More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  “How is business?” said the Princess.

  “Very good,” said the leader. “Except we had to run away. A man got very angry and chased us. So here we are. This is Shamrock, this is Mustache, and my name is Tobedwego.” They explain further: “You see, we jumped on this man and beat him up.”

  “We gave him a bloody nose,” said Shamrock.

  “And a black eye,” said Mustache.

  “And a sprained wrist,” said Tobedwego.

  “We punched him in the chest,” said Shamrock.

  “And kicked him in the shins,” said Mustache.

  “And took all his money,” said Tobedwego.

  “We took his watch,” said Shamrock.

  “And his ring,” said Mustache.

  “And then we forgave him,” said Tobedwego.

  “What did you forgive him for?” said Flossie.

  “For getting angry,” said Tobedwego.

  “After we forgave him,” said Shamrock, “we decided to admire ourselves for doing it.”

  “We decided that we had been generous,” said Mustache.

  This vein of amoral generosity runs deep in Lamador—the creatures work diligently on a guilt trip good enough to persuade Dulcy to sacrifice herself to the python’s hunger and the rabbit-skin umbrella, which, as the Princess points out to the Prince, “I promised you, and what’s more important, I promised my conscience too.” This wouldn’t be 1968, though, if all apparently societal problems weren’t in fact solvable in the realm of personal transformation. Handily, Shardlu has begun to itch, warning him that he may be ready for a major shedding. Everyone helpfully tugs at Shardlu’s outer skin together, while he clamps his teeth around a tree—but the unforeseen effect is that the python flips inside out. He turns a bright pink color, and loses his reason and eyesight as well, so gives blind, ravenous chase to Tobedwego, mistaking the lead Robber for a meal. When Tobedwego escapes, Shardlu blissfully swallows himself, and vanishes.

  Any time I’ve shown The Happy Valley to someone familiar with children’s books, they have the same quick response: that there’s way too much text on the pages for a colorfully-illustrated picture book, which is what it resembles in every other way. This may have dictated the book’s failure in its day (I don’t know this for a fact), but it isn’t fair. I try not to get defensive—after all, anyone who resists is only confirming more deeply my private relationship to the book, the sense in which it is a dream recounted that only I’ll ever completely understand. And the people I’ve handed the book to aren’t children, so they can never approach it with the same receptiveness I did. And not everyone resists.

  If you sit and read the book on its own terms the proportion of incident to illustration is, I think, quite reasonable. And what fills the pages are the lovely paradoxical dialogues:

  “Do you know why you have to face front in an elevator?”

  “No,” said Dulcy.

  “Neither do I,” said Abe. “So I always face the rear. It makes everyone nervous as a cat.”

  “Cats are nervous,” said Flossie. “He’s right, as usual.”

  These invariably enchant anyone of any age who I’ve managed to induce to dip into them.

  A mention of the illustrations, which are by Sylvie Selig. The bright-hued pages are certainly characteristic of their era, for a certain paisley-decorative splendor, and for the bell-bottoms and Nehru collars on the animals’ two-piece suits. The style, though, is mysterious and wonderful and slightly naïve, less Peter Max-slick than a sort of cross between Henri Rousseau’s paintings and Klaus Voorman’s jacket art for the Beatles’ Revolver. And the drawings play a nice trick I’ve never much seen elsewhere, one which made the book particularly spellbinding and rereadable for me as a child: they contradict and amplify and even sometimes seem to mock the text itself. For instance, where Shardlu’s work as “Friend & Companion” is described, the story also mentions his schedule of “breakfast on Monday morning, lunch on Wednesday at noon, and dinner on Friday evening.” Nothing more, but Selig has depicted Shardlu grinning over a plate of live—shrew? vole? Hard to tell—which pleads for its life. This nicely sends up “Friend & Companion” as well as prefiguring the rabbit-eating plot. Extra animals, unmentioned in the tale, clutter the peripheries—pigs, monkeys, alligators, even lobsters and giant beetles are shown joining in the communal hubbub. And as wordy as the book is, it stops several times for silent pages, where Selig’s lush, mysterious art bleeds to every margin. This has the effect of stopping time, much in the manner of a Japanese film where scenes are lingered over, the camera considering all corners of a room before resuming the plot. When I pick up The Happy Valley, which is often, I’m frequently going back to gaze deeper into the odd depths of the drawings, rather than rereading the tale from beginning to end.

