The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  As I tried to explain to Sharon while we were finishing off a bottle of champagne in celebration, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with those words this kind of book, which implied that Georgie Boy wasn’t completely original, in a class by itself. At that point in my career, I had no idea if any other novels had been published in America by Soviet dissidents, and during the weeks I waited for Publisher W’s reaction I visited the Arcata Springs Public Library, in a quaint limestone building donated to the town by that philanthropic cousin of our old haunter Lawren, and tried to find out what “kind of book” Publisher W published. But the only similar thing they’d done was not a novel: A Question of Madness, by the twins Zhores and Roy Medvedev, published a decade earlier. The book had been widely circulated in samizdat in Russia, and I had read it years before: the compelling story of how Zhores was railroaded into a mental hospital because of one of his books and because of his campaign to open up the Soviet scientific establishment to dialogue with the outside world. Alternate chapters of counterpoint—Zhores inside the “special psychiatric hospital” and his brother Roy outside it—chronicle the desperate battle to gain Zhores his freedom. It is paced like a novel, nervous like a novel, but it is not a novel.

  And perhaps Publisher W would have preferred that Georgie Boy be nonfiction too. After six weeks during which I spent a lot of time walking the steep streets of Arcaty, up to the Halfmoon and around it and back, Liz Blaustein sent me a copy of Publisher W’s letter of rejection. Several editors had read the book, and they’d even had a fact-checker attempt to verify the “truth” of it. Their only criticism, if that’s what it was, was that “this Bolshakov character is such a beast that he stretches credulity.” But that wasn’t their reason for rejecting the novel. “The young boy-narrator’s voice,” the letter said, “is somewhat arch, glib, even disagreeable.”

  “I disagree!” Sharon yelled as we sat on the porch swigging vodka in the early November chill, watching the leaves fall. In this off-season, there were no tourists, pedestrian or vehicular, to yell drunken remarks to. Sometimes, during the off-season, Sharon would let me come up to the Halfmoon and spend the night in one of the rooms there, pretending I could afford it. Given a choice, I would pick Room 218 and hope to meet its ghost, but I never did. I did meet Morris the cat, who was always thrilled to see me. The first time I saw him I said, “I told you I’d be back, didn’t I?” and he purred loudly and rubbed against me as if he’d been waiting patiently for me ever since.

  Liz Blaustein next sent the book to Publisher X, who had published Vladimir Bukovsky’s magnificent (but nonfictional) To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. Now, there was a voice that was arch, glib, and sometimes disagreeable, but I had loved it, and so had all of us in Russia who had worshiped Bukovsky as a brave, obsessed, articulate victim of the system of psychoprisons and the horrors of their “treatment.” Like myself he had suffered the double punishment of stretches in a “strict regime” prison with much time in solitary confinement, as well as time in a mental hospital subjected to the same “regime” of drugs and little tortures like the “roll-up” in a wet canvas sheet that wracks the victim excruciatingly as it dries. Also like myself (and like, I might add, Solzhenitsyn), he was educated as a scientist, a biologist, and became a “literary” person almost by default because of his experiences in the prisons and hospitals. Yes, I felt good about having his publisher, Publisher X, look at my novel. I seemed to detect some of the footprints of Anangka in that contingency. But if they were hers, they were pointed the wrong way, for Publisher X, too, turned me down.

  At least Publisher X, when they rejected Georgie Boy in the week before Christmas, made some flattering comparisons to Bukovsky, calling my experience “comparable” to his, “reminiscent” of his, and acknowledging that “the narrator’s voice is often as unrelentingly cocky and self-obsessed as Bukovsky’s.” Their main reason for the rejection appeared to be the editors’ personal distaste for the concept of sexual relations between a twelve-year-old boy and a woman nearly twice his age. “Liz, we don’t need our noses rubbed in this.”

