In Partial Disgrace Read online

  Newman had always known his only option was what he called “postmodernism”—a knowledge that assuaged his yearning for “modernism,” which was itself a balm for earlier aches. Though he’d always idealized the man in full, he was fated, was aware he was fated, to montage, sumlessness, pastiche. Ruritania will forever be trapped in the clockwork gears of the turn-of-the-century, but by the time another century was about to turn, the drive to synecdochize all of Europe in Vienna, or in a Swiss sanatorium (as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), or even in the sci-fi province of Castalia (in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game), had forsaken history for dystopia. If utopia was “no-place,” dystopia—cacotopia—was Anglo-America: Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange. Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard. By the 1980s—when Newman was first surveying Cannonia—the genre goons were at publishing’s gates, and they proceeded to divide and conquer: “literary novelists” would take care of the totum pro parte—“the whole for the parts”—in an effort to maintain the ideal of an artwork that could still mirror all of reality; while the pop hacks who hadn’t yet traded the page for TV and film would concern themselves with the pars pro toto—“the parts for the whole”—in an attempt to acknowledge that reality had sprawled beyond any consensus, exceeding the capabilities of any single novelist, and the capacities of any single reader. (Throughout the Cold War, espionage and thriller novelists made effective use of this limitation: in presenting Western spycraft as important to, though inconsistent with, Western democracy, they revealed even their right to publish fiction as the privilege of a fiction—a delusion.)

  Newman’s ambition was to write this change itself. He would show, and tell, the evolution of literature, would narrate the revolutions of the wheel. His cycle would begin with a volume of three books in Musil/Mann/Hesse mode—landmarks, monuments, all set in Cannonia, from the fin de siècle to 1924—follow with three books surrendering Cannonia’s metonymy to Russian hegemony, through 1938 (comprising a second volume Newman claimed to have begun, since lost), and conclude with three books triangulating with realpolitik—with Cannonia, Russia, and America negotiating between 1939 and 1989 (comprising a third volume Newman never began but described in correspondence—though he never mentioned whether the novel’s ’89 would’ve marked the end of communism).

  In Partial Disgrace is the one-volume version of the first volume—the one-book version of the first three books that Newman worked on for the last three decades of his life. Its initial hero was, and still is, Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar, “Hauptzuchtwart Supreme,” which is to say a dogbreeder, trainer, and vet nonpareil, whose clients include Freud—himself an analysand in the first volume—and Pavlov—the presumed bellwether of the second. His son, 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,” would become a “triple-agent”—Cannonian, Russian, American. Their stories, along with tales of the Professor (Freud), and the Academician (Pavlov), were all to be told as the memoirs of Iulus, “translated, with alterations, additions, and occasional corrections by Frank Rufus Hewitt, Adjutant General, U.S. Army (Ret.),” who remains a presence in this composite—indeed, he’s the parachutist who lands on the very first page, in 1945—and who was to emerge as the hero of the final volume, where he’d betray Iulus, or be betrayed by him, or—it’s anyone’s guess, anyone’s but Newman’s. The overarching theme of the cycle was to be the rebalancing of power, the shift from military brinksmanship to informational détente: if every side has the same intel, and so much of the same, it’s only the purpose, or the intention of disclosure, that matters, that means. Determining what one nation knows about another is to write their histories in advance—“prolepsis”—just as determining what readers should know about a book before they read it might be to split the difference between Freudian displacement and Pavlovian conditioning.

  Cannonia is a breeding ground, literally—not just for ideologies—for canines. The eugenic pursuit of the perfection of diverse breeds of Canis lupus familiaris takes on a far more sinister, defamiliarizing set of associations when applied to Homo sapiens. The Nazis compelled the Reich’s blondes and blues to mate their ways to an Aryan super-race, whereas the Soviets preferred to inculcate exemplary comradeship through “art”—a literature that would mold its own public, indistinguishable from its characters. Newman’s consideration of species—of speciation—is of a piece with his investigation into the properties of metaphor: the question of whether it’s irresponsible to try and perfect a breed is also the question of whether it’s irresponsible to try and perfect a novel—what happens to breeds that don’t please their masters? are misbehaving novels—or novelists—to meet the same fate as untrainable mutts? Nature v. nurture is the case, which Newman insists is as much a referendum on the master as on the mastered: is culture innate or cultivated? or both? Finally, if a new breed can only be the combination of old breeds, just as a new literature must come from a miscegenation of the old—what are we to make of ourselves? of humans? Are we just helixed bundles of parental genes, raised, hopefully, to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses? or could we find a way back to understanding ourselves as we did in Genesis—before mind-body dichotomies, before mind-body-soul trichotomies—as unities, perfect merely by dint of our existence?

