The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  An instructive contrast has to be made between George’s narration and the most famous first-person boy’s voice in fiction, his that begins, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book…” Georgie and Huck might like each other, or at least understand and appreciate each other. Georgie would consider Huck self-consciously and deliberately rustic, uncouth, and unlettered. Huck would think that Georgie is prematurely wise, somewhat cocky, and maybe a little too spoiled by his mother’s devotion. Probably the two boys would pick a fight and bloody each other’s noses…but neither would be victor. Each would greatly envy the other’s situation in life, the one’s chance to explore the Mississippi, the other’s chance to explore the way that people treat and mistreat each other in an institution. Perhaps, if only Huck could accompany Georgie when he runs away from home, from the Laboratory, and sets out on an epic journey across—again, is it Russia? or is it America?—if only Huck could be with George when George journeys a far distance to find the prison camp to which his beloved Princess has been removed, and to attempt to rescue her there-from, then perhaps…But again I hesitate to give away the ending, even by suggesting ways that Mark Twain could have handled it better.

  At least, when Princess is shipped out to the prison camp, she is escaping, for a while, from her tormentor, Bolshakov. (My first reading of these chapters led me to suspect that her prison camp may have been either the “strict regime” women’s zones at Bereznyaki or Orel, but then I deduced from certain clues—descriptions of the bleak Bashkir landscape, primarily—that it may have been the notorious Ishimbay, the most terrible of all Russia’s camps for women. Still, as far as the reader might be concerned, it could be simply Fort Worth or Frontera or any of the women’s “correctional institutions” in America.) Bolshakov, having failed to seduce her, having failed with all his arsenal of physical, chemical, and mental weapons to drive her out of her mind, having failed (worst of all for him, as far as his obligations to the System are concerned) to convert her dissent and extract any recantation or apology from her, can only send her off to a prison camp where she will be subjected to a variety of abuses of which not even he is capable.

  There are parallels, if I may draw them without maligning my own profession, between the psychiatrist and the book reviewer. Both are supposed to be intelligent if not intellectual persons of uncommon perspicacity and sufficient understanding of the foibles of mankind to be able to detect a warped psyche or a plot bent out of shape. Both are expected to be dispassionate, tolerant, and open-minded. Both are also expected to be honest, fair, and selfless. The virtues of kindness, sympathy, and fellow-feeling are not requisite, although they are helpful. Both professions place their practitioners in positions of enormous trust, the one from his patient and his patient’s family, the other from his audience of potential readers, not to mention the author himself.

  The chief comparison is that both the psychiatrist and the book reviewer wield great power, the power to create as well as the power to destroy. The reputation of a book is as fragile, as malleable, as the spirit of a patient. These powers can be corrupted and abused. At its most recent meeting or congress, in Honolulu, the World Psychiatric Association, with a jaundiced eye upon the abuses of the profession in the Soviet Union, adopted the so-called “Declaration of Hawaii,” amounting to a Hippocratic oath for psychiatrists. (The actual Dr. Bolshakov, incidentally, was in the Soviet delegation to this congress, and even had the audacity to deliver a paper, “Methods of Inducing Reality Acceptance into Mythomania.”) Article Number Seven of the Declaration reads, “The psychiatrist must never use the possibilities of the profession for maltreatment of individuals or groups and should be concerned never to let inappropriate personal desires, feelings, or prejudices interfere with the treatment.”

  Those words could so easily be paraphrased, “The book reviewer must never use the possibilities of the profession for maltreatment of authors and should be concerned never to let inappropriate personal desires, feelings, or prejudices interfere with the review.”

  In Georgie Boy, Bolshakov as psychiatrist, in the end, is like a book reviewer who, having done everything he could to destroy the book’s chances, must even visit the marketplace to ensure that the book is not displayed in bookstores, or, if it is, that its jacket is torn, its boards broken, its pages crumpled.

  LET ME MAKE A BOLD hint to America’s filmmakers, who seem to be running out of good ideas these days: the last fifty pages of Georgie Boy, if translated to the screen, could make a cinematic adventure of the highest order…even without Huck. Georgie travels alone, without money (because his mother neither gives him an allowance nor permits him to earn anything), across a thousand miles of country (it could be Russia, but the filmmakers will show us chunks of Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas) to reach an impregnable, formidable fortress of a prison where his girlfriend sits, her head shaved, in a cell of solitary confinement, having abandoned all hope.

  Hot on his heels, as the filmmakers say (and show), comes the team of two crazy shrinks, the evil Dr. Bolshakov and the flighty “Doctor Mom,” who suspected Georgie’s destination when he disappeared from the Laboratory. Georgie has a considerable head start on them but is on foot when he isn’t successful hitchhiking. The two shrinks drive a car. There is considerable suspense: Will they catch up with him before he reaches the prison?

  I will spoil neither the book reader’s nor the moviegoer’s pleasure by revealing how Georgie gets inside the prison. I will not even reveal what the filmmakers may choose to ignore: that Georgie is no longer merely a lad of twelve; two years have passed and he is pushing fifteen now. The tense, harrowing climax of the book loses no credibility through our doubts that a young boy can pull off such a stunt. He is not so young anymore…and he does not pull it entirely off.

