The professor made a bland gesture in my general direction as if to say, “Yes . . . yes . . . I suppose it’s something of that sort,” and then continued with her lecture. Such survivors from the old days could raise no defense against the postmodern onslaught.
Myself, I could see the logic behind postmodernism and its moral relativism. Much of what we think is good—individual freedom, equality before the law, tolerance for conflicting opinions—is learned from Western culture and taken on faith. Why should we not accept that other cultures with other values and other faiths might be just as legitimate as our own? I could see the logic—and yet, my senses rebelled. To abandon those basic principles seemed false to something equally basic within me. It seemed an act of violence against my idea of what a human being was. I was torn between the intellectual fashion of the day and my own deepest convictions.
That’s part of the reason why Hamlet obsessed me so: it was the story of a man who could not decide what was right, what was true. I read it first in a Shakespeare course, then read it again and again and watched many of the movie versions too. One scene—the “mad scene”—haunted me endlessly. Hamlet is pretending to be insane—and may actually be a little insane at that point. When he’s asked what he’s reading, he answers weirdly, “Words, words, words.” He talks about how his internal moods seem to transform outer reality so that he can never be sure what the world is really like. Morality especially has come to seem to him completely dependent on his own opinions. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he says.
How wild was this? Shakespeare had predicted postmodernism and moral relativism hundreds of years before they came into being! Like Hamlet, the postmodernists were declaring that language did not describe the world around us. It was just “words, words, words.” Like Hamlet, the postmodernists announced that what we thought was reality was just a construct of our minds that needed to be disassembled in order to be truly understood. And like Hamlet, the postmodernists had dismissed the notion of absolute morality. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
But there was one big difference. Hamlet said these things when he was pretending to be mad. My professors said them and pretended to be sane. Shakespeare was telling us, it seemed to me, that relativism was not just crazy, it was make-believe crazy, because even the people who proclaimed it did not believe it deep down. If, after all, there is no truth, how could it be true that there is no truth? If there is no absolute morality, how can you condemn the morality of considering my culture better than another? Relativism made no sense, as Shakespeare clearly saw.
But what was the answer then? On the one hand, it seemed prejudiced and dogmatic to cling to moral absolutes. On the other hand, relativism was self-contradictory, mad-scene gibberish. As a writer who wanted to describe reality, how could I steer between the craziness of postmodernism and the rigidity of self-righteous self-certainty?
The seed of the answer was planted in me by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. I was about twenty when I read it. It changed my life. I had moved out of Berkeley by then and was commuting to my classes from across the San Francisco Bay. I had a dingy little apartment on one of the pretty city’s pretty hills, a street of townhouses with bay windows, the cable-car bells ringing in the near distance. I still didn’t do much schoolwork, but I read more of the books I bought now, and read a broader range of books than ever. I had learned how to turn off my ever-so-insistent opinions and simply let the authors speak to me. I had learned to ride a story like a wave, wherever it went.
This was an important change in me, an essential change. Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it’s like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors. We can only say: it’s like this—this story, this picture, this song. I had finally sloughed off some of my teenage arrogance and started to listen to those descriptions with an open mind. Without knowing it, I had joined the Great Conversation.
So . . . I remember sitting in my San Francisco apartment one evening, sitting in a rickety, straight-backed wooden chair at my little writing desk. The paperback of Crime and Punishment was open like a prayer book in my two hands, held under the desk lamp. The lamplight was dim. I had to stare at the small print on the page through the deepening dusk. I stared, my eyes wide, my lips parted. I read.
Crime and Punishment is the story of Raskolnikov, a former college student. Sunken-eyed, feverish, half-crazed, depressive, he reminded me of me when I first arrived at school. Raskolnikov comes to believe that morality is relative, that a great man can create his own right and wrong in the name of freedom and power. In the grips of that belief, he commits two horrific axe murders. Then, too late, he discovers he has violated the absolute moral law within himself. It was real all along, much more real than he knew. His conscience will not let him rest. He is tortured by remorse. But slowly, he comes under the sway of a Christian girl who has fallen into prostitution. Through her love and kindness and faith, Raskolnikov begins to accept his sinfulness and shame and to return to the moral world. As the story ends, he begins the “new story” of his redemption in the Gospels.
When I finished the book, I laid it down on the desktop, my hand unsteady. I pressed the heels of my palms against my forehead as if to keep my thoughts inside me. After reading that novel, I was never quite the same. I did not accept the Christian aspect of it then. I couldn’t. It was too alien to my upbringing, too at odds with the mental atmosphere in which I lived. I told myself that Dostoevsky was merely using Christ as a symbol for the reality of moral truth. But never mind. I knew beyond a doubt that the essential vision of the novel was valid. The story’s rightness struck me broadside so that the journey of my heart changed direction. From the moment I read Crime and Punishment—though I did not know it, though it took me decades, though I was lost on a thousand detours along the way—I was traveling away from moral relativism and toward truth, toward faith, toward God.
