In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
nine, divided into three volumes, the first being In Partial Disgrace, which would contain the story of Felix and the Professor, though pushed all the way to the end. The second, “Learnt Hearts,” would take place in Russia a decade or so later and center on Felix’s relationship not with Freud but Pavlov. And the third, “Lost Victories,” would move to postwar America.
Having thus reenvisioned his tidy coastal steamer as a three-decker battleship, Charlie set out to write an introduction of suitable vastness, providing centuries of background and introducing characters who would not reappear for thousands of pages. The nature of the project all but required him to take this approach, if he was to create the world necessary to sustain an epic. The story itself could wait. Characters could get away with announcing themselves in the grandest possible manner, then vanish. Charlie’s passion for history and obscure primary sources could be indulged. It was all part of the excitement, the buildup, the setting of an appropriate tone.
Ten years later, Charlie was still writing the overture to his symphony, as Joshua Cohen notes. And not surprisingly, the time it was taking, plus the future amount of work he could surely see coming, not to mention the embarrassment of attempting such a behemoth, weighed on him as much as the unpayable generations of debt from Semper Vero weigh on Felix. Physically he was a wreck. A lifelong alcoholic who frequently stunned even the people who knew him best with his capacity for self-destruction and recovery, Charlie had curtailed his drinking in the 1980s through Alcoholics Anonymous and white-knuckle effort, then lost control in the ’90s, undoubtedly in part due to the stress of Cannonia. Toward the end of the decade his body began to break down, and he spent much of the following years in the hospital, where doctors at first thought he might have suffered a stroke or the onset of Parkinson’s. Intermittently unable to speak or walk, he put aside the trilogy for long stretches, struggled with depression, and when the wherewithal to write eventually returned, started a pair of new books instead (a history of American education and a long essay on terrorism.) He also became estranged from family, saw his marriage end, and reduced his teaching to the point where he was scarcely seen on campus.
During these years Charlie seemed to answer conflictingly every time he was asked if the book was done. In 1998, it was three-quarters finished, in 2005, only two-thirds, while in 2002 it was complete. His assistant in St. Louis believed he might never stop rearranging the table of contents and inserting new pages, and in fact he never did.
The first time I read a draft of In Partial Disgrace, Charlie was still alive, and reading it all but put me into despair. Page after page after page, nothing but setting or background. Cannonia was certainly a fascinating place, but it appeared to be one in which things only happened, usually in the distant past—there was virtually no present, no now. I was confused also because so much of the novel Charlie had talked about for so long seemed to be missing. Where was Freud? Where was Pavlov? Where were the battle scenes, and where, other than Rufus, who vanished from the story almost as soon as he appeared, were the spooks? After four hundred pages I put it down—obviously I held only a fragment of the overall work to come, and there was nothing to do but wait.
Then after Charlie died I found the story of Felix and the Professor, a self-contained, fully formed novel that was alive in its language, arresting in its ideas, and humanly engaging in its depiction of a friendship between two painfully isolated men. Like the television at the bottom of the closet, it pulsed with warmth, and the task became how to disentomb it. Mostly it was a question of moving material around rather than discarding it. In Partial Disgrace does have some elements of a conventional novel—the story of Felix and the Professor is an actual story, told in a relatively straightforward way—but Charlie hadn’t gotten into it quick enough, as his own notes on a late draft seemed to suggest. Felix did not even appear until a third of the way into the book, and the Professor not until a hundred pages further. So we took some of the Psalmanazar family back story—a considerable chunk of the book, which Charlie had stacked up front, posing a blockade to even the most patient reader—and found points later on where it could be inserted naturally.
Next was sorting out the book’s multiple narratives. In Partial Disgrace begins in the voice of Rufus, then shifts, at times disorientingly, between the accounts of Iulus, Felix, and the Professor. Rufus is clearly meant to return at some point but never does; Iulus, meanwhile, has a habit of talking about events in the future that never happen. Given Charlie’s fervent desire that the book be accessible, a certain amount of streamlining seemed warranted, as long as it preserved the essential thrust of each chapter and section. Like all of Charlie’s work, In Partial Disgrace shows a carefully balanced interplay of ideas, and as much as possible I wanted to preserve that balance, while giving it its fullest expression.
A note about sourcing: late in the editing of this book it was discovered that a small number of passages were borrowed from primary sources without attribution, which is not surprising given that the project was to write the history of an imaginary place based on real places and events. Whether Charlie intended to eventually provide credit is impossible to say—that is, unless some answer turns up in his papers, which hasn’t happened yet. However, the papers are vast and dense, and there may be more to come from them, including further adventures in Cannonia.
The publication of this book was helped by many people, including: Jeremy M. Davies, John O’Brien, Marie Lay, Paul Winner, Lawrence Levy, Norma Hurlburt, Sharon Griffin, and James, Nicolas, and June Howe.
BEN RYDER HOWE
Staten Island, 2012
IN PARTIAL DISGRACE
The Secret Memoirs of the Triple Agent Known as Iulus: A Report to History
Translated, with alterations, additions, and occasional corrections by Frank Rufus Hewitt Adjutant General, U.S. Army (Ret.)
IN THIS BOOK YOU WILL FIND ONLY REAL PEOPLE AND REAL PLACES, BUT NO REAL NAMES
LIST OF PRINCIPAL PERSONALITIES
FRANK RUFUS HEWITT, Adjutant General; U.S. Army, (Ret.) Historian, Counter Intelligence; former operative, and sometime educationist.
CORIOLAN IULUS PZALMANAZAR, Ambassador Without Portfolio for Cannonia, and inadvertently, the last casualty of the last war of the twentieth century, and the first great writer of the twenty-first.
FELIX AUFIDIUS PZALMANAZAR, Hauptzuchtwart Supreme, thinking man’s dandy, historian of the Astingi.
AINÖHA AEGLE APAMEA, Fairest of the Naiad line, Goddess of Fogs, Muse of the Living, Mistress of the Dead.
PRIAM ASCLEPIUS APAMEA, founder of Semper Vero.
ÖSCAR ÖLIVIER ÖZGUR, citizen soldier, loyal retainer, and exemplary gardener.
COUNT MORITZ ACHILLES ZICH, Foreign Minister of Cannonia, patron of the arts, the greatest one-armed pianist of all time, and the most intense admirer of the female sex in Europe.
OPHAR OSME CATSPAW, artist-in-residence at Semper Vero.
SETH SYLVIUS GUBIK, swineherd, prodigy, and future Commisar for Cults and Education.
PSYLANDER SYCHAEUS PÜR, the village doctor.
THE PROFESSOR (ORDINARIUS), Docent fur Nervenkrankheiten, A.D. Universitat Therapeia.
DRUSOC’S MISTRESS, one of the Professor’s love interests.
ZANÄIA, a princess of Cannonia.
CANNONIA, our ineffable tragi-comic protagonist, superior to tragedy.
Venit iam carminus aetas:
Magnus ab intego saeclorum nascitur ordo
Now is come the last age;
the great line of centuries