More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  This mutual seduction, which no consummation could approximate, meets C. S. Lewis’s criterion for what he calls Joy: “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” The cynic in me wants to say that the only honest billboard among the many dozens here is that for Pink Floyd’s The Wall, depicting a bricked-up surface. The cynic in me is in the minority, confronted with the Joy here. Really, what’s a lavish coffee-table book but another fetish? This book is reciprocal. It depicts and reenacts the dream of catching with binding and glue and gloss the ephemeral and ineffable; it represents another chance to pay for what can’t be bought: a dream. As a happy member of both of the cargo cults in question, I want these billboards on my coffee table. And next time I drive the Strip, I’ll rent a convertible.

  —The New York Times, 2012

  VIII

  Fan Mail

  Carved in Need

  I never met Theodore Sturgeon, but I did have a chance to introduce him to my father, in a Sturgeonish fashion. Paul Williams and I were visiting Woodstock, New York, on our way from a convention in Massachusetts, and there we were to meet my father, who had driven to pick me up from and return me to his cabin in the Catskills. In Woodstock Paul and I met Noël Sturgeon, his daughter. We were an hour or so early for the rendezvous with my dad, and, of course, more than a decade late to hope for an encounter in the flesh with Theodore Sturgeon.

  This was in 1993, at the start of North Atlantic Books’ noble publishing marathon, The Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, of which this is the tenth volume. At that time the project was a whisper or a promise. Or perhaps I should say it was a drive in the woods, for that is what it was that day. We went for a drive in the woods and Paul and I contemplated the territory of Sturgeon’s life in his Woodstock years, with Noël’s eloquent guidance, her narration and her silences. She led us down back-roads to contemplate the place where Sturgeon’s writing shack had been hidden. We absorbed the presence of his absence, and I absorbed the delicate weight of his daughter’s spoken and unspoken memories, and those of her father’s friend Paul. I remembered what I knew of Sturgeon, and I remembered the stories and when I’d first read them, when I was a kid. Noël spoke of her childhood with an artist father, and I thought of my own.

  Then we went back into Woodstock and met my father in a café. By the time I was able to introduce Noël to my father I felt I was returning a favor, or at least trying to. I felt that I was completing a circle. Leaving Paul and Noël behind, driving off into the Catskills, I spoke to my father of Sturgeon, and I spoke to him differently. That night I slept beside my father in two sleeping bags in a cabin lit only by candles and by the stars, and there I told him more of my life as an adult than I ever had. I was still with Sturgeon, though I was alone with my father, and had never been with Sturgeon at all.

  Sturgeon’s stories are like that: they speak of human beings connecting with other human beings or attempting to do so at great odds, and at odd angles; of human beings failing at or sabotaging their own best efforts for fear that what they want most doesn’t make any sense, or that the odds are too great; of human beings learning again and again that their thin howling selves are part of a chorus which stands shoulder to shoulder in a traffic jam, a mob scene of lonely selves, of members of a great estranged family of beings. Sturgeon wrote miraculous short stories. Some fly, some stumble, but all are miraculous. By that I mean he always wrote of miracles, of deliverance and miracles and of a lust for completion in an incomplete world. He wrote of needs and their denial, with such undisguised longing and anger that his stories are caustic with emotion. His stories are carved in need. Many of the fine examples gathered in Volume 10 are by happy coincidence the first ones Sturgeon wrote in those woods; he moved his family to Woodstock in 1959.

  Paul Williams once said, in conversation, that Sturgeon’s “only method was the tour de force.” That has long seemed to me the only critical remark on Sturgeon’s art that needs making. It is impossible to imagine the work arising from anything but the peculiar circumstances of its making. Sturgeon found his urgency directed in becoming, in bursts of stylistic juice, the John Dos Passos, the William Faulkner, the Ring Lardner, the James Thurber, the Virginia Woolf of science fiction. Science fiction gave him the motifs of transcendence and metamorphosis; it gave him, with its lunatic idealism about space exploration, the imperative of optimism. These he needed, to cut against what strikes me as an instinctive morbidity. See how Sturgeon’s imagination collapses into the gothic in the non-SF tales; alternately, consider how The Man Who Lost the Sea, the finest literary fugue this side of James Salter’s Dusk, relies on its rocket. Yet Sturgeon’s work is the opposite of Pop Art; he never predicted much; his cheerleading’s embarrassing. He can seem misplaced in science fiction. I’d argue he’d have been misplaced anywhere. And would he have written his masterpieces without that form to write against? I doubt it.

