Maybe, he thought now, he’d gone beyond his saturation point.
He’d read too much and thought too much and had gotten too tangled up in himself, in all that nothing full of nothing.
“Just another crackpot,” indeed.
In any case, more Fitzgeraldian than Hemingwayian, less nothing and more dark night of the soul (again, that hour when, according to the author of Tender Is the Night, “a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence”), in the end the book had been published.
A book closer to the one authorized by Fitzgerald’s failure. Fitzgerald who always “slept on the heart side” to tire himself out more quickly and, quoting in his Notebooks an improbable Egyptian proverb, he moaned “The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to,” and “It appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations” in his essay “Sleeping and Waking,” where he writes as if tormented by a mosquito that won’t let him sleep.
A book further from the one authorized by Hemingway’s success, Hemingway, who didn’t hesitate to bellow “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”; but who, also, was a chronic insomniac from early on, you know?
Not much had happened with the book (or absolutely everything that could possibly happen with a book of those characteristics had happened).
Something had happened with him: he’d come out of the writing of that book changed, different, as if battered by a brutal wind. That elegant and more or less noble decline (goals unaccomplished, promises broken, desires frustrated) you see in the faces and gaits of certain more or less well-meaning presidents after four or eight years installed in the impotence of power. Luckily, at least, in his line of work you didn’t have to go around kissing random babies, though—again, which writer said it?—each book you wrote was like dragging all over the house, from bed to desk and back again, a drooling and guttural child “with problems.” One of those babies who from the moment of their birth look so old, so wizened. A needy creature, always clinging to your leg, demanding your attention with its bumbling and its drool.
Or something like that.
That last book of his had been like a six-foot-tall, forty-pound baby whose voice and tears were of proportional power. And it was a strange voice. A voice that even in third person singular sounded so much like first person. A voice, he thought, as if arriving from outside, from on high, but as assimilated as the voice of parents reading their children a bedtime story. A voice that awoke and woke him up in the middle of the night, demanding more, asking for everything, keeping him from sleep, improving his insomnia (which he’d been dragging around since the time of the eternal night-watches of his military service, on the immediately rusted edges of an absurd war, not coincidentally referred to as “imaginarias”; when it was a blessing not to sleep, to stretch out the night and thereby put off the curse of a new day of nightmares where infrahuman creatures in uniforms screamed and forced you to drag yourself along the ground and clean bathrooms covered with shit and eat food that wasn’t all that different from what they cleaned in those latrines) until he reached the peak: the perfection of not sleeping and of the night as blank as a blank page.
Writing that book had been like letting the currents pull him out to try to rescue an immense little boy from drowning and to do it, yes. And to collapse on the sand of the shore like a Robinson who, suddenly, understood that now, supposedly saved, the truly dangerous part was just beginning. Because now he’d earned the title of castaway.
The book had gotten good (some very good) but slightly disconcerted reviews. And, for once, his habitual nemeses (reviewers trained in universities who considered him just less than the Antichrist or who availed themselves of him, praising him in opposition to other authors and constructing academic theories slightly less than demented) had opted to call themselves to silence.
The book had been considered “excessive.”
The book had been qualified as “transgressive” and had overly emphasized his luddite and anti-technological side.
And—his favorite reproach/praise among all the praise/reproaches it was given—the book had been apprised as something “whose reading demanded a true effort.”
And, yes, of course, that had been and was the idea: that the book was work, a labor, a challenge parallel to that of writing it. That his book couldn’t just be looked at and that it demanded awareness of each and every one of its letters from the reader. Reading had to be different than just looking, looking at letters, right? You had to read first to see later.
But none of his most devoted defenders had realized that behind his supposedly experimental pose (he had to be honest: he, the author, hadn’t been aware of it either until after the book was already in bookstores) there was nothing but the reinterpretation of other books. “Subconscious plagiarism”? Like what happened, according to a judge, to George Harrison with “My Sweet Lord”? That thing that, in a way, is the symptom that feeds off and off which feeds all artistic manifestation, where nothing begins in itself or ends in everyone else? “Really want to see you, really want to know you, really want to go with you”? The vampiric take-me-while-I-take-you? The contagious influenza of the influence contagion?
