by Joan Brady
Theory of War won the Costa/Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger
‘A modern work of genius . . . one of the most remarkable and accomplished fictions to come from these islands’ Spectator
‘Triumphant, shattering . . . passionate’ Mail on Sunday
‘Stunning . . . scorching . . . lyrical and bloody’ Observer
‘As vivid as anything in Jack London; the spare and illusion-stripped language of the book lifts it above any search for meaning until we can apprehend human life for what it is – an ecstasy made up of beauty, pain, cruelty and splendour’ Sunday Times
‘Gripping . . . harrowing . . . told with exceptional skill . . . a comment on notions of freedom everywhere’ Independent on Sunday
‘A measured and precise tautness within a stunning literary dynamic’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Enormously impressive . . . you’ll never forget it’ Guardian
Joan Brady was born in California and danced with the New York City Ballet in her early twenties. She is the author of Theory of War, winner of the Costa/Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Death Comes for Peter Pan, longlisted for the Orange Prize, an autobiography, The Unmaking of a Dancer, and the novels, The Émigré, Bleedout and Venom. She lives in Oxford.
First published in Great Britain by Andre Deutsch, 1993
First published as an ebook by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
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Copyright © Joan Brady
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Ebook ISBN 978-1-84983-526-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Alexander Brady
and his children
and his children’s children
Contents
ONE
Tuesday
RECONNAISSANCE
TWO
Wednesday morning
REVOLUTION
THREE
Wednesday noon
DÉTENTE
FOUR
Wednesday afternoon and evening
REARMAMENT
FIVE
Thursday
WAR
[Disability is] an allegory of all life in society.
– Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent
Same thing’s true of slavery, of course, but with slavery the metaphor’s so much a part of the language, nobody pays attention to it anymore.
– Nathaniel Carrick, MD (taped interview)
ONE
Tuesday
RECONNAISSANCE
1
How stupid the young are. When I was twenty-two I enrolled in philosophy at Columbia University. I wanted to find truth. I hired helpers to wheel me to it. My professors said, ‘Truth exists. It’s real and absolute. But the only place it has any meaning is in questions like “Is it going to rain tomorrow?” Wait until tomorrow and see. Then – hey, presto – you’ve got the truth.’ Well, what the hell good is that to me? I live down here, deep down in this wheelchair. I need more.
I’ll start in Sweetbrier. I hate the midwest, and Sweetbrier never was up to much, anyway. Today it’s no more than a smattering of shacks tossed down along one of those roads that score the cornfields. Cars don’t stop here. Farmers go elsewhere to shop and socialize. You can still make out Benbow Wikin’s name over his grocery store if you really want to, but there’s hardly anything on the shelves inside. The few patrons that come and go are as creaky and barren as the aged toad of a man who sleeps behind the counter.
Here lie the beginnings of truth.
Sweetbrier started to fall apart in 1923. The Midwest Pacific decided to close the line through the town, which had become not much more than a water stop on the way from Topeka to Jefferson City. This wasn’t the way the townspeople looked at it, of course, but people do kid themselves so. The news first appeared in the Overland Sentinel. Most everybody refused to believe it until Senator George Stoke – the great windbag himself – told them it was true. History calls this windbag a ‘fearless liberal’. Encyclopedias talk about his reformation of the Senate rules, his campaign against the First World War, his denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, his federal power projects – one so famous I’m afraid to mention it – and all those farm relief measures. John F. Kennedy wrote him into Profiles in Courage. Even so I say he was a windbag. Worse than that, he was a first-class shit, and the end he came to was too good for him – way too good for him. I’ll get to it.
Anyhow, he’d formed anti-railroad committees before anybody else had even absorbed the news. The Overland Sentinel suggested a picnic lunch on the lawns of his mansion, where at this late date in his career, the senator was still growing power as his main crop, manuring it well with money and years of patronage, planting in spring, flourishing in summer, ready for harvest by November and election time, for the festivals, the cider, the corn dollies – the win, the kill – and then plowing under in preparation for years to come. The senator lived just out of town. ‘We’ll run a full-page ad, Senator, sir,’ the gangly young journalist said to him. ‘’Course we will.’ And the senator’s eyebrows slithered around on his face like live bait in a fishing bucket.
It would certainly help if I knew what truth is. At Columbia they said they taught a powerful technique for making successive approximations to it; the phrasing is theirs, not mine. Like calculus, they said. But calculus produces something solid, slope of a tangent, orbit of a planet. Ask the philosophers what they produce, and all you get is drivel about weather reports and rain today. Well, as I say, it isn’t good enough. Besides, I’ll bet truth (whatever it is) is sometimes truer when you make it up. Like that first Saturday in June of 1923, out on the senator’s lawn. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even born. But I can see the wives of local worthies setting up tables on the grass. I can see the senator’s Greek-columned portico, asquat above rolling lawns like a tourist caught out with diarrhea alongside a golf course. Tablecloths flap in the breeze. Wicker baskets disgorge hams, salads, pies, cakes, lemonade, ice cream. The women gossip while they work. Hats bob. Dresses billow. My uncle Atlas knew most of these women. He told me about them years ago, when I was young, before the tumor in my spine began to grow too big for its bony enclosure. They had names like Hattie and Maude, Gertrude, Carrie and Hope.
