by Paul Auster
It is not until he becomes fluent in their language that Kepler understands why they have saved him. The Humans are diminishing, they explain, and unless they can begin to increase their numbers, the whole nation will disappear into nothingness. Silent Thought, their wise man and leader, who left the tribe the previous winter to live alone in the desert and pray for their deliverance, was told in a dream that a dead man would save them. They would find the body of that man somewhere in the cliffs that surround the settlement, he said, and if they treated it with the proper medicine, the body would come back to life. All these things happened exactly as Silent Thought said they would. Kepler was found, he was resurrected, and now it is up to him to become the father of a new generation. He is the Wild Father who fell from the moon, the Begetter of Human Souls, the Spirit Man who will rescue the Folk from oblivion.
At this point, Barber’s writing begins to stumble badly. Without the least pang of conscience, Kepler turns native and decides to stay with the Humans, forever renouncing the thought of returning to his wife and son. Shifting from the precise, intellectual tone of the first thirty pages, Barber indulges himself in a number of long and flowery passages of lascivious sexual fantasies, a teenager’s masturbatory lust run wild. The women do not resemble North American Indians so much as Polynesian sex toys, beautiful, bare-breasted maidens who give themselves to Kepler with laughing, joyous abandon. It is pure make-believe: a society of prelapsarian innocence populated by noble savages who live in complete harmony with each other and the world. It does not take Kepler long to decide that their way of life is vastly superior to his own. He shucks off the trappings of nineteenth-century civilization and enters the stone age, happily throwing in his lot with the Humans.
The first chapter ends with the birth of Kepler’s first Human child, and when the next chapter opens, fifteen years have passed. We are back on Long Island, witnessing the funeral of Kepler’s American wife through the eyes of John Kepler, Jr., who is now eighteen years old. Resolving to uncover the mystery of his father’s disappearance, the young man sets out the following morning in true epic fashion, determined to devote the remainder of his life to the quest. He travels to Utah, and for the next year and a half he tramps around the wilderness searching for clues. With miraculous good luck (none too plausible as presented by Barber), he finally stumbles upon the Humans’ settlement in the rocks. It has never occurred to him that his father could still be alive, but lo and behold, when he is introduced to the bearded chief and savior of this small tribe, which now numbers almost a hundred souls, he recognizes this man as John Kepler. Struck with stupefaction, he blurts out that he is Kepler’s long-lost American son, but Kepler, calm and impassive, pretends not to understand him. “I am a spirit man who came here from the moon,” he says, “and these people are the only family I have ever had. We will be happy to give you food and lodging for the night, but tomorrow morning you must leave us and continue on your journey.” Crushed by this rejection, the son turns his thoughts to revenge, and in the middle of the night he slips from his bed, crawls up to the sleeping Kepler, and plunges a knife into his heart. Before an alarm can be sounded, he runs off into the darkness and disappears.
There is only one witness to the crime, a twelve-year-old boy named Jocomin (Wild Eyes), who is Kepler’s favorite son among the Humans. Jocomin chases after the murderer for three days and three nights, but he does not find him. On the morning of the fourth day, he climbs to the top of a mesa for a view of the surrounding countryside and there, just minutes after giving up hope, he encounters none other than Silent Thought, the aged medicine man who left the tribe years before to live as a hermit in the desert. Silent Thought adopts Jocomin and gradually initiates him into the mysteries of his art, training the boy over long and difficult years to acquire the magical powers of the Twelve Transformations. Jocomin is a willing and able student. Not only does he learn how to heal the sick and communicate with the gods, but after seven years of constant work, he finally penetrates the secret of the First Transformation, mastering the forces of his body and mind to such an extent that he can turn himself into a lizard. The other tranformations follow in rapid succession: he becomes a swallow, a hawk, a vulture; he becomes a stone and a cactus plant; he becomes a mole, a rabbit, and a grasshopper; he becomes a butterfly and a snake; and then, last of all, conquering the most strenuous of the transformations, he turns himself into a coyote. By now, nine years have passed since Jocomin came to live with Silent Thought. Having taught his adopted son everything he knows, the old man tells Jocomin that the moment has come for him to die. Without uttering another word, he wraps himself in his ceremonial garments and fasts for three days, at which point his spirit flies out of his body and travels to the moon, the place where the souls of the Humans dwell after death.