No or yes.
His book, the product of the confluence of two books he’d read so long ago and created by—here he comes again, once more, with you all—his sweet lord: Vladimir Nabokov.
Books that functioned like farewells to, first, a body of work (the one Nabokov had written in Russian) and, later, to a life (the one Nabokov, at the end of his career, had rewritten to fit his surname turned adjective).
Both books functioning as encrypted or—to use a term chosen by their creator—“oblique” autobiographies.
The first one, Дар (published in installments between 1935 and 1937, and that he had read in English as The Gift, from 1963), was a goodbye to his past (his native tongue and literature; including a long biographical-encyclopedic insert) from someone who was already preparing to reinvent the English language and, while he was at it, the entire planet, with the name/species of Lolita and the creation of an Antiterra a.k.a Demonia (a kind of R.U.S.A., a cross between The United States and Russia, to which, again, he’d only traveled between lines and hearsay). Along the way, there, he postulated that all books could be divided into two classes: books for the nightstand and books for the trash can.
The second one, Look at the Harlequins!, from 1974, was a never-before-seen kind of autobiography with the modalities of a blurry photograph and a clear-eyed rewrite (in it, The Gift mutated into The Dare, whose original and Russian title, Podarok Otchizne, was the equivalent of a “A Gift to the Fatherland”), commanding “Play! Invent! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Look at the Harlequins!, the last of Nabokov’s novels published while he was alive (an inspired offshoot of a tense duel with his biographer, the possessed Andrew Field, who’d overstepped in his role and interpretations of the Nabokovian universe), was not an alternate self-portrait but something far more interesting: a kind of catalogue of all the mistaken reasoning and preconceived notions ever attributed to Nabokov. There, a transparent/murky alter ego of the author with the physical/mental particularity of not being able to trace his steps back in his memory. Or something like that. Another kind of Mr. Trip. The fact that this final book was considered “minor” by scholars and fans and even “awkwardly written” as well as “the product of an aging writer trapped inside his own literary personage” concealed, for him (for whom the only thing he had to criticize, and only in a low voice, was the exclamation point in the title), a final and ingenious joke on Nabokov’s part: having to retell and correct and rarefy himself in the first person (and along the way prove that he’d achieved the definitive achievement: that the novel of a writer resemble his or her life without falling into that compulsive banality that the life of a writer has to resemble his or her novels), Nabokov had settled the
fact that, in reality, nobody was at his level. Nobody was worthy of telling him. And so, the protagonist writer had to be, necessarily, a worse writer than he was. Someone who wouldn’t be Nabokov but, merely, Nabokovian. Someone with the imperfections of an imitator, but—inexact on innumerable key details—suffering, to cite just two examples, from a couple defects unforgivable to his author. To wit: the degrading deficiency of having learned to drive automobiles and driving them instead of being driven (only someone who doesn’t know how to drive could let himself take such automobilist photographs, so aware of being in a car, like the ones Nabokov took for Life magazine) and, the most serious of all, lowering himself to that indignity there was no coming back from and that his creator would never have allowed himself. The indignity of returning to Mother Russia, besmirched by communism, in an airplane with broken air conditioning and crammed with sweaty and lugubrious bureaucrats and fat, bare-armed stewardesses.
Also, important detail, in addition to all the foregoing, that of their coinciding on the perfect imperfection of being unable to sleep: debating and wringing “my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find some combination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, to help me, oh help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn.”
Like him now.
And he, then, didn’t say, as he said already, any of this.
Moreover, so satisfied with his theory regarding the lesser writer as a tool to narrate the unsurpassable writer, he’d gone back and flipped through/skimmed the book again. And, around chapter three of the second part, he’d read: “I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.”
Ah, the same thing always happened: every time he was sure he’d gotten ahead, abuzz, of Nabokov’s intentions; it didn’t take him long to discover that Nabokov was always ahead, waiting for him at the next stop along the trajectory. With his net aloft ready to go hunting butterflies. Or to squash him with a swat, like a somnolent tsetse fly; or to stomp on him firmly, like a cockroach or bug or whatever it was that woke up one day and discovered something strange had happened to it during the night.