  The results—well, they’re as impossible as the foregoing suggests. Theodore Sturgeon’s best stories are triumphant Golems. They stride tall while they shake off the entreaties of the clay of the battleground of which they were formed. They have nothing but their voices.

  —Foreword to The Man Who Lost the Sea: Volume X: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, 2005

  New Old Friend (A Toast to Kenneth Koch)

  I’m subject to an awful temptation here, and that is to lapse into some version of a shameless imitation of one of his own poems in introducing to you my hero, Kenneth Koch. How easy and disastrous it would be to begin Oh Thank You for giving me the chance of being Kenneth Koch’s introducer! Or A serious moment for the novelist is when he is asked to draw aside the curtain for his favorite poet! Or At a reading, one writer may hide behind another—And yet I’m going to try to resist this temptation, this seduction, because I know where it leads, or at least I know where it led me once: when I was eighteen my adoration for Kenneth Koch led me to mistake myself for a poet. In 1984 as a college freshman I bluffed my way into a poetry workshop that was meant to be closed to freshman. I did this by appearing in person at the office of the poet who led the workshop, and when he looked at my trembling sheaf and asked me who my favorite poet was I declared proudly Kenneth Kotch! Rhyming it with crotch. I’d never heard the name said aloud. Now I know that that declaration was a very early warm-up for this evening. The teacher-poet corrected my pronunciation and let me into the workshop, and then, in a matter of months, taught me that I was not a poet. Or he allowed me to teach myself. Still, I wasn’t done with being seduced by Kenneth Koch, not by a long shot.

  A few years later, my then-wife and I began a photocopied zine which we called Idiot Tooth, and the motto of the zine, which was printed on the contents page, was “The only thing I could publicize well would be my tooth!” from Kenneth Koch’s “Thank You.” What is so seductive in those lines I’m compelled to mangle in my parodies, what it is that compels me to read and re-read Kenneth Koch’s poems alone and in company, silently and aloud, what it was that once compelled me to read the entirety of “The Boiling Water” to a wedding full of people waiting to dance to a Klezmer band, is the forever-startling freshness and exuberance and generosity of the voice, the mock-effortless way that Kenneth Koch sweeps aside the drab curtain of formality to offer plain talk, wit, rhapsodic inventions, memories, dreams, regrets, fresh air. How odd it is, in a way, to try to introduce poems whose every first line is itself a how-do-you-do, a handclasp, a hot cookie cooling on a tin sheet in a corner of the kitchen when the baker’s back is turned.

  So often Kenneth Koch has offered us an apparent transparency—the gesture or impulse seemingly recorded naked for the page. Not that we should be fooled for a minute as to the rigor and purposefulness required to deliver such excellence—except, of course, for the endless pleasure in being fooled this way. In an early poem called “The Artist,” Koch seems to display his own ambition and restlessness for us to admire:

  I often think Play was my best work.


  It is an open field with a few boards in it.

  Children are allowed to come and play in Play

  By permission of the Cleveland Museum.

  I look up at the white clouds, I wonder what I

  shall do, and smile.

  Perhaps somebody will grow up having been

  influenced by Play.

  I think—but what good will that do?

  Meanwhile I am interested in steel cigarettes…

  Well, I’m not a poet, but I am a child who was permitted to play in Play. Kenneth Koch, as a writer, showed me the value of paradox and surprise, he showed me the value of intimacy and informality, and when I studied him harder he taught me the value of alertness, and hesitation, and of reading myself as patiently as I read others. He taught me how much of what I love might be allowed into my work—and, beyond that, and writing completely aside, he taught to me consider how much of what I loved might be allowed into my life. I’m terribly grateful to be invited to introduce to you a man who, though we’ve never met before tonight, is one of my oldest friends, Kenneth Koch.

