Curiouser and curiouser: the character of ‘Iris’ is not only Siri Hustvedt in semi-transparent disguise, but a character in her own novel Blindfold (published in 1994); Auster, she has told interviewers, asked her permission for the characters to marry. And in a later novel, What I Loved (2003), she draws on some of the same shared experience with Auster – the case of an apparently charming and honest adolescent boy who ultimately proved to be a sociopath – that provided him with some raw material for Leviathan.
And somewhere behind the characters of Sachs and Dimaggio stands the strange and ragged figure of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.
7 Terror
He didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell that he supported Berkman, that he believed there was a moral justification for certain forms of political violence. Terrorism had its place in the struggle, so to speak. If used correctly, it could be an effective tool for dramatising the issues at stake, for enlightening the public about the nature of institutionalised power.
Written almost exactly a decade before the killers flew across the sky and into Manhattan’s highest buildings, Leviathan frets at thoughts of domestic rather than imported, Jihadist terrorism. Even so, the novel now seems at least modestly prophetic of the early twenty-first century and the mental climate of the War on Terror. The passing of a decade deepened rather than diminished its power. Ezra Pound’s famous claim that artists are the antennae of the race now seems almost as dated and puffed-up as Shelley’s contention that poets are our unacknowledged legislators. But isn’t it one sign of a good novel that it should be sufficiently alert to new things in spirit of the age – its novelties, small and large – that it will come to seem newly pertinent when the seeds mature and the times suddenly, terribly, change?
There is a strong autobiographical component here. In Hand to Mouth, Auster recalls how, in the summer of 1969, he walked into a post office and idly looked at the FBI’s list of ten most wanted men. He knew seven of them. From early 1968 until the summer of the following year, Auster’s alma mater, Columbia, had become one of the most turbulent universities in the nation: sit-ins, demonstrations, occupations and riots were the order of the day. Auster himself, too much a solitary to submerge himself altogether in the self-styled ‘revolution’, was no more than a sympathetic onlooker throughout most of this, but he was none the less appalled by the plight of those who became ‘casualties of their own righteousness and noble intentions’; ‘the human loss’, he says, ‘was catastrophic’, and he names three losses in particular.
Mark Rudd, one of his childhood friends, joined the Weather Underground and had to spend more than a decade in hiding from the law. Dave Gilbert, ‘an SDS spokesman whose speeches had impressed me as models of insight and intelligence’, was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison for his part in a politically motivated bank robbery. And, most pertinently for Leviathan, there was Ted Gold, who ‘blew himself to smithereens in a West Village brownstone when the bomb he was building accidentally went off’. There but for the grace of … coincidence? Leviathan is an act of imaginative sympathy with those clever, ardent young men and others like them around the world.
At least one critic has pointed out that Leviathan may be read as a reply to Don DeLillo’s Mao II – another book about writers and terrorists and their unelected affinities. Here is an angry remark by DeLillo’s protagonist Bill Gray, an ageing writer who, in the Salinger/Pynchon tradition, has shunned all publicity for many years, and lives an anchorite life of perpetual tinkering with a novel he will never be able to release to the world:
‘There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence … Years ago I used to think that it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.’
Other characters muse in similar vein: ‘And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels?’ asks one of them. ‘Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don’t abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It’s the only honest word to use.’
This is a character’s outburst, not DeLillo’s. One doubts that Miss Austen would have thought it a sensible view. Would Conrad? Dostovesky? Bely? Or any of the other novelists who embraced acts of terrorism in their novels if not in their hearts and minds? Surely, many of us would reply, it is the job of the novelist not to be partisan but to be myriad-minded – to take imaginative hold of the colonial policeman and the landlord as well as the desperate bomber? Can it really be true that, in our times, the law of the Black Ox should take priority over all other claims? Or is that just facile extremism, masochistic posturing … in a well-worn phrase, Radical Chic?
These are not cosy matters. And novels are not wholly about consolation and escape.
8 Name dropping
He was a great one for turning facts into metaphors, and since he always had an abundance of facts at his disposal, he could bombard you with a never-ending supply of strange historical connections, yoking together the most far-flung people and events. Once, for example, he told me that during Peter Kropotkin’s first visit to the United States in the 1890s, Mrs Jefferson Davis, the wife of the Confederate president, requested a meeting with the famous anarchist prince. That was bizarre enough, Sachs said, but then, just minutes after Kropotkin arrived at Mrs Davis’s house, who else should turn up but Booker T. Washington?
Only Sachs could have informed you that when the film actress Louise Brooks was growing up in a small town in Kansas at the beginning of the century, her next-door playmate was Vivian Vance, the same woman who later starred in the I Love Lucy show.
