ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether Newman’s fascination with Hungary originated on assignment, or merely as an inexplicable esprit de parti. The truth is that Newman always pursued estrangements and alienations, not just as opportunities to reinvent, but also as psychological defenses—as refuges, as amnesties.

  In the Eastern Bloc, literature could define one’s life, civically. A Hungarian’s criticism of the regime could be a one-way ticket if not to gulag, then at least to penury and oblivion, whereas a famous, and famously self-aware, American abroad had to be on guard against incarceration as much as against romanticism, the fatuous touristic thrills. Newman’s passport redeemed him, even while it mortified. He didn’t like his face or his name, except when they were praised, and he didn’t like his nationality, except when it could be condemned in prose that was praised. Whenever he lost faith in the struggle to keep life and literature as separate as Buda and Pest, he clung to the belief that they were interlayered, or overlaid, in the same way that Budapest is built atop the rubble of Aquincum, and Magyar identity merely the false construct of a racial purity atop the tribal burial mounds of Celts, Mongols, Turks.

  It followed that Hungarian literature wasn’t just the literature Newman helped to translate from the Hungarian; it was also all literature, in every language—about Austro-Hungary, Ottoman Hungary, Antiquity’s Hungary, caravanning back to the clunky coining of the Hunnic runes. Newman’s tradition would provide sanctuary for the liturgies of seceded churches, the decrees of rival courts, as much as for the slick escapism of interbellum pulp fiction—written in a fantastic dialect called Ruritanian: the world’s only vernacular intended more for the page than for the tongue, the jargon preferred by creaky empires for diplomatic cabling with breakaway nation-states, and the unofficial argot of international dreamers.

  Ruritania has become the generic name for a hypothetical or fictional kingdom located at the center not necessarily of geographic Europe, but of European psychogeography and literature—though British author Anthony Hope (a pseudonym of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, 1863–1933) initially founded it somewhere, or nowhere, between Saxony and Bohemia, in his trilogy of novels (The Prisoner of Zenda, The Heart of Princess Osra, and Rupert of Hentzau) characterizing it as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic absolute monarchy. Despite this classic setting being perpetually in the midst of dissolution, that dissolution would mean only, paradoxically, more ground. Even as class, ethnic, and religious tensions threatened conflict, territory was taken at every cardinality. War could not destroy it, peace could not bore it—every dark passage, be it to throne room or dungeon, met intrigue along the way. Ruritania’s annexations would acquire it more names, as if noble honorifics: George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark hexalogy expanded it southeast to the Carpathians and called it Graustark; in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Mad King, it’s located east toward the Baltics, as Lutha; in John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds, it’s a Scandinavian/Italian/Balkan mélange called Evallonia; Dashiell Hammett, in one of only two stories he ever set outside the States, had his nameless detective, the Continental Op, meddle in the royal succession of Muravia; Frances Hodgson Burnett further clarified the compass by positioning her Samavia “north of Beltrazo and east of Jiardasia,” names that should be familiar to every good mercenary as demarcating the borders of “Carnolitz.” Newman called his Ruritania “Cannonia”—a toponym echoing the martial ring of “cannon,” with the authority of “canon.”

  CANNONIA

  Still, to map Cannonia 1:1 onto Pannonian Hungary might be to misunderstand how Newman regarded place: To him, books could be just as physical as cities. The trashed palace of pages he left behind recalls another unfinished project: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, set in an impostor Austro-Hungary called Kakanien. Though Kaka is German juvie slang for “shit,” derived from the Greek prefix meaning “shitty”—if “calligraphy” is beautiful, “cacography” is ugly—Kakanien is also a pun on K und K, the empire’s abbreviation for itself: kaiserlich und königlich, “Imperial and Royal,” indicating Austro-Hungary’s dual crowns. Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers, with the death of its author, or the Death of the Author (Musil was stopped by a stroke at age sixty-one, having completed two of the projected three volumes).

