More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  —Introduction to The Deadly Percheron, 2006

  On the Yard

  The mind flinches from the fact of prisons—their prevalence, squatting in the midst of towns and cities, their role in so many lives, and in the history and everyday life of our country. And when the mind does find its way there, it wants the whole subject covered in hysteria and overstatement. Let prisons be one simple thing—either horrific zoos for the irretrievably demented and corrupt, or inhumane machines which grind down innocent men. Let them stand apart as raw cartoons of black-and-white morality, having nothing to do with the rest of us—we who live in the modulated, ambivalent, civilized world “the novel” was born to depict. We might secretly feel prison doesn’t need a novel, that it instead needs a miniseries or the Op-Ed page.

  Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard, temperate and unhysterical as its title, is the novel prison needs. It’s also a book any lover of novels ought to know, for its compression, surprise, and wry humor, for its deceptively casual architecture, and for characters and scenes which are unforgettable. Of course, readers may be compelled to read realistic novels set in war or plague or prison by uneasy cravings to know particulars of lives they hope never to encounter more directly. And Braly surely has knowledge we don’t, tons of it. During a miserable, nearly fatherless childhood, Braly began acting out his grievances through a series of petty and eventually not-so-petty burglaries, until, in the company of some reckless partners in crime, he found himself in an interstate chase which climaxed in a gun battle with police, then capture and imprisonment. Upon his first release he slipped back into a desultory pattern of minor crime; eventually managing to spend a majority of his first forty years of life behind prison walls without having murdered or raped, without having even stolen anything of much value.

  Apart from knowledge, Braly possesses an insouciant tone of confidence which causes us never to doubt him, and which is more persuasive than any fact: if these things can be taken as givens, taken almost lightly, then truly the prison is another world as real as our own. But beyond reportage, or tourism, On the Yard succeeds because through its particulars it becomes universal, a model for understanding aspects of our self-wardened lives. Inside and outside prison walls human beings negotiate, stall, bluff, and occasionally explode in their attempts to balance ecstasy against ennui, to do more than merely eke out their narrowing days on earth. But Braly skirts allegory: his book is much too lean and local to bother with that. The reader supplies the allegory.

  The novel could be said to center on the plateau and fall (we never witness his rise) of Chilly Willy, a prison racketeer who deftly controls a small empire of cigarettes, pharmaceutical narcotics, and petty bureaucratic favors, orchestrated by a routine of minimal violence and, as his name suggests, maximum cool. Despite his name, and the outlines of his career, he’s a deeply real and human character, even a sympathetic one. We watch as Chilly manipulates the razor’s-edge power dynamics of the prison until a single miscalculation causes him to lash out. It is then that the prison administration undertakes Chilly’s destruction, by the simple act of placing a receptively homosexual cellmate in his previously solitary cell. The new cellmate serves as Chilly’s mirror—not for a repressed homosexuality, but for the fact that his manipulations had always had concealed within them a grain of solicitude, perhaps even disguised family-feeling. The men Chilly commands are under his care, however apparently dispassionate a form this care has taken. Sex becomes the means of Chilly’s self-destruction—but then nearly every character in the book is shown in a second act of self-destruction inside the prison, which recapitulates and confirms an initial act outside.

  The novel could be said to center on Chilly’s fall, except it barely centers anywhere, moving by its own cool strategy through the minds and moments of dozens of characters, some recurrently, some only for a sole brief visitation which nearly always proves definitive. Three or four of these are into the minds of the prison’s keepers, including that of the morose, long-enduring Warden. The rest are a broad array of prisoners, some “hardened” repeaters, some newly arrived at San Quentin, some floating in between and trying to measure the rightness and permanence of their placement inside those walls. All but the craziest and most loathsome—like the shoe-sniffing, anal-compulsive Sanitary Slim—are presented at least briefly as potential audience and author surrogates. All of them are rejected, either gently or rudely, by the end.