Leviathan is not a didactic novel; not, at any rate, in the sense that it ‘teaches’ any neatly paraphrasable doctrine or argues a party line. It does, however, fairly consistently instruct us about things, or at any rate suggest lines of future enquiry for the lively reader. (Anthony Burgess once pointed out that a very reasonable reason for reading novels is to educate oneself painlessly about the state of the world. Hundreds of tons of mass-market fiction are sold on the promise of telling people how the CIA works, or how autopsies are conducted, or how drug cartels operate.) So we are told, for instance, that Fanny had ‘an abiding passion for such artists as Ryder, Church, Blakelock and Cole’. Ryder, we find out further down that page, was Albert Pinkham Ryder. (An almost identical list of painters appears in Moon Palace.) The doorway to further erudition has been opened for us, should we choose to enquire more deeply.
If you are curious, here are some of the other names scattered across its pages: Hugo Ball, Admiral Peary, Emma Lazarus, Sitting Bull, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Pulitzer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Auguste Bartholdi, Catherine Weldon, Rose Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ellery Channing, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman (Sachs quotes him: ‘Grant stood by me when I was crazy, I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always’), Grand Duke Alexis, ‘Moose’ Skowron, Bakunin … and Alexander Berkman (Sachs takes Berkman’s name when on the run). Less than thoroughly well-versed in the minutiae of American anarchism, I wondered whether the last of these names was a real person, and whether the brief biography of his life given in Leviathan is accurate. The facts checked out.
One final name-check: Sir Walter Raleigh. ‘He was fond of saying that a poet was responsible for bringing his mother’s family to Boston, but that was only a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, the man who introduced the potato to Ireland and hence had caused the blight that occurred three hundred years later.’
All of Auster’s major work
s include at least one allusion to Raleigh.
Not everyone knows that. As Sachs might have said.
9 The American Grain
’Too many years without baseball, I suppose. If you don’t get your ration of double plays and home runs it can begin to dry up your spirit.’
So Aaron to Sachs, explaining on their first meeting why he felt it was time to return from France. This is not just guy stuff, male bonding between bookish chaps who want to seem like regular dudes. Like his friend Don DeLillo, Auster has had a lifelong passion for the holy American game. One day some one will no doubt write a thesis on Auster and baseball; there is certainly no shortage of material. His first completed work of fiction, published under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, was a thriller set in the baseball world, Squeeze Play; in his years of poverty, he devised and tried to market a card came, Baseball Action; he has even suggested that he owes his vocation as a writer to a disappointment he experienced at the age of eight. At his first major-league game, the boy Auster approached Willy Mays and asked for his autograph. Alas, no one had a pen or pencil, and from that point on, Auster took always to carrying a pencil with him. Books became inevitable.
Baseball plays a relatively minor part in Leviathan, though one of its secondary characters is called Dimaggio, and he is killed – how pleasant it is to report that this does not feel like a cunningly planted ‘symbol’ – by a blow from a baseball bat. But the book teems with other types of Americana, from the Emerson quotation onwards: Aaron refers to Ichabod Crane, to John Brown, to ‘Rip van Winkle’, to Huckleberry Finn, to Ishmael, to Daniel Boone … and, again and again, to the Statue of Liberty. One of the other poisonous heritages of the Reagan (and, we can safely extrapolate, Bush Sr and Jr) ideology as Aaron and Sachs see it is that the forces of moronic, chest-pounding Americanism have taken out a monopoly on patriotism, and can see those who are compelled to dissent as treacherous scum. But Sachs, and Aaron, are tormented by their country precisely because of their passionate love for what it is and what it can be.
For the past hundred years, it [the Statue of Liberty] has transcended politics and ideology, standing at the threshold of our country as an emblem of all that is good within us. It represents hope rather than reality, faith rather than facts, and one would be hard-pressed to find a single person willing to denounce the things it stands for: democracy, freedom, equality under the law. It is the best of what America has to offer the world, and however pained one might be by America’s failure to live up to those ideals, the ideals themselves are not in question. They have given comfort to millions. They have instilled the hope in all of us that we might one day live in a better world.
Leviathan is a noble attempt to yank patriotism back out of the hands of the yahoos.
10 Secret dungeons
If I’m wrong about this, then everything I’ve written so far is rubbish, a heap of irrelevant musings. Perhaps Ben’s life did break in two that night, dividing into a distinct before and after – in which case everything from before can be struck from the record. But if that’s true, it means that human behaviour makes no sense. It would mean that nothing can be understood about anything.
And perhaps everything I have written in this short attempt at detailed praise is also rubbish, a heap of irrelevant musings. Relevant or not, they are the musings that Leviathan prompted in me when I first read it, greedily, and are prompted in me every time I re-read it, with deepening satisfaction. Unlike mass-market fiction, it makes no attempt to tie up loose ends, or to fill every gap and crack with narrative plaster. What was Lillian up to in the daytimes, when she told Sachs she was working as a masseuse? Who knows? And – in a strictly non-cynical sense – who cares? Perhaps Auster himself could not provide the answers. Some questions are not appropriate; they are almost impertinent. It doesn’t seem to me that Leviathan is a radically sceptical novel – it does not endorse Aaron’s anxiety, and simply pronounce the sweeping verdict that ‘nothing can be understood about anything’. It does, though, imply that, no matter how banal our lives, we all live deep in mystery. That there is only so much we can ever hope to know, even of the people we are closest to, even of ourselves.
