The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  The terror of the scene is intricate, for we suspect these fantasies are as much re-creations as revisions of past reality. Elsewhere Uncle Julian muses aloud about whether Merricat has been too utterly adored to develop a conscience. The motif links Castle to the midcentury’s crypto-feminist wave of child-as-devil tales like The Bad Seed and Rosemary’s Baby, and to the sister-horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jackson’s book is The Bad Seed as rewritten by Pinter or Beckett—indeed, Jackson’s vision of human life as a squatter’s inheritance in a diminishing castle recalls the before-and-after of the two acts of Happy Days, where Beckett’s Winnie, first buried up to her waist, and then to her neck, boasts: “This is what I find so wonderful. The way man adapts himself. To changing conditions.” As Constance and Merricat’s world shrinks it grows more defiantly self-possessed, and as threatening elements are purged their castle gains in representative accuracy as a model of the (dual) self. When at last the villagers repent of their cruelty and begin gifting the castle’s doorstep with cooked meals and baked goods, the situation mirrors that of Merricat’s playacting in the summerhouse—only this time the offerings laid at her feet are real, not imaginary. The world has obliged and placed a crown on Merricat’s head. Her empire is stasis.

  —Introduction for We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 2006

  Thursday

  How do you autopsy a somersault? G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is one of the great stunts ever performed in literary space, one still unfurling anytime you glance at it, as perfectly fresh and eloquent as a Buster Keaton pratfall. The book constructs its own absolute and preposterous terms in the manner found most often in certain children’s books, Alice in Wonderland, or The Phantom Tollbooth, or Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child. Like those books, it offers the possibility of being about everything and nothing at once, and vanishes at the end with the air of a dream. Like them it begs to be reread.

  Description is appropriately impossible, except by a series of exclusions. Kingsley Amis called Thursday “not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but it has something of all three.” To that I’d add: not quite a roman noir, nor a simplistic religious allegory, nor—despite Chesterton’s subtitle—a nightmare. It’s much too complete and legible to be a nightmare, and, really, too happy—yet far too personal and strange to parse as an allegory of Chesterton’s Catholicism. For a while it does resemble a kind of Dickensian noir, but the stakes are all wrong. A noir exalts sex and money, and no two things could be further off Chesterton’s radar. Here, villain and MacGuffin are combined in one being in the monstrous and godlike figure of Sunday, the president of the Anarchist Council. If Thursday’s a version of The Maltese Falcon, it’s one in which Sydney Greenstreet is encrusted head-to-toe in precious rubies and disguised with black enamel, to then steal away with the booty of himself.

  Of course, there aren’t really characters in Thursday, not any more than there are characters in Lewis Carroll, or in a drawing by M. C. Escher, or in John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus.” This is definitely an “I-am-you-and-you-are-me-and-we-are-all-together, joo joo ga joob” sort of world. But there are characterizations, and those are dashed off with a breezy, almost distracted assurance: Gabriel Syme, the insouciant and mild poet-policeman, feels wonderfully individual from his opposite number, the soapbox orator and sole true anarchist, the blazing and Blakean Lucian Gregory. Nevertheless, the reader understands instantly that the two are essentially Chesterton’s two natures, given form as philosophical sprites and pitted against each other. Chesterton loved argument, and his arguers are lovers, or at least twinned souls.

  The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton’s nutty novelistic agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn’t be interesting at all, though, if he didn’t also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body. You know he’s been tempted by these things; you feel it in how adoringly he loathes them. President Sunday, that huge gorgon of darkness, induces horror and desolation in Chesterton’s heroes, but they’re also drawn to him as toward a black sun.

  The book begins with Syme and Gregory in an open-air debate in the London suburb of Saffron Park, bathed in a glow of sunset which establishes the surrealistically oversaturated descriptive atmosphere once and for all: “All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face.” Right at the start the book threatens to be all charming talk—and I do mean charming: Chesterton’s is sophistry you’d listen to forever. The two poets debate art and anarchy and the fate of the world and insult each other like a couple of affectionate spin doctors on cable television, working themselves up to the point where they’ve just got to hurry off together to a pub. Sort of like college. It’s then, though, that things get beautifully weird. The table they’ve seated themselves at slowly begins to rotate, until it corkscrews into an underground passage. There, Gregory explains, a secret anarchist cell will gather that very evening to elect a new Thursday to the Great Anarchist Counsel of all Europe, which has seven members, each named for a day of the week.

  That kicks off the most spectacular sequence of bluff-calling in literature: Gregory calling Syme’s bluffs, Syme calling Gregory’s in return, and most of all Chesterton calling his own imaginative and ontological bluffs until he reaches the highest levels of straight-faced improbability. The invention is breathless, and so’s our man Syme, as he dodges and twists through ominous breakfasts, freak snowstorms, battles on beaches and in forests, shadowy pursuits by relentless, street-stalking figures, and a sword battle conducted in a time trial with an approaching locomotive and against an opponent who never bleeds. The garish cast of spies and policemen trade places with innocuous ease, and the conversation is always somehow droll and hysterically doomy at once. The trick to Chesterton is that he takes himself and his notions at face value, only every face is a mask with another mask underneath. It’s been pointed out again and again that Chesterton advances his arguments, as well as his stories, by the use of paradox. What’s less frequently noted is his furious use of velocity. The book has the compression of a three-minute Warner Brothers epic like Duck Amuck.