  For consolation, during the dark days of the holiday season following that rejection I reread Nabokov’s charming essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” at the end of that volume that Ingraham had given me. For further consolation, I was tempted to visit Ingraham, who, I had learned, had returned yet again to his native state; but, eschewing Stick Around for whatever reasons he had, he was living in a shack on a lake, or a reservoir, named for the dam-building rodent. Not two hours away by car, if I could drive, or if I could get Sharon to take me. But I suspected, rightly as it turned out, that he might be plunged into some depression or soul searching himself and would not be able to respond to my bad luck.

  For bad luck it certainly was, as the Nabokov essay reminded me in narrating his own unhappy experiences trying to find an American publisher for Lolita. The reactions of his Publisher X, who thought the book too long, Publisher Y, who thought it had no good people in it, and Publisher Z, who thought he’d go to jail if he printed it, somewhat surpassed the feeble rejections I’d had so far. I had still to hear from Publisher Y, the third place Liz Blaustein sent the book. Publisher Y had brought out, just the year before, Victor Nekipelov’s Institute of Fools: Notes from Serbsky. I had known Victor Alexandrovich, had been a fellow victim of incarceration in the Serbsky Institute, had enjoyed several opportunities of talking with him, but had not yet read his book, which of course had the same principal setting as mine (although I disguised the Serbsky Institute as “the Laboratory”), and many of the same cast of characters, including the nyanki, a word like baby-sitter that he applied to the ward orderlies. Now, while waiting to hear from Publisher Y, I ordered for myself a Christmas present—through the Gazebo, Arcaty’s lone bookstore—a copy of Nekipelov’s book, and I spent January reading and rereading it, partly out of envy, because there it was, in cold print between hard covers, the same place, the same people, some of the same doctors, including a thinly disguised Bolshakov, in a nonfictional memoir that was distinctly Chekhovian, and, despite being deliberately oversimplified or nonarch in style, was greatly readable. I consoled myself that if my book never did find a publisher and thus could not bring any pressure to bear to stop the psychiatric abuses of the Serbsky, Nekipelov’s book could do the job, for all of us—a damning document of evidence against those doctors.

  Publisher Y liked my book very much…which is why they kept it so terribly long before rejecting it. It reminded them very strongly, they said, of the Nekipelov, but it had the “virtue” of being a novel, and thus of “enjoying the benefits of the author’s rich imagination.” In the final analysis, however, the editorial board’s vote, very close, was to decline, because there appeared to be two irreconcilable separate stories involved here: that of Kathy with Bolshakov, and that of Kathy with Georgie.

  “Bull manure!” Sharon said, hauling out a fresh half gallon of vodka. We could sit on the porch again: Springtime had returned; the daffodils and tulips were blooming, the trees leafing. “‘Irreconcilable,’ my hind foot! The jerks don’t even realize that you meant to play off the relationships one against the other, the badness of Bolshakov, the goodness of Georgie.”

  “I love you, Sharon,” I said, holding back my tears. The next day, with a hangover, I sat myself down and composed a little letter to Liz Blaustein. Could you please, I requested, try the book on some publisher who has not published any books by Soviet dissidents?

  And thus, ever after, I had myself to thank for the book’s finally going to Publisher Z, who took it.

  II

  Then, as now, it required roughly an entire year to take a manuscript from the author’s hands and put the finished book on the shelves of bookstores. That span of twelve months, it seems to me in retrospect, is a kind of “missing year” of my life: There aren’t any engrams for it upstairs in my head. Oh, if I took the trouble to consult my journal, I’d find plenty of little jogs to my memory of that year, March to t
he following year’s April, when Georgie Boy finally appeared: During that twelvemonth Sharon moved out of our apartment and took up residence in the heart of what had been Stick Around, where, within that same year, her Larry followed, not to move in with her (which she would not permit) but to take up lone occupancy of the old hotel; my employer, Mrs. Clements, became very ill and was required to move into a nursing home because I had to decline her request to move in with her and work for her seven days a week around the clock. Unemployed, I once again attempted to find a teaching post, and luckily (or with intervention by Anangka) the mycologist at the state university took an on-campus sabbatical and turned his fall semester classes over to me, one semester only: no general botany courses, mycology alone, at junior, senior, and graduate levels, with many idyllic field trips into the autumnal woods outside that city which is called “Athens of the Bodarks” because it is an intellectual oasis in a state without intellectuals.

