The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  From the time I first started reading real books, I’ve been a fan of Jules Verne. I have always been enamored of the juxtaposition of the anachronistic and the futuristic. Verne was, at times, a plodding prose stylist, but his work incorporated the elements of adventure and wondrous technology. The images generated by his stories have been some of the most vivid I have ever experienced. When I was around twelve years old, a publishing company reprinted a series of some of his more obscure titles: The City in the Sahara, The Village in the Treetops, Off on a Comet, etc. I scoured the racks at the local candy store for these and collected and read as many as I could. Along with the better known titles like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, these books comprised my first forays into the world of science fiction. Their influence is everywhere in my fantasy trilogy that begins with The Physiognomy.

  One Christmas a few years ago I acquired three of the more famous Verne novels in one volume. The book had some of the original illustrations and was printed in that eye-strain style with small type in double columns. What I loved about the edition was that it had a piece of journalism from Verne’s time in which a reporter visits and interviews him. Part of the piece is a description of a normal day in the life of Jules Verne. It told about his writing habits, his leisure activities, his wife, his home. I was envious of this reporter, so I decided that I would pretend to have visited Verne myself and write it up in the style of an interview. “High Tea” is not about the real Jules Verne though, it is about my Jules Verne, the one I still often visit in my imagination. This story was published by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link in their wonderful magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

  Bright Morning

  If there is one thing that distinguishes my books from others it is the fact that in the review blurbs that fill the back cover and the page that precedes the title page inside, the name of “Kafka” appears no less than eight times. Kafka, Kafkaesque, Kafka-like, in the tradition of Kafka. Certainly more Kafka than one man deserves—a veritable embarrassment of Kafka riches. My novels are fantasy/adventure stories with a modicum of metaphysical whim-wham that some find to be insightful and others have termed “overcooked navel gazing.” Granted, there are no elves or dragons or knights or wizards in these books, but they are still fantasies, none the less. I mean, if you have a flying head, a town with a panopticon that floats in the clouds, a monster that sucks the essence out of hapless victims through their ears, what the hell else can you call it? At first glance, it would seem that any writer would be proud to have their work compared to that of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, but upon closer inspection it becomes evident that in today’s publishing world, when a novel does not fit a prescribed format, it immediately becomes labeled as Kafkaesque. The hope is, of course, that this will be interpreted as meaning exotic, when, in fact, it translates to the book-buying public as obscure. Kafka has become a place, a condition, a boundary to which it is perceived only the pretentious are drawn and only total lunatics will cross.

  As my neighbor, a retired New York City transit cop, told me while holding up one of my novels and pointing to the cover, “Ya know, this Kafka shit isn’t doing you any favors. All I know is he wrote a book about a guy who turned into a bug. What the fuck?”

  “He’s a great writer,” I said in defense of my blurbs.

  “Tom Clancy’s a great writer, Kafka’s a putz.”

  What could I say? We had another beer and talked about the snow.

  Don’t get me wrong, I like what I’ve read of Kafka’s work. The fact that Gregor Samsa wakes from a night of troubling dreams to find that he has been transformed into a giant cockroach is, to my mind, certain proof of existential genius firing with all six pistons. Likewise, a guy whose profession is sitting in a cage and starving himself while crowds throng around and stare, is classic everyman discourse. But my characters run a lot. There’s not a lot of running in Kafka. His writing is unfettered by parenthetical phrases, introductory clauses, and adjectival exuberance. My sentences sometimes have the quality of Arabic penmanship, looping and knotting, like some kind of Sufi script meant to describe one of the names given to God in order to avoid using his real name. In my plots, I’m usually milking some nostalgic sentiment resulting from unrequited love or working toward a punch line of revelation like an old Borscht Belt comic with a warmed-over variation of the one about the traveling salesman, whereas Kafka seems like he’s trying to curtly elicit that ambiguous perplexity that makes every man an island, every woman an isthmus, every child a continental divide.