And what is true of people is just as true of works of the imagination, like novels. Beyond a certain point, persistence in enquiry becomes boorish, silly, annoying. There are enigmas – ‘secret dungeons’ – in Leviathan that ought to remain so: the pleasure of a puzzle is that it must never be more than partly solved, which is why the Giaconda is one of the greatest hits of Western art. As a French poet once put it, the poem resists its annihilation into meaning. (Which is not to say that it is meaningless, but that it fights to preserve its most recondite treasures.) A good novel may reawaken us to the oddity and richness of the world, sometimes perceptible even at its most humdrum moments. Leviathan – I hope this much, at least, is clear by now – is an exceptionally good novel.
10 Ross Thomas, Briarpatch
MICHAEL WOOD
I
In one of Ross Thomas’s last novels, Twilight at Mac’s Place, published in 1990, five years before his death, a man leaves a curious legacy to his son. The man is – or was; the story opens with his thinly attended funeral in Arlington, Virginia – a CIA operative and his legacy is a detailed memoir of his career. The son understands immediately. His father didn’t have any money to bequeath him so he bequeathed him the means to get some. He is to sell the memoir to the highest bidder, who is likely to bid very high – not in order to publish the book but to make sure no one does. The bids start to come in straight away, and the narrative escalates into a series of murders and a proliferation of feints and disguises, including a second typescript of the touted memoir.
The set-up offers an elegant fable about the price and power of silence in certain circles; but the wit of the dead man’s scheme goes much further. He has understood that in such situations the goal may be cash for silence but the true authority, almost the only indispensable player in the game, is rumour. To activate it you don’t need to write a memoir, you need just to be thought to have written one. When the son and his lawyer open the box containing the supposedly troublesome text they find almost four hundred pages. On the first page there is a title, Mercenary Calling, and a note establishing copyright. On the second page there is an epigraph from Housman, giving a context for the title:
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages and are dead.
On the third page is a dedication to the man’s son. And on the fourth are the words ‘Chapter One’, followed by ‘I have had an exceedingly interesting life and, looking back, have no regrets. Or almost none’. There is nothing else on the page, or on any of the other pages, although all of them are scrupulously numbered. We see the style of the man’s mind in the form of the joke. Strictly, for the launch of a rumour, he didn’t need a title, or a box, or paper. But he wanted to sign his non-existent book, he wanted his son not only to get the point and the money but also to share the intricate working of the trick. In this sense the memoir does exist; its blank pages evoke all the details the would-be buyers are afraid it will provide, and the epigraph seems to know all about the late twentieth-century adventures of the United States in Indo-China, which is where the man did much of his work, and where the not-to-be-known stories had their day.
This location (and this fear) remind us that rumour is not quite the only indispensable player. Someone has to worry about the rumoured revelation and to act on that worry. The memoir may be fictive or absent, but the tales it might tell must be true, and in need of disavowal.
No one explores and inhabits this shifting territory, where the imaginary gets entangled in the real because of what the real has been up to, better than Ross Thomas, at least in the territory’s American mapping. He writes crime novels, not political thrillers, but his characters live on the edge of, or in the aftermath o
f, politics and war. Whether the institution is an intelligence agency, an American trade union, a police department, a newspaper, the army, or a congressional committee, there is always illicit money to be made, and there are often inducements even better than money – a hold over powerful people, for example. Thomas seems to know just how such things are done, and he probably does, since after his wartime service in the Philippines he worked in American intelligence, in advertising, in union copywriting and in Washington and regional politics. Then at the age of forty – he was born in Oklahoma City in 1926 – he became a writer of fiction, and published twenty novels over the next twenty-eight years. Twenty novels as Ross Thomas, that is. He also published five under the name of Oliver Bleeck.
But the great interest of these works lies not in their inside knowledge, however real or unreal it is; it lies in the shape and movement of the world Thomas has made out of these scams, deals, capers and deaths, the fictional universe that is all his own. His tradition, as I have said, is that of the American crime novel, whose patron saints are Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and whose archbishops are Ross Macdonald and Elmore Leonard. All of these writers can seem at times more gripping and urgent than Thomas is, but none has his ease or range or his almost scholarly sense of the varieties of moral corruption. He likes crooks – or likes to watch them at work and think about them. He suggests fine distinctions among devious modes of honour, and often allows us to contemplate the outrageous lack of any such notion. Even the seediest and nastiest of his figures commands his full, unmoralising attention. He paints no purely good guys, and is closest to Leonard in this respect. Where the chief characters of the other writers I have just mentioned are defined by unorthodox but unmistakable virtues, Thomas’s heroes find their very virtues snarled in ruthlessness, and we are often alerted, early in the novels, to the coldness in their eyes. ‘Down these mean streets,’ Chandler famously wrote, ‘a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ There is plenty of tarnish and fear in Thomas. His motto might be that only people we would call mean have any sort of chance on his streets, but some people are meaner than others.
The Good of the Novel Page 17
