More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  —Afterword to the Italian edition of Dr. Bloodmoney, 2008

  Thomas Berger

  What if there were a great American novelist with a vision so diverse, timeless and hilarious that he’d been mistaken by literary culture for an irrelevant virtuoso? That’s the fate of Thomas Berger, apparently. Though his popular and critical heyday was the ‘70s, when he was meaninglessly grouped with the “black humorists,” Berger’s focus grew through the ‘80s. But by the end of that decade he’d mostly lost his audience and been taken for granted by critics, his image blurred somewhat by two film adaptations, one good (Little Big Man, faithfully Bergeresque but credited to the director and star), and one awful (Neighbors, with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd a casting trainwreck—Donald Sutherland and Alan Arkin might have worked).

  No summary can do justice to the extraordinarily various assignments Berger has given himself: to visit each genre in turn (Western: Little Big Man, Detective: Who is Teddy Villa-nova?, Dystopia: Regiment of Women, Arthurian legend: Arthur Rex, etc.), to span his career with an anti-Updikean sequence featuring a lumpen protagonist at different life stages (the four Reinhardt novels), to understand and demolish existentialist justifications for murder (Killing Time, Meeting Evil), and, whatever else, always to advance his lifelong exercise in deadpan eloquence. The fact that Berger is often painfully funny isn’t incidental, but central to his accomplishment. Scenes in Berger’s fiction never unfold logically, but instead are warped this way and that by the fleeting and paradoxical responses of his main characters who, though tormented by guilt and experience, remain yearning and gullible and oddly angelic.

  Three of Berger’s first five novels featured his hopeless alter-ego Reinhart—the books are brilliant, each encompassing a new aspect of American life—but typical of Berger, Reinhart seemed a different character each time out. The two non-Reinharts were Little Big Man, the encyclopedic Western most usually acclaimed by readers unfamiliar with Berger, and Killing Time, which was poorly received but now seems Berger’s early masterpiece—Jim Thompson noir as done by an American Flaubert.

  Neighbors, in 1980, was a watershed book (as well as a comic summit). There Berger refined a theme of malice, guilt and victimization that had been emergent in his work. This exploration produced dark masterworks in The Houseguest (1988) and Meeting Evil (1982). Houseguest refracts the hostility of Neighbors through multiple viewpoints, culminating in that of a female character. Berger had too often previously denied his women the misanthropic, contradictory depths of his men.

  Special mention should also be given to Berger’s “small town” books—Sneaky People and The Feud. Without abandoning his trademark mordancy, these are perhaps Berger’s tenderest books, and covertly autobiographical of his Cincinnati childhood. Elsewhere in his late career Berger is slight, and droll—Nowhere, Changing the Past, Robert Crews, Being Invisible and Reinhart’s Women (the fourth and last of the Reinharts) are best savored by initiates.

  Berger’s giddy program of writing a different book every time out, coupled with the curlicues of his style and his obsessional approach to character, make him a sort of auteur within the space of his own career: no matter what genre or mode or scale the “studio” of his vast imagination dictates, the sensibility of the “director”—Berger’s uniquely sweetbitter vision of life—is unmistakable. One can only hope that the ballyhooed sequel to Little Big Man currently in the works will provide the occasion for a major boom.

  —The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, 2000

  Letters from the Invisible Man: My Correspondence with Thomas Berger

  Thomas Berger and I have never met. Yet I also count Thomas Berger, a veteran of World War II and the (insufficiently) celebrated author of 23 novels, among my best friends on this earth. Can this possibly be true? And if so, might it be pathetic, something better kept to myself? My question has some general currency, since lately some of us befriend, or “friend,” whole armies of discorporate beings. Yet long before virtuality made this gesture prosaic and compulsive, readers were in the habit of making disembodied friendships with authors. I mean, of course, in the sense that J.D. Salinger had in mind when Holden Caulfield, after reading a book, expressed the wish to call its author on the telephone.