  Newman had always known his only option was what he called “postmodernism”—a knowledge that assuaged his yearning for “modernism,” which was itself a balm for earlier aches. Though he’d always idealized the man in full, he was fated, was aware he was fated, to montage, sumlessness, pastiche. Ruritania will forever be trapped in the clockwork gears of the turn of the century, but by the time another century was about to turn, the drive to synecdochize all of Europe in Vienna, or in a Swiss sanatorium (as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), or even in the sci-fi province of Castalia (in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game), had forsaken history for dystopia. If utopia was “no-place,” dystopia—cacotopia—was Anglo-America: Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange. Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard. By the 1980s—when Newman was first surveying Cannonia—the genre goons were at publishing’s gates, and they proceeded to divide and conquer: “Literary novelists” would take care of the totum pro parte—“the whole for the parts”—in an effort to maintain the ideal of an artwork that could still mirror all of reality; while the pop hacks who hadn’t yet traded the page for TV and film would concern themselves with the pars pro toto—“the parts for the whole”—in an attempt to acknowledge that reality had sprawled beyond any consensus, exceeding the capabilities of any single novelist and the capacities of any single reader. (Throughout the Cold War, espionage and thriller novelists made effective use of this limitation: In presenting Western spycraft as important to, though inconsistent with, Western democracy, they revealed even their right to publish fiction as the privilege of a fiction—a delusion.)

  Newman’s ambition was to write this change itself. He would show and tell the evolution of literature, would narrate the revolutions of the wheel. His cycle would begin with a volume of three books in Musil/Mann/Hesse mode—landmarks, monuments, all set in Cannonia, from around 1900 to 1924—follow with three books surrendering Cannonia’s metonymy to Russian hegemony, 1925 through 1938 (comprising a second volume Newman claimed to have begun, since lost), and conclude with three books triangulating with realpolitik—with Cannonia, Russia, and America negotiating between 1939 and 1989 (comprising a third volume Newman never began but described in correspondence—though he never mentioned whether the novel’s ’89 would’ve marked the end of communism).

  In Partial Disgrace is the one-volume version of the first volume—the one-book version of the first three books that Newman worked on for the last three decades of his life. Its initial hero was, and still is, Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar, “Hauptzuchtwart Supreme,” which is to say a dogbreeder, trainer, and vet nonpareil, whose clients include Freud—himself an analysand in the first volume—and Pavlov, the presumed bellwether of the second. Felix’s son, Coriolan Iulus Pzalmanazar, “Ambassador without portfolio for Cannonia, and inadvertently the last casualty of the last war of the twentieth century, and the first great writer of the twenty-first,” would become a “triple agent”—Cannonian, Russian, American. Their stories, along with tales of the Professor (Freud), and the Academician (Pavlov), were all to be told as the memoirs of Iulus, “translated, with alterations, additions, and occasional corrections by Frank Rufus Hewitt, Adjutant General, U.S. Army (Ret.),” who remains a presence in this composite—indeed, he’s the parachutist who lands on the very first page, in 1945—and who was to emerge as the hero of the final volume, where he’d betray Iulus, or be betrayed by him, or—it’s anyone’s guess, anyone’s but Newman’s. The overarching theme of the cycle was to be the rebalancing of power, the shift from military brinksmanship to informational détente: If every
side has the same intel, and so much of the same, it’s only the purpose or intention of the disclosure that matters. It’s how nations reacted to these disclosures that interested Newman, and his cycle was to stage a kampf between those two great schools of behavior explanation: the Freudian (transference) and the Pavlovian (conditioning).

  Cannonia is a breeding ground, literally—not just for ideologies, but for canines. The eugenic pursuit of the perfection of diverse breeds of Canis lupus familiaris takes on a far more sinister, defamiliarizing set of associations when applied to Homo sapiens. The Nazis compelled the Reich’s blondes and blues to mate their ways to an Aryan superrace, whereas the Soviets preferred to inculcate exemplary comradeship through “art”—a literature that would engineer its own public. Newman’s consideration of speciation is of a piece with his investigation into the properties of metaphor. The question of whether it’s irresponsible to try to perfect a breed is also the question of whether it’s irresponsible to try and perfect a novel: What happens to breeds that don’t please their masters? Are misbehaving novels, or novelists, to meet the same fate as untrainable mutts? Nature v. nurture is the case, which Newman insists is as much a referendum on the master as on the mastered: Is culture innate or cultivated or both? Finally, if a new breed can only be the combination of old breeds, just as a new literature must come from a miscegenation of the old—what are we humans to make of our prejudices?