  But what about the plot? It needs finishing. Though he never quite “tuned in,” Shardlu has, of course, dropped out and turned on quite heroically. His transformation doubly spares Dulcy’s life, since the blue skin he shed before swallowing himself makes the Princess a fine umbrella. The Robbers are likewise reconciled by a suggestion from Abe: that their intrinsic necessity of robbing be satisfied by robbing one another. The Restless Nogo might have to wander on to find things to discover, until he is offered, by Abe, this insight: why not discover himself?

  Finally a happy banquet is laid out for all the creatures, including the suddenly returning Shardlu, who explains:

  “I changed my mind. So I unswallowed myself backward so I would be right side out again, and here I am.”

  “Oh, my!” said Dulcy.

  “Don’t worry,” said Shardlu. “I discovered that if you once swallow yourself, you can never be the same afterward. I don’t want to eat Dulcy anymore. Now all I want are flowers and toys and hardware and jelly beans, and there are plenty of those things around.”

  “How did you change your mind?” asked the Princess.

  Shardlu doesn’t know how to answer, but Abe does, and it is here Berne tips his hat just slightly to his great model, Lewis Carroll: “You either swallow yourself or get to the other side of a mirror. I was there myself when I was younger.”

  So, there’s the gift The Happy Valley brought me—it took me as far on the other side of the mirror as the Carroll books, its Hippie aura no less poignant and affecting than the Victorianisms of Alice. Here’s the odd gift it brings me now: since The Happy Valley is entirely mine, it can still take me there, a little. I can still visit Lamador and have my bad vibes smoothed out by the happy inhabitants, the ever-so-slightly sexy sheep and rabbits, the droll Zen Koan-ish wisdom of Abe, which in truth stands for the naïve Utopian yearning of our parents’ sweetest, most hopeful selves. Unlike The Restless Nogo, they may not have convinced me (or the world) to stay back there in the late sixties. But like Shardlu, I can roll in for a visit.

  —from Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers

  and Their Adventures in Reading, 2004

  Footnote on Sylvie Selig

  I’m not a writer who hides. The result is that I’m destined be reached out to by the real people mentioned, or who feel their lives indirectly evoked, in the work. Everywhere on book tour I meet kids who went to public schools in Brooklyn in the 1970s; some of them are my actual schoolmates, like Rusty Cole, who appeared at a bookshop in San Diego a year or two after The Fortress of Solitude was published, and who I hadn’t seen since fourth grade.

  People stick around. When they don’t they leave DNA crumb trails. I got to exchange letters with Russell Greenan, and to know Daniel Fuch’s son, and Italo Calvino’s daughter. Out of my solitary memoryscape, I’ve stocked my life with unexpected acquaintances, as if my lonely teenage bookshelves were animating into faces. Surely the most magical among these was when I received an e-mail from Sylvie Selig, the illustrator of The Happy Valley. The obscurity of the book, and the fact that I’d barely focused on the illustrations (though I love them), and the fact that she’d spent the rest of her career as a painter, not a book illustrator
, and the fact that she was a (then) sixty-four year-old Frenchwoman—all made it feel that time and space and probability had collapsed.

  At this point, the story is best taken up by a short piece I wrote for a French catalogue of Sylvie’s paintings, which has never been published in English until now:

  Five or six years ago I described a lost and esoteric children’s book called The Happy Valley, written by Eric Berne and published in 1968 and then forgotten, the dreamlike power of which swayed me deeply as a child. In my attempt to account for this power, I wrote: A mention of the illustrations, which are by Sylvie Selig. The bright-hued pages are certainly characteristic of their era, for a certain paisley-decorative splendor, and for the bell-bottoms and Nehru collars on the animals’ two-piece suits. The style, though, is mysterious and wonderful and slightly naïve, less Peter Max-slick than a sort of cross between Henri Rousseau’s paintings and Klaus Voorman’s jacket art for the Beatles’ Revolver. In using her name with such passing familiarity, it may seem to the reader that I was versed in—or had any idea at all—of Sylvie Selig’s wider existence. This impression would be completely wrong. For me, her name might as well have been the name of one of the characters in The Happy Valley, for I knew it not at all outside the boundaries of my single copy of that book—a book which seemed to me to have dropped from the sky—and had never seen another of Selig’s illustrations, let alone known of the existence of her extraordinary body of paintings.