  That this variety of intimacy is usually unknown to its target is a fact authors, even those less fan-averse than Salinger, have considered merciful. Yet that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable human feeling. Though stalkers make everyone rightly nervous, feelings that cannot be reciprocated—love of artists dead and distant, hatred of governments, etc.—are one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world. We derive the word “fan” from “fanatic,” yet to make ourselves fans of the right things, and to do so with unashamed abandon, can be an exalted mode of being. Fannish feeling, like laughter or tears, is one of those things that make us human.

  It was this form of phantom kinship I felt for Thomas Berger when, at the age of 18, I discovered his writing. Reading his novels, I felt not only amazed and entertained, but more alive and less lonely, confirmed in my presence as a member of my species by the commingling of some of the strangest parts of my brain with the strangest parts of another person’s. Being amazed and entertained made me Berger’s fan; I have been so ever since. I recommend his uniquely eccentric and erudite tales everywhere I go; Berger’s books are accessible and funny and immerse you in the permanent strangeness of his language and attitude. He also offers a book for every predilection: if you like Westerns, there’s his classic Little Big Man; so too has he written fables of suburban life (Neighbors), crime stories (Meeting Evil), fantasies, small-town “back-fence” stories of Middle American life, and philosophical allegories (Killing Time). All of them are fitted with the Berger slant, in which the familiar becomes menacingly absurd or perhaps the absurd becomes menacingly familiar. You have very few excuses for not reading Berger. And anyway, I don’t want to hear them.

  The books made me Berger’s fan; my sense of kinship with the person behind them—the sensations of feeling “more alive and less lonely”—made me want to become his friend as well. For those are the sorts of thing one usually looks to friendship to deliver, no matter the height of expectations one brings to books (mine tend to be outlandishly high). So it was that, a few years later, I started pestering Thomas Berger with letters.

  However, to begin writing to Berger, which I did in 1989 at the age of 25, I felt I needed an excuse. I couldn’t unstop gouts of fannish emotion into my missives—not only because these might have inspired Berger to contact the police, but because I wasn’t much good then at unstopping gouts of emotion into my prose. This aspiring writer was at the time also a baroquely brainy kid, busy disguising feeling behind all manner of clutter. My excuse for contacting Berger, then, was that I wanted to write a biographical essay or appreciation on his friend, the now-forgotten writer Bernard Wolfe (I surmised Berger’s and Wolfe’s acquaintance because they’d dedicated books to each other). I wasn’t completely bogus in this pursuit: in fact, somewhere in my juvenilia are scraps of an attempt at a book-by-book “guide” to Wolfe’s fiction. I’m sure I told myself this was the reason I’d written to Tom—for, once he’d begun writing droll and generous letters in reply to mine, he’d become Tom to me. After all, I was a fan of several other living writers, and I hadn’t contacted them, had I? I was thrilled, if a bit daunted when Berger wrote in response: “I might have quite a bit to say about Bernie,…but first I’d like to hear your bona fides, for reminiscing takes a lot of energy and I have little to spare.” Bona fides! How I wished to have some of those—assuming I could figure out what they were.

  In retrospect, it’s unmistakable that I was attempting to prove to myself that I existed. For, within a year of making contact, I’d shamelessly sent Tom copies of two of my own earliest-published stories and received the sanctification of his letter of November 20, 1990: “You are a gifted writer!” Which verdict, I need no one to point out, may merely have been polite. (Mo
re than twenty years later, I’m not going to trouble Tom for confirmation that he genuinely admired the little stories I was managing at twenty-five.) In fact, Tom might have given nearly equal satisfaction if he’d written: “You are a lousy writer, but a writer nonetheless!” I had no one in those days giving me any confirmation that I was a writer at all besides myself, certainly not someone I regarded as one of the living titans of American fiction.

  If I’d begun seeking confirmation, and received the gift of encouragement, I got much more than I’d bargained for. Exchanging letters with Tom regularly for several years, I found I’d fallen down a marvelous rabbit hole, where my self-appointed tutor revealed himself as a figure akin to one of Lewis Carroll’s perverse mentors to his Alice. Most if not all my Mock Turtle had to teach me about my own aspirations was how silly they were, how insupportable and perverse and unlikely to be rewarded by any clear result—and, at the same time, how I was likely stuck with them.