  My friend, Quigley, once described the book The Autobiography of a Yogi as “a miracle a page,” and that’s the kind of effect I’m striving for, building up marvels until it just becomes a big, hallucinogenic shit-storm of wonder. Admittedly, sometimes the forecast runs into a low-pressure system and all I get is a brown drizzle; such are the vicissitudes of the fiction writer. On the other hand, Kafka typically employed only one really weird element in each story (a giant mole, a machine that inscribes a person’s crime upon their back) that he treats as if it were as mundane as putting your shoes on. Then he inspects it six ways to Sunday, turning the microscope on it, playing out the string, until it eventually curls up into a question mark at the end. There are exceptions, “A Country Doctor,” for instance, that swing from start to finish. I don’t claim to be anywhere near as accomplished a writer as Kafka. If I was on a stage with Senator Loyd Benson and he said to me, “I knew Kafka, and you, sir, are no Franz Kafka,” I’d be the first to agree with him. I’d shake his damn hand.

  I often wondered what Kafka would make of it, his name bandied about, a secret metaphor for fringe and destination remainder bin. For a while it really concerned me, and I would have dreams where I’d wake in the middle of the night to find Kafka standing at the foot of my bed, looking particularly grim, half in, half out of the shaft of light coming in from the hallway. He’d appear dressed in a funeral suit with a thin tie. His hair would be slicked back and his narrow head would taper inevitably to the sharp point of his chin. Ninety pounds soaking wet, but there would be this kind of almost visible tension surrounding him.

  “Hey, Franz,” I’d say, and get out of bed to shake his hand, “I swear it wasn’t my idea.”

  Then he’d get a look on his face like he was trying to pass the Great Wall of China and haul off and kick me right in the nuts. From his stories, you might get the idea that he was some quiet little dormouse, a weary, put upon pencil pusher in an insurance office, but, I’m telling you, in those nightmares of mine, he really ripped it up.

  Do you think Kafka would be the type of restless spirit to reach out from beyond the pale? On the one hand, he was so unassuming that he asked Max Brod to burn all of his remaining manuscripts when he died, while on the other hand, he wrote an awful lot about judgment. He might not have as much to do with my writing as some people say, but me and Franz, we go way back, and I’m here to warn you: the less you have to do with him the better. His pen still works.

  It was 1972 and I was a junior at West Islip High School on Long Island. I was a quiet kid and didn’t have a lot of friends. I liked to smoke pot and I liked to read, so sometimes I’d combine those two pleasures. I’d blow a joint in the woods behind the public library and then go inside and sit and read or just wander through the stacks, looking through different books. In those days, I was a big science fiction fan, and I remember reading Martians Go Home, Adam Link, Space Paw, Time Out of Joint, etc. In our library, the science fiction books had a rocket ship on the plastic cover down at the bottom of the spine. There were three shelves of these books and I read just about all of them.

  One afternoon at the library, I ran into Bettleman, a guy in my class. Bettleman was dwarfish short with a dismorphic body—long chimp arms, a sort of hunchback, and a pouch of loose skin under his chin. He was also a certified math genius and had the glasses to prove it—big mothers with lenses thick as ice cubes.
I came around a corner of the stacks and there he was: long, beautiful woman fingers paging through a book he held only inches from his face. He looked up, took a moment to focus, and said hello. I said hi and asked him what he was reading.

  “Karl Marx,” he said.

  I was impressed. I knew Marx was the father of Communism, an ideology that was still viewed as tantamount to Satanism in those days when the chill of the cold war could make you dive under a desk at the sound of the noon fire siren.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “What have you got there?” he asked me.

  I showed him what I was carrying. I think it was Dandelion Wine by Bradbury. He pushed those weighty glasses up on his nose and studied it. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, as if remembering, and when he opened them proceeded to rattle off the entire plot.

  “Sounds like it would have been a good one,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he told me, “it’s alright—fantasy with a dash of horror meets the child of Kerouac and Norman Rockwell.”

  “Cool,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about, but recalling him correcting the math teacher on more than one occasion.

