philosophy of life or by her great competence and obvious caretaking instincts? Do you think Rudy and Nandini will meet again? Could Rudy be as content in India as in Texas, considering what he’s learned about both change and life?
11. In the end, what Rudy wants is reality—Kant’s “thing in itself, things as they really are.” One reviewer observed that, in the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, Robert Hellenga and Rudy come down on the side of literature, which is closer to life as we live it than is philosophy. Do you agree with this opinion?
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Robert Hellenga is also the author of the acclaimed novels The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, and Blues Lessons. He was educated at the University of Michigan and Princeton University, and he teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
“Robert Hellenga has done it again: told a straightforward story or ordinary people with ordinary problems and invested it with wit, charm, and extraordinary magic.”
—Valerie Ryan, Seattle Times
RUDY HARRINGTON is ready for a new life. His daughters are grown, his wire has died, and the idea of running an avocado grove in Texas suddenly seems infinitely more appealing than staying in his rambling Midwestern house.
Philosophy Made Simple Page 26