At eleven-thirty, guests from all over the state of Kansas begin to arrive. Men in Sunday suits take out hip flasks and add gin to the lemonade. It would have been bootleg gin, wouldn’t it? The twenties were Prohibition years, weren’t they? Not that it matters. Boys in knickerbocker pants and girls with hoops. Barking dogs. A banner says SIGN AND GIVE TO SAVE SWEETBRIER and snaps in the breeze. Or perhaps the day was windless. This doesn’t matter, either. At twelve, the dancing begins. At one, the senator’s vast bulk irons down the grass across the lawn on the way to his speech. ‘Timing’s everything,’ the senator
used to say. ‘Get the timing right and you got your public fucked before you lay down a penny.’ He stops here to shake a hand and there to bend his public smile over a lady’s glove. He makes a perilous stoop from the waist to accept ice cream from a girl in ringlets.
Photographs of Senator George Stoke at the age of sixty-two are not pretty. Some fat men look well-contained. Not George Stoke. He oozed. His lower eyelids gaped; they exposed their angry red interiors, which showed not red but black in the grainy black-and-white newsprint of the time; they seeped. The flesh hung over his starched collar as moist and flaccid as rotting pork. He carried a walking stick that ended in an open-mouthed snake with a real snake’s teeth and pearls for eyes. He wore a frock coat, shiny at the elbows and cut to a pattern that had gone out of style nearly thirty years before. This frock coat was important to him – and it’s important to me and to what goes on hereafter. He’d worn one like it throughout his career. Everybody knew George Stoke’s frock coat. Everybody knew his monumental vulgarity, too; he worked hard at it. He jiggled with glee when he shocked the strait-laced and the starched. ‘See this litmus paper?’ he’d ask one such. ‘I’m gonna put it up to your face just like this, right? And by the’ – oh, what a deliciously hideous, famous, favorite phrase: oh, how long in my life I’ve wanted to use it and never, never once, found just the right meeting of opportunity and, well, what? courage? confidence? – ‘And’, said George Stoke, Democrat of the state of Kansas, essential bit of plumbing in the United States Senate for more years than anybody could remember – ‘by the quivering cunt of the unfucked mother of Christ, it’s gonna tell me whose ass you had your nose stuck up last night.’
But it was more than words. This Senator Stoke was a cobra of a politician. He knew what he wanted; he knew what was right for the people who voted him in, and he saw no reason to modify it for anything or anybody at all. He lulled his enemies into comfort, then squeezed them dry and threw away the husk. He’d survived in politics for a long time. He’d been re-elected again and again according to laws that in any civilized society would have ruled him out to begin with. But then there aren’t any civilized societies, are there?
2
My grandfather knew George Stoke well. They grew up together, but there couldn’t be any two men less alike, at least to look at. Where George was suet, my grandfather was fire. He reminds me of the steelworks at Cardiff that lie alongside the major artery from Wales into England, where I live the life of a resident alien. They’re a vast landscape of foundries, furnaces, rolling mills, chimneys. At night the area for miles around glows red from the fires inside. This is hell on earth, where there’s a shroud of fiery smoke, a lowering, breathing, glowing miasma that pollutes the night as surely as it pollutes the air and the waters of the Bristol Channel – as surely as my grandfather’s fury pollutes my life, even though the man was dead before I was born. He was all teeth and claws, as the uncrowned king of Arabia said of himself. This is why I went to Columbia to seek truth: to find out what my grandfather’s life means. I have a right to know; I bear his curse.
My father told me stories about him when I was small. But it was Atlas’s stories I remembered: Atlas’s stories that I felt, that I dreamed about while I was growing up. ‘When dad first laid eyes on George Stoke—’ and I could feel myself straining to get the focus clear, straining to see that first sight of George as my grandfather’s eyes took it in; not to reproduce the memory, not just that: I coveted my grandfather’s memories in the Biblical sense, sinfully, secretly, and I strained to do the actual remembering itself, to colonize these fleeting intimacies inside my mind, steal them from him wholesale with all the rights to ownership that go with them. Atlas once said, ‘He rode that first train across the Rockies—’ And the clackety-clack: do I remember it? do I? dare I? If you turn your head quick enough you can kiss your own lips. Sometimes when I’m alone, I can – well, almost anyway, just for a second. My head buzzes with the effort, but when the horizon clears, I’m back where I started, just plain old me again. Of course the idea’s absurd. How could I remember my grandfather’s life? I never even met him.
This man, my grandfather, was called Jonathan Carrick. He was about two years younger than the senator. My uncle Atlas said nobody ever did find out precisely how much younger. There isn’t a record of his birth anywhere. At the time of the senator’s party he was somewhere in the region of sixty, which is one age in a greasy old senator and quite another in such as Jonathan. There’s kinship here even so; not only a shared past, deeper than that: the kinship of old enemies, the kinship of war.