  To my surprise, Ingraham was also living there, as I discovered by accident when I bumped into him one Saturday afternoon at the supermarket. We embraced, then blocked an aisle with our carts for nearly an hour. He expressed surprise and delight at how “gorgeous” I looked with my hair grown long again. I observed that he looked healthier than I had ever seen him. He was able to report that he was on the wagon, for good as it turned out, and had acquired a girlfriend who, in October of that year, was scheduled to become his second wife. (He would invite me to the wedding, a Bodarkian “costume” affair, but a previous commitment to take my mushroom-hunting students on a field trip would keep me from it.) Ingraham was not employed at the university but was doing some research there in preparation for a nonfiction book he and his wife-to-be were collaborating on, concerned with, naturally, ghost towns. For some reason that I was never able to determine afterward, I could not tell him that my novel had been accepted and was “in production.” I thought, possibly, that to do so might leave him envious and discouraged. Later during that one semester I lived in that cultural oasis (which Ingraham told me could be spelled either as celebrative Fêteville or as momentous Fateville, so I shall opt for the latter) I met and liked his wife, Kay, a charming blonde who was about my age yet had a beautiful son named Andrew who was just turning twelve. “Unt-uh,” Ingraham grunted at me, wagging his finger back and forth negatively in my face when he introduced me to Andrew.

  But Fateville was filled with many other twelve-year-old boys, although few of them found their way into the pages of my journal that fall. Most of my available free time off campus was spent in writing letters and making phone calls to my editor at Publisher Z. Since, as I’m about to show, that editor was responsible for tampering with my gender, making me sexless, or more implicitly male than otherwise, I think I shall return the “favor” (or the sex-change operation) by never revealing that editor’s sex, if he or she actually had one.

  So I shall call the editor, him or her, “H. (for Heinrich or Henriette) Wölfflin,” which happens to be the name, Ingraham pointed out to me, of a famous Swiss art historian. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) is dead, and my dear editor nearly, not so long ago, became dead because of me, as I’ll ultimately have to reveal.

  The many long letters I received from Wölfflin while Georgie Boy was in production concerned such matters as choice of words (my editor’s forte was the exact word, the perfect word, the, to use Wöfflin’s own oft-employed French, mot juste), narrative (excising the more clinical, less lyrical descriptions of lovemaking between Kathy and Georgie), grammar (I confess I am still not certain about the distinction between that and which), and even such mundane matters as choice of “dingbats” (not, as I first thought, silly eccentric persons but the ornamental pieces of type for separations, chapter headings, etc.). But in one of the letters there appeared suddenly one day this sentence leaping out and shaking me: Do you know, dear Kat, that your full name is entirely too long to appear on the title page, let alone the spine?

  My first reaction to this was that I had never given any thought to the spine. My second reaction was to run to the university library and check the title page of Princess in Uniform, the autobiography of my great-aunt and namesake, Ekaterina Alexandrovna Dadeshkeliani, one of the few Svanetians ever to publish a book. Naturally the library did not have the book, but a young woman named Debby Cochran who was running the interlibrary loan department was able to obtain it for me within a few days. And, alas, there on the title page, instead of Auntie’s full name with patronymic, was simply, By Princess Kati Dadeshkeliani. (And also, Translated from the French by Arthur J. Ashton, London, G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1934.)

  “All right,” I conceded to Wölfflin by return mail. “So what do you propose?”

  I have been giving this some serious thought, Wölfflin replied in the next letter. Your narrator is, of course, not only male, but a twelve-year-old male. This is a tour de force, I assure you, that puts such child-narrator novels as To Kill a Mockingbird and True Grit entirely to shame. But I think many of your readers (and particularly your reviewers) might be thrown by the discovery that you are female. Don’t answer this precipitously or impulsively. Please give it some long and hard thought. But let me suggest that you consider using only initials that would not reveal your sex.

