Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  This is a Richard Powers novel, after all, and as such it must bend our minds as gravity bends time. Einstein on general relativity intersects with Leibniz on music. If, as David Strom dies hoping, most galaxies would rather rotate counterclockwise, then traveling back in folded time is possible, but only if we’ve already been whenever. If time is always now, so is music, “an exercise in occult mathematics by a soul that doesn’t even know it’s counting.” And shame, too—shame is the very air we breathe, the normal respiration of our fearful tribal lungs.

  Jacobo Timerman, Renaissance Troublemaker

  If you add up all the victims and victimizers, they form such a small percentage of the world population. What are the others engaged in? We victims and victimizers, we’re part of the same humanity, colleagues in the same endeavor to prove the existence of ideologies, feelings, heroic deeds, religions, obsessions. And the rest of humanity, the great majority, what are they engaged in?

  —Jacobo Timerman

  ED ASNER WANTED to play Jacobo Timerman in a film version of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. I don’t know why he didn’t, but he certainly would have been better than Roy Scheider in the misbegotten 1983 TV movie that wasted the talents of Liv Ullmann, about whom more in a minute, and Budd Schulberg, who insisted his name be deleted from the credits after they butchered his script. Not only does Asner look more like the Argentine editor, but he has generally behaved more like him, too, making trouble and waves.

  Timerman, who died last week at age seventy-six, was a Renaissance troublemaker—something he carried with him in his Jewish-diaspora DNA from the Netherlands, from which his family fled in the sixteenth century to escape the Spanish Inquisition, to the Ukraine, from which they fled in 1928 to escape the pogroms. Growing up in Buenos Aires, he became a socialist and a Zionist in a country that was pro-Hitler in World War II. As editor of La Opinion from 1971 through the 1976 military coup until his kidnapping in April 1977, he was equally opposed to state violence and sectarian terrorism, and insisted on publishing the names of the “disappeared” every day on his front page. And so he was seized, for thirty months, by neo-Nazi hoodlets who actually seemed to believe in a Zionist plot to gobble up Patagonia—chained to a concrete bed; beaten while blindfolded (“boarded up”); smashed against the wall by cops linked in single file pretending to be a locomotive (“the choo-choo shock”); chanted at (“Jew… Clipped prick… Jew… Clipped prick”); and obliged at regular intervals to “chat with Susan” (a machine that applied electrodes to his genitals). International pressure by everyone from Amnesty and Solzhenitsyn to Kissinger and the pope finally secured his release, after which he was stripped of his newspaper and his citizenship and shipped off by bloody parcel post to Israel.

  Where he wrote Prisoner… (1981). Had it been only a witness to torture and deranged anti-Semitism, it would still have been a noble document on humanism at the end of its tether and the pornographic intimacy of violence, where “memory is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man,” “hope is synonymous with anxiety and anguish,” and “goodness is madness”: “Do I not, I ask myself, wind up being suspect in my own eyes for having undertaken that impossible choice, that permanent vigil of my own despair, experiencing a kind of omnipotence in being the victim? The Victim. Didn’t that hatred of all those who’d caused me to surrender the best of myself, my courage and sacrifice, didn’t that hatred wind up asserting itself within my fear, leading me at times to believe that perhaps there was indeed some underlying motive, something that had escaped me—some vague guilt hidden behind my principles… ?” But troublemaking Timerman was just as hard on his fellow Jews, three hundred thousand of them in Argentina, whose silence he saw as an acquiescence in his torture. They were, he suggested, as fearful, obedient, and tongue-tied as the Judenrat during the Holocaust. Well: Hannah Arendt all over again.

