The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Did I, in my imaginings, substitute for my non-girlfriends’ unconquerable forms the visual stuff I’d gleaned at drawing group? Nope. As much as a T-shirt’s neckline or tube top’s horizon might seem a cruel limit to my wondering gaze, I didn’t want my imagination to supply the pink pebbly fact of aureole and nipple, like those I’d examined under bright light for hours at a time. It wasn’t that I found real women’s bodies unappetizing but that I didn’t have any use for them in the absolute visual sphere within which I’d gained access. Much like a person who’s disappointed or confused at seeing the face attached to the voice of a radio personality well known to their ears, and then realizes that no face would have seemed any more appropriate, I suspect I didn’t really make mental nudie shots of girls my age. I didn’t picture them undressed, I imagined undressing them and the situations in which such a thing would be imaginable. My eyeballs wanted to be fingertips. I was a romantic.

  A romantic teenage boy, that is. My romance encompassed a craving for illicit glimpses, not due to a lack of visual information but as rehearsals of transgression and discovery. A craving for craving, especially in the social context of other teenage boys, that mass of horny romantics. But we’re talking about a terrible low point in the history of teenage access to pornography: Everyone’s dads had canceled their Playboy subscriptions in a feminist epiphany a few years before (that everyone’s dad had once subscribed to Playboy was a golden myth; I trust it was halfway true), and the Internet was a millennium away. A friend and I were actually excited when we discovered a cache of back issues of Sexology, a black-and-white, crypto-scientific pulp magazine, in the plaster and lathe of a ruined brownstone on Wyckoff Street. Pity us. When a couple of snootily gorgeous older teenage girls suddenly moved into the upper duplex of a house on Dean Street, there was some talk among the block’s boys about climbing a nearby tree for a leer, a notion as halcyon-suburban as anything in my childhood. But the London plane trees shading our block had no branches low enough to be climbable, had likely been selected precisely for their resistance to burglars. The point is, I was as thrilled to imagine glimpsing the sisters as any of the other schemers. I could very well have gone off to drawing group the evening of that same day, but made no mental conjugation between the desired object and the wasted abundance before me.

  Only two uneasy memories bridge this gulf, between the eunuch-child who breezed through a world of live nude models and the hormonal disaster site I was the rest of the time. One glitch was the constant threat or promise that a drawing-group model would cancel at the last minute, since tradition had it that one of the circle would volunteer for duty instead. Two of the group’s members were younger women—named, incredibly enough, Hazel and Laurel—for whom I harbored modest but definite boy-to-woman crushes, and with whom I may have managed even to be legibly flirtatious. If one evening a model had canceled and either Hazel or Laurel took her clothes off, I’d likely have been pitched headfirst into the chasm of my disassociation. I never faced this outcome. The only substitute model ever to volunteer on my watch was our host, the hairily cherubic Bobby Ramirez. But I would never forget what didn’t happen, who didn’t undress. You may choose to see this as evidence against my assertion that the scene was not a sexual one for me. I choose to see it as certifying proof of my capacity for fantasizing about clothed women who lingered in the periphery of my vision at the exact instant I ignored naked ones in the center of my vision.

  The second slippage took place not at drawing group but in my room, with my friend Karl. We were fourteen. Karl and I usually drew superhero comics together, but this afternoon, deep into the porn drought of the ’70s, we drifted into trying to produce our own doodling fantasy females without the veil of a cape or utility belt. At one point Karl reached an impasse in his attempt to do justice to the naked lady in his mind’s eye and let me analyze the problem. Yes, the nipples were too small, and placed too high, on the gargantuan breasts Karl had conjured. He’d also too much defaulted to the slim, squared-off frame of the supermen we’d been compulsively perfecting. “Do you mind?” I asked. Taking the drawing from Karl, I compacted and softened the torso and widened the hips, gave his fantasy volume and weight, splitting the difference between the unreal ratio and something more persuasive. He’d handed me a teenage boy’s fantasy and I, a teenage boy, passed back a woman, even if one who’d need back surgery in the long run. Karl and I were both, I think, unnerved, and we never returned to this exact pursuit. Our next crack at DIY porn was retrograde and bawdy, a comic called “Super-Dick,” with images that were barely better than stick figures.

