The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

  The reader coming from the Pilgrim and wanting more of the same might be well advised to turn to the middle of the book and the second tale, “Tears of the Damned: A Counterfactual Tale.” With a protagonist who boldly announces himself as “Dylan Klebold,” we are now in sci-fi-fantasy territory, where Nowicki addresses his Columbine demons with an intriguing premise: an alternative timeline in which the two teens become not mass murderers but solid, even heroic, citizens, their crimes appearing only in obsessive dreams. Or are these dreams? They seem much more real than their “real” lives. In a twist worthy of the old Twilight Zone, it seems that crime can be sidestepped, but not guilt and punishment—an interesting explanation for our general despair.

  Speaking of crime and punishment, the next tale returns to what I identified in my review of Columbine as cockroach territory. “Autobiography of a Violent Soul” gives us a vivid specimen, motionless on his filthy mattress; one who has reacted to the vicissitudes of life by seemingly taking Noël Coward’s advice to “rise above it” but actually storing up a detailed inventory of grudges so extensive that only God could take the blame.

  He’s the sort of life of the party who, when the first girl he has the courage to call hangs up on him, launches into a meditation on “the Fall”:

  Summer was over. Summer is always over before you know it, slain by the ubiquitous, unstoppable tyrant known as autumn, that ruthless season of death, always on the march, which captures and devours its prey in one murderous lunge. The air turns chill, the leaves shrivel and die, and their corpses fall from their branches and litter the ground Summer is the illusion—fall the reality. Life is the ephemera, death the essence.

  The Fall, get it, hypocrite lecteur?

  Indeed, when it comes to erudite whining he gives Beckett’s equally mattress-bound schizophrenic Malone a run for his money:

  Through existing, I’ve gotten attached to existence. Bit by bit, I’ve been initiated into one after another successive degradations of being, and following each degradation, my soul has been further debased, reduced, polluted, and corrupted. After first suffering the misfortune of conception, I was born and proceeded through a mostly happy childhood. . . . I have complaints about my parents, of course. Who doesn’t? I’m sure they had complaints about me too. But they loved me, fed me, sheltered me, clothed me, and kept me safe from harm, and I was happy.

  I don’t blame them for what has become of me, far from perfection as they might have been. I don’t blame my mother and father, who in a sense were my “makers,” but only biologically speaking. Rather, I blame my Maker; I blame the One who created me from scratch, ex nihilo, the one who gave me flesh and bone, and put me here to suffer, bleed, and die. It’s He I indict. I am alone to blame for my mistakes, but He alone is to blame for the mistake of forcing my life upon me, of making me who I am and causing me to be who I have become.

  Yes, I blame God!

  And Malone:

  I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes. But I am less given to them now, since coming here. Of course I still have my little fits of impatience, from time to time, I must be on my guard against them, for the next fortnight or three weeks. Without exaggeration to be sure, quietly crying and laughing, without working myself up into a state. Yes, I shall be natural at last, I shall suffer more, then less, without drawing any conclusions, I shall pay less heed to myself, I shall be neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid, without enthusiasm. I shall not watch myself die, that would spoil everything. Have I watched myself live?

  Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honored name. (p. 165)

  Perhaps Beckett’s decrepit protagonist has lived long enough with his ramblings to become more succinct, but the same spirit, composed of squalor and Gnosticism, is there, as well as in his final act of supposedly “poetic“ violence—or would be, if only he could find a reason to get up off the mattress.

  And speaking of getting off—sorry, too long an acquaintance with the cockroach does tend to coarsen one’s sensibilities—the title story of this collection represents a change in polarity, taking us into the inner life of Dr. Carol Golden, an attractive, professionally successful but sexually unfulfilled widow, right down to her various fantasies, fleshly folds, and fluids.

  The fluids are inspired by a Penthouse-style letter from an anonymous patient, demanding that she

  Wear a skirt, my love. Wear it, if you wish, during our session, but more importantly, wear it in your life! Let the spirit of life rush between your legs and buoy you up in grand ecstasy—be free from grief and pain.

  She quickly identifies this as the work of Fenton Balonsky who, in the midst of 21st century America, is still Slavic enough to have seen, and even dwelt briefly, in Hell, and can smell “degeneracy and despair” even in his colleagues at the seminary he thought would provide refuge. He uses the Church to “ride the tiger” (Evola’s phrase is quoted) until blossoming (like a man-eating plant) into another Ramen-eating, manifesto-writing Gnostic with an urge to tell all to a psychiatrist before killing himself.

  This being Nowicki-land, one dreads their inevitable encounter, expecting either a humiliating mistake to be brooded on for years or an axe-murder, but doctor and heretic find they have more in common than they, or the reader, may have suspected, and Nowicki manages to contrive an ending that, for him, is almost worthy of a Hollywood rom-com, but without entirely betraying his dour Weltanschauung. Bravo!

  Nowicki is seems to be shaping up as the Alternative Right’s Aldous Huxley, who also blended an obsessive focus on the physical grotesquerie of ordinary existence (although even Nowicki has yet to top Huxley’s lovers inundated with the exploded guts of a dog dropped from an airplane) with deep—or lofty, if you prefer—spiritual intimations, in the hope that by intensifying the one the other may be conjured into appearance.