  “Hey, you want to read something really wild?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said uncertainly, thinking about the first time I was dared into smoking weed.

  He closed the book in his hand and walked to the end of the aisle. I followed. Three rows down, he turned left and went to the middle of one of the stacks. Moving his face up close to the titles, he scanned along the shelf as if sniffing out the volume he was searching for. Finally, he stepped back, reached out a hand and grabbed a thick, violet-covered book from the shelf. When he turned to me he was wearing a wide smile that allowed me to see through his strange exterior for a split second and genuinely like him.

  “There’s a story in here called “The Metamorphosis,” he said. “Just check it out.” Then he laughed loudly and that pouch of flesh that caused the other kids to call him The Sultan of Chin jiggled like the math teacher’s flabby ass when she ran out of the room, embarrassed at her own ignorance in the face of Bettleman’s genius.

  He handed it over to me and I said, “Thanks.” I turned the book over to see the title and the author and when I looked up again, he was gone. So I spent that sunny winter afternoon in the West Islip public library reading Kafka for the first time. That story was profound in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. I knew it was heavy, but its burden was invisible like that of gravity. There was also sadness in it that surfaced as an unfounded self-pity, and underneath it all, somehow, a sense of humor that elicited in me that feeling of trying not to laugh in church. I checked the book out, took it home, and read every word of every tale and parable between its covers.

  It took me a long time to read them all, because after ingesting one, I’d chew on it, so to speak, for a week or two, attempting to identify the flavor of its absurdity, what spices were used to give it just that special tang of nightmare. Occasionally, I’d see Bettleman at school and run a title by him. He’d usually push his glasses up with the middle finger of his left hand, give me a one-line review of the story in question, and before scuttling hastily off to square the circle, he’d let loose one of his Sultanic laughs.

  “Hey, Bettleman, ‘The Imperial Message,’” I’d say.

  “Waiting for a sign from God that validates the industrious drudgery of existence while God waits for a sign to validate his own industrious drudgery.”

  “Yo, Bettleman, what do you say to ‘The Hunter Gracchus’?”

  “Siamese twins, altogether stuck. One judgment, one guilt, both unable to see their likeness in the other which would allow them to transcend.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Then in the first days of spring, I came across a story in the Kafka collection that I will admit did have a true influence on me. Wedged in between “The Bucket Rider” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” I discovered an unusual piece that was longer than the parables but not quite the length of a full-fledged story. Its title was “Bright Morning,” and for all intents and purposes it seemed to me to be a vampire story. I read it at least a half dozen times one weekend and afterward couldn’t get its imagery out of my mind.

  I went to school Wednesday, hoping to find Bettleman and get his cryptic lowdown on it. Bettleman, it seems, had his own plans for that day. He sailed into the parking lot in the rust Palomino, three-door Buick Special, he’d inherited from his old man and didn’t stop to park, but drove right up on the curb in front of the entrance to the school. When he got out of the car, he was wearing a Richard Nixon Halloween mask and lugging a huge basket of rotten apples. He climbed up on top of the hood of his car and then, laughing like a maniac behind the frozen leer of Tricky Dick, started beaning students and teachers with the apples.

  Although Bettleman’s genetic mishap of a body prevented him from being taken seriously by the sports coaches at school, those primate arms of his were famous for having the ability to hurl a baseball at Nolan Ryan speeds. He broke a few windows, nailed Romona Vacavage in the right breast, splattered a soft brown one against the back of Jake Harwood’s head, and pelted the principal, No Foolin’ Doolin’, so badly he slipped and fell on the sauce that had dripped off his suit, dislocating his back. Everyone ran. Even the tough kids with the leather jackets and straight-pin-and-India-ink tattoos of the word SHIT on their ankles were afraid of his weirdness. Finally the cops came and took Bettleman away. He didn’t come back to school. In the years that followed, I never heard anything more about him but half expected to discover his name on the Nobel lists when I’d run across them in the newspaper.