Jocomin returns to the settlement and lives there as the chief for a number of years. But hard times have fallen on the Humans, and as drought gives way to pestilence, and pestilence gives way to discord, Jocomin dreams a dream in which he is told that happiness will not return to the tribe until his father’s death has been avenged. After consulting with the council of elders the next day, Jocomin leaves the Humans and travels east, going into the world of the Wild Men to search for John Kepler, Jr. He takes on the name of Jack Moon and works his way across the country, eventually coming to New York, where he finds a job with a construction company that specializes in building skyscrapers. He becomes a member of the topmost crew on the Woolworth Building, an architectural marvel that would stand as the tallest structure in the world for close to twenty years. Jack Moon is a superb laborer, undaunted by even the most tremendous heights, and he quickly gains the respect of his co-workers. Outside of his job, however, he keeps to himself and makes no friends. All his spare time is devoted to tracking down his half-brother, and this task takes him nearly two years to accomplish. John Kepler, Jr. has become a prosperous businessman. He lives in a mansion on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights with his wife and six-year-old son and is driven to work every morning in a long black car. Jack Moon stakes out the house for several weeks, at first intending to kill Kepler pure and simple, but then he decides that he can mete out a more proper vengeance by abducting Kepler’s son and carrying him back to the land of the Humans. He does this without being detected, snatching the boy from his nanny one afternoon in broad daylight, and at that point the fourth chapter of Barber’s novel comes to an end.
Back in Utah with the boy (who in the meantime has become deeply devoted to him), Jocomin discovers that everything has changed. The Humans have vanished, and their empty houses are devoid of any sign of life. For the next six months he hunts high and low for them, but with no success. At last, realizing that his dream has betrayed him, he accepts the fact that his people are all dead. With grief in his heart, he decides to remain there and look after the boy as his own, all the while hoping for a miracle of regeneration. He renames the boy Numa (New Man) and tries not to lose courage. Seven years go by. He passes on the secrets he learned from Silent Thought to his adopted son, and then, after three more years of steadfast work, he manages to bring about the Thirteenth Transformation. Jocomin turns himself into a woman, a young and fertile woman who seduces the sixteen-year-old adolescent. Twins are born nine months later, a boy and a girl, and from these two children, the Humans will once again populate the land.
The action then shifts back to New York, where we find Kepler, Jr., desperately searching for his lost son. One clue after another leads him nowhere, but then, by pure chance—everything in Barber’s book happens by chance—he is put on the trail of Jack Moon, and bit by bit Kepler begins to piece the puzzle together, realizing that his son was taken from him because of what he did to his father. There is no choice for him but to go back to Utah. Kepler is forty years old now, and the hardships of desert hiking are a strain on him, but he doggedly pushes on with his journey, horrified at the thought of returning to the place where he killed his father twenty years before, but
knowing that he has no choice, that this is the place where he will find his son. A full moon is poised dramatically in the sky for the last scene. Kepler has come within range of the Humans’ settlement and is camped out in the cliffs for the night, holding a rifle in his hands as he watches for signs of activity. On a neighboring outcrop of rocks, not fifty feet away from him, he suddenly sees a coyote standing with its silhouette against the moon. Fearful of everything in this remote and barren territory, Kepler impulsively points his rifle at the animal and pulls the trigger. The coyote is killed with one shot, and Kepler cannot help congratulating himself on the accuracy of his aim. What he does not realize, of course, is that he has just killed his own son. Before he has time to stand up and walk over to the felled animal, three other coyotes leap out at him from the darkness. Unable to defend himself against their attack, he is chewed to pieces within a matter of minutes.
So ends Kepler’s Blood, Barber’s one and only attempt at a work of fiction. Given his age at the time he wrote it, it would be unfair to judge his effort too harshly. For all its shortcomings and excesses, the book is valuable to me as a psychological document, and more than any other piece of evidence, it demonstrates how Barber played out the inner dramas of his early life. He doesn’t want to accept the fact that his father is dead (hence Kepler’s rescue by the Humans); but if his father is not dead, then there is no excuse for his not having returned to his family (hence the knife that Kepler, Jr., thrusts into his father’s heart). But the thought of that murder is too horrible not to inspire revulsion. Whoever thinks such a thought must be punished, and that is precisely what happens to Kepler, Jr., whose fate is worse than any other character’s in the book. The whole story is a complex dance of guilt and desire. Desire turns into guilt, and then, because this guilt is intolerable, it becomes a desire to expiate itself, to submit to a cruel and inexorable form of justice. It was no accident, I think, that Barber’s later scholarship was devoted to exploring many of the same issues that appeared in Kepler’s Blood. The lost colonists of Roanoke, the accounts of white men living among Indians, the mythology of the American West—those were subjects that Barber dealt with as a historian, and no matter how scrupulous and professional he was in treating them, there was always a personal motive behind his work, a secret conviction that he was somehow digging into the mysteries of his own life.
