The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  I knew also that Vernon had decided many years ago to take a certain array of subjects in alphabetical order and, devoting a steady six months to each one, attempt to master it completely. At least, as much as one could master a subject. He made it through one letter of the alphabet and two subjects each year. He had started, sixteen years before, with “art history” and “astronomy” and within a year, aided by a fabulous collection of art slides, portfolios and monographs, and a quite expensive Celestron Ultima telescope, he had acquired the equivalent of a Ph.D in both subjects. No, that’s wrong, because a Ph.D implies a kind of limited academic expertise, a certain narrow, specialized knowledge. Vernon literally knew everything. I recalled from my previous aborted novel that like Willie Stark of All the King’s Men he possessed an elephantine memory: if you quizzed him at breakfast on those thirty books he’d read overnight, he wouldn’t give you many wrong answers. And since art history was my own professional field, I greatly envied Vernon his knowledge of that subject and often wished he would be willing to discuss it with me, if nothing else (especially nothing else). After he had published in Art Bulletin an astounding study of van Gogh drawings proving that van Gogh was not an expressionist after all, I wrote him a nice letter proposing an exchange, either by mail or in person. Jelena answered with a note to the effect that Vernon was totally absorbed with wrapping up his study of botany, running behind schedule, and biochemistry was waiting impatiently for him.

  Another year, and they were followed by chess and Christianity; Jelena provided such an able partner for the former that it did not surprise me to learn that both Vernon and Jelena had acquired Grand Master status as chess players. As for Christianity, the Ingledews, since time immemorial, by tradition and genetic disposition, had been atheists, and Vernon’s profound investigation of the birth and development of a way of belief based upon a Jew of Nazareth named Yeshua was not at all pious or god-fearing but totally objective and scholarly, and he came away from it no less a nonbeliever than ever. The next two subjects, under D, were drama and dance, requiring Vernon and Jelena to spend most of the year in New York City, in order to attend performances. The year he did entomology and English he stayed home in Stay More, and a paper he published in Journal of Insect Behavior on the mating habits of Periplaneta inspired me to write my novel, The Cockroaches of Stay More. (Day told me that Vernon was not at all amused that I called him “Gregor Samsa Ingledew” or Sam, in the novel, and had had him romantically involved with a female cockroach, Tish, who was not at all Jelena.) Vernon’s study of Titus Andronicus has been acknowledged by Harold Bloom in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

  Year by year this “Program” of Vernon’s greatly increased his knowledge of the world and even contributed to the world’s knowledge of itself. His ultimate motive, perhaps, was a theme I had stated toward the end of my architecture novel and which is originally set forth in that Ozark funeral hymn, “Farther Along”: the idea that, farther along, we’ll know all about it, father along we’ll understand why. Vernon really did intend to understand everything eventually, even if he could do only two subjects a year and might have to start all over again when he reached the end of the alphabet. Getting into the F’s, Vernon’s factotum George Dinsmore helped him with some practical applications of his intensive study of finance, and he received much willing help from all the old-timers of Newton County in his study of folklore, which was not limited to Ozark folklore but encompassed that of the whole world. Indeed, Vernon made and published important studies of the parallels between Russian and German folk-tales. Two years were devoted to geology and gods, and history and horses, respectively. (Day reported that Vernon had found horses a more extensive and difficult subject than gods.) When the letters of the alphabet brought Vernon to “I,” he was hard-pressed for a pair of subjects, but settled upon Irish and Indo-European Linguistics, the former requiring Vernon and Jelena to rent a cottage in County Meath for six months, where, according to Day, they made friends with the reclusive and eccentric novelist J.P. Donleavy, once again to my everlasting envy.

  Vernon discovered a clever way to combine his next two subjects, Japanese and journalism. For the five months that he and Jelena spent in Tokyo he was the Japan reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and was invited to become Tokyo bureau chief for the Associated Press at just the time he was getting into knight-errantry and the Koran; he could find no connection between those two other than, of course, that many of the knights had been bent upon destroying Islam. Undoubtedly his study of the former subject required a lively reading of Don Quixote without his realizing that he himself would become quixotic in his eventual quest for the governorship.

  One of the Ls was easy to choose: Latin. He already knew how to read it; even before he’d started his “Program,” his first intensive act of autodidacticism as a young man was to teach himself Latin for the purpose of translating a certain old book, De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, he’d found in a bookstore in Rome on the first wanderjahr that he and Jelena had taken. Latin was a subject I’d flunked in the ninth grade (although I’ve pretended to knowledge of it in some of my books); Vernon was so fluent in it that throughout his Program he had not hesitated to acquire books in Latin on art, cuisine, gods, horses, etc.

  Choosing the other L was a bit more difficult, and he was strongly tempted to pick law. Given his amazing assimilation of all the topics he chose, he could doubtless have been admitted to the Arkansas bar if he had, but he would unknowingly have defeated one of the strongest selling points for his eventual gubernatorial campaign: the very fact that, unlike most of the other candidates, he had no background in law. He also considered the possibility of “locution” and its many subcategories, and perhaps he should have picked that, because when he ran for governor he would discover to his dismay that he had no talent at all for public speaking. But I must stress that all of these topics were undertaken without any inkling on his part that any of them would have any connection with his entry into politics.