  The Kafka collection didn’t get returned to the library until the end of the summer. I’d run up a twenty-dollar late fee on it. In those days, twenty dollars was a lot of money, and my old man was pissed when he got the letter from the librarian. He paid for my book truancy, but I had to work off the debt by raking and burning leaves in the fall. Under those cold, violet-gray skies of autumn, the same color as the cover of the book, I gathered and incinerated the detritus of August and considered Kafka and the plight of Bettleman. I realized the last thing that poor bastard needed was Kafka, and so when my labor was completed I put the two of them out of my mind by picking up a book by Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar. The light confection of that work gave me a rush that set me off on another course of reading, like “The Hunter Gracchus,” in frustrated search of transcendence.

  The hunt lasted throughout most of my senior year of high school, taking me through the wilds of Burroughs and Kerouac and Miller, but near the end, when I was about to graduate, I found myself one day in the stacks of the public library, returning to the absurd son of Prague for a hit of real reality before I went forth into the world. To my disbelief and utter annoyance, I discovered the book had been removed as soon as I had returned it at the end of the summer and never brought back. In its place was a brand new edition of The Collected Stories of Franz Kafka. I paged through the crisp, clean book, but could not find the story “Bright Morning.” The incompleteness of this new volume put me off and I just said, “The hell with it!”—much to the dismay of the librarian who was within easy earshot of my epithet.

  I went to college and dropped out after one semester, bought a boat and became a clammer on the Great South Bay for two years. All this time, I continued to read, and occasionally Kafka would rear his thin head in a mention by another author. These were usually allusions to “The Metamorphosis,” which seemed the only work of his anyone ever mentioned.

  One night on Grass Island out in the middle of the bay, a place where clammers congregated on Saturday nights to party, I ran into a guy I knew from having spoken to him previously, when I’d be out of the boat, with a tube and basket, scratch raking in the flats. If we were both working the same area, he’d take a break around three o’clock when the south wind would invariably pick up, and wander over to talk with me for a while. He was also a big reader, but us
ually his tastes ran to massive tomes like the Gulag books, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Proust.

  That night on Grass Island, in the gaze of Orion, with a warm breeze from off the mainland carrying the sounds of Lela Ritz getting laid by Shab Wellow down in the lean-to, we were sitting atop the highest dune, passing a joint back and forth, when the conversation turned to Kafka. This guy from the bay, I don’t remember his name, said to me, “I really like that story, “Bright Morning.”

  “You know it?” I said.

  “Sure.” Then he proceeded to tell the entire thing just as I remembered it.

  “Do you have a copy of it?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll bring it out with me some day for you.”

  The discussion ended then because we spotted Lela in the moonlight, naked, down by the water’s edge. Lela Ritz had the kind of body that made Kafka seem like a bad joke.

  In the days that followed, I’d see that guy from time to time who owned the book, and he’d always promise to remember to bring it out with him. But at the end of summer, I’d heard that he’d raked up the beringed left hand of a woman who, in June, had been knocked out of a boat, caught in the propeller, and supposedly never found. The buyer at the dock told me the guy gave up clamming because of it. That fall I returned to college and never saw him again.

  I went to school for my undergraduate and masters degrees at SUNY, Binghamton, in upstate New York, where I studied literature and writing. It was there that I met and worked with novelist John Gardner, who did what he could to help me become a fiction writer. His knowledge of literature, short stories, and novels was encyclopedic, and when I was feeling mischievous, I would try to stump him by giving him merely a snippet of the plot of, what I considered to be, some obscure piece I had recently discovered: Bunin’s “The Elaghin Affair,” Blackwood’s “The Willows,” Collier’s His Monkey Wife. He never failed to get them, and could discuss their merits as if he had read them but an hour earlier. Twice in conversation I brought up the story by Kafka, and on the first occasion he said he knew it. He even posited some interpretation of it, which I can’t now remember. The second time I brought it up, in relation to having just read his own story, “Julius Caesar and the Werewolf,” he shook his head and said that there was no such piece by Kafka, but if there was, with that title, it would have to be a horror story.