From the stands: his mother’s ecstatic cry.
From his bag in Piemonte: the famous rubber bands uncoiled for the famous childhood hero.
From the cabin’s doorway: the sea horse lady bursting in, opening windows to let out the smoke from Less’s botched attempt at a fire.
Arthur Less was up for a prize only once before: something called the Wilde and Stein Literary Laurels. He was informed of the mysterious honor through his agent, Peter Hunt. Less, perhaps hearing “Wildenstein,” replied he wasn’t Jewish. Peter coughed and said: “I believe it is something gay.” It was, and yet Less was surprised; he had spent half a lifetime living with a writer whose sexuality was never mentioned, much less his half life as a married man. To be called a gay writer! Robert scorned the idea; it was like elevating the importance of his childhood in Westchester, Connecticut. “I don’t write about Westchester,” he would say. “I don’t think about Westchester. I’m not a Westchester poet”—which would have surprised Westchester, whose council had placed a plaque on the middle school Robert had attended. Gay, black, Jewish; Robert and his friends thought they were beyond all that. So Less was surprised to know this kind of award even existed. His first response to Peter was to ask: “How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono. But Peter persuaded him to attend. Less and Robert had split by then, and, anxious about how he would appear to this mysterious gay literary world, and desperate for a date, he panicked and asked Freddy Pelu.
Who knew Freddy, then only twenty-six, would be such a boon? They arrived to a college auditorium (banners everywhere: Hopes Are the Ladders to Dreams!), on whose stage six wooden chairs were arranged as in a court of law. Less and Freddy took their seats. (“Wilde and Stein,” Freddy said. “It sounds like a vaudeville act.”) Around them, people were shouting recognition and hugging and having intense conversations. Less recognized none of them. It seemed so strange; here, his contemporaries, his peers, and they were strangers. But not to bookish Freddy, suddenly come alive in literary company—“Look, there’s Meredith Castle; she’s a language poet, Arthur, you should know her, and that one is Harold Frickes,” and so on. Freddy peering through his red glasses at these oddities and naming each with satisfaction. It was like being with a bird-watcher. The lights went down, and six men and women walked onstage, some of them so elderly, they seemed to be automatons, and sat in the chairs. One small bald man in tinted glasses stepped to the microphone. “That’s Finley Dwyer,” Freddy whispered. Whoever that was.
The man began to welcome them all, and then his face brightened: “I admit I will be disappointed tonight if we reward the assimilationists, the ones who write the way straight people write, who hold up heterosexuals as war heroes, who make gay characters suffer, who set their characters adrift in a nostalgic past that ignores our present oppression; I say we purge ourselves of these people, who would have us vanish into the bookstore, the assimilationists, who are, at their core, ashamed of who they are, who we are, who you are!” The audience applauded wildly. War heroes, suffering characters, adrift in a nostalgic past—Less recognized these elements as a mother might recognize the police description of a serial killer. It was Kalipso! Finley Dwyer was talking about him. Him, harmless little Arthur Less: the enemy! The audience roared on, and Less turned and whispered shakily, “Freddy, I have to get out of here.” Freddy looked at him with surprise. “Hopes are the ladders to dreams, Arthur.” But then he saw Less was serious. When the award for Book of the Year came up, Less did not hear the announcement; he was lying on his bed, while Freddy was saying not to worry. Their lovemaking had been ruined by the bedroom bookcase, from which dead writers stared at him like dogs at the foot of the bed. Perhaps Less was ashamed, as Finley Dwyer had accused. A bird outside the window seemed to be mocking him. He had not, in any case, won.
Less has read (in the packet the beautiful women handed him before vanishing into the glasswork) that, while the five finalists were chosen by an elderly committee, the final jury is made up of twelve high school students. The second night, they appear in the lobby, dressed up in elegant flowered dresses (the girls) or their dad’s oversized blazers (the boys). Why did it not occur to Less these were the same teens by the pool? The teens move like a tour group into the greenhouse, formerly Less’s private dining room, which now bustles with caterers and unknown people. The beautiful Italian women reappear and introduce him to his fellow finalists. Less feels his confidence drop. The first is Riccardo, a young unshaven Italian man, incredibly tall and thin, in sunglasses, jeans, and a T-shirt that reveals the Japanese carp tattoos on both arms. The other three are all much older: Luisa, glamorously white-haired and dressed in a white cotton tunic, with gold alien bracelets for fending off critics; Alessandro, a cartoon villain, with streaks of white at his temples, a pencil mustache, and black plastic spectacles that narrow his look of disapproval; and a short rose-gold gnome from Finland who asks to be called Harry, though his name on the books is something else entirely. Their works, Less is told, are a Sicilian historical novel, a retelling of Rapunzel in modern-day Russia, an eight-hundred-page novel of a man’s last minute on his deathbed in Paris, and an imagined life of St. Margory. Less cannot seem to match each novel with its author; has the young one made the deathbed novel or Rapunzel? Either seems likely. They are all so intellectual. Less knows at once he hasn’t a chance.