  The topic he chose was love. He was to discover that of all the subjects he had devoted himself to, it was the most boundless. A month into his investigation he began to realize that he could never hope to cover it, not even in a lifetime, certainly not in six months. Knowing Latin, he read and reread Ovid on the subject, as well as Seneca and Tibullus. He read Dryden and Stendhal and Goethe and Dickens and Oscar Wilde. He even read Henry Miller. When his eyesight was strained from reading and he needed to close his eyes, he listened to a plethora of love music, from ancient ballads and lays to modern pop and rock and funk.

  His eyes rested, he stared long at certain paintings: Giorgione’s Tempest, Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, Kokoschka’s Tempest, or Bride of the Wind. He even read a few Harlequin romances, just to discover the source of their appeal to the masses.

  As in so many of his courses of study, he enjoyed always the willing assistance of his consort, Jelena, who could not only match him game by game in chess but could match him, pang by pang and throe by throe, in love. He discovered, very quickly, that love can be written about, it can be painted, it can be composed into music, it can certainly be felt, but it cannot be discussed, not between lovers. Lovers can endlessly tell each other how much, how deeply, how endlessly, they love each other, but they cannot discuss love itself and its meaning. One knows love by not knowing it.

  Learning that, Vernon was free. He went on down the alphabet. In recent years, Vernon’s plunge into mathematics and music resulted in actual contributions to the knowledge: Vernon’s paper on “New Approaches to Game Theory Suggested by John von Neumann’s Study of the Rings of Operators in Hilbert Space” appeared in American Journal of Mathematics, and his study of “‘Ranz Des Vaches’ and other Mountain Airs in Relation to Appalachian/Ozark Folk Music” was acknowledged as the inspiration for Benjamin Fisher’s haunting “Symphony No. 2 in C Minor,” which premiered at the New York Philharmonic not so long ago.

  N was for Nature and for nuclear physics.
Oh, he had some fun with “O”: occult and Osage, the latter the name of the tribe who had inhabited Stay More before being displaced by white settlers, principally Vernon’s ancestor, Jacob Ingledew. For years I’d known that Vernon owned and jealously guarded the original holograph of The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew, in which, it may be assumed, that founder of Stay More detailed his earliest encounters not only with the last remaining Osage Indian but especially a brief liaison with that Indian’s squaw which supposedly had resulted in a pregnancy. These things, however, were not part of Vernon’s motive when he undertook to read all the dozens of volumes about the history and culture of the Osages in Missouri, Arkansas, and ultimately their reservation in Oklahoma, especially V. Kelian’s recent Dawn of the Osage, which inspired Vernon to master a speaking ability in the Osage language with the help of Francis La Flesche’s A Dictionary of the Osage Language, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1932, and also by hiring and importing to Stay More from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, for two months, one of the few remaining mixed-blood Osages still fluent in the language. Day wondered if the man, whose name was James Big Eagle, realized that he was temporarily a resident of a hunting ground which had once belonged to his ancestors.

  In alphabetical order, politics comes after philosophy, so Vernon had spent the first half of the previous year trying to read as much as possible of the enormous literature on philosophy, aided by, and starting with, a “popular” classic, Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. The subject of philosophy was almost as deep as the subject of love; it was almost as unknowable. Jelena told Diana that Vernon had doubled his consumption of coffee during this “course of study.” He gleaned some personal mottoes that would come in handy when he got into his next subject. For example: Socrates’ “Let him that would move the world first move himself.” And Francis Bacon’s “It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear: and yet that is commonly the case of Kings.”

  Quite possibly, in his determination to “cover” all the subjects in his Program, he was consciously or unconsciously jumping ahead to the next one. He made frequent note of how the great philosophers had viewed politics, such as Plato’s “The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in government, is to live under the government of bad men.” (Arkansas itself was currently under the thrall of Governor Shoat Bradfield, one of the baddest.)

  The first thing he learned about politics is that, like all art, it is a lie meant to refresh truth. The deceptions of politics, like those of art, are not necessarily meant deceitfully but for the magic regeneration of life. The promises of good politicians are not meant to cheat but to inspire. In every society, there are two kinds of people: those who, like most of us, assume that there is somebody around who is going to take care of everything, and those who believe that the only caretakers are themselves. All politics are based upon the indifference or the apathy of the majority.

  Slowly, as he rapidly devoured writings by Plato, Bacon, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Adams, and Woodrow Wilson, he came to realize that he could no longer be part of the indifferent majority. By the time he began reading such things as Harry Lee Williams’ Forty Years Behind the Scenes in Arkansas Politics and Diane D. Blair’s Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule? he had pretty much made up his mind that he should seek election as Newton County representative to the state legislature, and he was so taken with the notion that he could think of nothing else. George Dinsmore went to Jelena to report that Vernon was just standing out in the middle of one of the pig pastures, not tending his swine but staring off into space. Jelena went and got him and told him that he had been reading too much, or too heavily. She recommended that if he had to read, he ought to read something light, like novels. She reminded him of how much he’d learned about love just by reading Harlequins.

