The Great Good Thing

by Andrew Klavan

  I had started out wanting to be a writer of suspense and adventure stories. Yes, I wanted my stories to be fresh and rich and original. Of course, I wanted them to be full of the stuff of life. I had seen this done in Hitchcock’s movies and Chandler’s novels and in supernatural thrillers like Dracula and Frankenstein and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It was not so far-fetched to think I had the ability to make good things in those traditions. But now, to say I began to see myself as a talent of Shakespearean genius would be to understate the grandeur of my delusions. I began to imagine my vision was prophetic, even salvific. I began to feel I might be born to utter things kept secret since the foundation of the world.

  This thought closed over me bit by bit. It came to obsess me. Over the years, my writing became unreadable and unpublishable. Even Ellen, a ceaseless supporter of my ambitions, began to admit she could not always understand what I was trying to say. She did not know how deranged I was becoming, but she could see how unhappy I was.

  The more my work was rejected, the more windy and insistent my ego became. If I was a failure always short of money it must be because the world did not understand me, and if the world did not understand me it was because my genius was too incomprehensibly great.

  I don’t remember when I first conceived the notion of writing a novel about Jesus Christ. I think the underlying motivation was this: if the public could not discover my unique brilliance in the subtleties of a lyrical mystery novel like Face of the Earth, then I would bludgeon them over the head with it by deconstructing the intricate psychological and cultural meanings lodged in the central figure of human history. That ought to do it.

  Since my first reading of the Bible, I had continued to study Christianity from time to time and other religions as well. My interest was always cool and intellectual. I was not religious in any way and I was not drawn to faith. I called myself an agnostic at this point, but like most agnostics, I was a functional atheist.

  I did think religion mattered, though. I thought of it as a living myth that shaped the human mind and expressed our innermost fears and desires. Many of the thinkers I knew and read dismissed the power of religion over people’s lives. They thought faith was just a relic of mankind’s superstitious past, something we were growing out of now in our scientific age. I thought that was wrong. I agreed with the literary critic M. H. Abrams who wrote, “Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought.”1

  I thought that to be ignorant of Christianity was to be ignorant of the underpinnings of our own worldview. So when I began my research into mythology for Face of the Earth, I paid special attention to the gospel story. I saw it as the foundational myth of the West, the Great Narrative that had expressed and fashioned the Western mind-set more than any other.

  Which was true enough, as far as it went. Christianity is the great Western narrative, whether you believe in it or not. And the idea of reinterpreting that narrative through fiction wasn’t necessarily outlandish either. It had been done brilliantly and provocatively by Nikos Kazantzakis in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, a book I admired very much.

  In me, however, the scheme was simple madness. It was an act of narcissism, sorrow, and rage, at once grandiose and petty. Though Kazantzakis’s novel was radical and shocked the religious authorities of his day, it was at least a serious exploration of Jesus as God incarnate, the savior of mankind. My book, on the other hand, simply sought to disassemble this Christ figure and explain his influence away. Fraser in his Golden Bough had shown us that Christianity was just one more death-and-resurrection cult among many. Freud in his Totem and Taboo and Future of an Illusion had shown us it was merely a projection of our father fixation on the heavens. And now I—glorious, brilliant, postmodern I—would bring the source of that psychological mythology living to the page.

  My Jesus would be the tortured vessel of our signifiers, the miserable expression of our existential angst. He would find enlightenment, yes, but it would be the enlightened acceptance of material existence, death, and suffering. In denial of this revelation, the mob would reject him, kill him, and then deify him as a way of silencing his existential truth. My Jesus would be myself, in other words—a rejected genius—and I would become he in the creation of him: the failed storyteller resurrected as the Greatest Storyteller of All Time.

