More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I don’t read science fiction,” Burgess hissed, taking his revenge now.

  But he knew who I was talking about.

  —Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012

  A Furtive Exchange

  Reading Chester Brown’s Paying for It, I found myself unexpectedly recalling a trepidatious and exciting visit I once made, in 2000, to an anonymous-looking apartment in downtown Toronto. I went there looking to make a transaction, one in which I would exchange money for something I regard as beyond price, something from a realm outside that of transactions and money—but wait, before you leap to any conclusions, let me slow down and explain. Actually, before I explain, let me mention that I regard Paying for It as, simply, or not so simply, the most recent in a series of totally characteristic and totally unpredictable masterpieces by one of our greatest—one of our greatest-ever—cartoonists, or comic book artists, or graphic novelists, or whatever we’re calling them. Note also how I avoided having to say “North American” by saying “our,” which I prefer because, Louis Riel aside—and that’s a big aside—Chester Brown seems to me both more iconoclastic and more universal than “Canadian” or “North American;” he’s a citizen of the timeless nation of the dissident soul, as much as Dostoyevsky’s underground man. At the same time, he’s also a citizen of a nation of one: Chesterbrownton, or Chesterbrownslvania, a desolate but charged region he seems to have no choice but to inhabit, and of which I feel quite privileged to be a regular visitor.

  So, what was I seeking at the anonymous-looking apartment in downtown Toronto in the year 2000?

  I was seeking to commission Chester Brown to draw a cover for a small-press book I’d written, a novella, called This Shape We’re In, that I was designing myself. As it happens. I’d persuaded my publisher-collaborator that Brown was the ideal artist for the project—not difficult to do—and, since, also as it happens, I was intermittently living in Toronto at the time, I made it a fair excuse to impress myself on the man. He was, already then, one of my favorite cartoonists. I wanted to describe the project to him in person, and propose a very particular two-part deal to him, as well: I wanted him to draw the cover image for the book, and I also wanted to own a Chester Brown original, and so I asked if I could arrange to purchase the drawing for the cover in advance.

  What happened? Brown welcomed me in, and listened to my wishes, in a kind of attentively distant way, a kind of deadpan but not unfriendly way, one that was of course already somewhat familiar to me from his autobiographical comics and has subsequently become vastly more familiar—and then he agreed. Brown got the gist of what I wanted, and it was okay, he wasn’t judgmental of my odd wishes, he could help me with this, yes.

  Though this wasn’t without its humorous aspects—the fiction I’d written that needed the illustration, nor the situation of my describing it to him (the novella concerned a slumbering army of soldiers living inside a gigantic body, and so the drawing I requested for the cover was of a commander and his lieutenant marching, lost, within an enormous human intestinal tract) the atmosphere between us was oddly furtive and clinical, somewhat clipped and efficient, though, as I said, not in any way unfriendly. The gist of it seemed to be that Brown was able to relieve me of my problem. I think he charged me eight hundred bucks. Or three hundred. Or five hundred. I can’t remember.

  Now, since I’ve never paid for sex (thanks to Brown’s insinuating rhetorical powers in the footnote sections of Paying for It, and because of the pervasive aura of shame that infuses Brown’s work this almost feels like an embarrassing confession. Shouldn’t I have done so at some point? But no, no, that’s not right, I’m over-identifying with my subject right now), what this felt like, to me, was a visit to a drug dealer. I’d found the right address and been welcomed inside and told sure, I can hook you up. And, I’m not going to make you feel like a sick fuck for wanting what you want; some persons just need a drawing of army men lost inside an intestine from time to time. You’ve come to the right place.

