The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Donna’s scandal was another brand. No one had ever seen a first novel hoisted past reviewers into legend by a publicity machine, or if they had, they’d forgotten. David Bowman told me: “When that book was rolled out the sense of occasion was so large I remember thinking: I wish I had a novel out. Then I remembered I did.” This phenomenon wasn’t a cause to defend, which was just as well, since my response to Donna’s book was as murky to me as the unexamined loss of our friendship. Every person I recalled from our time at Bennington seemed reworked in her pages, except I saw no spot for myself—unless, as I joked to my girlfriend, it was as the murdered Vermont farmer, a character so beneath the regard of the book’s characters that he barely registers as human. Between me and myself it wasn’t a joke. I felt certain I was the farmer. I should have been uniquely positioned to savor Donna’s elegant ironies, but either they were wasted on me or I credited them to myself.

  By the time I crawled out of obscurity I’d find myself congratulated for being part of a generation of writers who’d helped put a corruptly oversold Brat Pack safely in the rearview mirror—though really I was Bret and Donna’s contemporary (as were Wallace, Eugenides, Moody, others seen as coming “next”). As with the kudos for skirting an MFA, I could only consent to this praise in bad faith. My old classmates and I had loads of cultural stuff in common, and also tended to similar commitments (to traditional narrative, to genre, perhaps also to a dubious melancholy) in our work. Possibly the only clear thing I’d gathered from my richly confusing hours in their company was that both were completely serious about their work. This should be the simplest thing to point out: No writer is equivalent to his or her publicity, his or her photograph, his or her flap copy, even less to your uncomfortable feelings about it (your resentment at being sold things, generally), however much you’re entitled to those feelings. Yet neither Bret, with his Warholian flippancy, nor Donna, with her near-Salingerian silence, has ever much altered the cartoon overreaction to their arrival. Bret’s resorted, in his last two novels, to writing into the teeth of it. I think of him as a child star, in the King Tut or Bob Dylan sense of being locked into a public identity before he could possibly have formed a resilient interior life. Lou Reed called it “growing up in public.”

  Notoriety is the only true form of postwar American literary fame. Not regard among readers, but real fame, of the household-name variety. I find this thought pretty persuasive, though I can’t remember whether to credit it to someone else or myself. Consider Miller (censorship), Nabokov (ditto), Mailer (knives, etc.), Vidal (feuds, homosexuality), Capote (ditto), Rushdie (fatwa), on through Bret and his “Brat” cohort. So it was that, with new notorieties eclipsing the old ones, I began to kid myself that I at last knew what my early acquaintance with Bret and Donna was for: I’d been specially appointed to be the Zelig to literary notoriety in my generation, the extra guy in the photograph. This was after I fell in with Dave Eggers, in San Francisco, before McSweeney’s and his memoir. I attended Dave’s ambitiously odd, charged parties, heard him hatch conceptual-art publishing schemes, then watched him grow mired in grotesque fame and need to fight through. Dave’s pixilated munificence was strengthened by the battle not to inhabit the cartoon—his superpower was to draw vitality from his enemies, who grew squalid, Gollumesque. I also knew Jonathan Franzen, pre-Corrections. (I’d been a bookseller handling Jonathan’s debut, too, ten years before.) Now, with a mutual friend, the painter Julia Jacquette, who’d met Jonathan at Yaddo, we ate Italian cookies and played Scrabble—at which Franzen cleaned my clock. Then I sent him a copy of As She Climbed Across the Table, which he acknowledged pretty kindly, saying he thought I’d picked a healthy approach in writing short novels and publishing often. The remark might have seemed mercenary if it hadn’t sounded depressed; I detected in it the cost to him of saying even that much, at a time when Jonathan feared he’d vanished in the interval between his second and third books. I felt I knew Franzen, and sympathized when he later tested an unworkable sincerity in the primetime arena. His fame, then and now, had a Chauncey Gardiner quality, seeming called into being by a novelist-shaped vacancy on the cover of Time (see: “Rushmore Versus Abundance”). These later brushes could be complicated for me, as they’d be for any writer with an ego, but were never as unfathomable as the earlier ones. I had the Zelig’s advantage: present in the photograph, but free to disappear from it as well, the next time you glanced.