  It was still early in my self-education. I didn’t really have the wherewithal to take on such a task, if anyone ever could. To my credit, I approached my work seriously. I holed myself away and read and researched and thought and wrote and outlined—which sent me crazier by the day. The failure of my first novel and the sudden shock of having pulled myself from a job I loved to lock myself up again in solitary study, threw me into horrible troughs of dissociation and melancholy. I would lose track of myself for half an hour at a time. I would come around to find myself in my car on some strange forest road without knowing where I was or how I had gotten there. I would have to find a gas station with a pay phone and call my wife so she could talk me through the process of getting home. For the first time, serious thoughts of suicide began to come to me. Nothing vivid or specific yet, just the notion: a moment’s suffering and then this pain would end. But I went on working. What was madness, after all, but the burden of genius in a world of fools?

  Ellen got a job with a small magazine in Boston. We moved there. I didn’t care where I lived, or thought I didn’t. We found an apartment in a house in Somerville, a working-class suburb that had been hit hard by the worsening recession. My money was almost gone and Ellen wasn’t making much. Our apartment was large but we couldn’t afford to furnish it so its rooms were all but empty. We had to put cardboard boxes in our secondhand refrigerator because we couldn’t afford to buy shelves. We ate noodles for dinner almost every night, except when we splurged and went down to the corner for a fast-food hamburger. In the street beneath our windows, angry drunks, out of work, screamed at their wives and at each other. In the neighboring house, pressed close to ours, an old man coughed up the last of his smoke-riddled lungs.

  Ellen’s boss was a nasty tyrant and so her job made her increasingly unhappy. I found weekend work as a security guard in a bank, standing idle in uniform through empty hours, bored and depressed.

  And during the week, day after day, at home alone while Ellen was at work, I sat tailor-fashion on the carpet of one of our unfurnished rooms, with books and notebooks spread out all around me. Gripping my fountain pen, I wrote for hours, feverishly. I once produced more than 150 handwritten pages in a single session. I kept the blinds drawn to block out the neighborhood. It drove our two cats insane and they fought each other viciously, climbing up the windows and slashing the blinds to ribbons while I worked on. In the afternoons, I would walk aimlessly around the city, dejected, daydreaming. I would haunt Harvard Yard, yearning to be part of the college life I had always despised. I would wander into pinball parlors and feed precious quarters into the machines.

  By the time the book was finished, I was an emotional cripple, barely able to think or speak or do anything but wander the city and dream. Was the completed work any good? I don’t know anymore. I threw the manuscript away many years ago, so I can’t go back and read it now and make an honest assessment of its qualities. I think I did as good a job at what I set out to do as I could. I can’t really say any more than that.

  I titled the book Son of Man. It took me weeks of backbreaking labor to type up its hundreds of handwritten pages. Then I sent the manuscript off to the famous editor in New York, now back from rehab. Weeks went by. No answer came. An agony of suspense. Finally the editor called. The book, he said, was a work of genius. Unique, explosively brilliant, revolutionary. But the subject matter was so controversial, he could not publish it without support from the other editors in the house. He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened to Face of the Earth, orphaned at p
ublication. He needed to get more readings.

  Again, weeks passed. Waiting. Terrible. Then the devastating news. The other editors at the publishing house had universally rejected the novel. My editor sent me their letters. They ranged from the outraged to the dismissive.

  My editor kindly helped me find a new agent for the manuscript, but the book never sold and I lost faith in it. Years later, I would write an extremely condensed version of the story and publish it with a small press, but I was just being stubborn at that point, refusing to take no for an answer. I worked hard at the new book, but I could not recover the inspiration of my madness. The version I published was hobbled and unformed. I’m sorry I did it.

  Ellen and I decided to flee the scene of our unhappiness. We left Boston and rented a cottage on the edge of a forest preserve in the suburban New York county of Westchester. It was a beautiful miniature three-story house, built in the era of the Revolution. It was set in a secluded rural spot, only an hour out of the city. Ellen went back to work at the literary agency. I was able to pick up freelance assignments from my old newspaper and continue some well-paying secretarial work I’d begun doing for Harvard.