And he—Shut the Fuck up, Memory!—didn’t say anything about that either. He didn’t reveal anything. Writers (and especially the writers of his now nonexistent country of origin, from the very totemic to the totem worshippers) were always fine cultivators, not of occulting the figure in the rug, but of sweeping it under it.
And pointing all that out would’ve probably been too complex (and so easy to misinterpret and question as pedantry) for those who devote themselves to reviewing writers and interviewing writings. Pearls lost in the mud.
And only one of them had noticed the possibly elegiac and last breath of his book and diagnosed and concluded his lines with a “And if it’s always an interesting exercise—cruel, of course, but interesting in the end—to think of the most recent book of an author as if it were the last he has decided to write, it’s hard not to wonder where this author would fit in the national tradition if he decided never to publish another word after the final period of this novel.”
And he’d been moved when he read that. He’d been moved a little, but, as tends to happen to him, that little had meant a lot.
And then he’d worried like when a doctor studies an X-ray and lets slip an “Uh-oh.” Or when someone pokes his head inside a half-open door to say: “Hey, the building’s on fire. Now we must all calmly proceed to the exit and go down the stairs and nobody will be scared, okay?”
But he swears that, at the time, he tried to keep his spirits high and a spring in his step.
Though the truth is that (something his publisher had been resigned to for a while) he hadn’t made things easy or helped all that much when it came to the promotion of the monster. It wasn’t ill will on his part. It’s just that easy things (among them easy reading and easy writing) easily bored him.
And so—while the noble and mature and well-read professionals languished, recalling the good old days or were retired for having too little online life—young journalists (fellows and interns, fanciful categories that made him think of the ethnicities of the fantasy genre) were asking him with a combination of disdain and “help me, help me!” if he could summarize “his subject,” to help them do their job, and keep them from having to read the book. Or, better, get him to write a piece for free so they didn’t have to write it for almost-free, let alone see themselves obliged to subtract his words. “It’s an ‘opinion’ piece; and opinions don’t pay,” they claimed with the precise diction of crooked accountants. “Even when I wasn’t thinking of offering an opinion and they ask me to?” he countered in vain, as if haggling over trinkets at an increasingly vacant market. Goodbye to the hypothesis/criticism of Virginia Woolf about how a woman has a right to “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” And if you’re a man, same thing. Now there wasn’t even that once “social” space, like a country club, that shared room that’d once been the editorial department at newspapers and magazines: places where you had to go to turn in an article in person and while there—or at the indispensable annex that was the bar on the corner—mingle with friends and enemies and learn about things, about everything that was happening throughout the cosmos. Now, editorial departments were virtual, places in the air and always on the verge of crashing, you connected to via cables and antennas. And journalism was virtual too. For a while now, the fixed or to-be-fixed idea that writing was done with no hope for remuneration beyond the one-off mention and the fleeting attention. Editorial strategy where the work of the cultural editors consisted of, basically, receiving spiels and responses via email. Bombarding you as if you were a family member when Kurt Vonnegut died or when they gave Bob Dylan the Nobel (to get him to recount his encounters with both; to his bewilderment, he’d received more congratulations for the latter’s recent award than for any of his own books or achievements). Or when, spurred on by the global psychosis caused by so many confessional blogs and comments where nobody showed their face but just their alias (more and more of them abandoned by their onetime proud owners, rusting in the air like those cars on the side of the road), that subject of fiction versus reality (what was true and what false in stories and novels)—oh so scandalously new and modern for so many, and as old as humanity for him—became “hip.” Or—after that episode, his and only his, with him and only him as indisputable and shooting and fallen dwarf star—when a video-gag faking a human sacrifice next to that statue of Shiva at the facilities of the particle accelerator and hadron collider at CERN in Geneva. And they asked him between chuckles if, after his … uh … performance?, he’d had anything to do with that. Quotes they later blindly cut according to the space available in pages ten or twenty names competed for, to see who was the most ingenious when it came to opining about matters that had less and less to do with noble fiction and more and more with the damned and implausible real. A challenge he no longer accepted (just as he avoided sending all his “unpublished texts” when they were solicited for group anthologies and other people’s “projects”) because he could still remember times when the designers of those projects tried to raise money to finance their projects and to pay their collaborators first, unlike now where it was the collaborators who worked for free on the thing that would later be sold and wind up financing the project.