  Because of his fondness for paradox, and for the stark and shuddering sense of aloneness in an indifferent universe which tends to come over Gabriel Syme every third page or so, Thursday’s been much compared to the novels of Kafka. C. S. Lewis was the first to make this identification, and I can understand why it stuck, but the comparison’s viable only if taken as another Chestertonian inversion: Chesterton’s the anti-Kafka, really. He may tease you for a while with the possibility of never reaching the Castle, but his conclusion—not to give anything away, I hope—is that it’s impossible not to reach the Castle, because you’ve been inside it the entire time. The only question left is whether there is an outside to the Castle. Lucian Gregory would claim so, but I doubt Chesterton would be likely to agree with him. Kafka himself read Chesterton and detected the humming engine of optimism at the book’s core, saying, “He is so gay, one might almost believe he had found God.” Gay’s an excellent word. The books trills with Chesterton’s happiness. The miracle—assuming you believe in miracles—is that it’s never smug. Chesterton is so thrilled by his acrobatic stroll along the razor’s edge of nihilism that he earns his sunniness anew on every page.

  Why not put The Man Who Was Thursday in its real context? The book was published in England in the same year as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and in some ways it describes a perfect midpoint between the two better-known books. The pre–Great War London full of revolutionaries with bombs in their coats and young men drunk on radical philosophies that Conrad and Ches
terton describe is eerily identical, and confirms an element of realism in Thursday it would otherwise be easy to overlook. The Conrad feels more culturally prescient because he cast his book as a tragedy—and because his terrorists drew real blood—but it’s the same early whiff of twentieth-century horrors both writers have tasted in the air. Seen from the other perspective, Chesterton’s young men are seduced to anarchism much as Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows is seduced away from a quiet life by the riverside by the obnoxious craze for motorcars. That is to say, in both Thursday and Willows the damage is reversible, the genie may be put back in the bottle. Motorcars might be renounced, and weasels and stoats driven from Toad Hall. Once the real weasels ran amok in Europe a bit later, it became hard to imagine anyone as serious as Chesterton writing such a reassuring book except as an act of nostalgia.

  Antidote to Conrad, or The Wind in the Willows for grown-ups, have your pick. Either way, this really is one of the great books of reassurance and consolation—maybe one of the only great books of reassurance and consolation. As John Carey writes, “Usually we feel superior to innocence, associating it with stupidity. But in Chesterton’s case that will not work. If you think yourself cleverer than him, the odds are about ten million to one that you are wrong.” Chesterton subtitles Thursday “A Nightmare” and prefaces it with a poem to his friend Edmund Clerihew Bentley, which suggests he feels he’s finally tackled a certain morbid part of himself, as if in writing Thursday he’d confronted a specter out of his mad, bad, dangerous, and gloomy youth: “This is a tale of these old fears / Even of those emptied hells, / And none but you shall understand / The true thing that it tells.” Yet the book is cheering because it feels, like the poem, retrospective: You sense Chesterton’s long since put the possibilities of despair and suicide—even doubt—firmly out of reach by the time of writing. His giddy and paranoiac soufflé is evidence, finally, of a man making grotesque and hilarious faces in the mirror, freaking himself out completely, then turning to his desk and diligently, elaborately, and brilliantly explaining the faces away.

  —Introduction for The Man Who Was Thursday, 2001

  My Disappointment Critic

  The job of the regular daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious intermittent critic, who writes only when he is asked to or genuinely moved to, in limited ways and for only a limited period of time … What usually happens is that (the staff critic) writes for some time at his highest level: reporting and characterizing accurately … and producing insights, and allusions, which, if they are not downright brilliant, are apposite … What happens after a longer time is that he settles down. The simple truth—this is okay, this is not okay, this is vile, this resembles that, this is good indeed, this is unspeakable—is not a day’s work for a thinking adult. Some critics go shrill. Others go stale. A lot go simultaneously shrill and stale. A few critics, writing quietly and well, bring something extra into their work … Some staff critics quit and choose to work flat out again, on other interests and in intermittent pieces. By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis …

  —RENATA ADLER, “The Perils of Pauline”

  As Bloom has settled into this second career, so his old virtues have gradually fallen from him. An extraordinary amount of the work of the last decade is luxurious with padding and superfluity; there is hardly a book of his that would not have been better off as an essay. He is not a critic anymore, but a populist appreciator … Above all, for Bloom, writers must be ranked, and the greatness of the very greatest asserted again and again. Moreover, all great writers are essentially alike.