  And I had. Though I ordinarily hate illustrational approaches to my writing, and have fought like a cornered terrier repeatedly to get art directors from major publishers to revert to jacket designs that consist purely of metaphorical or abstract imagery, or of font, there’s something about Brown’s line that works for me entirely as a representation of what written language does. His lines, his compositions and forms, are both persuasively somatic—grotty, physical, homely, a testimony or confession of the body—and simultaneously a thing of the deep soul-ether; they fuse the actual and the metaphysical as their baseline operation. No matter how hard Brown may work to purge this spiritual, phantasmagorical element from his drawing, and to ground us instead in a flensed and prosaic world (this is a supposition on my part; I have no idea whether he is attempting to do this), it is felt, under the skin. Of course, in describing this tension, I have the benefit of study of his progression of works, from Ed the Happy Clown, to the Gospels, to the deeply problematic and awesomely hypnotic Underwater (a triad of monumental unfinished works, and how unusual is that, for an artist to begin his career with the habit of abandoning gigantic unwieldy canvases?) to the increasing focus on “actuality” in some of the great short works like “Helder” and “Showing Helder” and then of course in I Never Liked You (aka Fuck) and Louis Riel and The Playboy (a triad of finished works, and how odd for the serial abandoner of potential masterworks to become a consummate completer of them!). This progression helps us appreciate the quality of focus and restriction, the sublimely microscopic attentiveness of the style that subsequently evolved—but they also cue us to the atmosphere of the surreal and grotesque and the transcendent, those things which steadily hum just beneath the surface of Brown’s contained panels, inside his silent passages, and in his metronomic silences and the dampened body language and facial expressions and blocking of his human figures, all of which are quivering in their containment and with their potential to erupt.

  So, what was it like to meet Chester Brown and to make that furtive exchange of cash for sublimity? What was it really like? (I should have probably mentioned up at the top of this piece that I was writing, helplessly, not as a critic but as a total fan.) I’m tempted to joke that the little man was not little, or that the happy clown did not seem particularly happy, but neither did he begin screaming and weeping and snapping his sticklike limbs but then it is the case that you know these things, because, in the tradition of R. Crumb and Daniel Clowes and Michel de Montaigne, Chester Brown has delivered himself to us, made himself knowable, despite the seeming impossibility of the human desire to be knowable, and Brown’s obvious ambivalence at even trying to do so. But what I want to say is this: though I’ve met many of my heroes, and many of them writers, and many of them writers of great privacy and intensity, and of powerful properties of both empathy and alienation, I think I’ll never come as near as I did that day in Toronto in 2000 to being able to imagine what it would have been like to pay a call on Franz Kafka.

  —from Drawn & Quarterly: 25 Years of Contemporary Cartoon, Comics and Graphic Novels, 2015

  Books Are Sandwiches

  Books are sandwiches. Between their bready boards lies a filling of information-dense leaves nestled together, an accumulation of layers for cumulative effect. Ratio is everything. Proportion. Too many slices of either meat or cheese can wreck a sandwich’s middle passages, the overused fundamental creating a bricky, discursive dry spot in what ought to have been a moist sequence. Too much aoli or chutney or roasted red pepper (always use those soaked in olive oil, never water) can gush, drench bread, run down the hand and destroy a wristwatch. Yet other sandwiches, the tours-de-force, thrive on excess, disunity, a pepperoncini or cherry tomato bursting through the door like a character with a gun in his hand, a rant of watercress or filibuster of brie, an unexpected chapter of flaked oregano inserted like a flashback or dream in italics.

  We dislike instinctively those who turn a sandwich and gnaw vertically, against the grain, wrecking the spine an
d architecture of a sandwich. Their disregard for narrative sequence is as violent as spoiling the plot of a book by gossiping in advance of the outcome. In each sandwich inheres an intrinsic eating speed, shameful to violate. Eating more and understand less? Slow down!

  Hors d’oeuvres on tiny crackers are poems, always seeking perfection in elusive gestures, annoying to try to make a meal of. Hot dogs, ice cream sandwiches, and Oreo cookies are like children’s picture books, bright and goonish, drawing the eater’s eye like a magpie’s to something glinting—the clowns of sandwiches. Hamburgers are clowns too, anonymous clowns that pile out of cars, frequently dwarves. Despite the propensity to make hamburgers ever bigger, to boast of ounces, the default hamburger is a White Castle—as Wimpy knows, burgers are eaten in serial, like mystery novels, eye always on the last page, and the burger to follow.