Soon after this, I met Ellen, the woman who would become my wife. I’ll tell all about that in the next chapter, but for now, I want to end with this.
Ellen’s father, Thomas Flanagan, was the chairman of the Berkeley English department. This had nothing to do with how I met her. I was so mentally dissociated from the school experience that I had no idea what the chairman of an English department was. But moving in with Ellen turned out to be sort of like marrying the boss’s daughter. Even the professors who suspected me of faking it started to give me As. It’s probably how I got my degree.
More importantly, Ellen’s father and mother took to me. The first time I came into their house, I was approached by their yapping wire-haired terrier. I laughed and said, “Asta!” Asta was the dog in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man—a schnauzer in the novel but a wire-hair in the famous 1934 film. Tom’s face lit up when I called the dog that name. I think both he and Ellen’s mother were thrilled their daughter had finally brought home a boyfriend who might have actually once read a book! In any case, they kindly welcomed me into their family.
It was a fine, delightful irony. Here I was, an academic fraud, suddenly attending dinners and cocktail parties with the stars of the university’s English department. These were brilliant men, almost all men, a faculty rated second in the country only to Yale’s. They spoke effortlessly and allusively of literature from Homer to Seamus Heaney. Seamus himself was a good friend of Tom’s and sometimes in the house. He and Tom and Ellen and I even traveled through Ireland together once, the Irish poet and the Irish-American professor-novelist discoursing on the history of every blade of grass. These men—all these learned men I met—seemed to know everything about everything. They made casual jokes about lines from poems I had never heard of. They discussed current events in the context of a history I only dimly understood. They l
ived, in other words, in a world whose existence I had only just begun to suspect: the world of ideas. For the first time, I started to wonder whether it might be my world, the world I belonged in.
So just as my years at university were ending, I was coming to understand what an education was. To escape from the little island of the living. To know what thinking men and women have felt and seen and imagined through all the ages of the world. To meet my natural companions among the mighty dead. To walk with them in conversation. To know myself in them, through them. Because they are what we’ve become. Every blessing from soup bowls to salvation they discovered for us. Individuals just as real as you and me, they fought over each new idea and died to give life to the dreams we live in. Some of them—a lot of them—wasted their days following error down nowhere roads. Some hacked their way through jungles of suffering to collapse in view of some far-off golden city of the imagination. But all the thoughts we think—all the high towers of the mind’s citadel—were sculpted out of shapeless nothing through the watches of their uncertain nights. Every good thing we know would be lost to darkness, all unremembered, if each had not been preserved for us by some sinner with a pen.
I wanted to read their works now, all of them, and so I began. After I graduated, after Ellen and I moved together to New York, I piled the books I had bought in college in a little forest of stacks around my tattered wing chair. And I read them. Slowly, because I read slowly, but every day, for hours, in great chunks. I pledged to myself I would never again pretend to have read a book I hadn’t or fake my way through a literary conversation or make learned reference on the page to something I didn’t really know. I made reading part of my daily discipline, part of my workday, no matter what. Sometimes, when I had to put in long hours to earn a living, it was a rough slog. I still remember the years when I would wake up at 3:00 a.m. to go to a job writing radio news for the morning rush hour. I would come home from a seven-hour shift and play with my baby daughter. Then I would write fiction for four hours. Then, finally, I would read—my eyes streaming with tears of exhaustion—read until past midnight even if it meant I’d get only an hour or two of sleep before I woke up at three and went to work again.
The stacks around my wing chair dwindled and I built them up again and they dwindled again and I built them up.
It took me twenty years. In twenty years, I cleared those stacks of books away. I read every book I had bought in college, cover to cover. I read many of the other books by the authors of those books and many of the books those authors read and many of the books by the authors of those books too.
There came a day when I was in my early forties—I remember I was coming out of a pharmacy on the Old Brompton Road in London—when it occurred to me that I had done what I set out to do. I had taught myself the culture that had made me. I had taught myself the tradition I was in. In the matter of personal philosophy, I had finally earned the right to an opinion. I was no longer what I had been in my youth.
Against all odds, I had managed to get an education.
CHAPTER 9
LODESTAR
My last year in college, I owned an ancient jalopy, a maroon Dodge Dart. My friends and I christened it the Artful Dodge, after Oliver Twist’s pickpocket pal the Artful Dodger. Because I had moved into San Francisco, I had to drive the Artful Dodge across the Bay Bridge to the Berkeley campus on the days when I had classes. A pal of mine who didn’t own a car let me park the Dodge in his assigned space in the garage of his apartment building.
One day in early Autumn, I was walking back from campus to collect the car for the drive home. I looked up from my usual reverie and saw a woman hitchhiker standing across the street. She was slender and tall—as tall as I am—and as beautiful as a model on a magazine cover. To this day I remember the words that went through my head when I first saw her: My God, would you look at that gorgeous Amazon!
She was gorgeous—and she was literally asking to be picked up! Standing in the cross street by the parked cars with her thumb out, trying to flag a ride. I knew it wouldn’t be long before some other guy saw her and swept her away. In fact, I was sure it was going to happen at any moment. And there I was, still half a block from where the Artful Dodge was parked.
