In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
not going to lunge across the table if we brought it up, but some part of him softened, something opened up, and if you didn’t press him too much you could extract a few details—which of course weren’t always that enlightening.
“It’s the great un-American novel,” he would say in a cheerful mood, or “it’s a novel for people who hate novels, a novel pretending to be a memoir that’s really a history”—or something like that. Sometimes he would go on at length, easefully sketching out major characters, including the most important character of all, Cannonia, the invented country in which the book was set. Sometimes he would simply say “it’s indescribable—nothing like it has ever been written,” and there’d be nothing to do except let the conversation move on.
The openness could have been reassuring, a sign that Charlie was on top of his book and didn’t fear talking it away. The more he spoke, though, the more I worried, in part because the book he was describing sounded not just indescribable but unwriteable. First, there was its premise: Charlie said he was going to write the history of a place which did not exist but wherein virtually everything described—characters, events, locales—was real, drawn from actual sources. That alone explained why the book was taking so long: Charlie had gotten bogged down in research. (A grant proposal I later discovered listed the primary texts he was using as “obscure diaries, self-serving memoirs, justifiably forgotten novels, carping correspondence, partisan social and diplomatic histories, black folktales and bright feuilletons.”) But it wasn’t the only reason to be nervous; there was also Charlie’s intention to somehow merge his fake-but-real history with a spy thriller, a cold war novel of suspense. Was such a book even possible? Wasn’t a spy thriller supposed to be brisk and plotted, and history (even pseudo-history) ruminative and disjointed? How would you blend the two genres? And then there was Charlie’s insistence that the book, despite its writerly ambitions, would somehow be “accessible and commercially viable,” containing not one but “several” movies. This seemed least fathomable of all—the most uncompromising writer ever, compromising? Bowing to conventional taste? Altogether the project seemed impossible, even for Charlie, who once vowed to “write books that no one else could write” and who would have rather changed careers than give up the pursuit of new forms.
“You must push your head through the wall,” Kafka says in an essay quoted at the end of The Post-Modern Aura. “It is not difficult to penetrate, for it is made of thin paper. But what is difficult is not to let yourself be deceived by the fact that there is already an extremely deceptive painting on the wall showing you pushing your head through it.”
Maybe this time Charlie was pushing too hard.
* * *
About eight years later and a month or so after Charlie’s death in 2006, I went back to his office—not the one in St. Louis but the one in New York, which was in a high-rise on West 61st Street called The Alfred. The space was as Charlie had left it before he died, and at the bottom of a closet, underneath an assortment of blankets, Italian suits, and hunting clothes, I found an old television still murmuring, its picture tube faintly aglow. It had been five months since Charlie was there, but I had the sense that the inflamed set had been attempting its manic, muffled communication even longer. The temperature inside the closet was at least one hundred degrees.
Unlike the office I had been in fifteen years earlier, this one was chaotic and even a bit squalid, cluttered with foldable picnic tables, overstuffed vinyl chairs, and still-running air purifiers clogged with De La Concha tobacco dust. The couches were stained and burned. Every level surface had been covered by manuscript pages, notebooks, disassembled newspapers, quackish-sounding financial newsletters, and advertisements for pills, potions, and vitamins. The entire Central European history and literature sections of the Washington University library seemed to be on hand, plus hundreds of books on espionage and psychoanalysis. I made a list of titles near Charlie’s desk: “Freud and Cocaine,” “Werewolf and Vampire in Romania,” “Escape from the CIA,” “A Lycanthropy Reader,” “Mind Food and Smart Pills.”
Back in the 1990s, when Charlie moved into the Alfred, the feature of his apartment he had been proudest of was a custom-built series of cubbyholes spanning one entire wall, which he would use to organize the Cannonia manuscript. Like his openness when discussing the book, the shelves had a reassuring aspect—after all, they were finite (you could see where they ended) and therefore so must be the book!
But the actual filing system I discovered after Charlie’s death bespoke madness, the cubbyholes having been neglected or filled with items that had nothing to do with Cannonia. The actual manuscript was stored in dozens of sealed Federal Express boxes which had apparently been sent back and forth from New York to St. Louis and vice versa—draft after draft after draft after draft, so many that it was impossible to tell which one was the most recent. The endlessly revised and unrevised manuscripts piled up under the picnic tables and filled up closets, many of them unopened, possibly going back years. Also in the apartment were hundreds of sealed manila envelopes containing those cut-out, typed-up sentences—“Angry hope is what drives the world,” “He had brains but not too many,” “Women fight only to kill”—which it appeared Charlie had also been mailing, one tiny sliver per envelope, whether to an assistant or himself wasn’t clear.
Charlie had several helpers at The Alfred—unofficially, the doormen, who knew he only left the building to go to the Greek diner two blocks away, and to call the diner’s manager when he did to make sure he arrived. There was also a young woman he had hired to fix his virus-flooded Gateway and provide data entry—in the office I found her flyer with its number circled, the services it advertised including not only computer repair but martial arts instruction and guitar lessons. I met her a few times after Charlie’s death and we talked about the book, which she claimed Charlie had finally finished. “I know because we wrote it together,” she said. “He thought up the ideas for the scenes and I wrote them.” But she never showed me the completed, final manuscript, and a few weeks after we met she stopped returning calls.
* * *
Here is the story of Charlie’s book, I think. In the 1980s Charlie wrote a novel, the story of Felix, the bankrupt “breaker of crazy dogs and vicious horses,” and the Professor, a certain Viennese psychoanalyst who brings Felix neurotic animals and theories of the mind. This modestly-sized, thoroughly old-fashioned book “split the middle,” to use one of Charlie’s favorite phrases, between fantasy and autobiography—Charlie, of course, being neither a Central European aristocrat living on an abandoned royal hunting preserve, nor an acquaintance of Freud. He was, however, a one-time breeder of dogs who in his forties owned an expansive farm and kennel in one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia (near Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia), where, like Felix, he imported trees and animals from all over the world and satisfied his desire to live in isolation from other intellectuals. Losing the farm, as he did in the mid-1980s (to inflation, as he described it—inflation also being the scourge of several of Charlie’s books, it is worth noting), was surely the novel’s impetus.
“I wanted to write a long novel about the farm,” he once told an interviewer, “but the farm was so hurtful to me in many ways, not only economically but in terms of the loss of beloved animals,” as well as what he called a “nineteenth-century” existence. So he wrote a short novel instead, one that was a throwback as much as the farm. In many ways it is a response—positive and hopeful, for all the unhappiness it apparently came out of—to the wrenching blankness of White Jazz and The Post-Modern Aura, works that depict spiritual suffering in an age of multiple, overlapping determinisms. For if nothing else, Felix lives in a world where his own agency matters, and where meaningful connections (with his wife, his animals, the Professor, and perhaps above all the land he lives on) are possible.
Charlie could have published the story of Felix and the Professor in the early ’90s, roughly maintaining his schedule of a book every few years. But one of Charlie’s idiosyncrasies as a writer is that he would often write something, then put it aside, and eventually find an unexpected way to combine it with other material he was working on. In the case of the book inspired by the farm, he decided to hold off in favor of incorporating it within a massively enlarged work to be harvested from the book’s fantastical setting—Cannonia.