“I read your book,” says Luisa, her left eye batting away a loose scrap of mascara while her right one stares straight into his heart. “It took me to new places. I thought of Joyce in outer space.” The Finn seems to be brimming with mirth.
The cartoon villain adds: “He would not live long, I think.”
“Portrait of the Artist as a Spaceman!” the Finn says at last, and covers his teeth as he ticks away with silent laughter.
“I have not read it, but…,” says the tattooed author, moving restlessly, hands in pockets. The others wait for more. But that is all. Behind them, Less recognizes Fosters Lancett walking alone into the room, very short and heavy headed and looking as soaked in misery as a trifle pudding is soaked in rum. And perhaps also soaked in rum.
“I don’t think I have a chance of winning” is all Less can say. The prize is a generous amount of euros and a bespoke suit made in Turin proper.
Luisa flings a hand into the air. “Oh, but who knows? It is up to these students! Who knows what they love? Romance? Murder? If it’s murder, Alessandro has us beat.”
The villain raises first one eyebrow, then the other. “When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.”
“You remain this way,” Luisa chides, and he shrugs. Less senses a love affair from long ago. The two switch gears to Italian, and so begins what sounds like a squabble but could really be anything at all.
“Do any of you happen to speak English or have a cigarette?” It is Lancett, glowering under his eyebrows. The young writer immediately pulls a pack from his jeans and produces one, slightly flattened. Lancett eyes it with trepidation, then takes it. “You are the finalists?” he asks.
“Yes,” Less says, and Lancett turns his head, alert to an American accent.
His eyelids flutter closed in disgust. “These things are not cool.”
“I guess you’ve been to a lot of them.” Less hears himself saying this inane thing.
“Not many. And I’ve never won. It’s a sad little cockfight they arrange because they have no talent themselves.”
“You have won. You won the main prize here.”
Fosters Lancett stares at Less for moment, then rolls his eyes and stalks off to smoke.
For the next two days, the crowd moves in packs—teenagers, finalists, elderly prize committee—smiling at each other from auditoriums and restaurants, passing peacefully by each other at catering buffets, but never seated together, never interacting, with only Fosters Lancett moving freely among them as the skulking lone wolf.
Less now feels a new shame that the teenagers have seen him nearly naked and avoids the pool if they are present; in his mind he sees the horror of his middle-aged body and cannot bear the judgment (when in fact his anxiety has kept him almost as lean as in his college years). He also shuns the spa. And so the old rubber bands are brought out again, and each morning Less gives his Lessian best to the “trophies” and “action heroes” of the long-lost manual (itself a poor translation from Italian), each day doing fewer and fewer, asymptotically approaching, but never reaching, zero.
Days, of course, are crowded. There is the sunny town square luncheon alfresco where Less is cautioned not once, not twice, but ten times by various Italians to apply sunscreen to his pinkening face (of course he has applied sunscreen, and what the hell did they know about it, with their luscious mahogany skin?). There is the speech by Fosters Lancett on Ezra Pound, in the middle of which the bitter old man pulls out an electronic cigarette and begins to puff away; its little green light, at this time alien to the Piemontesi, makes some journalists present conjecture he is smoking their local marijuana. There are numerous baffling interviews—“I am sorry, I need the interprete, I cannot understand your American accent”—in which dowdy matrons in lavender linen ask highly intellectual questions about Homer, Joyce, and quantum physics. Less, completely below the journalistic radar in America, and unused to substantive questions, keeps to a fiercely merrymaking persona at all times, refusing to wax philosophical about subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them. The ladies leave amused but without enough copy for a column. From across the lobby, Less hears journalists laughing at something Alessandro is saying; clearly he knows how to handle these things. And there is the two-hour bus ride up a mountain, when Less turns to Luisa with a question and she explains that the roses at the ends of the vineyard rows are to detect disease. She shakes her finger and says, “The roses will be taken first. Like a bird…what is the bird?”
“A canary in a coal mine.”
“Sì. Esatto.”
“Or like a poet in a Latin American country,” Less offers. “The new regime always kills them first.” The complex triple take of her expression: first astonishment, then wicked complicity, and last shame for either the dead poets, themselves, or both.
And then there is the prize ceremony itself.
Less was in the apartment when Robert received the call, back in 1992. “Well, holy fuck,” came the cry from the bedroom, and Less rushed in, thinking Robert had injured himself (he carried on a dangerous intrigue with the physical world, and chairs, tables, shoes, all came rushing into his path as to an electromagnet), but found Robert basset faced, the phone in his lap, staring straight ahead at Woodhouse’s painting of Less. In a T-shirt, and with tortoiseshell glasses on his forehead, the newspaper spread around him, a cigarette dangerously close to lighting it, Robert turned to face Less. “It was the Pulitzer committee,” he said evenly. “It turns out I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all these years.”
“You won?”
“It’s not Pew-lit-sir. It’s Pull-it-sir.” Robert’s eyes took another survey of the room. “Holy fuck, Arthur, I won.”