  To compound his offenses, from Tel Aviv he had a clear view of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in which his son, Daniel, was a soldier. Timerman expressed his sorrow and anger at Israel’s “messianic concept of geopolitics,” first in a dispatch to The New Yorker and then in The Longest War: “Now history is Palestinian,” he wrote after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, this man whose first Hebrew teacher in Buenos Aires had been murdered in the Negev by a Palestinian terrorist. Those of us who happened to be in Israel in the spring of 1983 can testify that, for his black ingratitude and moral presumption, Timerman was as much reviled as Arafat, even at Peace Now cocktail parties during Jerusalem’s Book Fair. How dare he bad-mouth the country that gave him sanctuary? After all, he hadn’t lived through the Holocaust, or 1948, or 1967. (“But does the key to it all lie in the scale?” he asked in Prisoner.) Obviously, he had been tortured in the wrong language.

  Upon the restoration of democracy in Argentina in 1983, Timerman returned and went to court to accuse his tormentors. But he wasn’t done stepping on toes and minefields. In 1987, he visited Chile for the first time since the assassination of his friend Allende. In Chile: Death in the South, he told us the usual horror stories of Pinochet’s dictatorship—brutalization; rape as an instrument of state policy; murder as a norm—but also spoke of the numbed psychology of the afflicted, of the powerfully destructive grip of nostalgia on the imagination of the liberal parties, and of the impotent romanticism of the exiles who’d gone helplessly home again. Besides saying outrageous things about writers as various as Neruda, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, he declared (correctly, it turned out) that Pinochet would not be dislodged by “phantom armies” of the left, “pseudo-guerrillas” who had persuaded themselves they could overwhelm the military when all their violence did was “grease the wheels of the killing machine.” Left extremists trying to make themselves appear more dangerous than they were had managed to motivate the armed forces in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina “to genocide.”

  This was news, from a man of the left: You can’t hate torture while at the same time rooting for, or excusing, terrorism. It is news that seems not yet to have reached Colombia.

  Worse was to come, in 1989, from Cuba. He’d known Fidel since 1959. A reacquaintance after thirty years appalled him—brainwashing, alienation, and hypocrisy; megalomania at the highest levels and informers on every city block; “re-education camps” for homosexuals and the suicide of old revolutionary comrades like Haydee Santamaria and Osvaldo Dorticos. In the arts community, toadyism; among journalists, self-censorship and despair. In Havana in 1989, you couldn’t even buy a Soviet magazine that might be full of news of glasnost and perestroika.

  Language consumed this bad-news bear, because the corruptions of language and the corruptions of power were joined like monstrous Siamese twins. Why were so many Cuban writers in prison or exile: Carlos Franqui, Herberto Padilla, Cabrera Infante? He was especially hard on García Márquez, “one of the greatest writers of our time,” who had helped Padilla get out of the country alive, but who was otherwise complicit in his buddy Fidel’s dictatorship, even disgusting in “his public eulogies with their byzantine hyberbole.” Personally, Timerman identified with an ex-journalist who prefered to work as a fumigator instead of a reporter: “He’d rather poison garden insects than Cuban minds.”

  The death of his wife and the bottom of a bottle slowed him down in his last decade and now we will probably never get those memoirs. Never mind the offense he gave to the caudillos, to the left-romantics, to Sharon and Likud, to some of my favorite writers, even to me. (I only met him once, at lunch in 1981 with the publisher of the New York Times, where he was as full of impatience and reproach for me, at my having insufficiently emphasized in my review of Prisoner the silence of the Jews, as he was for Hilton Kramer, who suspected him of being somehow soft on Tupemaros. In 1983, in Tel Aviv, he didn’t answer the phone.) But what about Liv Ullmann?

  He met her in New York only a month after his release, in the backseat of a big black car on a rainy night after a lecture by Elie Wiesel. And he explained to her that she, of all peo
ple, had done him the most harm while he was in prison. Her autobiography had arrived behind their bars—on the outside enhanced by a photograph of her gentle face, in that ungentle place; on the inside so full of tenderness toward her daughter, when he couldn’t see his sons. Even its title, Changing, had been offensive to him, because he couldn’t. The very “tenderness” of which Ullmann seemed so proud in her book was the “enemy” of a victim of torture. In the “biology” of his survival, “the intoxication of tenderness is tantamount to death, madness, suicide.”