  To Newman, Freud’s psychology compartmentalizes our being—as if life were just a train of alternating appetites and suppressions—whereas Pavlov’s physiology coheres us as singularities, but as beasts. Newman alternately accepts and rejects these two conceptions, even while slyly offering a third: Men are no better than dogs, and no better than locomotive engines—though they can become the worst of both, especially in the company of women. (Felix’s “three golden rules”: “1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1,500 Florins, and a knife.” Elsewhere he gives his son another trinity of “advice”: “1. Neither marry nor wander, you are not strong enough for either. 2. Do not believe any confession, voluntary or otherwise. And most importantly, 3. Maxime constat ut suus canes cuique optimus”—which Newman glosses as “Everyone has a cleverer dog than their neighbor.”)

  In Partial Disgrace stalks its elusive prey through landscapes that resemble the Great Plains (that is, if they’d been treated to their own Treaty of Trianon), stopping for refreshment from lessons in obedience theory (“The animal, like society, must be taken into liberality without quite knowing it,” Felix avers), from lectures on theater, dance, music, art, and the ethnology of the nomadic Astingi, Cannonia’s sole surviving indigenous tribe (“They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic”), and from high-minded entr’acte harangues (“Cannonia and America had a special and preferential historical relationship, [Iulus] insisted, beyond their shared distaste for oracles and pundits, as the only two nations in History of whom it could be truly said that all their wounds were self-inflicted. And what could Cannonia offer America?—the wincing knowledge that there are historical periods in which you have to live without hope”).

  “History” appearing thrice in one sentence—and once even capitalized, Germanically? But what of that other word, “disgrace”? Grace is for the religious; disgrace is for the damned. Humans once hunted for sustenance; now they hunt for sport. To go through the motions of what once ensured survival, now purely for entertainment, is ignominious, but vital—the ignominy is vital. Even if the rituals have become as hollow as rotted logs, or as unpredictable in their ultimate attainments as the rivers Mze—Newman’s double Danubes, whose currents switch from east to west to east—the very fact that we remember any ritual at all is enough to remind us too of a more essential way of being. Our various historical, racial, and ethnic selves are cast in a masquerade, which makes a game of integration. Yesterday’s work is play today, as contemporary life converts all needing to wanting. That’s why when the hound points and we squeeze the trigger, when we slit the knife across the quarry’s throat, we experience disgrace—a fallen estate, an embodiment of Felix’s Semper Vero, his ancestral holdings lost to laziness and debt. Agriculture has become a hobby for us millennials. Along with reading and writing. But “once upon a time,” everything was sacred. The traditions haven’t changed, only our justifications of them have, and so though when we’re faced with tradition we’re disgraced, our disgrace is only partial. The holiness remains.

  PARTIALITY

  But, again, to be partial is to be polysemous, and another meaning is “to favor,” “to incline”—as a hill becomes a mountain, where a settlement is raised, around an empty temple. Newman’s disgrace brings solace, as the storms of spring bring flowers. Newman’s disgrace is secular grace. “Not even a curtain of iron can separate Israel from its Heavenly Father,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said in third-century Palestine. “An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Winston Churchill said in 1946 at a college in Missouri. The eiserne Vorhang—the iron curtain, or firewall, an innovation of Austro-Hungary—is a sheet of civic armor dropped from a theater’s proscenium to prevent a conflagration that starts onstage from spreading to the audience. Newman lifts this barrier and invites his readers to ascend and bask in the flames.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  A CERTAIN ANGLE

  “Remember,” the receptionist said, after loaning me a pen, “it won’t write unless held at a certain angle.”

  THE MIND TOO

  “[The pen] dries up if you don’t keep it flowing.”