  Perhaps I fantasized that by contacting a figure in “the literary world” I’d discover the hidden entrance to that world, so I might pass through myself. Yet Tom’s “literary world” seemed to consist of rereading Frank Norris’s McTeague, working his way through Kafka in the original German and watching Laird Cregar movies; I still remember my astonishment when he replied to my mention of Don DeLillo by saying he’d never heard the name. I sometimes joked that writing letters to Thomas Berger was like sending them into a time machine, or an alternate literary reality. Yet that analogy didn’t catch the full oddness of my experience. Writing letters to Berger was, and is (for I still do it) most of all like sending them into a fictional space, to be replied to by a member of the Pickwick Society.

  Reading over them, I find us talking a lot about dachshunds and Jack Russell terriers, Maine and Germany, peppering our correspondence with the names of character actors and dead authors, those both canonical and sliding from view. I also find Tom gently deflecting my suggestions that we meet in person; I spent a decade or so bringing the subject up, and receiving his demurrals, before I quit. I was obtuse in persisting with this suggestion, not grasping how Tom was patiently assembling a performance-art project in slow motion over nearly a quarter-century, that of an unreal friendship more real than most things. As he wrote to me, a few years ago: “Who can prove I’m still alive?” By the time Tom presented this teasing paradox, I’d grown accustomed to the regular sensation of his teasing the ground out from under my feet. The reply I wish I’d thought of on the spot, and that I offer him now: “Who cares one way or the other, so long as you keep writing?”

  —The New York Times, 2012

  Footnote on Berger

  Thomas Berger died in 2014, at 89. He’d published a short novel, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, in 2005; another novel, completed after, went unpublished. (It’ll turn up in his papers, but also in mine, since he sent me a copy of the manuscript, with no Max Brod request that I destroy it.) In our letters, Tom had always bragged of his indestructibility, while giving hints of the physical suffering he and his wife Jeanne increasingly endured. She was older than he was, significantly sicker, and both were bedridden and suffering dementia at the end. I don’t think Tom was writing at all in his last year or two, but instead caring for her, cooking and cleaning, maintaining their house as well as he could. I was surprised he died before her (she followed less than a year later). I imagine he was too.

  Our thirty-year friendship, conducted exclusively in letters or e-mails and phone calls, then took a peculiar turn to the material realm. It began with furniture. Tom left me a desk and a trunk. A lawyer described these to me: a seventeenth-century Spanish vargueno traveller’s writing desk, with inlaid-ivory and hidden drawers, and an eighteenth-century carved trunk from Madagascar. Tom had also specified that I was to have my choice of the books in his library, which couldn’t be dissolved until I appeared at the house to make a selection—would I please appear at the house? I was bewildered. I’d never been left anything in a will before. And now I was to invade the mysterious address Tom had never even revealed, having preferred a nearby P.O. box for receipt of his letters.

  After some appropriately Bergerian confusion and dismay (long silences, missed calls, a change in lawyers by the estate), a year or so later I appeared, with my mother-in-law Sally as my back-up (She knows furniture, and can talk to anyone.), at a tiny house perched on the river side of a street overlooking the Hudson, just south of Nyack, New York. This wasn’t a long trip, just across the George Washington Bridge. Tom, that semi-famous recluse, had been forty-five minutes away from the action all that time.

  It was a cool day in March; I think it had rained. Tom’s executor Charles arrived. Charles was tall and elegant, a retired actor and a friend of Tom’s and Jeanne’s from their days in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. He was in his nineties, and overwhelmed by the tasks before him. (Pick an executor younger than yourself—you might live a while.) He was driven by Michele, a younger friend who’d been helping a great deal. The house was in poignant disarray. Jeanne had been cared for by a visiting nurse in the weeks following Tom’s death, then moved to a nursing home. But the books, and Jeanne’s paintings, were intact on the walls. Here were the desk and the trunk—I decided to arrange to have the desk, which was gorgeous, shipped to California. The trunk I declined on the spot. Tom will forgive me for saying it looked like a large sculpture of a dog turd.