  —Introduction to Kenneth Koch’s reading at the Bowery Poetry Club on March 30, 2002.

  Printed that same year in Crossroads

  Eyes Wide Open

  I’m aware of one—one—reader who doesn’t care for Lorrie Moore, and even that one seems a little apologetic about it. “Too…punny,” my friend explained to me, resorting to a pun as though hypnotized by the very tendency that had triggered her resistance. For others, Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary American writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious, and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, Moore is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows. For many readers, the fact that Moore has relieved an eleven-year publishing breach (her last book, the story collection Birds of America, concludes with her unforgettable baby-with-cancer story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” a breathtakingly dark overture to a decade’s silence—as if the Beatles had exited on “A Day in the Life”) is reason enough to start Google-mapping a route to the nearest surviving bookstore.

  If American fiction writers largely find themselves sorted tediously into the category of “natural” at either the short or the long form, regardless of the extent of their commitment to both, then Moore—justly celebrated for her three story collections—has surely been counted as a miniaturist. This book should spell the end of that. A Gate at the Stairs is a novel more expansive than either of her two previous novels, the slender, Nabokovian Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? or the structurally dizzy novel-as-set-of-variations Anagrams. It’s also one that brandishes some “big” material: racism, war, etcetera—albeit in Moore’s resolutely insouciant key.

  The novel’s protagonist and narrator Tassie Keltjin is a student at a midwestern college mecca, daughter of a boutique potato cultivator, who finds work as the nanny-in-waiting for a brainy couple awkwardly on the verge of adoption. This ambiguous assignment takes the foreground in a tale ranging over Tassie’s home life and love life—the nest she’s just departed and the nest she’s hoping to flutter into. Moore’s class diagnostics are so exact that she can make us feel the uneasiness not only between town and country in a sole landlocked state, but between different types of farmers on neighboring plots. The book is also set in the autumn of 2001, a fact Moore has the patience to barely deploy for two hundred pages, and then only with a deft sleight-of-hand that will make readers reflect on the ways other treatments of this (unfinished) passage in American life have resembled heart surgery performed with a croquet mallet.

  In a 2005 interview, Moore made an allusion to this “post-9/11” aspect of the work that grew into this novel: “I’m…interested in the way that the workings of governments and elected officials intrude upon the lives and minds of people who feel generally safe from the immediate effects of such workings.” The delicacy of this remark fails to disguise its clarity of purpose, and, as it happens, distant international affairs are by no means the only source of “intrusion” in A Gate at the Stairs. Moore’s continuing interest in how power imbalances make themselves felt in human encounters fastens here on the Kafka-worthy bureaucracy of adoption agencies and foster homes. Combined with her immaculately tender portrayals of young children, so real you want to pass around their snapshots, this aspect of her novel will do such things to your heart that you may find yourself wishing for the surgeon with the croquet mallet, just for mercy.

  Moore’s cast is sneaky-large (she’s like an athlete you keep wanting to call sneaky-fast, or sneaky-tough). Any of Tassie’s relationships—like that with her adoption-seeking employer Sarah Brink, or her vivid goof of a younger brother, or her exotic first love interest, Reynaldo (whom she meets in “Intro to Sufism”)—may seem this book’s essential one, at least while it assumes center-stage. But the novel’s real essence is its sinuous roving spotlight, in which each character and element is embraced in Tassie’s wondering and exact sensibility, as when with her brother she revisits a childhood haunt:

  When the gnats weren’t bad I had sometimes accompanied him, sat in the waist-high widgeon grass beside him, the place pink with coneflowers, telling him the plot of, say, a Sam Peckinpaugh movie I’d never seen but had read about once in a syndicated article in the Dellacrosse Sunday Star. Crickets the size of your thumb would sing their sweet monotony from the brush. Sometimes there was a butterfly so perfect and beautiful, it was like a party barrette you wanted to clip in your hair. Above and around us green leaves would flash wet with sun-setting light. In this verdant cove I recounted the entire plot of Straw Dogs…Now we stood at the cold stream’s edge, tossing a stone in and listening for its plonk and plummet. I wanted to say, “Remember the time…” But too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn’t match. I would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it, and Robert would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable to the talk, which is also effortless.