  This is Braly’s brilliantly successful game—he’s a master at exploiting the reader’s urge to identify with his characters. The results are estranging, in the best sense: both funny and profound. Each character undergoes a sort of audition. The first pair of candidates is offered in Chapter One: Nunn, a repeat offender shuffling his way back inside and trying to come to terms with his propensity for self-defeat, his missed opportunities during his brief stint outside, and Manning, a sensitive and observant first-timer who has overturned his innocuous life with a sudden and incomprehensible crime of sexual perversion. The reader begins to squirm in a way which will become familiar—ordinary guilt and innocence will not be our map here. Braly is enormously conscious of the effect of withholding the criminal histories of certain of his characters, while blurting others. His writerly pleasure in this game is tipped in comic miniatures like this one: “He lit his cigarette, then held the match for Zekekowski, noting again how finely formed Zekekowski’s hands were, actually beautiful, the hands of a…of an arsonist, as it happened.”

  If the men glimpsed in Braly’s San Quentin break into roughly two groups, Manning and Nunn are typical of each: those who are career criminals, and those who’ve committed single crimes of impulse—the molesters and wife-killers. Braly leads us gently to the irony that the former commit relatively harmless crimes and yet are compulsively recurrent, whereas the latter are morally abhorrent yet less likely to return to the prison after their release. The impulsives are frequently bookish and bourgeois, unlike the careerists in outlook or temperament, and with a tendency to look down on them as lessers. At the extreme we meet Watson, a priggish impulsive: “Watson stood with culture, the Republic, and Motherhood…He had killed his two small sons, attempted to kill his wife,…all because his wife had refused a reconciliation with the remark, ‘John, the truth is you bore me.’ ” Watson defends himself in a therapy session, claiming, “I see no point in further imprisonment, further therapy, no point whatsoever since there’s absolutely no possibility I’ll do the same thing again.” And he’s immediately teased by the raffish, Popeye-like career criminal Society Red, who says, “That’s right…he’s run out of kids.”

  More sympathetic is Lorin, a fragile jailhouse poet who cringes inside fantasies of Kim Novak and notebook jottings like “Yet I am free—free as any to test the limits of my angry nerves and press the inner pains of my nature against the bruise of time.” Braly doesn’t hold such sensitivity up for either mockery or admiration: like other responses to the condition known as San Quentin, it is simply presented as one possibility among many. Nearer to the author’s own sympathies—or so a reader may suspect—is Paul Juleson, Lorin’s sometimes mentor and protector. Juleson at first glance seems the most resourceful and best equipped of the prison intellectuals, and therefore both a likely survivor and a good bet for author’s proxy. In a flashback we learn that Juleson killed his wife; the hell of his short marriage is portrayed with devastating economy and insight, and the violence of his crime doesn’t prevent our inclining toward Juleson’s sympathies. Richard Rhodes, in The New York Times’s original review of On the Yard, came out and said it: “Juleson is probably Mr. Braly’s alter ego.” Yet I don’t think it’s so simple as that—and certainly Braly denies us the usual satisfactions of rooting for this character when, despite all his wiles and wisdom, Juleson puts himself in the path of Chilly Willy’s contempt by a dumb play for a few packs of cigarettes.

  From that point Chilly and Juleson catalyze one another’s destruction. It is as though these two have always been fated to ex
pose the weakness in the other. So if Braly has an alter ego in the book, it is split, in an act of symbolic self-loathing, between these two men. Rhodes, in his otherwise admiring review, went on to call the book “curiously ambivalent, as though the author had not yet sorted out his own attitudes when he wrote it.” I think this ambivalence, far from unintentional, is in fact the essence of Braly’s art. The criminal professionals are not so different from the middle-class murderers after all—they are united in self-destruction. San Quentin exists, at some level, because these men need a place to solve the puzzle of their lives by nullification. It also exists because of our society’s need to accommodate that nullification, giving it four square walls, a pair of coveralls, and a number, as well as a few perfunctory hours of group therapy a week.