  Bret and I had one more odd fate to share. I’d gotten to know him again in Manhattan in the ’90s. Our friendship, though ostensibly between two working novelists, seemed less to overwrite our college acquaintance than to extend it against a new backdrop of ersatz grownups. Every encounter was on his terms. I revisited my Bennington role, the reverse-slumming Brooklyn kid slipping out for dinner at Balthazar, Bret’s regular place. Afterward we’d go to a party bankrolled by a publisher or magazine, which still happened frequently then. We did drugs. It’s one of Zelig’s traits, a weakness that is also a capacity, that he melts agreeably into nearly any milieu, at least briefly. There might be an element of Stockholm syndrome in the way I could still be lured by Bret’s glum magnetism, and that I still found him a figure of sympathy, like rooting for Jose Canseco or Barry Bonds—something I also did.

  The fate: Bret and I were out on the town on Monday, September 10, 2001, well into the early hours of the following day. We began at Balthazar, then moved to a party at a concocted “speakeasy” behind Ratner’s Deli, called Lansky’s Lounge. If you need a symbol of pre-9/11 excess, I offer my whereabouts that night in the spirit of disclosure to the prosecution. I’d been sleeping off a hangover in my Brooklyn bed when I was woken by the eruption of an airplane against the building across the river, less than a mile away—the sound of the fireball, a tremor in my floor. I’d later give testimony in the Times (see: “Nine Failures of the Imagination”), but I left the Bret part out of it.

  We’ve lost touch. Bret was kind to me, in the ways he knows how, in two distinct parts of my life, but both are vanished. Likely it was inevitable that when I mentioned to a friend that I’d begun writing about Bret that my friend should draw my attention to a recent interview where Bret claims—peevishly I’d say—to have hardly known me. Inevitable because I think that Bret, in his Andy Warhol way, has no equipment for believing anyone outside his most immediate and present circle could consider him a friend. This slight cast me, for an instant, into my old Bennington shame, the sulky outsider denied. Yet it was a gift. My Stockholm syndrome burst like a soap bubble. Why go on about Bret, Bret, Bret? This whole essay, I thought, should be about Donna—amazing, strange, sad, lost (well, lost to me) Donna. Yet that friendship remained frozen in its ruined moment, two nineteen-year-olds who’d forged a meaningless grandiose enmity.

  Or not meaningless. Maybe our disaffection had a subject. In three semesters at Bennington I kept switching work-study jobs, looking for one that fit to hide my shame. It wasn’t that I thought work was in itself shameful, but the fact that I worked while other students didn’t—mostly, they didn’t—was syllogism for the cloud of egalitarian delusion from which I’d fallen, or kept continuously falling, still waiting to learn what the impact would feel like when I landed. For a while I found a sanctuary in the ceramics department, a zone abandoned between classes. There I worked mixing clay and dusting out kilns, my only company the agreeably stoned and hippieish ceramics instructor, with whom I debated the comparative merits of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Later I’d hide out as the projectionist at the school’s movie theater, a bat in a belfry—suitable employment for an aspiring novelist hoping to project his reels into waiting brains. But my first work-study job, probably the only one available to a new freshman, was on the front lines of my secret class war: I served food at the dining hall to my fellow students, stuck on the wrong side of the counter with the Vermont locals, those whom we elsewhere snubbed as if they were Cro-Magnons taking up space on our Homo sapiens campus, subhuman like that farmer-victim of Secret Hi
story’s murderous classicists. Is it hallucination that among my fellow student-workers there, those of us in paper aprons and possibly paper hats as well, holding outsized food-service ladles dripping with gunk, at least for a shift or two, was Donna? The possibility came flooding into recollection just now, as the sympathy I’d been spending on Bret found a different home. I have no way to confirm it. The image may be a fantasy: Perhaps I only recall serving Donna food from across that counter. If it is a fantasy, it was surely induced by rereading the brilliant first pages of Donna’s novel, where her narrator describes filling out his application to “Hampden” College: “Would you like to receive information on Financial Aid? Yes.” As any crime writer knows, if you want to hide a clue, bury it at the start of a book.

