Their friendship begins in traditional male-bonding style, with an enjoyable, bourbon-soaked evening in a bar, and is soon consolidated when Peter reads Benjamin’s singleton book and recognises a considerable talent, a man he can admire. They grow closer, especially when Benjamin and his equally sympathetic wife Fanny nurse Peter through his painful divorce; but there are already the beginnings of division in this quasi-paternal care for the younger man’s well-being. By chance, Peter and Fanny had known each other slightly some years ago, when they had attended the same course of lectures on aesthetics, and Peter had been smitten by her beauty.
When Benjamin goes off to Hollywood for a few weeks to work on a screenplay version of The New Colossus, Peter and Fanny have a brief, intense affair, and Paul falls for her badly; so much so that he is willing to sacrifice his most important friendship to stay with her. When he finds that Benjamin knows all about the affair, and claims not to mind, Paul is enraged, almost horrified at such indifference. After some edgy exchanges, they pledge to remain friends despite it all. Plainly, though, things can never be quite the same again.
Peter recovers from his heartache, and within a matter of months finds sudden and wholly unexpected bliss; he meets the wondrous Iris. Soon they are married; it is from the comfort and safety of this ideal marriage that he either witnesses or learns about Benjamin’s strange path. The transformation seems to begin with a near-fatal accident – during a boozy July 4th party, Benjamin falls from an upper storey while flirting with a sexy woman, and emerges from his convalescence a different man.
Benjamin distances himself from his wife, gives up writing as a futile activity. After a violent encounter on a back road – he kills a gunman who has just shot the innocent local who was giving Benjamin a ride – the quondam novelist and essayist gradually becomes a political activist. A terrorist, most people would call him, though a terrorist who is careful not to harm people, only symbolic objects: to be exact, replicas of the Statue of Liberty. In the course of one of his self-imposed bombing assignments, Benjamin accidentally blows himself up. The FBI find a paper among his remains which leads a couple of agents to come and interrogate Peter …
Which, roughly speaking, is how Leviathan both begins and ends. Its first sentence: ‘Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in northern Wisconsin.’ Its last: ‘We’ – meaning the narrator and an FBI agent named Harris, who after two months of investigation has uncovered the identity of that dead man, and at least something of his links to Peter – ‘walked up the stairs together, and once we were inside, I handed him the pages of this book.’ So the main conceit of Leviathan is that it has been hastily assembled in the weeks between Benjamin’s death and the FBI’s successful sleuthing.
Among other things, then, Leviathan is a memorial volume, a work of mourning for a dead friend: a tale told against a ticking clock, swiftly, urgently, yet with as much human sympathy as the narrator can muster, so that its ethical complexities and nuances might have some chance of prevailing even when cruder versions of the same story – the ‘official version’ of solitary lunacy – come into circulation and become the received wisdom. And Leviathan was also the name, Peter tells us, that Benjamin had chosen for his uncompleted book. But things aren’t quite that simple.
2 Imaginary friends
‘Of all the tragedies my poor friend created for himself, leaving this book unfinished becomes the hardest one to bear. I don’t mean to say that books are more important than life, but the fact is that everyone dies, everyone disappears in the end, and if Sachs had managed to finish his book, there’s a chance it might have outlived him.’
Friendship is a rich field for any novel to plough, not only because of its centrality to our lives but because the experience of being caught up in a novel can sometimes feel like entering into a peculiarly intimate form of friendship. Auster/Aaron tips us the nod almost from the outset: ‘… They read your book, and something about it strikes a chord deep in their soul. All of a sudden, they imagine that you belong to them, that you’re the only friend they have in the world.’ Those readers who enjoy this contact of subjectivities a little too much are, we tend to feel, at best a shade naive, or perhaps mildly unhinged, like those notorious viewers of soap operas who confuse jobbing actors and the roles they play. In the worst instances, they may turn ugly, resorting to ‘The unbalanced letters, the telephone calls at three o’clock in the morning, the anonymous threats.’ Writing novels is hardly like mining coal, but even such a quiet and sedentary profession has its occupational hazards.
To enter too thoroughly into imagined lives can be foolish, even corrupting. (Flaubert wrote a novel about this: Madame Bovary. So did Cervantes: Don Quixote.) Recall Coleridge in his radical days, righteously angry at the thought of young ladies weeping over sad lovers in pretty romances, while they carelessly sweetened their afternoon tea with ‘the blood of Negroes’ – sugar imported from the slave-worked Caribbean plantations. Coleridge gave up his radicalism, but two centuries on, the remark has not lost its power to sting.
On the other hand, it can also feel as if the refusal to play the part of cooperative reader is to be clenched, sour, boring; somehow less than fully human, or at any rate less than homo ludens. Lots of children have imaginary friends; they usually grow out of that phase. If they are lucky, though, they will discover the joys of fiction and have imaginary friends of a different kind: friends like ‘Peter Aaron’. One reason why Leviathan can be a page-turner is that we almost immediately like Peter, and soon like him a lot more. It’s largely a matter of the way he talks. (One of Auster’s gifts is a narrative style which creates the illusion of being spoken to our inner ear, even when it takes flight from its plain, demotic diction and calculatedly easy-going rhythms.) It’s the voice of a decent, unpretentious, thoughtful, sympathetic kind of guy; someone, we might hope, really quite a lot like us, taken at our best.