  In other words, if it’s difficult to discern with whom Malcolm Braly identifies, this is likely because Malcolm Braly doesn’t identify with himself. Not exactly. This becomes plain in Braly’s False Starts, his extraordinary memoir of his childhood, and of his pathetic criminal and prison careers. In this second masterpiece, published ten years after On the Yard, Braly marvels extensively at his own tropism for the prison, at those miraculous self-sabotages which led him again and again to the miserable comforts of incarceration. We learn that during one break-in he actually managed to accidentally leave behind a slip of paper bearing his full name and address, as though desperate to forge a path back inside.

  Standing outside On the Yard’s character scheme is the lanky teenage sociopath, Stick. Leader of a mostly imaginary gang of fascist hoodlums called The Vampires, Stick is a cipher of human chaos, and he eventually brings down an unlikely destruction on the prison. Stick’s uncanny near-escape is by hot-air balloon, one painstakingly constructed by his cellmate and stolen by Stick at the last moment. This reveals a vein of dreamy masturbatory fantasy, a childishness, which our fear of criminals and prisoners usually conceals from us, but which Braly doesn’t want concealed. The balloon is an unusually direct symbol for any novel, but especially Braly’s. It bears evidence of that ambivalence which marks all the characters and their strivings: when examiners consider the crashed balloon they find it scored by excessively reworked sewing, which has weakened the fabric: “[the stitches] suggested an analogy to hesitation marks in a suicide.” Stick also, it seems to me, reveals On the Yard as being a 1960’s California book, and San Quentin in the Sixties as being oddly subject to the same propensity for utopianism and social experiment as the Bay Area within which the prison darkly huddles. In an eastern prison Stick might more likely have been drawn into some preexisting gang or Mafia: thirty years later he’d be a Crip or Blood. Here he’s free to self-invent, and so becomes a prognostication of Charles Manson or Jim Jones.

  Malcolm Braly’s life was sad, triumphant, and sad again. He lived mostly inside for twenty years, until his writing, together with the will and generosity of Gold Medal Books editor Knox Burger, provided a rescue. He died in a car accident at fifty-four, leaving behind a wife and infant daughter—Knox Burger has said he was “fat and happy.” His peak as a writer came in the two complementary books, the novel and the memoir, and in the memoir he says about the novel “I was writing over my head.” A reader needn’t to explore the earlier books to confirm this, for Braly is working over his head in On the Yard in the sense that any novelist is when he has moved beyond his tools, or through them, to experience a kind of transubstantiation with his characters. At those moments a writer always knows more than he ever could have expected to, and he can only regard the results with a kind of honest awe. The book is no longer his own, but a vehicle by which anyone can see himself both exculpated and accused, can find himself alternately imprisoned and freed. Braly’s novel is something like Stick’s borrowed balloon, in the end, a beautiful, unlikely oddment rising from the yard of San Quentin, motley with the scars of its making and no less perfect for showing those “hesitation marks.” It rises above the prison walls in a brief, glorious flight, before gravity makes its ordinary claim.

  —Introduction to On the Yard, 2012

  Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird

  Walter Tevis is a maker of fables, and Mockingbird is one of his finest, a fable written twenty years ago that you, reading this now, need and want urgently though you don’t necessarily know it. Parts of this elegant fable will seem oddly familiar, accidentally and by design, for Tevis was a master manipulator of archetypes, an artist capable of delving into the zeitgeist while nevertheless remaining on his own pure search for himself.

  Chunks of books like 1984 and Brave New World and Earth Abides seem to be swallowed here, likely because Tevis knew those books, but also chunks of movies, movies he knew (and mentions) like Kong Returns and movies he might have seen, like Vertigo, and movies he couldn’t have, like Blade Runner—and while we’re at it, doesn’t Mockingbird read like the perfect bridge between Clifford Simak and Steve Erickson, and don’t you hear echoes of Bob Dylan’s “Isis” in this tale of exile and return? All of these shadows and echoes moving through Mockingbird attest to our yearning, graver than we probably know, for fables of this type at the end of the American century, for stories that embarrass us with their desperate hopes, their savage nostalgia, their instinct that precious things have already been destroyed and forgotten—Vonnegut, Bradbury, Bernard Wolfe, Brazil, Alphaville: we gather stories like these until we thrust them away, appalled by adolescence, divesting ourselves of grandiose and absolute feelings.