  To Newman, Freud’s psychology compartmentalizes our being—as if life were just a train of alternating appetites and suppressions—whereas Pavlov’s physiology coheres us as singularities, but as beasts. Newman alternately accepts and rejects these two conceptions, even while slyly offering a third: men are no better than dogs, and no better than locomotive engines—though they can become the worst of both, especially in the company of women. (Felix’s “three golden rules”: “1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.” Elsewhere he gives his son another trinity of “advice”: “1. Neither marry nor wander, you are not strong enough for either. 2. Do not believe any confession, voluntary or otherwise. And most importantly, 3. Maxime constat ut suus canes cuique optimus.”—which Newman glosses as “Everyone has a cleverer dog than their neighbor.”)

  In Partial Disgrace hunts its elusive prey through landscapes that resemble the Great Plains—if they’d been treated to their own Treaty of Trianon—through lessons in obedience theory (“‘The animal, like society, must be taken into liberality without quite knowing it,’” Felix avers), ethnologies of the nomadic Astingi, Cannonia’s sole surviving indigenous tribe (“They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats.”), lectures on art, music, theater, dance, and entr’acte harangues (“Cannonia and America had a special and preferential historical relationship, [Iulus] insisted, beyond their shared distaste for oracles and pundits, as the only two nations in History of whom it could be truly said that all their wounds were self-inflicted. And what could Cannonia offer America? The wincing knowledge that there are historical periods in which you have to live without hope.”).

  “History” appearing thrice in one sentence—and once even capitalized, Germanically? but what of that other word, “disgrace”? Grace is for the religious, disgrace is for the damned. Humans once hunted for sustenance, now they hunt for sport. To go through the motions of what once ensured survival, now purely for entertainment, is ignominious, but vital—the ignominy is vital. Even if the rituals have become as hollow as rotted logs, or as unpredictable in their ultimate attainments as the rivers Mze—Newman’s Danubes, whose currents switch from east to west to east—the very fact that we remember any ritual at all is enough to remin
d us too of a more essential way of being. Our various historical, racial, and ethnic selves are cast in a masquerade, which makes a game of integration. Yesterday’s work is play today, as contemporary life converts all needing to wanting. That’s why when the hound points and we squeeze the trigger, when we slit the knife across the quarry’s throat, we experience disgrace—a fallen estate, an embodiment of Felix’s Semper Vero, his ancestral holdings lost to laziness and debt. Agriculture has become a hobby for us millennials. Just like reading has, and writing. But “Once upon a time,” everything was sacred. The traditions haven’t changed—only our justifications of them have—and so though when we’re faced with tradition we’re disgraced, our disgrace is only partial. The holiness remains.

  Partiality

  But, again, to be partial is to be polysemous, and another meaning is “to favor,” “to incline”—as a valley becomes a hill becomes a mountain, where a settlement is raised, around an empty temple. Newman’s disgrace brings solace, as the spring brings not flowers but storms, which bless us with power outages, salutary loneliness, full wells. Newman’s disgrace is secular grace. “Not even a curtain of iron can separate Israel from its Heavenly Father,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said in third century Palestine. “An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Winston Churchill said in 1946 at a college in Missouri. The eiserner Vorhang—the iron curtain, or firewall, an innovation of Austro-Hungary—is a sheet of civic armor, able to be dropped from a theater’s proscenium to prevent a conflagration that starts onstage from spreading to the audience. Newman lifts this barrier—and invites his readers to ascend and bask in the flames.