  Then one day a year or two after writing those words, and seeing them published, a letter magically appeared in the mailbox of my computer, as if summoned up by my unconscious, bearing the name Sylvie Selig. The painter, from her home in France, had come across my essay mentioning her illustrations, also due to internet magic. In her letter, Selig expressed her astonishment that anyone recalled The Happy Valley, let alone that a child influenced by the book and its illustrator would become a writer who’d happen to publicly resurrect the book in my tiny remembrance. Well, she hardly could have been more astonished than me. Selig explained that she’d long since left illustration behind, and resumed her career as a painter. And within a few moments I browsed an on-line gallery of her artworks.

  At that instant, Sylvie Selig’s imagery re-colonized my imagination at the level of a childhood dream, consoling and disturbing me like an intervention, a preemption, at a level before language or category (painting, film, surrealism, metaphor, symbol, etcetera) could intrude. Past and future became fused in my total responsiveness to her vision. I couldn’t possibly exaggerate how natural this seemed to me.

  Of course Sylvie Selig adored both Lewis Carroll and David Lynch—in my own imaginings she’d connected the two already, her ominous and helpless rabbits, first in The Happy Valley, and now in these parallel paintings, ushering my sensibility from Carroll’s March Hare to the situation-comedy bunnies in David Lynch’s Inland Empire, never mind that those didn’t exist yet. Though it would be decades before I could finish the journey from Carroll to Lynch, Selig was secretly with me, and inside me, all the way. And anyway, it wasn’t a journey in the sense of moving from one thing to the other: Sylvie Selig knows that we never leave Lewis Carroll behind (and for my part I still write stories with talking animals in them). And of course her brush collects film directors, detecting the tender closet surrealism of Hitchcock and Lubitsch, as well as the more obvious European examples, even while it also still gathers up the menagerie of fellow animals that cover our earth—and treats both, directors and creatures, as exotic and familiar, as dream companions.

  I’m disinclined to trouble with art-historical language, or any attempt to place Sylvie Selig in a continuum of painting per se, if only because it would nudge her from her privileged place in my dreaming gallery, where she preceded them all, but also because her gathering up of literary quotations and film actor’s faces and so many other gifts from the cultural sphere so beautifully expresses the ecstasy of influence (as opposed to Bloom’s anxiety of influence), making the work a timeless celebration of her life as a reader, filmgoer, and human being. So, Sylvie Selig, my mysterious imaginary unmet French parent, would it be an affront if I confessed that I wonder if I dreamed you into existence? We’ve still never met. Yet in her “film fictions” Selig has seemingly read my mind again, using the universal language of externalized dream: the cinema, making the visual vocabularies of so many quintessential directors briefly and brilliantly her own, encompassing so many of my favorite film icons and symbols that I am forced to consider the opposite explanation: Sylvie Selig dreamed me.

  Shortly after writing this, I traveled to Paris with my family. One afternoon my wife and I and our two boys enjoyed Sylvie’s hospitality at her extraordinary studio in Paris. And a tiny Selig canvas depicting a flying man-rabbit now hangs in the boys’ bedroom in California.

  Engulf and Devour

  You know Moby-Dick before you know it. You feel it coming before you read it, like Ishmael in the book, enduring the global duration of the voyage and suffering the thrill and agony of delay of the title character’s actual appearance. The title alone is a cultural “meme”—Elvis Presley, in his “Comeback Special,” in 1968, raises his microphone stand like a harpoon and sneershouts it—“Moby Dick.” He raises a laugh of recognition from a crowd of fans in a TV studio. You might be a John Huston completist, or an Orson Welles partisan, or a Ray Bradbury fan, and come into contact with the 1956 film. You might read the Classic Comic, or come across one of any number of the paraphrases or references that trickle through popular culture.