  But if I had thought to come here to recover emotionally, it was a mistake. With no money, we couldn’t afford cars that worked. Our otherwise elegant driveway was always littered with the shells of broken jalopies. Half the time I was stranded in the cottage and couldn’t go anywhere. There was no Internet yet, no cell phones. I was stuck where I was, alone with myself. At another time, it might have been idyllic. I was surrounded by forest, which I’d always loved. I had time to read and write, to hike in the woods and fish in the reservoir at the bottom of the gorge. But I was furious and frustrated and confused by my failures and thwarted ambitions. The solitude turned me in on myself. I descended into painful and obsessive self-analysis to try to untie the tangle of my anguish. My writing became obscure and bizarre.

  As my money dwindled, as my books and stories were rejected everywhere, my heart filled with paranoia and rage. It was agonizing. I saw saboteurs like my father all around me. I thought everyone—family, friends, colleagues—was out to hurt me, trip me up, betray me. They tried to hide their hostility—maybe they even hid it from themselves—but I saw the signs. They didn’t want me to succeed, and it made me mad.

  My wife seemed especially threatening to me, because I had trusted her and we were so intimately close. I was suspicious of everything she did now. Everything she did infuriated me. I remember once coming upon a bath towel Ellen had left lying on the bathroom floor. The sight of it filled me with fury. How thoughtless she was to just leave it there! What an insult to my manhood to be forced to pick up after her! It was obviously purposeful on her part. She wanted to belittle me and render me powerless. Well, I wasn’t going to stand for it! I spent the day rehearsing the brutal things I was going to say to her when she got home. My hands fairly itched to get ahold of her . . .

  Our marriage saved me here. I wanted so badly to say something cruel to Ellen, even to do something violent to her. But I loved her too much and she was too good to me. An intelligent and insightful woman, she had grown up with a writer father and knew what writers were like and what they needed. She was old-fashioned, feminine, tender, and generous—a dedicated homemaker who took careful care of me. The idea that she was plotting against me made no sense. The idea that she was working against me made no sense. Even I could see that, even then.

  Because our marriage was what it was, because my wife was who she was, and because I loved her, my rage came to seem like a stranger to me. It felt to me like some red satanic hand trying to work me like a puppet. I fought it. When my wife came home, I swallowed all my fine, lacerating speeches. I told her what was happening inside me, carefully describing my crazy thought process step by step. As morose and brooding as I sometimes became, as angry as I sometimes felt, I never took it out on her, never even raised my voice to her. This fight was just between me and the devil of my rage.

  But the madness had another side, equally tormenting. Something in me must have been horrified by the violence bubbling up in me. It set off an answering explosion of guilt and shame. My mind began to punish me with rampant hypochondria. It took me over entirely. I’d never experienced anything like it before. I would find a mark on my skin, an irregularity in my flesh, and I’d become certain it was cancer. I would lie awake each night in a cold sweat of fear. Each day, I would discover some new symptom that convinced me I was dying. After a while, I could barely think of anything else but the disease I knew I had. I would go to work and sit at my desk for hours without producing so much as a usable paragraph. Probing my own flesh. Fretting. Afraid.

  What a wreck I was! Rage, guilt, terror. My heart was hell. The pain was so intense, I abandoned my agnosticism for an eccentric, puling spirituality. I prayed wildly for help to a god I didn’t believe in. I grew mystic and weird. I would try to mentally cast myself out of myself, to project my soul into a tree or a stone in order to separate myself from my own pain. Sometimes, amazingly enough, it actually worked. My mind would seem to travel elsewhere. The agony of anger and fear would subside. For a few minutes. A few hours maybe. Then it all came back: rage, guilt, terror. What a wreck.