  JOSHUA COHEN

  New York, 2012

  Editor’s Note

  “Is it a book then . . . that you’re working on?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a book, really.” Felix replied evenly, his knuckles white on the balcony railing.

  “But through all our talks, you’ve never once mentioned it!” the Professor, now truly hurt, blurted mournfully. “How can that be?” Then the question authors dread above all others:

  “Pray, what’s it about?”

  Like his stand-in Felix, my uncle abhorred the Professor’s question, and my mother warned me never to ask him. The first time was the summer of 1989, when Charlie rented a house near ours on Cape Cod. Charlie didn’t quite fit on the Cape—he had no affinity for water (“the sea means stupidity”), nor a family to indulge at the mini-golf courses—and his sleek black Acura with its trunk jammed full of Deutsche Gramophone CDs stood parked all summer in the sandy driveway of his cottage like a rebuke to the entire peninsula. Afterward, though, we inferred that it had been a good summer for work. The book he was writing then, this book, was at that point only a little behind schedule. Charlie had averaged a new book every three years since his late twenties, and now, in his early fifties, at his peak, his career should have been moving along briskly. Only four years earlier, in 1985, he had produced a volume of essays, The Post-Modern Aura, which despite being called “Hegelian” for its “daunting” prose and “exquisitely complex argument,” had been reviewed in over thirty publications and mentioned in mainstream magazines like Time. His previous novel, White Jazz, had been a bestseller. Every few months his byline appeared in some publication—an essay, a book review, even a profile of George Brett for Sport.

  Don’t ask what your uncle is writing about—but I was eighteen at the time and less intimidated than I should have been. One day, a few months after that summer on the Cape, while visiting Charlie in St. Louis, where he taught in the English department of Washington University, I waited until he went to campus and slipped in his office. Charlie’s goal when he started each day was to come up with one or two, possibly three sentences he liked, and to get there he handwrote his initial drafts, then sent those pages to an assistant, who returned them typewritten on plain white sheets, which Charlie then cut into slivers, isolating individual sentences before reinserting them with Scotch tape in the handwritten notebooks or tacking them to a wall. Those tacked-up sentence slivers were before me now, along with dozens if not hundreds of pink and yellow note cards scrawled with phrases, lists, and snatches of dialogue. The book, in other words, was in front of my face, vertical and spread out. No drawers had to be opened, no papers shuffled. The office itself was surprisingly clean and easy to move around in, the only clutter being fifty or so briarwood pipes and an astonishing number of library books.

  I stayed in the office until the Acura pulled in the driveway an hour or so later, by which time I still had no idea what the book was about. Charlie’s heavily stylized shorthand (it’s no accident that Ainoha, Felix’s wife, wonders of the Professor, “how you could sleep with a man with such bad handwriting”) was often indecipherable even to assistants who had worked with him for years, and as for the sentences that had been typed, they were typically fragments (“army of deserters,” “mad for sanity”) or mystically oblique pronouncements such as “History has a way of happening a little later than you think” or “In Russia you always have to buy the horse twice.” Sometimes they contained no more than a single word. (“Deungulate.”)

  However, the question also has to be asked, even if I had found some synopsis for the unfinished book, would it have made a difference? Charlie’s books resist summary—how, for example, would you distill the plot of White Jazz? (“Sandy, a young man who works for an information technology company, sleeps around”?) How would you describe The Post-Modern Aura—as a book about art, literature, history, or simply the human condition? Even sympathetic readers can find themselves struggling to say what Charlie’s books are about. (Paul West, attempting to describe The Promisekeeper in a 1968 review for The Times, called it “not so much a story as an exhibition, not so much a prophecy stunt as a stunted process, not so much a black comedy as a kaleidoscopic psychodrama.”)

  Over the next several years Charlie continued to work on his mysterious book in St. Louis and New York (where he lived when he wasn’t teaching), as well as various parts of Europe, Russia, and the US. He and my parents frequently traveled together: all of us sat with him in restaurants and walked through museums in places like Santa Fe, Chicago, and Kansas City and did not ask him about the book.

  But then a surprising thing happened: Charlie began to talk about it. I can’t quite remember when it became clear that he was 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 nov
el 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.