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  January 23, 2011

  BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG NOTHING

  Andy Nowicki

  Under the Nihil

  San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2011

  Like a hellhound on the heels of his last book, The Doctor and the Heretic, comes snarling in Andy Nowicki’s Into the Nihil (pronounced, as the characters do, as “Nile,” as in Land of the Dead).

  Here we have another one of Nowicki’s “cockroach” heroes—perhaps he really should get out more—but with a bit more gumption than usual, having early found the Church (or “run to it” as his brutish father sneers) and persevered through schoolmate taunts (“Bead boy! Peed Boy!”). You might think he’s related to the titular heretic of his previous collection until he is undone by the Mother Church itself; its once hippy-dippy post-Vatican II superiors no longer interested in Kumbaya but desperate now to keep out the weirdos like . . . him.

  Frederick Rolfe, another “spoiled priest” convinced of his vocation, took a thirty year vow of celibacy, sponged off a series of friends in lieu of secular employment, wrote a sequence of exquisitely unpublishable novels (“Caviar, but from a real fish,” D. H. Lawrence called them) and then, his vow expired, perished in Venice during spell of “furious pederasty” (according to my old Penguin edition). Our unnamed narrator moves into a crack neighborhood rather than a working class rooming house, writes a blog rather than novels (“which shows you just how far away I truly was from salvation”), but the main difference is that he finds what Rolfe always wanted: a benefactor with a big checkbook. This “Mister X,” who represents “a privately-run organization which sometimes consulted for the interests of American security,” provides a weekly stipend in return for participation in the trial of a secret, experimental drug: Nihil.

  But at this point I’d like to step back and take a look at the book’s unusual narrative form.

  The first thing you notice is that it
’s written in the second person. There must be something hard or unsatisfactory about such convention, since the number of second person narratives you can think of, to say nothing of whether you’ve read them, or if they’re any good, can be counted on the fingers of, well, slightly less than one hand.

  There’s Faulkner’s 1934 Absalom! Absalom! which, as you can tell from the title, no one reads. Then there’s Edna O’Brien’s 1970 novel A Pagan Place, but more recently, and more relevantly, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984)—and that’s the one you’ve probably read.

  Asked by the Paris Review about her unusual choice, O’Brien said:

  The reason was psychological. As a child you are both your secret self and the “you” that your parents think you are. So the use of the second person was a way of combining the two identities. But I tend not to examine these things too closely—they just happen. (Edna O’Brien, interviewed by Shusha Guppy)

  McInerney’s use has a different psychological effect. Consider his novel’s opening: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.”

  The effect here is to implicate the reader—or rather listeners, given the conversational style—in the narrator’s point of view. “You” means “If you were me right now at this here bar.”

  Nowicki’s “you” however is not the reader but our “Mister X,” who lassos the protagonist into a deranged “fight terrorism through drugs” scheme that seems all too plausible given the history of the half-assed “bright ideas” produced by the decayed Ivy Leaguers that make up our “intelligence community.” (See Tim Weiner’s excoriating history Legacy of Ashes.)

  And like so many of our “best and brightest,” his “Big Man on Campus bearing, incongruously clashing with the foot-shuffling false modesty” reaches the peak of annoyance with a Boston accent.

  It’s a small detail, that Nowicki goes on to milk for a few laughs, but it does set up a series of reverberations in this reader’s pop sensibilities, sort of like a round of “Kevin Bacon” (who appeared in JFK, which connects him to . . . you’ll see).

  Once the detail emerged, I began to hear Mr. X’s interview, and his subsequent ones, in the tones of Martin Sheen’s character in The Departed. Like the young men Sheen interviews there, Nowick’s hero is playing a double game, going along with Mr. X in order to “punk the punkers.” He thinks he’s smarter than this James Bond wannabe played by Thurston Howell III, and, like most of the CIA’s foreign “assets,” he probably is.

  The younger Sheen starred in Apocalypse Now, a fitting title for most of Nowiki’s work, where he is pulled from a drunken, self-destructive delirium in a disheveled Saigon hotel room – comparable to Nowicki’s "dump of an apartment, in the middle of a massive colony of roaches, rats, meth-labs, and gang-bangers [where] I set up shop, and began my downwardly-mobile descent . . .”—to be interviewed by another unctuous CIA type (who delivers the famous “Terminate . . . with extreme prejudice” line) before receiving his own secret assignment that, like this one, will also be subverted by an encounter with moral nothingness and end in a blaze of napalm:

  The chaos! “The horror, the horror.” The same conflagration of faith-eroding poison that had washed through society in the latter half of the 20th century, throwing all of our lives into the wretched mire of purposelessness, making us absurd, faceless, soulless mannequins tumbling through a terrifying abyss . . . this same poison now pumped through my veins, eating me away from the inside.” (p. 12)

  The “faceless, soulless mannequins” are the interchangeably baby-faced young actors in The Departed, instructed by older men like Sheen and Jack Nicolson that: “Frank Costello [Nicolson]: I was your age they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?”