  But Tevis’s book isn’t adolescent, it’s ruminative and ironic with middle-aged wisdom, richly ambivalent and knowing, because when Tevis reached for images of the grim, dwindled world against which his young lovers would strive, he reached into himself: the flinching eyes, the retreat of his citizens into drugged privacy, the pointlessly repetitive operations of his machines, and especially the nihilistic elitism of Spofforth, the ancient robot at the center of Mockingbird, who wishes for the world to die so that he may die—when he limned his world Tevis drew a dark self-portrait to contrast the bright one he drew in his lovers.

  And despite the echoes and shadows moving through Mockingbird and for all of Tevis’s sophistication, he has the unembarrassed courage to write his tale of the future, his paean to memory, with a sort of beautiful literary amnesia: like Orwell and Huxley and George R. Stewart and Bernard Wolfe, he wrote as though no one had ever written a tale of the future before, so that Mockingbird stands apart, gawkily refusing genre, instead a novel of character and a fable as singular as the wrecked Empire State Building that looms over Tevis’s Manhattan, a fable that, I may already have mentioned, you want and need more than you know.

  —Introduction to Mockingbird, 1999

  Everything Said and Exhausted (Daniel Fuchs)

  Six years ago I wrote:

  There’s nothing on my shelf I flip open for inspiration as often these days as Daniel Fuchs’s three novels about Brooklyn, set and written in the 1930’s…reprinted in 1961 in one volume as Three Novels, then separately in paperback in 1965—a moment of rediscovery now as forgotten as the original publication. Fuchs published in The New Yorker, was a buddy of Cheever’s at Yaddo, and somewhere Irving Howe compared him to Willie Mays for the ease of his effects, but unlike Willie Mays he’s nearly vanished from the record books…

  Today, thanks to Black Sparrow’s superb one-volume distillation of the latter part of Fuchs’s career—in which our hero flees Brooklyn and, for the most part, fiction, in favor of Hollywood and an uncommonly serene career as a studio screenwriter—contemporary readers are likely to come to Fuchs’s grittily enchanted vision of Brooklyn backward. That brief volume, The Golden West, published in 2005, gathered essays and a trickle of fiction on the theme of Hollywood, produced over five decades. However lovely—and any paragraph Fuchs put to paper is lovely—The Golden West records a disconcerting abandonment. The present bulging volume, The Brooklyn Novels, three books produced in little over five years, presents the commitment—to fictional voice and fictional form—that w
as to be abandoned. And, since Fuchs was a man of compulsive scruples, the book also records the dilemmas, artistic and personal, that made Fuchs’s flight from the material of his splendid early fiction so needed, as well as the terms by which abandonment was to be enacted.

  I discovered Fuchs at Yaddo, while browsing idly on the shelves reserved for the works of previous occupants of the place. I was there trying to find a way to write about Brooklyn. You can imagine my surprise at opening Summer in Williamsburg and discovering Fuchs’s secret Dickensian tapestry depicting a coming of age among immigrant dreamers and scoundrels. Fuchs’s voice—tender, antic, vernacular—struck me as essential, a compass for my own work, and his collected works a missing piece in my interior bookshelf. Here was something like the milieu I’d glimpsed in Malamud’s earliest fiction, in Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments, in the tenement stories of Will Eisner, depicted in full and from the inside, with absolute and sometimes claustrophobic authority, yet without the air of decrepitude and undropped grudges, of mingled bitterness and sentimentality, which had so often discouraged my curiosity about Jewish Proletarian fiction. The material evoked, specifically, my experience of my mother’s family (my uncle Fred, a numismatist, author of several volumes on American coins, who tattled on a mobster and lived in fear of reprisal, was, just for instance, a perfect Fuchs character). Fuchs’s voice was so fresh and enticing that I felt a disbelief at the 1930’s copyright dates—yet if I could accept the sense of contemporaneity I located in the dialogue in Fitzgerald and in Howard Hawks movies, maybe I should accept Fuchs’s.