I started running. I’ve always been fast on my feet and I reached the garage and my car in only a few seconds. I unlocked the Dodge, tossed my schoolbooks inside, and slid behind the wheel. The Artful was a good old car, it really was, but it never started on the first turn of the key, not ever. It was old. Most times when I tried to get it going, it wheezed; it coughed; it stuttered; it only started on the third or fourth try.
But this day of all days, the Dodge roared to life on the instant. I wrestled the transmission stick on the steering wheel and threw the car into reverse. The tires screamed on the concrete as I shot the car backward out of its space, spun it round right, and then fired it out of the garage like a bullet—a wobbly, rattling, dirty, maroon bullet.
The streets of Berkeley in that neighborhood were laid out in a one-way grid. The Gorgeous Amazon Hitchhiker was to my right but the road outside the garage ran leftward only. I would have to go all the way around the corner to get back to her—and so I did, rocketing insanely through a busy residential area at about fifty miles an hour. I wove in and out of traffic. I skirted pedestrians. I have one vivid memory of a gray-haired lady with a shopping bag dangling from her wrist, frozen in my windshield, her face agape with terror. I somehow managed to swerve around her and go racing past. It’s possible I screamed at her some words I shouldn’t have.
But at last, I saw the hitchhiker up ahead with only one car between us. I could make out that the driver of that car was male, and while I didn’t pray for him to go blind or die, I confess I did try to seize hold of his mind with my own and direct his thoughts away from any idea of stopping. To my astonishment, this appeared to work. The Gorgeous Amazon went on standing in the road with her thumb out and the guy in front of me drove right past her.
I pulled up alongside her. Trying to keep my voice steady and to dull what I knew must be the insane glaze of my rolling stare, I worked down my window and ever-so-casually asked if I might offer the lady a lift. I remember full well the sensation I had when she sat down in the front seat beside me. Nothing like a surge of passion. Nothing like a soundless symphony of invisible violins. It was instead almost exactly like what you feel when you are doing a jigsaw puzzle, when you have been searching for a piece without success for a long time, and suddenly you pick the right one from the pile and fit it to the picture with a whispered click.
“Sharp short,” she said to me. Meaning: nice car.
“We call it the Artful Dodge,” I told her.
She thought I was married because I used the word we. I thought my whole life made a kind of sense it had never made before.
I drove her back to her place, a house in the hills where she rented a room. I went inside with her and we sat and talked for more than three hours. I was so afraid she would see the way I felt about her—how gone I was—that I lost my nerve and couldn’t bring myself to ask for her phone number. I’ll always be able to find her house again, I told myself as I drove home. But in the days that followed, I found it wasn’t so. Her house was hidden among the mazes of winding lanes up there. Well, I thought, after searching for it fruitlessly, I’ll go back to the place where she hitchhiked and find her there. But her car, broken that first day, had been repaired soon after. She wasn’t hitchhiking anymore.
Every day then, at the same hour each day, I would drive by the spot where I had first seen her, but she was never there. Even on days when I had no classes, I would travel across the bay to look for her. By then, I had begun to realize in some callow way what had happened to me, what a stroke of luck, or gift of providence it was. I knew I would find the Amazon again eventually, because I knew I had to.
After a few weeks of searching, though, I began to grow desperate. I considered phoning her father. She had mentioned he was th
e chairman of the English department, whatever that meant. I looked him up in the school directory and, yes, there he was. It was a daunting thought—to call up a professor and ask him to help me find his daughter for libidinal purposes—but I was ready to do it.
Fortunately, before it came to that, I managed to stumble on the girl herself. I was on one of my passes by her old hitchhiking place when I spotted her walking to her car, which was parked nearby. I pulled up beside her and asked her out. Within weeks we were living together in an apartment in San Francisco. Four years later we were married. We’re married still.
My marriage to Ellen has not been an ordinary one, not by a long shot. It has been a lifelong romance. I love her, by which I mean her good is my good and her misfortune mine, and I love her passionately, by which I mean I hunger for her company as well as her touch. This has not changed even a little in our nearly forty years together. In nearly forty years, we have had exactly one quarrel. It was a meaningless flair of temper more than thirty years ago. Our apartment was being painted. Everything was in chaos. I had a night job and hadn’t slept in weeks. We were both out of sorts, and we snapped at each other. It quickly passed. For the rest, we have been poor and rich together, crazy and sane, happy and miserable, but never wholly out of harmony. I find I can no longer even dream a woman who is not in some sense she.
But more than that. Our marriage has taken on a life of its own. It has become a third creation, greater than anything we are individually or together. I like to think we’re perfectly decent people, Ellen and I, but I have all the usual flaws of men and she of women. We’re clearly neither one of us as special as this vessel that contains us. Our marriage shines around us and between us with an otherly light, a sacred habitation for our shambolic humanity. It is soul stuff made visible.
The Great Good Thing Page 13
