The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF MACDONALD HARRIS

  “There can no longer be any question whatever that MacDonald Harris is one of our major novelists.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “How come you haven’t heard of [Harris]? How is it that his books—often loosely fantastic or magic-realist—are out of print? You tell me … While the comparison to Verne is inevitable in any novel called The Balloonist, there is a hard, crystalline quality, reminiscent of Rilke’s poetry, to Harris’s bleakly exhilarating vision … Every so often, one discovers a novel that simply stays with you, that haunts your imagination for days after it’s closed and put back on the shelf. The Balloonist is that kind of book.”

  —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

  “The Carp Castle is a delight. It could be by no one else—the combination of effortless technical detail and delicate emotional perception is utterly MacDonald Harris, and so is his sense, marvelously deployed here, of the simultaneous tenderness and absurdity of love. His sympathy for such a range of characters in their crazinesses, their various kinds of loneliness, their sheer comedy is wonderful. I think it’s one of his very best; what a pity he didn’t live to see it published.”

  —Philip Pullman

  “Magnificent … Stunning … Harris was a novelist with a keen interest in sailing, arctic exploration and music—all of which come together beautifully in The Balloonist. And what a joy it is to read this book, so full of the spirit of adventure! It is a book about physics and metaphysics but also about ice and whiteness and the push and pull of erotic love … A delightful, quirky novel, The Balloonist is written in a dancing prose that matches the excitement of the enterprise. Brilliant.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “As stirring and beautiful as one of the airships that MacDonald Harris so obviously delighted in, The Carp Castle is surely among the best ‘lost novels’ published in recent memory. Harris is at his peak here: witty, sexy, surprising, and so generous to his cast of crackpots and con-artists and heartsore seekers.”

  —Owen King, author of Double Feature

  “Harris weaves a magical web of words in his narrative of mysticism, séances and a dirigible named The League of Nations … The action [in The Carp Castle] is inspired and written in undeniably gorgeous prose.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Mr. Harris is an elegant and fastidious writer, and thinking man’s novelist, with a penchant for international situations and polyglot dialogue.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A gifted craftsman, a meticulous writer whose powers as a storyteller are as compelling as the sexual tensions he imagines.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  “[The Balloonist] is leisurely, it’s subtle and reflective, it’s funny, it’s accurate and fascinating about the technical business of flying balloons and meteorology and the mysteries of early radio; there’s a love story that is tender, sexy and ridiculous all at once, there are characters who are firmly conceived and rounded and surprising, there’s an immaculate and jazz-like sense of rhythm and timing; but best of all there’s that sensation that comes so rarely, but is as welcome as a cool breeze on a hot day when it does—the sensation that here is a subtle, witty and intelligent mind that really knows how to tell a story. Actually, it’s almost impossible to read any of Harris’s first pages without helplessly turning to the next, and the next. I’m astonished that he’s not far better known.”

  —Philip Pullman

  “Harris’s range is, in fact, immense. Genuinely cosmopolitan, yet without the pretensions, he deeply knows and loves the many foreign languages, landscapes and mythologies that figure in his books … Harris is an erudite writer, well-versed not only in the history and arts of the past but in science and technology as well.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  ALSO BY

  MACDONALD HARRIS

  Private Demons

  Mortal Leap

  Trepleff

  Bull Fire

  The Balloonist

  Yukiko

  Pandora’s Galley

  The Treasure of Sainte Foy

  Herma

  Screenplay

  Tenth

  The Little People

  Glowstone

  Hemingway’s Suitcase

  Glad Rags

  A Portrait of My Desire

  The Cathay Stories and Other Fictions

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2013 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com, or write

  us at the address above.

  Copyright © 2013 by The Estate of Donald Heiney

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0841-9

  Contents

  Praise for the Work of Macdonald Harris

  Also by Macdonald Harris

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ONE

  Romer is running over a meadow, following a white form that emits strong erotic waves, as though it were a radio station, or a Vision of the Grail. It disappears into a thicket, flashes momentarily in an opening in the leaves, and disappears again with the abruptness of those white spots that sometimes dance on a movie screen at the end of a picture. Ahead of him on the grass he sees a no-nonsense English walking shoe with three rows of laces; its mate, he seems to remember, he encountered some time back. His own shoes are long gone, along with his coat, pants and shirt. He sprints after Eliza into the thicket, which is full of prickles and thorn-bushes that sting his naked legs. It seems to him that he is moving very slowly, as though his limbs are stuck in molasses, while she is racing along at an astonishing speed for one who seems so high-minded and ethereal, so un-athletic, in ordinary life. But he seems to be keeping up with her, so perhaps this is only some kind of hallucination caused by his lust.