  So he began reading some novels. He ordered from his Internet bookseller a whole slew of political fiction. He started with William Brammer’s The Gay Place, about politics in Texas, and found it so readable that he began to devour a political novel at the rate of several a day, reading Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent and Capable of Honor before lunch, and novels by Salinger—not J.D. but Pierre, who had been Kennedy’s press secretary—in the afternoon, along with Fletcher Knebel, William Safire, and Ward Just at night. He enjoyed Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, based upon that Arkansas governor who had ascended to the presidency. According to his reading schedule, during the days he consumed Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and lesser novels by Jeffrey Archer, Anton Myrer and Stephen Longstreet, he even found time late one night in December, to read my When Angels Rest, which was not, strictly speaking, a political novel, or rather was concerned with the make-believe politics of children, a bunch of kids whose names were all familiar to Vernon because they had attempted to set up a government for the village of Stay More during World War ii, before Vernon was born. He found the novel honest and accurate in its depiction of the village of Stay More and of the way of life then, and he even felt an intense pang of nostalgia for a world he had never known except in his imagination of the way it might have been if he had lived at that time.

  That modest little novel should have convinced him that politics (like the warfare that is its handmaiden) is best left to innocents and idiots and idealists. There is no room in that country for the truly wise.

  But instead he decided that, as he told Jelena at breakfast, the only way he could learn politics was to spend some time as a politician. What she answered is not known, but can be imagined.

  Chapter two

  George Dinsmore took another sip of his bourbon, which didn’t help him figure out an eight-letter word ending in y with the second and third letters as de, meaning a system of beliefs. He didn’t have him a pencil; a-working these goddamn things with a ballpoint pen was like a rattlesnake with piles trying to get home. He could flip over to page 113 of this here Sky magazine and find the answers, but that wouldn’t be honest. Hell’s banjer, he wouldn’t’ve tried the dumb puzzle in the first place except that nobody else before him had already started messing with it, the way you can usually count on some dumbass previous passenger to’ve already screwed up the puzzle before calling it quits when the plane landed. But this here one had been clean until George got aholt of it. Now look at it. And he wouldn’t’ve even started the dadburn puzzle if Boss had been awake for him to talk to. It was the first time in his life he’d ever seen Boss a-sleeping. No kidding, he’d known Boss ever since he was just a little squirt and ever year of his life except the four years George was doing his duty in Vietnam, and he’d even asked his niece Jelena, who lived with Boss, “Don’t he never sleep, even way off of a night in the early hours?” And Jelena had laughed and explained that Vernon sometimes went for days without a wink but usually got on the average four or five hours each night.

  Now Boss was sawing logs so vigorously he didn’t even notice the air pockets this 747 kept hitting, one of them so bad George’s bourbon sloshed onto the laptray and would’ve wet his pants if he hadn’t mopped it up with the napkin. George realized that Boss probably had a good reason for being dead to the world: he was plum wore out from this project, not so much the hard work of it and the flying around from place to place, but the total shuck doodly poo going nowhere of it. It sure was a good thing that Cincinnati was the last stop, the bitter end maybe but down into the short rows, don’t you know? Boss hadn’t made no promises, but George had the feeling that if Cincinnati was a bust they could get their butts on back to Stay More and live happy ever after without any more of this here politics foolishness. George sure did hate to admit it, even to himself, but he had under his hat swore to his niece Jelena, cause she asked him to, that he would do everything in his power to crumb the deal, to louse up the whole project, short of wasting any poor sucker who was dope enough to swallow the bait. George didn’t like being put on the spot like this, being
a two-faced four-flusher, pretending to Boss, who he liked more than any man on this here earth, that he was helping him out at every turn, not to mention costing him a chunk of money for airfares and hotels and eats etsettery, when in fact he was a double agent, working for Jelena, who didn’t want her man wasting his fortune running for governor.

  Not that they couldn’t afford it. Last time George had looked, or that is, the last time that Rowena Coe the bookkeeper had told him, there was so much in the sock or under the mattress, so to speak, that Vernon could shut down the pig works and spend the rest of his life taking Jelena around the world once a week, not to mention buying out the Library of Congress, which he’d likely care to do. Way back in the Seventies, when the money first started rolling in, Boss had got his broker, over to Fayetteville, to buy up no end of Wal-Mart stock, when it was selling for diddly, and now look at it: what with stock splits and the bull market etsettery Boss had come mighty nigh to owning as much of the company as old Sam Walton hisself, rest his bones. So it wasn’t that Jelena was worried the campaign would put them in the poor farm; she just didn’t cotton to the idea of spending so much money on something she didn’t believe in and she wasn’t convinced that Vernon himself believed in.