Now, American fiction from Poe to Nabokov and onwards notoriously teems with narrators who are con-men or seducers or lunatics, selling you their self-justifying take on reality, entangling you in their chains and skeins of delusion, ambition or obsessed horror. Peter Aaron explicitly denies any such skill: ‘Generally speaking, I don’t have much of a talent for deception, and in spite of my efforts over the years, I’ve rarely fooled anyone about anything.’ In many other novels, this would be a big red warning sign. (Beware the travelling salesman who claims to have no bottles of snake oil, no designs on your wallet.)
In Leviathan, this is almost certainly not the case: the novel is shot through with moments of uncertainty and avowed ignorance, but not of the kind which snag the threads of narrative coherence, and so expose a fiction as a lie. We need to like Peter, and to feel that he is a good and thoughtful man, in order to carry out the much harder task of feeling measured sympathy for Benjamin Sachs. One of the main points of reading literature, the great critic William Empson often said, is that it is the best means – apart from actual friendships or love affairs – of understanding that other human beings, equivalent centres of self, can feel and think in entirely different ways. Novels are a kind of company: imaginary friends in their own right. They may also offer an account of the way we live now.
3 Politics
‘The idea of writing disgusts me. It doesn’t mean a goddamned thing to me anymore … I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rolling pieces of paper into a typewriter. I want to stand up from my desk and do something. The days of being a shadow are over. I’ve got to step into the real world now and do something.’
Both the title and the epigraph of Leviathan announce it as a political novel. The title alludes to Thomas Hobbes, and his conception of the state. (Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, 1651); the epigraph, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, narrows the focus a little to American politics, and to a traditional Yankee suspicion of the state and its mechanisms: ‘Every actual State is corrupt.’ But Auster’s book does not adumbrate; it
mulls, ponders, broods. It addresses the ways in which the broader political climate of the time, from the Vietnam war to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of President Havel, can change the feeling of daily life, filling it with optimism or despair:
The age of Ronald Regan began. Sachs went on doing what he had always done, but in the new American order of the 1980s, his position became increasingly marginalized. It wasn’t that he had no audience, but it grew steadily smaller, and the magazines that published his work became steadily more obscure. Almost imperceptibly, Sachs came to be seen as a throwback, as someone out of step with the spirit of the time. The world had changed around him, and in the present climate of selfishness and intolerance, of moronic, chest-pounding Americanism, his opinions sounded curiously harsh and moralistic. It was bad enough that the Right was everywhere in the ascendant, but even more disturbing to him was the collapse of any effective opposition to it. The Democratic Party had caved in; the Left had all but disappeared; the press was mute. All the arguments had suddenly been appropriated by the other side, and to raise one’s voice against it was considered bad manners.
Like most of Auster’s other novels, Leviathan is in large measure about writers and writing. It meanders around the topic of what writing can and cannot do to redeem the time, and acknowledges that – in a dark period – honest, uncompromising and even admirable souls may come to look on the business of stringing words together as futile and decadent. Reed Dimaggio, the man killed by Sachs on a country road, is the writer in Leviathan about whom we know least. He is also, we suspect, the most politically extreme. His magnum opus is a study of a moderately obscure American anarchist. Sachs, of whom we know a good deal more, is at first a more conventionally literary writer, who comes to question the value of writing and launches an idiosyncratic form of terrorism. As noted, his two books are a novel, The New Colossus (the title is derived from Emma Lazarus), and an uncompleted sequel, Leviathan. Peter Aaron, our narrator, is the author of at least one successful novel (about which we know almost nothing save its title, Luna: probably, then, quite similar to Moon Palace; Luna was one of that book’s earlier titles), and a few essays, notably one on Hugo Ball; and the book we are reading as he writes it over the course of two months, also called Leviathan.
As the mysteries unfold, we gather that Dimaggio appears to be an actual terrorist; hard to find any other explanation for his weapons, gun and big bag of money, though there is a possibility that he may all along have been an agent provocateur, funded by the government and playing a fatal double game. Sachs, who stubbornly sat out a period in prison during the Vietnam war, at first seems to be a disciple of Thoreau:
Thoreau was his model, and without the example of ‘Civil Disobedience’, I doubt that Sachs would have turned out as he did. I’m not just talking about prison now, but a whole approach to life, an attitude of remorseless inner vigilance. Once, when Walden came up in conversation, Sachs confessed to me that he wore a beard ‘because Henry David had worn one’ – which gave me a sudden insight into how deep his admiration was ….
But Sachs renounces words, and he grows, or declines, into a symbolic terrorist – a prankster and underground folk hero, travelling from town to town blowing up local replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and gaining a certain cult following as the ‘Phantom of Liberty’. (A nod to Buñuel’s late film, and to surrealist mischief in general.)