  I gave it some long and hard thought, perhaps a month’s worth. Until I had to return it to Interlibrary Loan, I kept and reread my great-aunt’s book, Princess in Uniform, in which she tells the exciting story, a true story, of her life: how after a conventional childhood in Svanetia not very different from my own and a study of medicine until the age of twenty (and an early marriage to an aristocrat who turned out to be a homosexual), she found herself by a fluke of destiny in the First World War given an opportunity to masquerade as a Russian soldier on the Austrian front. Her disguise would have shamed Cathlin McWalter. (And I refer the curious, especially those with access to interlibrary loan departments, and especially those who are badgering me for a photograph of myself, to the frontispiece of her volume, with its stunning photograph, full-length in uniform, of “Prince Djamal,” as my great-aunt was known during her imposture. If you look carefully at the “prince’s” face, you will see a very close resemblance to my own. It was this photograph of my aunt in her soldier’s cap that inspired me to have the jacket photo and the publicity photos for Georgie Boy show me wearing my short hair inside an American “farmer’s bill cap,” like a baseball cap, and wearing a denim jacket that does not reveal the bulge of my breasts, and thus to appear more masculine than feminine.)

  As far as anyone in my family was able to determine, or as far as I could determine by a careful rereading of the autobiography, there was nothing bisexual, let alone androgynous, about Aunt Kati. She was simply a strong willed and beautiful woman who found it expedient for the duration of the war to serve as a man. As she pointed out, Svanes take an enormous pride in having fine guns, and she enjoyed carrying and using guns. She genuinely adored the czar, Nicholas ii, and considered the revolution that occurred shortly thereafter “the greatest and bloodiest tragedy that the world has ever known.” But for the space of a few years she transcended her womanhood and got herself into an adventure, with some narrow escapes, that would keep her for the rest of her life. In Paris, where she remained forever in exile after the revolution, and during my brief trip there as a student from Leningrad, I talked with her in her old age—she reminded me, come to think of it, of Lara Burns—and she was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known.

  Would she, I asked myself, have approved of my decision to become male, or sexlessly initialed, in my nom de plume? And the conclusion I reached was yes.

  I thought also of beloved T’hamar, or Tamara, queen of all Georgia during its golden age, A.D. 1184 to 1213, who was clearly a female and yet was thought of as a king. She was our Alexander the Great, and the chroniclers of our history call her the greatest of our kings. This gender confusion, if that is what it was, was part of my heritage. Would the Georgians approve of my decision to becom
e male, or sexlessly initialed, in my nom de plume? Yes.

  Yes, I wrote to Wölfflin. So let’s just make it V. Dadeshkeliani. Using both initials troubled me for their association with the nickname Evie, what Loretta Elmore had called me.

  Some time after that, Wölfflin thanked me for my decision but added, Here in the office we are pretty much agreed that nobody can pronounce your last name, let alone remember it. Can you think of any way to shorten or Anglicize it?

  Keliani? I reluctantly wrote back.

  How about simply Kelly? Wölfflin replied by return mail,

  Would you shorten your name to Wolf! I replied. No, I think Kelly makes me sound Irish. I wouldn’t mind being Scottish, or even Scotch-Irish, but not Irish.

  We haggled. We experimented. We eliminated such choice cuts from my last name as Dade and Skelly and Deskel and even Liann.

  We ended up with the compromise that is, of course, dear reader, the name that you and millions have come to know, and that adorns the spine of this book also.

  III

  The New York Times Book Review, in its catch-all “In Short” columns on page 47 (“That far back in the back just kills us,” Wölfflin sadly commented) of that early April issue, said, V. Kelian is apparently young; that appears to be all that is known about him. His publisher offers virtually no clues as to whether this stunning novel is autobiographical or not. We would like to know. At the risk of sounding like the despised Bolshakov, we wonder why he simply didn’t tell the truth. Why couldn’t he have simply given us the unvarnished Kathy, or whoever she was, without straining to turn her into a fictional victim? Kelian is going to have to decide whether he wants to be a novelist or a historian.