  Clerk

  I was what I would be if I wasn’t a writer: a clerk in a used bookstore. No other possibility. I worked in eight bookstores in fifteen years, five years during high school and college, then ten years straight after that. Shelving, running registers, re-alphabetizing sections, learning the arcana. I was bitter, intense, typical, holding myself superior to customers who could afford the best items I could only cherish in passing, part of a great clerkly tradition. I was certainly aware of the tradition. I still repair broken alphabetical runs and straighten piles on tables, absently, despite myself, whenever I’m in stores. It calms me during book tours. The last five years I worked at one of the best stores in the country. I was becoming an expert in the books I cared about most, modern first editions and rare paperbacks. In, say, another fifteen years of apprenticeship—a trifle in antiquariania, as with any serious guild—I might have been one of the top rare-lit men in the world.

  Or it might have all gone south. Some clerks never make it, end up burned out, start stealing books, like cops gone bad. They get hooked on tea, next thing they know they end up in a card game. Then a craps game. Then they wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags them off to Philadelphia. They get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas ad. Then the big Mexican lady burns the house down and the next thing they know they’re in Omaha. They move in with a high-school teacher who does a little plumbing on the side, who’s not much to look at but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Then these clerks settle in, start scheming. Using the high-school teacher’s know-how they begin printing up samizdat Gold Medal paperback originals by fake noir authors with names like Orphus Blurt and Crash Burnstein and Walter Girlfriend. You see those books come floating across the buying counter and you just grin: You know a haywire clerk’s out there, flaming like a shred of Korean barbecue. I think that’s probably the type of clerk I would’ve become, after a while.

  —Brick, 2004

  II

  DICK, CALVINO, BALLARD: SF AND POSTMODERNISM

  Through no fault of my own I’m in a sticky situation

  I’m suffering the consequences of a bad education

  —BLUE ORCHIDS, “Bad Education”

  My Plan to Begin With, Part Two

  The project of self-exile wasn’t halfway complete. The geographical genius of the Bay Area made a good start (Berkeley an island-nation decorated by my parents’ counterculture, America’s Amsterdam), but I needed to detach from the literary mainland, too. I’d beam my signal down from space instead. I mapped an orbit, a willfully eccentric course I couldn’t prove was navigable but had to try. Japan had Kobo Abe; Poland, Stanislaw Lem; Italy, Calvino. The U.K. had J. G. Ballard. These writers were fabulators and world literary figures, in the Nobel conversation. Behind them, the inarguable weight of Kafka, Borges, Cortázar. Ursula Le Guin called Philip K. Dick “our own homegrown Borges,” but I knew he didn’t cut that ice, not completely. Maybe I could. This was a stupid idea. Nobody wanted it done. If Vonnegut had needed to fudge his origins, if Samuel Delany’s or Tom Disch’s or Le Guin’s writing still didn’t qualify for graduation day, I should notice the structural resistance in the barrier I wanted to break down—resistance from both sides. My difficulty persuading writing teachers of the worth of my secret pantheon was only equaled by the shrug of most science-fiction people when I suggested DeLillo and Barthelme should interest them. I’d taken the logic of Borges’s essay—“Kafka and His Precursors,” in which a writer creates a private lineage for himself by the act of appearing—as being equivalent to a literary-political cause: Unite the divided realms! But my private myth didn’t translate.