A war between two people is not all that different from a war between two countries. To begin with the surface of things, the troops must have a flag, a banner, colors, and so they do in the war between my grandfather and the senator. Jonathan Carrick wore a frock coat, just as the senator did; his was out-of-date, too, just like the senator’s – the frock coat a cockade, and no sillier than the roses, ribbons, feathers that make up national cockades, either. My grandfather looked good in his frock coat with a velvet collar, but then the good-looking look good in anything; there’s an ease to the body, a sureness to the gestures that ordinary-looking people never show. My grandfather’s gestures were remarkable. Sometimes he answered with his hands alone, and you were left in no doubt as to what he was saying. Atlas explained this to me. It was a captivating talent, discordant, unexpected in so permanently angry a person, yet so graceful, so magical in its accuracy, so oddly moving that it aroused maternal feelings in women for miles around in the county where he lived – just as the boiling undercurrent in him aroused feelings of a less respectable nature. There is always much speculation after a man like this becomes a widower.
People said he’d taken his wife’s death too hard. They said he should get on with life. But what is there to get on with? What is the point? When he went shopping he stopped sometimes mid-stride in the streets with a look of anguish on his face. ‘His heart,’ said the gossips. But it was his war, not his heart that caught at him: that look came over him when he suddenly realized that some flank lay exposed. At night, he paced back and forth in the dark of his empty house, studying the psychology of the enemy. ‘Does it have meaning?’ he would say. ‘Or is this meaningless, too? If this is meaningless, then – But it can’t be. Because if it is – No, goddamn you! No, you go too far. I won’t have it. Do you hear? No!’
To go a little deeper into the subject of war, it is a cardinal rule of strategy, an axiom set forth by that great philosopher of the subject, Karl von Clausewitz, that whoever really knows what he wants has the edge. Jonathan tested for fixed points. How about this? Did he really want it? No, damnit. How about that? No! It looked like the options were down to one: George Stoke. My grandfather read about the lawn party in the Seattle Intelligencer; he worked a farm near a tiny town called Hannaville up in the mud and pine trees of Washington state, half a continent away from Sweetbrier and the senator’s party. He read about the party on the same day – the very same day – that he read about the annual Methodist Congress, which that year was to be held in Topeka. Topeka is only fifty miles from Senator Stoke’s mansion. Clausewitz says war is a wonderful trinity of emotion, reason and chance, and here in the Seattle Intelligencer, a paper as relentlessly dull as the Overland Sentinel of Sweetbrier, my grandfather finds himself on the right side of ‘that play of probabilities’ – these are Clausewitz’s very words – ‘which make war a free activity of the soul’.
My grandfather didn’t finish reading about the lawn party. He threw the paper down, ran out into the yard and began overhauling his elderly Saxon to make it ready for the trip. A week later he was nursing it over the dirt roads that wound through the northwest, over the rutted tracks of the Rockies, out onto the straight gravel runs across the cornfields of Colorado and Kansas.
3
When my grandfather parked his car on the sweeping curve of the driveway into the senator’s property, he couldn’t see George. I know that. I went t
o Sweetbrier and surveyed the land myself. He would have seen only the crowd with the ladies’ skirts billowing and their hats bobbing. He couldn’t even hear George until he was halfway across the lawn. All the national papers ran George’s speech. It wasn’t anything special, but because of what happened afterwards, it got the kind of coverage few senators manage even when they pay out in hard cash.
As I play the scene for myself, Jonathan began to hear the words just as George was saying:
‘– and what are these fancy bosses in their button-up suits tellin’ us? Eh? “Sacrifice this little town of Sweetbrier for the greater good of the nation.” That it?’
When I was small, my two sisters and I spent a year at an elegant boarding school far away from home. My father and mother did a lot of wild quarreling; sometimes it was best to have us children out of the line of fire. Three little maids at school: there were banks of rhododendrons at the edge of the school’s lawn, and to this day the scent of rhododendrons brings back the peculiar unhappiness of that place and that time in my life with a force not even my most vivid memories can evoke. It was much like this for Jonathan, hearing George’s voice for the first time in more than forty years.
‘Got us licked? The Midwest Pacific? Us? Lemme hear what you say to that, friends.’
Jonathan took in his breath and began his report to the generals at base camp in Topeka, where the Methodist Congress was just getting under way. ‘The salesman’s smoothness: it rules everything – always did, of course, but there’s real power in it now. And money. Then what? There’s something – what is it? – something that’s askew. Why are the eyes dull? Is it greed? fear?’
George had become a traveling salesman at the age of fifteen when times were hard for his family. He was big for his age even then. They called them drummers in those days – some ten years after the Civil War was over – and George drummed up trade for Sweetbrier Chewing Tobacco in First Chance, Dixon, Nirvana and all the other little towns, dozens of them, that are still spotted here and there over the midwest like mold on damp linen. Jonathan hadn’t seen George in the flesh for nearly half a century, although he’d watched him grow older and fatter in newsprint: the papers carried many pictures of the great senator. It was such an illustrious career. Even so, when Jonathan thought of George, he thought of the boy who practiced his salesman’s spiel, elbow on makeshift table, black eyes shining: ‘Set ’em up, friend. Bourbon for me.’