  Timerman didn’t tell Liv Ullmann that he had hated her, but he wanted to. This seems to me so radical an opposition to our habit of ingratiating ourselves to anyone, our licking of the boots of war criminals and egomaniacs and psychopaths, as to amount to a new religion with its own liturgy: Always the truth. After “a chat with Susan,” we speak a different anguish.

  Jonathan Lethem’s Men and Cartoons, The Disappointment Artist, and The Fortress of Solitude

  1

  In The Fortress of Solitude, his great white whale of a novel, Jonathan Lethem chased after childhood, neighborhood, and the American leviathan of race relations. In Men and Cartoons, a grab bag of his stories, he paddles a kayak downstream over waters not exactly rapid. Old friends from elementary school reappear in order to deplore the compromises and corruptions of their former classmates. Bygone parents are revealed to have been capable of secret, sexual exultations. Young lovers in a burgled house go to bed with the ghosts of past relationships made visible by magic spray. Artists, agents, editors, opticians, and a talking sheep named Sylvia Plath negotiate dystopias of gridlock—a character in “Access Fantasy” lives in his car in a citywide traffic jam on the wrong side of a One-Way Permeable Barrier—and topographies of dork and cool.

  But the joke’s on Hemingway. According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate. When his characters aren’t listening to Frank Zappa and Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as “advertising robots” at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made out of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in “Super Goat Man,” the most ambitious of these stories, they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics cartoon crusader from the 1970s who is reduced in the nineties to teaching a college seminar on “Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life, 1955–1975.”

  Mostly, though, the comics mentioned in Men and Cartoons aren’t published by Electric. Or DC, Raw, or Fantagraphic. They are Marvel-branded, “which anyone who read them understood weren’t comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished story lines.” Lethem’s nerds entered into those complex worlds back in grammar school and junior high, between the ritual humiliations of pubescence. In years to come of pink slips, eviction notices, and deleted icons, of fax machines and vibrators, these Marvel worlds are the vistas in their mediated heads. They see in panels, talk in balloons, and feel in lurid colors. But how can a Columbia professor who plays party games (in “The Vision”), a museum director for acquisitions of drawings and prints (in “Vivian Relf”), or a cartoonist for a free music magazine published by a record-store chain (in “Planet Big Zero”) ever be expected to compete with the likes of Vision, the android in the Avengers series who could vary the density of his body from bullet-stopping diamond-hard to blue-smoke phantom fuzzy? Or Black Bolt, the noblest member of a band of outcast mutants known as the Inhumans, whose superpower was speech itself:

  The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two.

  In other words: once there were giants, with magical powers, secret identities, Technicolored underwear, and swishy capes. Male adulthood proved to be much less fun than the masked dreams of pop culture had led little boys to believe. Growing up stunted us. The primary emotions and psychic wounds of the Marvel superhero are as drums and trumpets to the disappointed marimba tinkle and sneezy regrets of the fortysomething salaryman. Perhaps, says Lethem, “superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body”—but we can’t help feeling that we traded in living large (James Dean, Godzilla) for the poignant (a wild pitch, a broken shoelace) and the ignoble (cowardice, envy: “Bite my crank, Super Goat Man!”—as two sozzled frat boys taunt the aging comic book hero, on a clock tower, waving a giant phallic paper clip).

  Sad-making. Pop nostalgia clings like kudzu to everyone who ever grew up feeling alien-freaky… all of us who somehow knew we were born to die uncool. Having posted my sugar-bomb box top to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1947, I was the first little boy on my block to own a Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring. I examined the color photo of a mushroom cloud while listening, on the radio, to “Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.” Such a perfect dorky pathos… and this was long before marijuana made everything seem more interesting than it really is.