  Confessing for the first time my authorship of Super-Dick, I’m flabbergasted, not at the dereliction of parental authority that would traipse nude women past the gaze of a boy still excited to sketch with ballpoint pen a hieroglyphic cock-and-balls in cape and boots and have it catapult into the obliging hairy face of a villain named Pussy-Man, but at the Möbius strip of consciousness which enabled that boy to walk around believing himself a single person, instead of two, or a hundred. If I’ve bet my life’s work on a suspicion that we live at least as much in our wishes and dreams, our constructions and projections, as we do in any real waking life the existence of which we can demonstrate by rapping it with our knuckles, perhaps my non-utilization of the live nude models helped me place the bet. How could I ever be astonished to see how we human animals slide into the vicarious at the faintest invitation, leaving vast flaming puddings of the Real uneaten? I did.

  My last year at Music & Art a teacher booked a nude model for us to draw in an advanced drawing class, one consisting only of graduating seniors. By chance this was the last time I’d ever sketch from a nude model, though I couldn’t have known it at the time. By implication this was a privilege we seniors had earned after four years of art school: to be treated like adults. Still, there was plenty of nervous joking in the days before, and when the moment came, the doors and windows were kept carefully shaded against eyes other than those of us in the class. Needless to say, I felt blasé for several reasons, not least my own recent sexual initiation. I’d also begun to reformat myself as a future writer, rather than an apprentice artist (at seventeen I’d already been an apprentice artist a long time), and everything to do with my final high-school semester felt beneath my serious attention.

  Yet ironically, I’ll never forget the model that day. I remember her body when I’ve forgotten the others—had forgotten them, usually, by the time I’d begun spraying fixative on my last drawing of them, before they’d finished dressing. I remember her not because she was either uncannily gorgeous or ugly, or because I experienced some disconcerting arousal, but for an eye-grabbing anatomical feature: the most protuberant clitoris I’d seen, or have since. This wasn’t something I could have found the language to explain to my fellow students that day, if I wanted to (I didn’t). The model showed no discomfort with her body. She posed, beneath vile fluorescent, and standing atop the wobbling, standard-issue New York Department of Education tables I’d been around my whole life, the four legs of which never seemed capable of reaching the floor simultaneously, and we thirty-odd teenagers drew her, the whole of us sober, respectfully hushed, a trace bored if you were me, but anyhow living up to the teacher’s expectation. But I do remember thinking: I know and they don’t. (The boys, that would be who I meant.) I remember thinking: They’ll think they’re all that way.

  On a Photograph of My Father

  The picture floats. Someone took it in the ’70s, the white backdrop gives no clue. My dad owned that wide-lapel trench coat for fifteen or twenty years, typical thrifty child of the Depression. (He probably tried to give it to me at some point.) The beard’s trim narrows the time frame slightly, that slightly rakish full goatee. So often later he wouldn’t have bothered to shave his jaw to shape it. Put this in the early ’70s. Somehow it floated into my collection of paper trinkets, ferried off to college, then to California for a decade. The only copy. By the time I showed it to my father, last w
eek, he hadn’t seen the photograph for thirty-odd years. He couldn’t be sure of the photographer, guessing at three friends with comically overlapping names—Bobby Ramirez, Bob Brooks, Geoff Brooks. (I remember all three of them, beloved rascals from my parents’ hippie posse.) He settled at last on Geoff Brooks, so that’s the credit we’ll give it. The picture was never framed nor mounted in an album, just survived shifted from file cabinet to cardboard box to file cabinet all this time. A scrap of Scotch tape on the left corner reminds me I had it taped up over a desk in Berkeley at some point. In a family that after my mother’s death scattered itself and its memorabilia to far corners of the planet, and reassembles now sporadically and sloppily, the picture’s a survivor. But I’ve lived with it for thirty years, gazed into its eyes as often, strange to say, as I have my father’s living eyes.