  For me, the book’s moment of truth, if not its actual climax, is the ultimate confrontation between the just-arrived pair Bolshakov/Doctor Mom and Georgie, in which the youth totally humiliates the both of them. It is the most satisfying “just deserts” I have ever encountered in literature, and I do not intend to give away one moment of its pleasure by quoting from any of it.

  Throughout the book’s final chapter, Georgie’s articulate narrative voice, never boasting or vainglorious, the same voice that earlier “lapses” into surrealistic wordplay and apparent babble, becomes increasingly musical. There is a distinct tone and timbre to it that, if I am not mistaken in my own “listening” to it, derives straight from the popular First Piano Concerto of Tchaikovsky, or at least strongly reminds this listener of the elegiac, haunting moods of it, which seem to blaze a trail through an uncharted pastoral woodland.

  The reader caught up in the very emotional music of the book’s words may be puzzled, if not disappointed, to discover that the book does not end. The music stops, the last page is blank, the last sentence has no period on the end of it—but the book does not end.

  HAVING ALREADY DIGRESSED, in this essay, into the nature of surrealism and the parallels between psychiatry and book reviewing, may I be permitted at the end a digression on endings? Any ending is sad (unless we are impatient to have done with a bad book) because, while we have spent the entire course of the book enjoying our privilege of actively participating in the creation of scenes and characters and even establishing the pace or time frame, we now find ourselves totally helpless to make the story continue. Given even the best imagination and inventiveness, we cannot visualize anything beyond “The End.” It may be argued that even in the hypothetical happy ending, wherein the hero and heroine “live happily ever after,” the hero and heroine are suddenly and certainly dead, as far as our access to them is concerned. Why then should they not literally die at the end of every story?

  But when any time-factored work of art (including those works of visual art that require a certain amount of looking time properly to see them) comes to its inevitable conclusion, should we think of it, or of ourselves in relation to it, as dead? We can repeat our experience o
f it, we can bring it “alive” again and again, but we can never prevent, deter, or alter its ultimate demise. That demise is final.

  Consider, as V. Kelian surely must have done, that none of the stories we experience in our nightly dreams ever has an “ending.” We may wake up, or we may switch to another story, but we never end a story in a dream. “Every exit is an entry somewhere else,” as a character declares in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

  V. Kelian miraculously does not end Georgie Boy. Certainly, he, or his character in the title role, is killed. (We do not even wonder how this narrative could have come to have been written if he were dead.) Certainly his voice stops, or permanently falters. But he is not dead. Just how this is achieved I leave to be joyfully discovered by the reader impatient to put down my review and rush out to buy a copy of this remarkable, incredibly beautiful first novel.

  20

  I

  There were two immediate results of that lovely review. The first, coming within days, was that an influential director of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had already passed up an opportunity to select Georgie Boy when it was still in manuscript, happened to read the review and was so taken by it that he brought strong pressure upon his organization to reconsider and to rush the novel into immediate adoption as an alternate selection for the month of June. This required a special printing of the volume (an edition somewhat more cheaply mass produced than Publisher Z’s)—a printing that, as it turned out, had to be doubled, tripled, and infinitely multiplied after the membership read their copies of the Book-of-the-Month Club News, with a review of my novel quoting all of the other good reviews up to that point and making it look like the sensation of the season.

  I was visiting Sharon in her newly restored residence in Stick Around, the house that had been her grandmother’s general store and post office, by coincidence on the day the local telephone company was installing her phone; Sharon and I were staring at the instrument, one of the “old-fashioned” ordinary black plastic telephones with a dial rather than buttons, and Sharon remarked, “I wonder who will be the first to call,” and the phone rang at that instant, the first call not for her but for me: I had given to Liz Blaustein Sharon’s name and address, where I could be reached “in an emergency,” although I wasn’t expecting anything.

  “Are you sitting down?” Liz asked. I wasn’t, but that didn’t deter her, and she told me about the BOMC selection, and also the second bit of good news generated by Clive Henry’s wonderful words: a major British publisher, who like the BOMC had already once rejected the novel, had been influenced to change his mind and was paying an advance for British rights that was small but, more importantly, might lead other European publishers to consider or reconsider the novel.

  Then, in rather quick succession, the “biggies” that Wölfflin had wanted began to appear. Time, Newsweek, and even U.S. News and World Report, the latter reviewing not so much the novel itself as its possible repercussions in foreign affairs: “Soviet Psychiatric House-cleaning Is in Order” was the title of their piece. Psychology Today had an essay-review under the title “What Motivates the Sadist?”

  A belated but lengthy and clever review in the New Yorker, by John Updike, seemed to be more interested in my pen name than in the novel itself and went to great lengths to speculate about similarities between V. Kelian and V. Sirin (as the early Nabokov disguised himself) as well as B. Traven (as the mysterious Hal Groves or Traven Torsvan called himself, he who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) But Updike took it for granted that Kelian, like Sirin and Traven, was male.