  Even so, from a young writer as clever as they come and as crafty as they get, who skinwalked and shape-changed from Kurt Vonnegut into Saul Bellow before our starry eyes, whose Huckleberry Brooklyn novel brought municipal fiction back from the dead, the whimsies in Men and Cartoons look like arrested development. And The Disappointment Artist, a collection of Lethem’s journalism and reminiscence, seems at first to be more of the same. Whole chapters are devoted to John Ford’s westerns, Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, Star Wars, John Cassavetes and Stanley Kubrick. Page after page celebrates such recording artists as Chuck Berry, David Bowie, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, and Cheap Trick, and such science-fiction writers as Frank Herbert and Jules Verne. And when the loftier likes of Kafka, Borges, and Lem, or Faulkner, Beckett, and Joyce, or Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and William Gass are mentioned at all, they will be fingered in brusque passing as “professional Bartlebys.” It’s not as if he’s never met them; they show up in his novels, wearing turtlenecks and trench coats; they hang in his closet. Yet not one is worthy here even of a paragraph.

  Do we care that Lethem saw John Ford’s The Searchers twelve times and Star Wars twenty-one, or that his “fever for authenticity” led him to Anthony Newley, or that he still believes the Fantastic Four superheroes were the Rubber Soul and the White Album of comics? (Do you care how many times I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or what’s going on in my head while I watch Sara Evans sing “Suds in the Bucket” on the country music cable channel?) Is it so unreasonable to want to know more of what he thinks about Julio Cortázar and less of how he feels about Obi-Wan Kenobi? To wish for a few words explaining why he stopped reading Don DeLillo, rather than thousands more on Red Sonja, Howard the Duck, and Marvel’s “existential loners”? And then this, as if Jean Genet instead of Jonathan Lethem were Marveling in the seventies:

  I’m breaking down here. The royal we and the presumptive you aren’t going to cut it. This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single true believer, every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as breathe of it to another boy, let alone be initiated by one more knowing. We and you don’t know a thing about what I felt back then, anymore than I know a thing about what you felt.

  The fact is that we do know what he felt back then, and he knows what we felt, and so do you. It’s obvious, blatant, standardized, like “the generic
reality” of the futuristic Oakland detective in his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music—which is what pop culture does to our obscure and shameful yearnings, which is why it’s helpful to feather your nest and prime your pump by branching out into Bible stories, Greek myths, Grimm fairy tales, Romantic poetry, grand opera, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and maybe even what Lethem calls “the violently solitary and elitist necessities of High Art.” But because he has been at it for a while, because The Disappointment Artist is already his tenth book, he has a surprise sleight-of-mind in store. In an essay on Edward Dahlberg, prince of churls, he tips this hand. Dahlberg’s memoir of his Kansas City childhood, Because I Was Flesh, is “a great book” in “the saddest and simplest way, for Dahlberg has arrayed an armor of rhetoric to fend off his pain, and everywhere the armor proves inadequate.”

  And what, exactly, was Flesh saying? Flesh was saying, Lethem explains: “I want my mama.” So does Lethem want his mama, the one who called him “kiddo,” sent him to public school in Brooklyn, steered him toward Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, took him to Star Wars screenings, and worried maybe he was gay; the young woman who, before she gave birth to Jonathan, was a Queens College dropout, a barefoot Jewish folksinger, an ear-piercing Greenwich Village beatnik, a draft-counseling campus wife of an avant-garde artist/SDS professor, a pot-smoking hippie matron in favor of open marriage and day-care centers, opposed to war, grapes, nuclear power, and Robert Moses; the thirty-six-year-old mother who died from a brain tumor in 1978, after giving her son a typewriter for his fourteenth birthday, on which the next summer he wrote his first book. Confined by her countercultural parameters, “I both bloomed within, like the windows of a greenhouse, and rattled against, like the jaws of a trap.” Canvassing his pop culture enthusiasms and obsessions, his furious fandom, he finds evasions, surrogates, anodynes, screens, beards, and a parental figure in the carpet bombing. On the one hand, as a motherless boy,