And Aaron? Aaron does not seem to be an overtly political writer, though it is clear that he admires Sachs’s self-lacerating spirit of perfectionism, as well as finding it dismaying:
He accepted everyone else’s frailties, but when it came to himself he demanded perfection, an almost superhuman rigor in even the smallest acts. The result was disappointment, a dumbfounding awareness of his own flawed humanity, which drove him to place ever more stringent demands on his conduct, which in turn led to ever more suffocating disappointments.
If a man is admirable, does this mean that we should strive to emulate him, no matter the cost?
4 Coincidence
‘I didn’t realise it at first, but I happened to be standing in the American fiction section, and right there at eye level, the first thing I saw when I started to look at the titles, was a copy of The New Colossus, my own little contribution to this graveyard. It was an astonishing coincidence, a thing that hit me so hard I felt it had to be an omen.’
Strange but true: coincidences, those staple embarrassments of Victorian fiction, are sometimes felt to number among the riches of Auster’s fiction. There are many small examples of coincidence in Leviathan, and two overwhelming ones. Quite early in the book, Maria Turner, the conceptual artist, finds the notebook which eventually leads her to rediscover Lillian, an old friend who has made a steady career as a prostitute. Later in the book, Sachs is menaced by a gunman in a lonely place, and kills him in self-defence. The dead man proves to be Reed Dimaggio: Lillian’s husband. Why do these brazen improbabilities not exasperate Auster’s readers? One very simple answer is that we know, from The Red Notebook and other sources, that coincidences have played a significant part in Auster’s own life, and that he is so fascinated by the subject that he collects them.
Ponder these subjects too long and you are in danger of heading down the roads previously trodden by the likes of Jung in his essays on ‘synchronicity’ and Arthur Koestler in The Challenge of Chance. I can think of two possible reasons why readers are beguiled rather than disgusted by coincidence in Auster. One: however realistic the surface details of the novel – and Leviathan was, on its publication, the closest Auster had so far come to writing a novel wholly founded on quotidian reality – the roots of his fiction have the appeal of wonder stories, fables, well-I-never yarns. Two: the book’s narrator is engaged in a noble but necessarily futile attempt to explain an exceptional life. But there are moments when the plausible chains of cause and effect, influence and action, break down. The world remains mysterious, resistant to commentary and narrative. (There is a faint, sometimes more than faint, intimation of the mystic in Auster’s writings.) And what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
5 Families
Maria became his companion, his consolation prize, his indelible reward. He cooked breakfast for her every morning, he walked her to school, he picked her up in the afternoon, he brushed her hair, he gave her baths, he tucked her in at night. These were pleasures he couldn’t have anticipated …
Despite what Mr Tolstoy said, not all happy families are alike. Some happy families, like the awkward triad of Sachs, Lillian and her daughter Maria, are not even real families, but improvised equivalents of that old institution, and yet they can offer unexpected solace as well as predictable torment. Most novels – all novels? – have at least something to do with families, and Leviathan, though it does not make much fuss about the fact, is no exception. Aaron’s first attempt at creating a family quickly fails; Benjamin’s marriage to Fanny, though childless, seems far stronger. Then Peter finds Iris, and from that point on we hear very little about his life save that he has another child and is entirely happy. After Sachs’s marriage breaks up, he forms a potent if tentative bond with the wife and child of the man he killed. Had it worked out, there would have been no Phantom of Liberty, no explosive death … and no Leviathan. Nietzsche once quipped that there is no feast without cruelty. Perhaps there are no true novels without a due measure of discontent, loneliness, and failure to achieve a happy family life. Happiness writes white.
6 Toads and gardens
I can only speak about the things I know, the things I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.
The sweet cheat of fiction is to make us accept, at least for the duration of reading, that imagined things are true. One of the standard ways of pulling off this trick is to set, as the poem has it, imaginary toads (characters, events) in real gardens (New York, Vermont, California). The correspondences between Peter Aaron and Paul Auster could be guessed at by the most naive reader; and when
you know just a little bit more about the author, they become almost insultingly obvious. PA and PA have both spent time in France, both come back to the USA in their late twenties or so, both undergo a painful divorce, both remarry (Auster to Siri Hustvedt; Aaron to the anagrammatical ‘Iris’), and so on and on.
Unless we react with exasperation – for God’s sake, at least make a bit of an effort at disguising yourself, Auster! – the apparent half-heartedness of the fictional disguise has the effect, not so much of making Sachs more real (in the old sense of ‘a well-rounded character’) as of making us uncertain of how we have stored our memories. Hang on a moment – did Auster really know someone like this? How about that mad novelist he mentions in one of his memoirs, the bloke who handed out money to strangers in the street? Maybe Leviathan is only very lightly fictionalised? Maybe Sachs is, was, real?
Quite a few modern novels nest their levels of reality one inside the other; Leviathan is unusual, and possibly even unique, in the complexity of its wanderings in and out of the garden of reality. On the preliminary page containing publication details, we read the line ‘The author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact and fiction.’ As most Auster fans now know, the works of conceptual art and private rituals that Aaron ascribes to the character ‘Maria Turner’ were either actual projects by the artist Sophie Calle, or, in the wake of the novel’s publication, became so. See Sophie Calle and Paul Auster, Double Game (1999) for further enlightenment.
The Good of the Novel Page 16