  Or you might be me, who walked into a stranger’s downtown renovated loft one night—I was there not on any literary or bookish errand, but because I’d been promised a good dance party—to find a wall of four or five long bookshelves. I always step up to bookshelves when I visit a home for the first time. It’s probably rude, but I can’t stop myself. These shelves, astonishingly, consisted of nothing but different editions of Moby-Dick. Hundreds of them. It was a kind of parlor trick or art installation; anyway, one of the most breathtaking surprises I’ve ever seen in my book-loving life. What did these shelves mean to the person—the book-collector as obsessed Ahab—who’d assembled them? Was he or she satisfied yet? Probably not.

  My stepmother, when I was fifteen, was keen on whales, on saving them, of course, but also on taking whale-watching boat tours in the Atlantic, listening to whale songs on scratchy LPs, and on re-reading Moby Dick once a year. She claimed it was best read “just for the story,” and that this could easily be accomplished by simply skipping every other chapter. Now, this isn’t strictly true, not even close; the philosophy and epistemology and ontology and also the freaky poetical crypto-zoological musings interpenetrate the “story,” just as the story interpenetrates many of the (seemingly) digressive “fugue” chapters. But her suggestion strongly shaped my first reading, which came five or six years later—the point being, you too, dear reader, arrive at page one with expectations, anticipations, your breath held, your narrative-seeking brain boiling helplessly with “spoilers.”

  Well, then, if you are lucky enough to be reading Moby-Dick for the first time, you’ll find the book can encompass every one of these—engulf and devour them, one and all—and satisfy and discharge every impulse that brought you, and that you brought, to its opening page. It takes up such a ridiculous amount of space in the cultural imagination for the very simplest of reasons: for the amount of space it occupies in the private imagination of each individual reader. Moby Dick installs itself in your brain as a kind of second brain, bigger than that which contains it, much like swallowing an ocean of language and implication. And that, in turn, connects your engorged mental container to all the others, through time, that have made the same encounter. As the whale is too big for Ahab or Ishmael to fully digest in their apprehension and awe, so is the book to our literary imagination. The unknown reader who filled those shelves (as I’ve begun, slowly, to do in emulation—I have twelve or fifteen different editions now) was trying t
o explain what had happened to him—those fathomless shelves were an externalized model of a book which is itself a hologram of consciousness, in its variousness and paradox, endlessly altered each time it touches the world and at each point where it mysteriously contacts itself.

  —Moby-Dick, The Norton Critical Edition, 2016

  The Figure in the Castle

  The first time I read Kafka I thought I’d been duped. This was in high school, of course, when I had a tendency to suspect I’d been duped by most anything, particularly anything that, like adulthood itself, drew me nearer to it by some irresistible force and yet which baffled me. Specifically, I couldn’t accept that Kafka’s novel The Castle had no ending. Nobody warned me—I wasn’t reading Kafka for a class, but had taken him from the school library, driven by the same erratic booklust that had driven me that same year through volumes of Priestley, Dreiser and Camus, as well as Alan Drury’s Advise and Consent—and when I got to the last page, which ends mid-sentence, I felt betrayed. This was meant to be one of the century’s greatest writers’ greatest novels, and he couldn’t even finish it? I was a stubbornly literal reader then, filleting books for their raw plots, absorbed (I thought) not by the music of the prose or by the evocations of theme or symbol, but by the behavior of characters as they moved toward their fates. In this way I was as stubborn and literal as Kafka’s main character in The Castle, the not-quite-named K., who goes on trying to enter the castle, or at least to get the full attention of its operatives, long after savvy readers will have concluded his efforts are not only unlikely to be rewarded, but intrinsically hopeless—hopeless, indeed, in a way that seems to define the essence of Kafka’s art. Consummately un-savvy, at that instant when I turned the last page and met with my disenchantment—K.’s not gonna make it!—I may have been both Kafka’s worst reader, and his best. Or anyway, his most committed.