  Book Digest ran a review of the NYRB review: a story about Clive Henry, the “thoughtful, wry, attentive” professor at Columbia University who had written the “brilliant” review for the New York Review of Books and had “dared” to compare the profession of book reviewing to that of psychiatry, both subject to abuses and corruption. Sharon pointed out to me that the photograph of Clive Henry accompanying the article made him look exactly like her old lover Larry Brace, and I agreed that the resemblance was indeed striking. I was tempted to write Clive Henry a fan letter but decided that authors ought not praise their own critics.

  Liz Blaustein called again. “How do you feel about television?” she asked. Both “Good Morning, America,” and the “Today” show had made firm offers for appearances, ten-minute minimum, and they were ready to fly me to New York or L.A., whichever I preferred. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I replied, having picked up a few phrases of the polite jargon of the trade, and I called my editor, Wölfflin, and asked, “How do I feel about television?”

  “You’re beautiful,” Wölfflin said, “but I’ll have to get back to you on that.” And Wölfflin called a day later to inform me that “our people have talked to their people,” and our people had concluded that while television appearances would certainly boost sales, it would be better if I preserved the “mystery” of my identity. The public should not know that V. Kelian was a woman.

  This meant that I had to decline not only all of the requests, and they began to multiply, to appear on television, but the urgent appeals from People magazine and US magazine for photo interviews. The more I (or rather Liz) refused the invitations, the more intense and aggressive they became. The so-called Sunday supplements, Parade and U.S.A. Weekend, ran articles with titles like “Who Is V. Kelian?” and “Mysterious Young Best-selling Writer Guards His Identity,” but their discussions of the book itself denounced it for its pornography…which of course greatly helped sales.

  The unpleasant New York Times Book Review had the duty of reporting Georgie Boy’s steady climb, week by week, up the exalted ladder of its Best-Seller List. Within two months of Clive Henry’s review, my novel was firmly lodged in the top position on the list, where it would remain for over a year.

  I moved into a suite of rooms in the Halfmoon Hotel, where I could have three meals a day in the Crystal Room when I didn’t feel like walking to one of Arcaty’s fine little eateries. Morris the cat immediately decided that he wanted to move in with me, or at least spend more of his time with me than elsewhere in the hotel, and one of the first of the many fine things I began to collect for my rooms was a wicker cat-cushion-cave for Morris to sleep in. I also began to pick up other things, folk furniture and folk crafts from the Bodarks and other southern highlands: an extensive assortment of baskets woven from white oak splits; a variety of quilts, some of them family heirlooms; and the beginnings of my collection of ladder-back, woven-hickory-seated furniture from Mount Judea, not far from Stick Around. And for my walls, in addition to the hangings of folk “finger weavings” and “wood pretties,” I collected the time-warp and space-warp prints of M.C. Escher before they became fashionable everywhere. Soon my suite was overcrowded with my collections, and I began to think about more spacious quarters, especially after Georgie Boy rights were sold to Bantam for a cool million.

  Commentators who have made much of certain similarities between Nabokov’s later lifestyle and V. Kelian’s have overlooked a crucial difference: Nabokov owned few possessions and boasted of being able to move easily from one lodging to another without anything in tow; I have collected so many things during my years at the Halfmoon that it is going to require several haulings with a four-wheel-drive truck to move my belongings from this hotel to my next destination…or else I am fated to remain here for the rest of my life.

  How did Ingraham know I was living at the Halfmoon? Perhaps he guessed. At any rate, that was where he addressed his letter to me. The letter was ostensibly congratulatory. He was only assuming, he said, that Georgie Boy was the same novel that he had known and encouraged as Geordie Lad back in Pittsburgh and that he had “provided” me a place to finish. If I wanted to keep my identity a secret, he assured me, he would not brag to any of his Fateville friends that he had known me “back when” or that he had actually helped in the production of that runaway best-seller. He himself, he reminded me, had “pursued the bitch godde
ss, Success,” for all of his long writing career, but “never got within sniffing distance of her body odor, even.” So he was glad, and vicariously thrilled, that she had smiled upon me.

  The real reason for his letter, it turned out, was that he, with the help of his wife, Kay, had finished six chapters of a nonfiction book about ghost towns. The book was quasi-autobiographical; in it he compared six episodes of his own life to the beginning, rise, and decline of the towns. He had not yet reached the Pittsburgh episode and rushed to assure me that he did not intend to capitalize upon his friendship with me or to reveal my identity. He might not even mention me at all. Anyway, what he really wanted to ask me was, would I consider using my “considerable influence” with Publisher Z in order to find an editor interested in his work?

  Grateful as I was to Ingraham for all he’d done for me, I thought that was rather presumptuous of him, and I replied, You have confused me with the notorious V. Kelian, the male author of the best-seller Georgie Boy. Have you read the book? I knew that Ingraham, given his reading habits, or rather nonreading habits, had probably not purchased the book, let alone read it.