He’d also lost any hope when it came to interviews conducted by beings little prepared in the art of more or less intelligent conversation, but only in the transcription of voice to text.
Every so often he flipped through Strong Opinions—the anthology of interviews of Vladimir Nabokov, interviews carefully revised and rewritten by Vladimir Nabokov—and he sa
id to himself that, if he were alive and responding here and now, the Russian would’ve lost his mind. There was no rigor or care. And they could attribute anything to you. He remembered how once, explaining that his first contact with the English language had been the lyrics on the back cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, his interviewer had opted to type that “I remember learning English reading the booklet Farmer Peppermint.”
And there it was and there it remained, floating like space trash in the orbits of the web.
And that’s why he (following the lessons of the evasive and sinuous Robert Strange McNamara, onetime president of the Ford Motor Company, directly responsible for its sweeping success across many latitudes, including in its infancy, with the infamous model Ford Falcon, later the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, and after that the president of the World Bank Club until 1981) applied his “Answer the question you wish they’d asked.”
And agree to everything with a polite smile to then respond to/edit things that’re a bit out of time and place.
Things impossible to transcribe into letters or fit in the body of a note.
Things like “What’s my area of interest, my territory as a writer, my style, my subject? … I could offer a brief answer: what interests me is texture. The texture of the text. But that wouldn’t be an entirely correct or precise answer … Mmm … I like to think my thing is something like an airplane in flight contemplated from the window of another airplane in flight … Something apparently normal that, suddenly, doesn’t seem so normal, right?, no? Is there anything stranger than flying while seeing yourself fly? That space/nothingness between one aircraft and another like my blank page or screen … Though now, aboard airplanes, inside airplanes, stranger and stranger things happen. Stranger things than all the things that happened inside airplanes for decades. Like the absurd and useless six rows for smokers or non-smokers on flights of more than fourteen hours, with all the smoke spreading throughout all the non-smoking rows. And it’s all good, everything in order. And the terminally ill with their lives in the air and their deaths dragging them toward the most firma of terra; thinking about whether the machine might not be moving too much; about whether that position with head between knees in case of an emergency landing does any good; about whether seatbelts might not actually be there so bodies don’t scatter all over the place during a crash, because, after all, what logic is there in having seats for smokers and non-smokers … Now, even stranger strange things. Like how there were still ashtrays on the armrests to torture those who would give anything for a little bit of tobacco. Or like that application on the screen that before only showed airplane movies. Movies with airplanes of nonexistent airlines, because, of course, something horrible is going to happen in and with those airplanes that’re like the equivalent of those photographs of the betrothed on their wedding day. Light and floating and flying movies in airplanes where now they offer the service and the app, for the addict passengers going through withdrawals, that allows you to send and receive messages from strangers, also in need of their fix, in other seats on the same airplane … And, of course, there are always the classics: the nauseated baby that pukes on you, the consparanoic who starts to tell you how the white lines that airplanes leave in the sky are ‘chemical agents,’ the one who, to break the ice, asks you ‘Want to know how many spiders we swallow without knowing it every year while we sleep? Four!’ and, every so often, the also-nauseated young, aspiring writer who recognizes you and doesn’t hesitate, right there, to puke up on you a copy of his toxic and arachnid unpublished novel … And, ha ha ha, now you see, now you hear: concerning what intrigues you or what you don’t understand about my digressive style and psychotic theme … Allow me to quote for you from memory a brief fragment from a letter of Virginia Reed, survivor of the cannibalistic Donner Expedition, trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847, that seems to perfectly define what I’ve done and what my novel is about. Virginia says there: ‘I have not wrote you half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is’ … Or, if you prefer, that thing T. S. Eliot said: ’We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ … Like that tired but seasoned and wise voice in ‘Nettie Moore’ … When it comes to seeing the airplane from another airplane, it’s clear that from that airplane we’re seeing ourselves when we see it … Next question.”
The Dreamed Part Page 48