  He passes a white brassiere hanging from a tree-limb; the rest of her clothes she has strewn behind her on branches and bushes, as though, he thinks, to mark the way for her return, like a child in a fairy tale. Bursting out of the thicket, he catches sight of her again, far enough ahead that she seems a small china doll, clad now only in scrap of linen that twitches to the rhythm of her running legs. This makes him redouble his efforts, while at the same time pondering over the problem of how to remove his own underpants without falling behind in the pursuit. The two of them are careering over the meadow with a view of the Rhine to the left, a fair and pleasant ribbon of blue, flowing as though to define the ancient word meander through the verdant Hessian hills. Interrogating his racing thoughts, he makes the decision to stop for a moment to sacrifice his final garment to this priapic ceremony, if that is what it is. He knows a good deal about women, but not enough to know exactly what she has in mind or how it is all to end. It is possible that she had no idea herself, that she is counting on him to make the last touches of the dramaturge to this playlet of their common fancy. He stumble
s or rather hops over the meadow with one foot bouncing in the grass and the other leg doubled up like a ballet dancer in an effort to thrust it through the opening in his underpants. He glances ahead and sees that Eliza, with a parallel problem, has solved it by rending her garment and leaving the fragments floating in the air behind her, but male underpants are made of sturdier stuff. He gets it off the first leg and, after a brief contretemps in which it hangs for a moment on the hat rack, he manages to slide it down the other leg and kick it off.

  Now he begins running again, preceded by the prow of his sex. Her white form swims dizzily before him, displaying its cleft as though made with the stroke of a brimming pen, with a little cross-mark under it. His head seems about to split with desire. She turns briefly to look at him, as she has at least twice since they began their chase by the tumbled picnic basket and the motorbike leaking oil onto the grass, and emits a shriek of laughter.

  He must look silly enough, he imagines. Utilizing her eyes as mirrors, he sees bounding over the meadow his own tall figure with its spindly arms and legs, his face moon-pitted with the scars of old acne, and his uncombed scraggle of black hair with a tuft the same color lower down. His large hands and feet are matched in size by his penis, so that the true symmetry, the true logic, of his body is not apparent when he is going about the world with his clothes on. Has she noticed this? Perhaps this is the source of her laugh.

  Ahead there is a wood of beeches and oaks. She disappears into the maze of tree-trunks with another fleeting glance behind her; the last he sees is her elongated face with its freckles and red hair, its diagonal glance, its half-fearful, half-enticing expression of a Botticelli nymph fleeing from a satyr. He plunges after her into the woods, swerves, lunges, adroitly leaps a projecting root that might send him tumbling, and sees approaching him, with a microscopic exactitude and in immense detail, like an illustration in a botany text, the trunk of a large beech; he even sees the minutest striations in the smooth olive-green bark, the tiny flecks of lichen, an insect no larger than an eyebrow.

  He has an extraordinary thought. This instant! It is now and he is here, focusing on the gray cylinder of vegetable matter, and that is the only thing he sees, and that is all there is—this is the moment. This instant is the only instant. It is inevitable that this should happen, but he has never anticipated it, for all his recondite studies in universities in America and Germany, his doctoral degree in metaphysics; although, he knows in the same instant, he could not be aware of the phenomenon if it were not for his philosophical training. The classic theories of time in Aristotle and Newton as something which “in itself and from its own nature flows equally” are false. All except this instant is past, which is only a rapidly dimming shadow in the mind, or future, an even more evanescent shimmer which, in fact, doesn’t exist.

  Once this idea has occurred to him (and it all happens necessarily in less than a wink) everything else becomes unimportant. For what significance can it have that in the past he was born on a Venezuelan cork farm and had an overweight Spanish woman for a mother, or that in the future he will catch Eliza in the woods and something or other will happen, or that he will not catch her and will go back to the hotel in Mainz on his motorbike with whatever pieces of his clothing he is able to retrieve; or that other things may or may not happen in the future, that he will soar over London in an airship, that he will marry a pygmy in Africa, that he will become a gangster in Chicago, or a pasha in Cairo, or die in a charity hospital in Toronto; it is all moonshine and cobwebs and in reality he is trapped in this infinitely tiny moment, staring at an oblong of beech-bark?

  The secret of the universe is that time is a single particle. If only he had known it then, when he was a student of philosophy! The speculations he labored over for so many months, immured in the dusty cloisters of libraries, would have been cast joyously out the window in favor of this universal, all-encompassing, final, definitive end to metaphysics, the doctrine of the Unique and Only Instant. And it would not even have been necessary to write a book about it, only to place a dot on a blank page, or do nothing; simply to allow the eloquence of this discovery to burst on the world like an enormous spark, obliterating history, memory, religions and gods, human consciousness itself, destroying once and for all that tenuous and invisible Thread so much speculated over by deep thinkers and sages, a filament which does not exist once it has been replaced by this tiny atom, the last speck that is left of the concept of time, floating in the air in front of a beech-tree. This tree-trunk, henceforth, is the only book anyone is allowed to read. The word beech, Anglo-Saxon boc, bece, or beoce, German Buch, Swedish boc, means at once a beech-tree and a book. The first books in Europe, the ancient runic tablets, were formed of thin boards of beech-wood.