  The strangest part of all this was that I didn’t realize how abnormal it was. My psyche was crumbling like a ruined tower in some gothic romance and I thought it was just the way things were. After all, I had always had periods of depression and mental difficulty. The Bola—it was just part of me. Wasn’t that the way things were for any honest-thinking man in this existential horror show of a world? To think is to suffer, isn’t it? To think is to know the nearness of death, to understand the ambivalence of love, to carry the weight of tragedy on your shoulders. Isn’t it? Isn’t that what it means to be an artist and intellectual?

  I didn’t know that this was madness. I thought that it was life.

  So in the midst of this lunacy, I just trudged on. I worked every day. I went on reading through my stacks of books. My bank account dwindled, but I always managed to avoid absolute zero with some freelance gig or other. My wife and I wanted children, so we simply went ahead with our plans and Ellen got pregnant. That only made our situation more impossible, of course. We both wanted Ellen to be an at-home mother, and my income was nowhere near enough to support us in that.

  At one point, it actually occurred to me that—hey, since I’d always wanted to write suspense stories—maybe I ought to dash one off. I would do it under a pseudonym, of course. It wasn’t part of my real work of salvific revelation. It was just a way to make some money. I plotted out the novel carefully then enlisted one of my younger brothers, Laurence, a talented playwright, to help me. He and I pounded out the first hundred pages in three days. We not only sold it—the first check arrived as my bank balance dropped to mere pennies—we won the Edgar Award for best paperback mystery and got a movie deal as well. In my heart of hearts, I knew that telling such stories was my gift. I was just too magnificent to stoop to using it.

  I don’t know how long I would have gone on like this. I’ve seen people waste their whole lives mired in this kind of psychic trouble. This is just the way I am, they think. This is just the way life is. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe my wild, mystic, lunatic prayers were heard. But finally something happened that, quite literally, opened my eyes to the truth of my situation.

  One day during this period, I went fishing at a local reservoir with a friend. He and I went out on a rowboat together and worked the water through dawn into early morning. My friend was a Texas-bred yarn-spinner. As we sat in the boat, he began to tell me a long story about an airplane mechanic. The mechanic, he said, had been lying on his back under a plane’s wing working with a screwdriver. The mechanic got distracted—I don’t remember how—and the tool slipped from his fingers. It fell on him point downward and poked out his eye. Naturally, the story made a deep impression on my delicate hypochondriacal nerves.

  A few weeks later, I was ass
embling a new writing desk in my attic workspace. Ellen was sitting in my swivel chair, chatting with me to keep me company. I was lying on my back under the desk, tightening up the drawer slide with a screwdriver. The phone rang and I crawled out from under the desk to answer it.

  A familiar voice on the other end of the line brought me disturbing news. One of my brothers had had an emotional breakdown. There had been a dramatic scene. The crisis had passed. He was seeing a psychiatrist. All would be well.

  I said the appropriate words and hung up the phone. I told my wife what had happened. We both felt sorrow for my brother, but we assured each other everything would be all right. I climbed back under the desk, lay on my back again, and went on tightening the drawer slide with my screwdriver.

  But in a few more moments, my hand began to shake. My fingers went weak. The screwdriver slipped from my grasp and fell toward my face, point down. It struck me just beneath the orbit of the eye, right on the hard edge at the top of the cheekbone. Then it tumbled harmlessly to the floor.

  With that, realization opened in me like a flower. I suddenly saw how broken I was. All this time, despite the arguments with my father, despite his unkindness to me and my anger at him, despite my mother’s disengagement and distance, despite the violence and anxiety of my school days, despite my long retreat into fantasy, I had tried to tell myself I had had a happy childhood in a happy family. I had tried to tell myself my suffering was just a normal part of a thinking man’s life. I had tried to tell myself that my inability to sell my unreadable work was the world’s fault.

  My brother’s pain dispelled all those illusions in a moment. In him, I saw myself, and I realized I was wrong. It was all wrong. My childhood had been miserable. My upbringing had been twisted and hostile. My view of myself was delusional. My view of reality was completely unreal. This wasn’t life. This wasn’t ordinary life at all. Something was wrong inside me. Something was terribly wrong.