  —JAMES WOOD

  The house of fiction, as Henry James once said, has “not one window, but a million,” and hence no single aperture gives access to what James called “the need of the individual vision and the pressure of the individual will.” Different novelists look to different models. Fielding, Sterne, and Stendhal set the pattern for the ironic or self-conscious novel, flaunting its own narrative devices. Balzac became the great exemplar of the social novel, as Scott and Manzoni did for the historical novel. Tolstoy’s deceptive simplicity transformed style into a transparent window on the real. Kafka’s metaphorical novels and stories turned fiction into fable or parable. Each of these writers depends on exact circumstantial detail, but the strength of their fiction comes not from the phrase, the sentence, the metaphor, as critics like Wood would have it, but from how they actualize larger units of scene and theme, plot and character. It can be misleading to approach fiction primarily through its language, a technique better suited to the study of poetry …

  —MORRIS DICKSTEIN

  Everyone speaks of the “negative capability” of the artist, of his ability to lose what self he has in the many selves, the great of the world. Such a quality is, surely, the first that a critic should have; yet who speaks of the negative capability of the critic? How often are we able to observe it?

  —RANDALL JARRELL, “Poets, Critics, and Readers”

  What happened is this: I wrote a book (The Fortress of Solitude) and James Wood reviewed it. What happened next: I wrote James Wood a long, intemperate letter. (Not an open letter.) And he wrote a curt postcard in reply. Eight years later, I haven’t quit thinking about it. Why? The review, though bearing a few darts (“Depthless Brooklyn,” “squandered,” “before our disappointed eyes”), wasn’t the worst I’d had. Wasn’t horrible. (As my uncle Fred would have said, “I know from horrible.”) Why, I hear you moan in your sheets, why in the thick of this Ecstasy Party you’ve thrown for yourself, violate every contract of dignity and decency, why embarrass us and yourself, sulking over an eight-year-old mixed review? Conversely, why not, if I’d wished to flog Wood’s shortcomings, pick a review of someone else, make respectable defense of a fallen comrade? The answer is simple: In no other instance could I grasp so completely what Wood was doing.

  Also, I had expectations. (That fatal state.) I felt, despite any warnings I should have heeded, that to be reviewed at last by the most consequential and galvanizing critical voice, the most apparently gifted close reader of our time, would be a sort of graduation day, even if I’d be destined to take some licks. Taking some, I’d join a hallowed list. I mean this: I’d have taken a much worse evaluation from Wood than I got, if it had seemed precise and upstanding. I wanted to learn something about my work. Instead I learned about Wood. The letdown startled me. I hadn’t realized until Wood was off my pedestal that I’d built one. That I’d sunk stock in the myth of a great critic. Was this how Rushdie or DeLillo felt—not savaged, in fact, but harassed, by a knight only they could tell was armorless?

  As it happened, I wandered into this encounter a self-appointed expert in the matter of expecting—a lot? too much?—and being disappointed. I’d written a cycle of personal essays called The Disappointment Artist, its subject, precisely, the crisis of being so fraught with preemptory feelings in approaching a thing—a book, a movie, another person—that the thing itself is hardly encountered. So was I too ready to see Wood in my own framework, a version of “the narcissism of minor difference”? Or did it make me specially qualified to demand of Wood what I’d demanded of myself: that in the critical mode I sort out self and subject, even if they always again intermixed, at least long enough to spare the pouring-on of inapt disappointment?

  James Wood, in 4,200 painstaking words, couldn’t bring himself to mention that my characters found a magic ring that allowed them flight and invisibility. This, the sole distinguishing feature that put the book aside from those you’d otherwise compare it to (Henry Roth, say). The brute component of audacity, whether you felt it sank the book or exalted it or only made it odd. These fantastic events hinge the plot at several points, including the finale—you simply couldn’t not mention this and have read the book at all.

  Or rather, you couldn’t unless you were Wood. He seemed content to round up the usual suspects: italics, redu
ndant clauses, and an American kind of “realism” he routinely deplores. Perhaps Wood’s agenda edged him into bad faith on the particulars of the pages before him. A critic ostensibly concerned with formal matters, Wood failed to register the formal discontinuity I’d presented him, that of a book which wrenches its own “realism”—mimeticism is the word I prefer—into crisis by insisting on uncanny events. The result, it seemed to me, was a review that was erudite, descriptively meticulous, jive. I doubt Wood’s ever glanced back at the piece. But I’d like to think that if he did, he’d be embarrassed.

  Strangely enough, another misrepresentation, made passingly, stuck worse in my craw. Wood complained of the book’s protagonist: “We never see him thinking an abstract thought, or reading a book … or thinking about God and the meaning of life, or growing up in any of the conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Now this, friends, is how you send an author scurrying back to his own pages, to be certain he isn’t going mad. I wasn’t. My huffy, bruised, two-page letter to Wood detailed the fifteen or twenty most obvious, most unmissable instances of my primary character’s reading: Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Mad magazine, as well as endless scenes of looking at comic books. Never mind his obsessive parsing of LP liner notes, or first-person narration which included moments like: “I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw …” That my novel took as one of its key subjects the seduction, and risk, of reading the lives around you as if they were an epic cartoon or frieze, not something in which you were yourself implicated, I couldn’t demand Wood observe. But not reading? This enraged me.*