  Charles and I talked while I looked over the books. They were perfectly organized, and made a version of Tom’s brain for me to climb around inside. I selected about three cardboard boxes worth of them—probably less than five percent of what was there. I took Tom’s copies of Kafka in English and in German, a few of which were those early editions he’d bought to read while stationed in Germany after World War Two (He’d written the year and the city of their acquisition on the flyleaf.). I took Tom’s ancient edition of Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur, the source for his own Arthur Rex. I took my embarrassing gushingly-inscribed copies of my own books, which I’d sent over the years to that P.O. box. One of these I presented to Charles, who appeared pleased. It was Berger who’d introduced me to my favorite quote of Nietzsche’s: “The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and that all his treasures have been rescued.” Now Tom had—perversely?—cast me in the role as a scavenger at the site of his departure.

  Charles had been tentatively reminiscing about Tom and Jeanne, and gratifying me by saying how much our correspondence meant to Tom in his last years. He and Michele also worried aloud about the problem of properly dispensing with Jeanne’s paintings and drawings and prints; there was no gallery, and no one who still cherished her work, that they knew of. I began thinking of ways I could help, beyond just claiming my desk and pillaging the bookshelves. I began talking of how I knew a friend of Tom’s and Jeanne’s, the Pakistani-American writer Zulfikar Ghose, in Texas, who might very much like to have one of her canvases—would they like me to try to arrange a gift? They would.

  As we warmed to one another, it seemed Charles had been feeling me out for another task. Or perhaps it was only a sudden impulse. Anyway, he gripped my arm and pointed into the kitchen. On the counter, amid the clutter, stood a distinguished-looking black package with a typed white label. “That’s him,” Charles said. I didn’t understand. “His ashes.” I understood, but couldn’t speak. “He asked to have them scattered in the Hudson River,” said Charles. “I haven’t been able to do it. You have to do it, please.” I worked to rearrange my grasp of reality quickly enough. Did he mean today? “Yes,” said Charles. “It’s perfect. We’ll do it. You’ll help me.”

  With that, with nothing more than that, we were on our way outside. As Charles held my arm, we proceeded down the steps inlaid in the hill at the side of the house, to the stone embankment
where the back porch overhung Jeanne’s painting studio at the water’s edge. (Charles and Michele pointed out how her studio had been flooded during Hurricane Sandy, and never reclaimed.) Michele and Sally stood by. I unscrewed the container. Charles and I both said a little something, not much; I don’t remember what I said. I got Tom into the water pretty efficiently, without getting too much of him on my coat or pants, only a little. Then Sally and I drove back to Manhattan.

  VII

  OK You Mugs

  Heavy Petting

  It’s hard to read a compilation as genial and whole-hearted as O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors—edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson—and not wish it to go on a bit longer, or to be followed immediately by a sequel. The book’s premise is as easily-grasped as it is irresistible—Wasn’t there such a book already? you wonder as you browse, searching for favorites on each side of the ledger, the adoring and the adored. After compulsively gobbling down, say, Greil Marcus on the late, great character actor J.T. Walsh, you want to know what he thinks of M. Emmet Walsh, or, for that matter, Paul Dooley. Geoffrey O’Brien on Dana Andrews, Jacqueline Carey on Margaret Dumont, David Hadju on Elmer Fudd: all quite brilliant, yes—now where’s Diane Johnson on Peter Lorre, Michael Tolkin on Laurence Fishburne, Jack Womack on Godzilla? I want to read them, too. More than that, I’m ashamed to say that I can’t keep from petulantly wishing that I’d been invited to this dinner party myself (confidential to Sante and Pierson: Anyone have dibs on Robert Ryan? I could do you a great Robert Ryan), and not just allowed to eavesdrop. Maybe O.K. You Mugs should be a magazine instead of a book - I’d get a lifetime subscription.