A party was called for, of course, and the old gang all came back together—Leonard Ross, Otto Handler, Franklin Woodhouse, Stella Barry—piled into the shack on the Vulcan Steps, and patted Robert on the back; Less had never seen him so bashful with his pals, so obviously delighted and proud. Ross went right up to him, and Robert bowed his head, leaning into the tall Lincolnesque writer, and Ross rubbed his scalp as if for good luck or, more probably, as if they had done this when they were young. They laughed and talked about it ceaselessly—what they were like when they were young—which baffled Less, because they seemed just the same age as when he met them. A number had given up drink, including Robert by then, so what they drank was coffee, from a beat-up metal urn, and some of them passed around a joint. Less resumed his old role and stood to the side, admiring them. At some point, Stella saw him from across the room and went over with her stork walk; she was all bones and sharp edges, a too-tall, unpretty woman who celebrated her flaws with confidence and grace, so they became, to Less, beautiful. “I hear you’ve taken up writing too, Arthur,” she said in her scratchy voice. She took his glass of wine and sipped from it, then handed it back to him, her eyes full of devilry. “Here’s my only advice. Don’t win one of these prizes.” She herself had won several, of course; she was in the Wharton Anthology of Poetry, which meant she was immortal. Like Athena coming down to advise young Telemachus. “You win a prize, and it’s all over. You lecture for the rest of your life. But you never write again.” She tapped a nail on his chest. “Don’t win one.” Then she kissed him on his cheek.
That was the last time they ever were together, the Russian River School.
It takes place not in the ancient monastery itself, where one can buy honey from cloistered bees, but in a municipal hall built in the rock beneath the monastery. Being a place of worship, it lacks a dungeon, and so the region of Piemonte has built one. In the auditorium (whose rear access door is open to different weather: a sudden storm brewing), the teenagers are arrayed exactly as Less imagines the hidden monks to be: with devout expressions and vows of silence. The elderly chairpeople sit at a kingly table; they also do not speak. The only speaker is a handsome Italian (the mayor, it turns out) whose appearance on the podium is announced by a crack of thunder; the sound goes out on his microphone; the lights go out. The audience goes “Aaaah!” Less hears the young writer, seated beside him in the darkness, lean over and speak to him at last: “This is when someone is murdered. But who?” Less whispers “Fosters Lancett” before realizing the famous Brit is seated just behind them.
The lights awake the room again, and no one has been murdered. A movie screen begins to unroll noisily from the ceiling like a mad relative wandering downstairs and has to be sent back into hiding. The ceremony begins again, and as the mayor begins his speech in Italian, those mellifluous, seesawing, meaningless harpsichord words, Less feels his mind drifting away like a spaceman from an airlock, off into the asteroid belt of his own concerns. For he does not belong here. It seemed absurd when he got the invitation, but he saw it so abstractly, and at such a remote distance in time and space, that he accepted it as part of his getaway plan. But here, in his suit, sweat already beginning to dot the front of his white shirt and bead on his thinning hairline, he knows it is utterly wrong. He did not take the wrong car; the wrong car took him. For he has come to understand this is not a strange funny Italian prize, a joke to tell his friends; it is very real. The elderly judges in their jewelry; the teens in their jury box; the finalists all quivering and angry with expectation; even Fosters Lancett, who has come all this way, and written a long speech, and charged his electronic cigarette and his dwindling battery of small talk—it is very real, very important to them. It cannot be dismissed as a lark. Instead: it is a vast mistake.
Less begins to imagine (as the mayor doodles on in Italian) that he has been mistranslated, or—what is the word?—supertranslated, his novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet (Giuliana Monti is her name) who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed, without a single interview request by a journalist (his publicist said, “Autumn is a bad time”), but here in Italy he understands he is taken seriously. In autumn, no less. Just this morning, he was shown the articles in la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, local papers, and Catholic papers, with photographs of him in his blue suit, gazing upward at the camera with the same worried unsophisticated sapphire gaze he showed to Robert on that beach. But it should be a photograph of Giuliana Monti. She has written this book. Rewritten, upwritten, outwritten Less himself. For he has known genius. He has been awakened by genius in the middle of the night, by the sound of genius pacing the halls; he has made genius his coffee, and his breakfast, and his ham sandwich and his tea; he has been naked with genius, coaxed genius from
panic, brought genius’s pants from the tailor and ironed his shirts for a reading. He has felt every inch of genius’s skin; he has known genius’s smell and felt genius’s touch. Fosters Lancett, a knight’s move behind him, for whom an hour-long talk on Ezra Pound is a simple matter—he is a genius. Alessandro, in his Oil Can Harry mustache, the elegant Luisa, the perverted Finn, the tattooed Riccardo: possible geniuses. How has it come to this? What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth? Decided by high school students, in fact. Is there a bucket of blood hanging high in the auditorium rafters, waiting to be dropped on his bright-blue suit? Will this become a dungeon at last? It is a mistake, or a setup, or both. But there is no escaping it now.
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