  A

  …difficult letter to form while writing on moving tr…ins…buses.

  POSTERITY

  Posterity might think I had terrible handwriting. Truth is, I wrote everything on planes.

  REORIENTALISM

  ON MATHIAS ÉNARD

  EDWARD SAID, MAY PEACE BE Upon Him, regarded Orientalism as an Occidentalist illusion, and the Orient itself as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe” upon which Westerners from Napoleon to Flaubert projected their lavish fantasies of violent djinns and nymphomaniacal houris, which were ultimately more revelatory of the psychic yearnings of European culture than of the daily lives of diverse Easterners: Turks, Egyptians, Iranians, and Syrians.

  Today, nearly forty years after the publication of Orientalism, Said’s thesis has been elevated to the status of dogma in Western academe, and among Western writers who—having lost the public imagination and so fighting increasingly internecine intellectual skirmishes—have taken to issuing soft fatwas against one another for the sin of writing from the “perspective” or “experience” of a person (a fictional person) of another ethnicity or race. Meanwhile, Arabic and Persian writers—the Others themselves—keep being jailed, tortured, and having their heads cut off.

  Compass, Mathias Énard’s masterly novel that attempts to redeem the specter of the Orient (it won the Prix Goncourt in 2015), refers to Said prophet-style, as “the Great Name.” After acknowledging that the Palestinian-Manhattanite polymath “had asked a burning but pertinent question: the relationship between knowledge and power in the Orient,” the narrator goes on to say, “I had no opinion, and I still don’t, I think; Edward Said was an excellent pianist.”

  Which is all that matters—if not to Énard himself, then to the narrator, an insomniac musicologist named Franz Ritter, who lies bedridden in Vienna, the “Porta Orientalis,” fervid with his memories and an unspecified but assuredly fatal illness. There’s no room in Franz’s sickroom for debate about what it means “to appropriate,” or “to be appropriate”; his only concern is for beauty, because beauty—especially nonverbal beauty, musical beauty—is a foretaste, or forehearing, of paradise, where we’ll all finally speak the same language again, akin to
the twittering of birds.

  Énard—the French author of Street of Thieves (2012), a novel set during the Arab Spring, and of the widely lauded Zone (2008), a novel about Mediterranean Europe, Nazism, and the Yugoslav wars presented all in the course of a single train journey, and a single five-hundred-page sentence—here posits aestheticism not as a political substitute, but as a political “compass”: If you take pleasure from music, if you’re good at performing or, above all, composing good music, then in his cosmology you’re innocent, even if you happen to be what the Saidists would call a “colonizer.”

  In Compass, Orientalism is offered up as a third way or “alterity”—the Orient not a place, even an imaginary place, but a passage, a circumvention of the East-West dialectic. The novel’s characters—modulated from major to minor to major again—live in literal pipe dreams, which they access through opium, sex, the delirium of infirmity (syphilis or tuberculosis being the historical choice), and an almost fundamentalist submission to the religion of art. The narrator Ritter has written scholarship about how “revolution in music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed everything to the Orient”; how Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, et al., used “the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy.” He sits up through the night like a donnish Scheherazade, lecturing the darkness on the discredited discipline of Orientalism, through a survey of the careers of the Orientalists he’s known: disreputable loners all; emeritus drifters at home nowhere, or only in museums, library archives, and more ancient forms of ruins. There’s the Prussian archaeologist and “madman,” Bilger; the Aryanologist and “specialist in Arabic coitus,” Faugier; and Ritter’s inamorata, his Unsterbliche Geliebte (Immortal Beloved), Sarah, a Jewish Parisienne who has captured his heart (her research interests include legends of medieval European cardiophagy, or heart-eating). As Ritter counts down the clock to morning—to the sun, which rises in the cardinality of his obsession—he turns to recounting times past, excavating the precipitous collapse of his profession in the last days “before Google” and ISIS, when he and his colleagues still traveled through the region, and lived it up on fieldwork grants in Tehran (until the Islamic Revolution), and Damascus, Aleppo, and Palmyra (until the civil war).