  Or as Nowicki says: “One can fall both ways—gravity often reverses from generation to generation.” (p. 15)

  Billy Costigan [Di Caprio]: Families are always rising or falling in America, am I right?]

  Oliver Queenan [Sheen]: Who said that?

  Billy Costigan: Hawthorne.

  Dignam [Mark Wahlberg]: What’s the matter, smartass, you don’t know any fuckin’ Shakespeare?

  Cop, or criminal? Nowicki’s narrator chooses a third, more traditional path:

  I decide I’m going to be a priest! The lovely sense of calm that accompanies this thought. I have a CALLING, instead of just a FALLING. . . . Now that I’ve declared my calling, in fact, I feel more lonely, more isolated, more doubtfully dubious than I’d ever felt previously . . . (p. 15)

  The interview between Sheen and Di Caprio essentially conflates the two sequences in Under the Nihil, Sheen tells him he’ll “never be a cop” but offers him the chance to “serve and protect” in the role of a rat; Nowicki’s hero is told he’ll never be a priest: “‘Not “no,” but “not yet,”’ he said. Oh, but he was wrong! It was no; the profoundest of nos, to every possible question!” (pp. 2–3).

  But he can help win the “War on Terrah” by becoming a lab rat.

  I COULD’VE been a priest, and been happy. I COULD’VE said the Mass reverently, could have composed and delivered worthwhile sermons, could have lived simply, could have counseled people who were in pain or faced difficult straits. Yet they drummed me out. I didn’t make the cut; I was deemed defective. (pp. 24–5)

  And we know from Oliver Stone’s JFK what happens when spoiled priests meet up with CIA agents and start living in filthy apartments filled with lab rats:

  David Ferry: All I wanted in the world . . . was to be a Catholic priest. Live in a monastery. Pray. Serve God. I had . . . one terrible fucking weakness. And they defrocked me! Then I started to lose everything.

  But what if your vocation really is something else? Perhaps he really does need to become a criminal after all. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise:

  They wanted me to snort and snivel and jump through their hoops, to prove myself worthy of their post-Vatican II norms, and I failed their examination, so it was off to the scrap heap for me . . . (p. 25)

  Frank Costello: Church wants you on your place. Kneel, stand, kneel, stand. If you go for that sort of thing, I don’t know what to do for you. A man makes his own way. No one gives it to you. You have to take it. “Non serviam.”

  Maybe, like Sheen in Apocalypse Now, you need not a career but one more mission. And if you’re bad enough, maybe you’ll get it.

  Yes, I was “saved,” but not really. I came “back,” but only partly. I hadn’t hit bottom, because in spite of everything I still found myself hoping against hope for hope. Still a poseur: not a hardcore bone in my brittle frame, my spirit still pitifully seeking its Savior, aching to fill its God-shaped hole with something, anything, unable to reconcile my God-hole to the Void that is, in fact, the very essence of God . . .

  The fools who treated me, of course, mistook my relapse for a recovery. It’s the typical response of the world to one who almost escapes its clutches, only to be pulled right back into its infernal orbit, as I was. (p. 29)

  Under the Nihil is relatively short book, and you can sense that perhaps the middle section, devoted to the narrator’s one Nihil-powered adventure, the seduction and humiliation of an older woman and her younger daughter, is only a sample of what could have been, like a Grail romance, or a picaresque novel, or most closely one of those overlong “great books” of the 50s, an Augie March or Sot-Weed Factor or Recognitions, an indefinitely multiplied, ramshackle series of grotesque, literally nihilistic “anti-adventures” in which the stupid, unhip world is one-upped by the anti-hero. Perhaps Nowicki thought one would be enough to make the point, and decided to spare his reader such a numbing and depressing trudge. (Even when Terry Southern did something similar in The Magic Christian or Candy, he kept it short and did it with humor, albeit of the then-fashionable “black�
� sort, and it still left a bad taste in the mouth.)

  Having acquired a certain notoriety by describing Nowicki, in reviewing his last book, as “the Aldous Huxley of the Alternative Right,” I may dare to go further by suggesting that this is his Brave New World, with our narrator as The Savage, whose confrontation with a world run by pharmaceutical manipulation—Soma rather than Nihil—ends in an equally futile public suicide. His final rant could have come equally well from The Savage’s interview with the World Controller:

  Freedom, you say? Freedom from what? Freedom to do . . . what?

  Freedom to drop their venerable old traditions, which gave their lives a sense of meaning and their deaths a sense of closure? Freedom to jettison their connection with the ancient, and embrace un-shackled materialism? Freedom to degrade themselves, debase themselves, corrupt themselves, turn themselves into animals, into something worse than animals? Freedom to elevate their loins over their brains; to make sure their sons become pimps and your daughters whores; to condemn their progeny to Hell forever? (p. 100)

  While The Savage has to stage his suicide at a mere lighthouse, Nowicki’s narrator has the Statute of Liberty to play with. Still, I find the final scenario—

  I hope to light a fire in the big, stony Whore’s head, a blaze that will light up the sky over Manhattan Island. I hope to turn many a head, provoke the posting of many a YouTube video, inspire a headline or two. (p. 101)