In the spring of 1939, Barber had one last opportunity to learn something more about his father, but it did not produce any results. He was a junior at Columbia then, and somewhere around the middle of May, just one week after his hypothetical brush with Uncle Victor at the World’s Fair, Aunt Clara called to tell him that his mother had died in her sleep. He took the early morning train out to Long Island, then weathered the sundry ordeals of burying her: the funeral arrangements, the reading of the will, the torturous conversations with lawyers and accountants. He paid off the bills to the home where she had lived for the past six months, signed papers and forms, sobbed intermittently in spite of himself. After the funeral, he returned to the big house to spend the night, realizing that it would probably be the last night he ever spent there. Aunt Clara was the only person left by then, and she was in no condition to sit up talking with him. For the last time that day he patiently went through the ritual of telling her that she was welcome to go on living in the house as long as she liked. Once again, she blessed him for his kindness, standing on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, and once again she returned to the bottle of sherry that she kept hidden in her room. The staff, which had consisted of seven people at the time of Barber’s birth, was now down to one—a limping black woman by the name of Hattie Newcombe, who cooked for Aunt Clara and made an occasional stab at housecleaning—and for some years now the place had been collapsing around them. The garden had been left untended since his grandfather’s death in 1934, and what had once been a decorous effusion of flowers and lawn was now a tangle of grim, chest-high grass. Inside, cobwebs hung from nearly every ceiling; the chairs could not be touched without emitting stormclouds of dust; mice sprinted crazily through the rooms, and Clara, the tipsy, perpetually grinning Clara, did not notice a thing. It had been going on like this for so long now that Barber had ceased to care. He knew that he would never have the courage to live in this house, and once Clara died the same alcoholic death as her husband Binkey, it was all one to him whether the roof caved in or not.
The next morning, he found Aunt Clara sitting in the downstairs parlor. It was not yet time for the first glass of sherry (as a general rule, the bottle was not uncorked until after lunch), and Barber realized that if he was ever going to talk to her, it would have to be now. She was sitting at the deal table in the corner when he entered the room, her tiny sparrow’s head bent over a game of solitaire, humming some tuneless, meandering song under her breath. “The Man on the Flying Trapeze,” he thought to himself as he approached, and then he came around behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. The body was all bones beneath the woolen shawl.
“Red three on the black four,” he said, pointing to the cards on the table.
She clicked her tongue at her own stupidity, merged two piles, and then turned over the card that had been freed. It was a red king. “Thank you, Sol,” she said. “I’m not concentrating today. I miss the moves I’m supposed to make and then wind up cheating when I don’t have to.” She let out a small, tittering laugh and then resumed her humming.
Barber worked himself into the chair opposite Aunt Clara, trying to think of how to begin. He doubted that she had much to tell him, but there was no one else to talk to. For several moments he just sat there and studied her face, examining the intricate network of wrinkles, the white powder caking on her cheeks, the ludicrous red lipstick. He found her pathetic, poignant. It could not have been easy marrying into this family, he thought, living with his mother’s brother for all those years, never having any children. Binkey was a moronic, good-natured philanderer who had married Clara back in the 1880s, less than a week after seeing her perform on the stage of the Galileo Theatre in Providence as the assistant in Maestro Rudolfo’s magic act. Barber had always liked listening to the scatterbrained stories she told about her days in vaudeville, and it struck him as odd that the two of them should now be the only people left in the family. The last Barber and the last Wheeler. A girl from the lower classes, as his grandmother had always called her, a dimwitted floozy who had lost her looks more than thirty years ago, and Sir Rotundity himself, the everburgeoning boy wonder, born to a madwoman and a ghost. He had never felt more tenderness for Aunt Clara than he did at this moment.
“I’m going back to New York tonight,” he said.
“No need to worry about me,” she answered, not looking up from the cards. “I’ll be just fine here by myself. I’m used to it, you know.”
“I’m going back tonight,” he repeated, “and then I’m never setting foot in this house again.”
Aunt Clara placed a red six on a black seven, scanned the table for a spot to throw off a black queen, sighed with disappointment, and then looked up at Barber. “Oh, Sol,” she said. “You don’t have to be so dramatic.”
“I’m not being dramatic. it’s just that this is probably the last time we’ll ever see each other.”
Aunt Clara still did not understand. “I know it’s a sad thing to lose your mother,” she said. “But you mustn’t take it so hard. It’s really a blessing that Elizabeth is gone. Her life was a torment, and now she’s finally at peace.” Aunt Clara paused for moment, groping for the copy word. “You mustn’t get silly ideas into your head.”
“It’s not my head, Aunt Clara, it’s the house. I don’t think I could stand to come here anymore.”
“But it’s your house now. You own it. Everything in it belongs to you.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to keep it. I can get rid of it any time I want.”
“But Solly … you said yesterday you weren’t going to sell the house. You promised.”
“I’m not going to
sell it. But there’s nothing to prevent me from giving it away, is there?”
“It comes to the same thing. Someone else would own it, and then I’d be packed off somewhere to die in a room full of old women.”
“Not if I give the house to you. Then you could stay copy here.”
“Stop talking nonsense. You’ll give me a heart attack talking like that.”
“It’s no trouble transferring the deed. I can call the lawyer today and get things started.”
“But Solly …”
“I’ll probably take some of the paintings with me, but everything else can stay here with you.”
“It’s wrong. I don’t know why, but it’s wrong for you to be talking like this.”
“There’s just one thing you have to do for me,” he said, ignoring her remark. “I want you to make out a proper will, and in the will I want you to leave the house to Hattie Newcombe.”