  Those postmodernists, Barthelme and Co., whom I’d been reading with excitement, and cribbing from wildly, could have suggested a home for my leanings. There was even an official headquarters, Brown University, where Robert Coover kept the flame lit. My thrill at disenfranchisement demanded more, though. I needed to come from Pulp-land and then be sanctified, an underdog script someone should have talked me out of. I’d carry my heroes on my back, prove that Patricia Highsmith and Charles Willeford and especially Philip K. Dick (“our homegrown Borges” was then out of print, not in the Library of America) were the exact same thing as Faulkner or Pynchon. My ego would reorganize institutions, bookstores, canons. What this script mostly guaranteed was that I’d appear to SF partisans (if you love Cyril Kornbluth, wave your hands in the air) as a caddish betrayer of an honorably self-sustaining subculture. Meanwhile, to sentinels of literature (nearly any editor or reviewer over the age of thirty-five), I’d look to have arrived at the dance in concrete overshoes.

  If my early novels should triangulate between DeLillo and Lem, or Steve Erickson and Ballard, I took it as given I’d also pen bushels of jargon-drunk surrealist tales connecting the dots between Borges, R. A. Lafferty, and Kenneth Koch. I managed a few before my project got gunked up with mimetic texture, sentimental references to myself, to Brooklyn, to certain songs and sandwiches I admired. Later I’d see Ben Marcus’s or George Saunders’s stories and feel a pang, as though they’d become the writer I hadn’t gotten around to being, but still reserved the right to be.

  Holidays

  New Year’s Eve

  Dress the cat in bags and break out the plankton sandwiches! Another year is come and gone.

  The first child born after the toll of midnight will frequently bear miniature antlers. They recede in the first six months and rarely reappear.

  Tocog

  Tocog (or “Gocot”) celebrates the arrival of the meat-loaf clans. They come to the table dressed to the nines in their formal jacket of glazed pastry or glistening aspic. Who will be named the unrivaled queen of the traditional mixtures?

  Saint Sebastian’s Day

  There are explanations for the association of Saint Sebastian’s Day with gunplay. I am afraid no single explanation will be sufficient. It is inadvisable to go outdoors during Saint Sebastian’s Day.

  April Fools’ Day

  April fools are no worse than October or March fools, yet we hang them in effigy from lampposts, and children construct tissue-paper voodoo dolls of April fools to flush down the toilet. As recently as the 1930s living fools were still being lynched in maddened towns in isolated parts of the Midwest.

  The Death of Toyland

  Toyland was America’s first utopian community. The characteristic spires and gazebos of Toyland are now taken very much for granted but were unprecedented in their day, and struck some observers as profound, others as terrifying. Surrounded on three sides by hostile savages, isolated from other settlers by their strange beliefs and unusual practices, the citizens of Toyland took to the sea in rafts in 1822 and were never seen again. Though the Toylanders are little missed, the gradual death of Toyland was an inevitable consequence of their disappearance. Toyland was declared dead in 1956.

  Auteurs’ Day

  Directors are recognized as the true authors of films on Auteurs’ Day.

  Arbor Day

  George Washington Arbor and Jonathan Livingston Appleseed fought their famous duel on Arbor Day, in 1875. Arbor’s words echo wherever lies are told. “I cannot tell the truth,” he said. “I hated the man who died
beneath the tree, but it was not my bullet that killed him.”

  Phone Day

  Do you have any idea how many phone calls I make on any given morning? I have no need of Phone Day.

  Easter

  Each year the warm-blooded species hold a weeklong festival to honor the passing of the giant lizards who ruled the earth for so many thousands of years. Voles and raccoons attack nested eggs in a reenactment of the original trauma. Will our guilt ever be appeased?

  The proponents of Ash Wednesday offer an alternate theory, asserting that it was a gigantic volcanic eruption that exterminated the dinosaurs. In my view this belief is an indulgence.