In Partial Disgrace Read online

  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. Now instead of one book there would be roughly 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? W
here 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

  begins anew

  Virgil, Eclogues

  IN DARKEST CANNONIA

  (Rufus)

  I fell into that hermit kingdom carelessly, the chute shuddering above me as the shroudlines cut my hands. Below, the rivers rested in their courses, like wine from a broken urn; above, the stars ran backward in the upper air. Cinching up my harness, I drifted trembling toward the signal bonfire and my contact—a man apart, devoted to his mission, whose realm would become my destiny, as ours would be his fate. But buffeted by cruel crosswinds, blows from the powers of the air, I was dragged toward shores of black milk, skipping like a stone through the dark and empty land. Palms turned to the stars, I cursed my gods, mentally settled my affairs, and muttered an incoherent prayer: Give me your hand.

  Grinding teeth and bloodied mouth a howl, I made out two horrific shapes hurtling toward me, two spotless dogs drawing near with unimaginable speed. One attacked the chute, deflating the billowing silk beneath his body; the other was in the air above me, all red mustachios, golden eyes, and ivory fangs. Was I to be saved from death by drowning only to be torn apart by devil dogs? We rolled and wallowed, my lapels in the brute’s jaws, until we finally came to rest, his forepaws crossed upon my chest, rearquarters raised up, cropped tail awhirr. And then, wise in his negligence, he ringed my ears with openmouthed kisses.

  Their master was soon beside us, a giant of a man in a shepherd’s cloak, a conical fur hat concealing his face, and wielding a staff at least ten feet tall. I prepared myself for the blow. Then the cloak parted like a theater curtain, revealing only a wiry boy’s boy very near my own age, standing upon stilts within the felt greatcloak and unremarkable save for his salient gray eyes, the left one half-closed.

  The dog stepped off me to join his mate, who trotted up, a bit of parachute silk in his flues, his red beard full of cockleburrs. They seated themselves on either side of Iulus, barrel-chested, taciturn, with heart-shaped buttocks and slightly webbed feet. A handsome brace of superior spirits, radiating the same unpretentious dignity as their young master, even down to the half-closed eye; sly and unsentimental, neither obsequious nor shy.

  Their coat, as their breeding, was like nothing I had ever seen in the animal world. A wiry texture, neither harsh nor loose, dark red bristles folded flat across a softer golden undercoat, changing its cast with every modulation of the moonlight. Their squared-off heads sported trim mustachios and goatees, brownish-pink lips and noses, and their immense ocher eyes were garnished with wispy eyebrows. When they shook their heads, the flapping of their ears sounded like distant machinegunfire, and it was only later that I noticed the detailed conchlike enfoldment of their inner ears, their only vulnerability, designed for the worship of natural sounds. And then, each with a single golden peeper trained on me, the dogs allowed their tongues to carelessly loll from the corner of their mouths, as if to say: “You see! One can be great; and amusing!”

  We put away the chute and the shepherd’s disguise in a hollow tree, buried my shortwave and silver dollars, and walked through the night without a word. It seemed our contact could not have been otherwise; we were of that age that requires no password.

  I was in a zone of pure existence, which I would not experience again until the tremors of old age. Part of me was still pasted in the sky, part of me ambled along the unsafe earth, illuminated by faint and mocking s
tars. And part of me was observing all this from an unknown vantage, calm and imperturbable. Yes, give me your hand.

  In Cannonia the dawn is striped. Between great sliding plates of slate and amber in the nervous sky a pallid sun appeared, diffuse and shapeless as a ball of Christmas socks. What I had upon first impact thought to be a carpet of fir needles proved to be a unique ground cover, impervious to frost or scorching. Neither heath nor grass nor legume, but firm and pliant kidney-shaped leaves with stemless white flowers, each large enough to hold a dewdrop, each footfall releasing a strong and refreshing aroma. If one stumbled, there was not the slightest sound, as if we were traversing a great expanse of silent pride which could absorb the rudest insult. Indeed, as I often saw that morning, the ground was so forgiving that bombs often did not explode on impact, but merely buried themselves up to their tailfins, scattered about the landscape like giant clumps of gray-green crocus.

  The dogs cast out from us in great looping figure-eights, apparently indifferent to game and involved solely in their role as escorts. Once an immense Icarian crane went up between them in an hysterical imitation of flight, but they paid no more attention to it than if it were a gnat. It was hard to say if their originality or their manners were more impressive.

  In an effort at conversation I inquired about their origins. My contact glanced through me, smiled slightly, then gave a transparent shrug, indicating that this was not the time or place for such a long and problematic discourse, and implying that the dogs were only a kind of theme in a larger drama over which we had already lost control. So I changed the subject to the smell of the earth, a bruised tang something between pineapple and spruce, an aroma more incensed than any I had experienced.