  The ten thousand books he has read! And that ponderous tome, bound in green imitation leather, which he carried so tediously on busses and trains across the landscape of the Middle West. Its greasy surface, its dog-eared pages, its typing mistakes, its odor of mildew, sweat, and fatigue! Its title page on which the “e” in Angels had slipped slightly as all the identical replications of this letter slipped on his cheap Corona portable, giving the impression that this machine had a kind of speech defect that made it stammer every time it came to this most common of English phonemes: “This is a sample of the work done on this typewriter.” With this beech, this boc in one hand and in the other a prismatic valise whose cardboard entrails were beginning to reveal themselves, he descended from a steaming and hissing green monster into a bus terminal in Ann Arbor, stunningly discouraging in its squalor, surely a warning that they who attempt to enter the academic world through this gate should abandon all hope. He paused for a cup of coffee and a pickle from the free jar, all he could afford for lunch. Then on foot, carrying his two fardels, to the university and the philosophy department, with pauses to ask the way from students and others, who stared with curiosity at his tall form with its oversplit legs, his large hands and feet (they couldn’t see the fifth monster), and his clutch of black hair.

  The interview was scheduled for two-thirty. He was forty-two minutes early when he arrived, and he found himself waiting in another comic parody of hell similar to the bus station: a room arranged like a counting-room in a novel of Dickens, with a yellow wooden counter, much dented and varnished, running the long way down its center. On one side of the counter was a pair of wooden chairs of the same Dickensian vintage, and on the other, in place of the clerk with his green eyeshade, was a receptionist whose name, as he could see from the oblong of cardboard on the counter in front of her, was Adeline Wayde; he recorded this information knowing that it was utterly useless and that never in his life, even if he got the job and spent the rest of his life in this place, would he call her anything but “Excuse me” and “Miss.” Something about her—her dress, her mien, the askew black ribbon in her hair, her odor of nutmeg—radiated pessimism; that is, not that she was pessimistic herself but that she possessed a hidden store of pessimism-gas, like the stink in the gland of a skunk, which she squirted in anyone’s direction as soon as he came into the room; at least if he were a former graduate student and now a helpless, hopeless candidate, probably one of dozens, for a position as lecturer in philosophy in this university. Romer already knew enough about universities to know that they are run by secretaries. And she was not going to give him this job.

  First, though, it was necessary to go through the formalities of the interview, to be conducted by Professor Winwein, the head of the department, and a search committee hand-picked by him to confirm Miss Wayde’s snap judgments and banish the unqualified to the farthest reaches of Ultima Thule, which was probably some college in Montana with the word creek in its name. Romer set down his two burdens, the dissertation and the cardboard suitcase, and took a seat. After the forty-two minute wait one of the varnished doors at the end of the room opened, a sepulchral voice spoke an undecipherable word, and Miss Wayde said, “The committee will see you now.” He decided to leave the cardb
oard suitcase where it was but take the dissertation with him. Passing through the door, he found himself in another room paneled in yellow wood, this one without a counter, in which five chairs were arranged, four of them in an arc facing the fifth, which had an air of wishing to retreat toward the wall. Through the window was the sylvan campus and glimpses of a lake, and in the four chairs were four professors. Professor Winwein was easy enough to identify. He was dressed in a tweed jacket, a white shirt, and a red bow tie, and his hair was cut as straight across his forehead as a Doric lintel. Everything about him was square; his jaw, his hands, his shoulders, his eyes, almost; he seemed to be assembled of pieces from a child’s toy that was easy to fit together. Since he was made up of such simple components, it was easy for him to be good-natured. We were in the Middle West, of course, where people are friendly and without ostentation. Yet even though he was a kindly man, his manner suggested, he was one who regrettably had been called by destiny to pass painful judgments. Imagine if you can a good man, a compassionate man, a Sunday-school teacher who had been forced or persuaded by circumstances to become an executioner in charge of a hanging. His basic good nature, and his unfortunate role at this afternoon’s interview, strove on his countenance like two spiders.

  The other three professors were gray men who may have been alive in their youth but now preferred to remain corpses or waxworks figures.

  “Tell us something about yourself, Mr. Goult,” suggested Professor Winwein (sympathetically, while mentally testing the drop of his gallows).

  “I have a doctorate in philosophy and I believe I am qualified for this position.”

  “I understand your dissertation was in metaphysics?” Professor Winwein glanced at the green tome on Romer’s knees but did not ask to see it.

  “It is a study of angels.”