  And it shows Richard Lethem as I dream him, my idol. His midwestern kindness, prairie-gazer’s soul, but come to the city, donning the beatnik garb, become the painter and poet and political activist he made himself, a man of the city. When I first knew my parents they were, paradoxically, just the two most exciting adults on the scene, part of a pantheon of artists and activists and students staying up late around the dinner table and often crashing afterward in the extra rooms of the house. My parents were both the two I had the best access to and the coolest to know, the hub of the wheel. I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys. The picture shows my dad meeting the eyes of a member of his gang, both of them feeling their oats, knowing they were the leading edge of the world. I wanted him to look at me that way. He often did.

  —Granta, 2010

  Hazel

  Oh, Hazel, you’re making me crazy and lazy and hazy! Hazel, I think I love you! Hazel, you were the beginning of sex to me, a boy’s love for an adult woman’s mystery. I’m a little drunk on you, when I dim the lights and let the memories flood in … Hazel you are a Gypsy dancer … but let me try to explain.

  My eyes are blue. Blue-gray. My father, a midwestern Quaker, has blue eyes. My Jewish mother had eyes that were something other. Brown, I would have said. My brother ended up with these eyes, too. Hazel, my parents both explained. This was important. Look for the green in the brown, the shimmer—that’s Hazel. I tried, I looked. I pretended to see it, gazing into my mother’s eyes, yes, sure, it’s there—Hazel. They looked brown to me.

  I associated this with a game of my mother’s, another trick of gaze: She’d put her nose to mine so that our faces were too near to see in focus and say, with bullying enthusiasm, “See the owl! Do you see the owl? It’s an owl, do you see it?” I never could see the owl. A blur, a cyclops, maybe a moth, but never an owl. I didn’t know how to look for the owl. But I didn’t know how to refuse: “Yes, I see the owl!” It was the same with Hazel. I saw and I didn’t see. I saw the idea: something green in the brown, a richness, something Jewish and enviable and special, not mere brown eyes. The notion of Hazel balanced, in our family, against the specialness of blue eyes, it stood for everything that wasn’t obvious in the sum of advantages or virtues between two parents. Hazel was my mother’s beatnik Jewish side, her soulfulness. I granted it—I was in love with it! So Hazel was my first imaginary color, before Infrared, before Ultraviolet, and more sticky and stirring than either of those: Hazel is to Ultraviolet as Marijuana is to Cocaine, as Patchouli is to Obsession. My mother wore patchouli—it smelled Hazel.

  My next Hazel was when I was fourteen or fifteen. My father is a painter, and I was following in his footsteps. He had a drawing group every Thursday night. I’d go and draw, sitting in the circle of artists, the one kid allowed. From the nude model. A mixed experience, a rich one. I was sneaking looks for hours at a time, in plain sight. This was the ’70s. I demanded they treat me as an adult, and I was obliged. And there were two beautiful women, artists, who sat in the circle and drew from the model as well: Laurel and Hazel. Like the names of two rabbits. Laurel was blond and Hazel dark, no kidding. I loved them both, mad crushes. Again, an intoxicating mix, the nude before me, blinding my eyes, Hazel and Laurel my peers in the circle. The model would finish with a pose and you’d go around, murmuring approval of one another’s drawings, pointing out flourishes. Crushes on your parents’ female friends, when you’re a hippie child, mash mothery feeling with earthy first stirrings of lust—you’re not afraid of women’s bodies, when you’re a hippie child. That’s got to be invented later, retroactively. I took showers outdoors with nudists, it was all good. Hazel was waiting for me, she was in store.