  Sandwiches are too often served in public. In fact the reader of sandwiches is essentially engaged in a private act, and becomes steadily irritable at our scrutiny. The Earl of Sandwich may have been a pool player, but the reader of sandwiches has no time for us or the ringing telephone, and only one hand free—for a book.

  —The Book Club Cookbook, 2004

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank all the individual commissioning editors, and Taylor Kingsbury, Ashley May, Jaime Clarke, Dennis Loy Johnson, Valerie Merians, and most of all Chris Boucher.

  Credits

  “Engulf and Devour” by Jonathan Lethem, from Moby-Dick, Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker, Harrison Hayford. Copyright © 2017 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  “The Figure in the Castle,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, May 1, 2005 © 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “The Greatest Animal Novelist of All Time,” by Jonathan Lethem, copyright © 2003 by Jonathan Lethem; from Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Used by permission of Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  “The Only Human Superhero” from Rolling Stone, copyright 2012 © by Rolling Stone LLC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  “Forget This Introduction” from The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss by Jonathan Lethem, copyright © 2000 by Jonathan Lethem. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  “Footnote” from The Thing the Book by John Herschend and Will Rogan, copyright © 2014 by John Herschend and Will Rogan. Used with permission by Chronicle Books, San Francisco.

  “Steven Millhauser’s Ghost Stories,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, September 2, 2011 © 2011 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “On the Yard” from On the Yard by Malcolm Braly, copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Lethem. Used with permission by New York Review Books.

  “Everything Said and Exhausted (Daniel Fuchs)” from The Brooklyn Novels by Daniel Fuchs, Introduction by Jonathan Lethem. Copyright © 2006 by The Estate of Daniel Fuchs. Introduction copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Lethem.

  “Consumed,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, September 26, 2014 © 2014 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “Bizarro World,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, June 20, 1999 © 1999 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “Remarks Perhaps Of Some Assistance To the Reader Of Joseph McElroy’s Ancient History: A Paraphrase” from Ancient History: A Paraphrase by Joseph McElroy, copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Lethem. Used with permission by Joseph McElroy.

  “Kazuo Ishiguro” by Jonathan Lethem, copyright © 2000 by Jonathan Lethem, from Salon.com’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, edited by Laura Miller with Adam Begley. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Thomas Berger” by Jonathan Lethem, copyright © 2000 by Jonathan Lethem, from Salon.com’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, edited by Laura Miller with Adam Begley. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Letters From The Invisible Man: My Correspondence With Thomas Berger,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, April 6, 2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “Close Reading (Ricks on Dylan),” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, June 13, 2004 © 2004 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “Mutual Seduction,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, November 30, 2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “Carved in Need” by Jonathan Lethem first appeared in The Man Who Lost the Sea: Volume X: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, edited by Paul Williams, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2005 by the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

  “Eyes Wide Open,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, August 27, 2009 © 2009 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “Pynchonopolis,” by Jonathan Lethem. From The New York Times, September 12, 2013 © 2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.”

  “A Furtive Exchange” originally appeared in Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Comics, Cartooning and Graphic Novels. 2015

  “Books Are Sandwiches” by Jonathan Lethem, from The Book Club Cookbook by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, copyright © 2004 by Judy Gelman & Vicki Levy Krupp. Used by permission of Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  About the Author

  JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including A Gambler’s Anatomy, Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Lethem has had work appear in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications.

  About the Editor

  CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER teaches writing and literature at Boston College, and is the managing editor of Post Road Magaz
ine. He is the author of the novels Golden Delicious and How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, both from Melville House. He lives with his wife and two children in Watertown, Massachusetts.