  We found more stones and tossed them. “A stone can’t drown,” said my brother finally. “It’s already drowned.”

  “You been reading poetry?” I smiled at him.

  As for the puns, they seem to me less an eagerness to entertain than a true writerly obsession. Moore’s an equal-opportunity japester: heroes and villains both crack wise with Chandleresque vivacity, so you can’t use cleverness as a moral index. The wrinkly recursiveness of her languages seems lodged at the layer of consciousness itself, where Moore demands readers’ attention to the innate thingliness of words. This includes not only their plastic capacity as puns, and the oddnesses residing in names for food, foliage and products—for instance, the fact that no bachelor likely ever wore the flowers called “bachelor buttons,” or that a fabric’s neutral hue can be awarded names as various as pigeon, parmesan, platinum or pebble—but their potential use as deliberate uncommunication: “ ‘Sounds good,’ I sang out into the dark of the car. Sounds good, that same midwestern girl’s slightly frightened reply. It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except it was promiseless—mere affirmative description.”

  Finally, this book plumbs deep because it is anchored deep, in a system of natural imagery as tightly organized as that in a cycle of poems like Ted Hughes’s Crow. The motif is birth, gestation, and burial, a seed or fetus uncovering its nature in secrecy, a coffin being offered to the earth. The motif declares itself upfront in Tassie’s father’s potatoes, which like sleeper cells grow clustered in darkness, and then, unearthed, assume names: Klamath pearls, yellow fingerlings, purple Peruvians and Rose Finns. In The Gate at the Stairs it is more than potatoes which adapt themselves for the world behind assumed names, but babies and grownups too.

  Great writers usually present
us with mysteries, but the mystery Lorrie Moore presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once—unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She’s a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one. On finishing A Gate at the Stairs I turned to the reader nearest to me and made her swear to read it immediately (well, the dog was between us, but doesn’t read much, and none of what I recommend). I might even urge it on my dissenting friend.

  —The New York Times, 2009

  Something About a Slice

  I shouldn’t be writing this with ink or pixels—I should be ladling tomato sauce onto a blank sheet of pizza dough to form the letters, or throwing my laptop up in the air and spinning it around on one finger while you look at me through an open counter window from the street. As a New York City street kid, watching those guys was for me like gazing at a well-appointed beat cop, a three-card monte hustler at his tiny folding table, or the fireman who drove the rear end of a hook-and-ladder—a fundamental exhibition of indigenous authority and style, of blue-collar masculine pizzazz (I hadn’t noticed the pizza hiding in pizzazz until just now). While I never twirled dough myself, I did test myself in the realm of pizza: the day I ate seven slices during a friend’s birthday party at a slice house on Livingston Street between Hoyt and Bond in downtown Brooklyn (we were coming back from seeing a Kung Fu movie or a Richard Pryor flick at the Duffield Theater, I’m guessing). That was the day I became a man, my Bar Pitzva. Later, as a punk teen with a fetish for pranks and mail-art, I ate a slice from Queen on Court Street fourteen days in a row, and mailed the cheese-greasy sheet of translucent white paper that had supported each slice—What the hell are those things called? They’re a slice’s footman, Igor to its Dr. Frankenstein, and no one ever pays them any attention at all, but they’re doing the job, man, they’re getting it done—to my friend Eliot, who’d lived in Brooklyn but now lived in upstate New York. This was my way of being a jerk—Hey, I still live in the five boroughs, and you don’t—and bragging of my appetites, but also of communing with Eliot on the subject of the sacred everyday things that were underfoot everywhere and needed celebration, the bounteous wrecked worlds of childhood and New York. Just the shakers full of oregano and red pepper flake and garlic salt, oh my: deciding which were your favored toppings, and in what proportion, and then sneering at those choosing otherwise.