  Then the Dylan song, of course, from Planet Waves. “Hazel.” Planet Waves I’d put with New Morning and Desire, the three records of Dylan’s most saturated with hippie aesthetics, the sexy Gypsy stuff, the handkerchief-on-the-head phase. “Hazel” is a ragged, tumbling song of lust, that Rick Danko organ sound: “You got something I want plenty of …” And from the same record, another lyric: “It was hotter than a crotch …” My mother loved Dylan, so it all folded together, the hot murk of Hazel, what I’d never seen but was ready to see, the green in the brown, Hazel, Dolores Haze-l, oh, I long for you still, you were the beaded, reeking initiation I never quite had, girls with potter’s clay under their fingers, maybe, girls who when they danced spun in whirling skirts, and sex outdoors with bugs around and the sun in hazel eyes. And at night we’d see the owl, I was sure. Instead by the time I was ready it was an infrared or ultraviolet world, we danced with knock-kneed Elvis Costello jerks, sneering at Hazel, those grubby Deadhead girls in the next dorm, and made out with short-haired punks in cocaine fluorescent light. We reinvented body-fear, pale anomic anorexic sex-ambivalence. Hazel might be having all the fun, but she was shameful now, David Byrne had explained the problem perfectly. I pretended I’d never known her, and I hadn’t—only trusted she’d be there, and detected the patchouli scent of her promise to me, the promise I failed to keep. Hazel, I never saw you.

  —Cabinet, 2002

  VI

  9/11 AND BOOK TOUR

  I’m eternally grateful to my past influences

  But they will not free me

  I am not diseased

  All the people ask me

  How I wrote Elastic Man

  —The Fall, “How I Wrote Elastic Man”

  I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose; he shares these preferences, but with a vanity that turns them into the attributes of an actor.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Borges and I”

  Back to the slow train wreck of a self-reflexive public life. What in god’s name are these two things—9/11 and book tour—doing in the same place? My fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won a big award at the start of 2000, and my sixth, The Fortress of Solitude, best-sold in 2003. In between, something happened. Well, a few things. In the year before and the three after the terrorist attacks it was my luck to be granted the most and the pleasantest literary celebrity I could ever have imagined for myself, as a specifically “New York writer” (there’d be no reason for anyone to bother recalling I’d been a “Bay Area writer” before). I savored every part of this, even as I was bewildered at relinquishing lifelong preparations to be a neglected artist.

  My response was obliging. I said yes to things for ten years. I’m still sorting through the results of that (specifically, by making this book). No complaints: Nobody told me to do anything. But the timing was such that among the first things nobody told me to do, only asked, was write and speak and be interviewed on the subject of the city after the attacks. It was a weird fate for someone whose brashest public pronouncements to that point had been to inform folks in the bar of the Radisson that they had more in common with Italo Calvino and Angela Carter and Don DeLillo than they knew, to the reward of pitying smiles.

  Nine Failures of the Imagination

  1. It began for me here, in the same room where I sit now, in Boerum Hill. It began as a non sequitur crackle of sunlight thunder, on a gorgeous mo
rning after an evening of thunderstorms. I ignored the sound, took a shower instead, wondering about the sports page: Had Roger Clemens won his twentieth? The phone rang, and a friend asked, “Did you see it?” So I went to the window, and saw. In this part of Brooklyn the towers are the nearest bit of Manhattan, easily visible from upper stories or rooftops. Neighbors commute—excuse me, commuted—to them by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Both planes had arrived by the time I looked out the window. My under-caffeinated denial slid from the fact of it—they’re on fire, wow—to tangential irritations, stuff I had to get done this week. I’d reenact this denial again and again in the next hours: the mind’s raw disinclination to grant this new actuality, cognitive dissonance run riot. I’d entered—we’d all entered—a world containing a fresh category of phenomena: the unimaginable fact.

  2. For the first forty hours of this war all I’ve done is shuttle between my apartment on Bergen Street, the homes of a few nearby friends, and the front-row seat provided by the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a rim of park that looks out over the tip of Manhattan. All I’ve done, really, is try again and again to grasp the unimaginable fact. I’ve stared across the river at the raw, unmediated plume, now black, now white, now gray, now black again. I’ve stared and stared and felt my mind slide from it again and again: unimaginable fact, confirmed by senses and testimony, confirmed by the procession of ash-bathed faces shambling through the neighborhood after crossing the bridge, confirmed by the television and yet granted no status by reeling, refusing mind. No status whatsoever. Turning from the plume to the television, I try again: Maybe CNN can sell it to me with their video loop, plane slicing cake of tower forever, the footage more ferociously lush and inevitable every time. I’ll understand this fact soon, yes? No. No. Back to the Promenade, then, to contemplation of my lovely plume, Manhattan’s inverted Fuji of roiling particles. And now back to the television.