The Novel

  ‘What should I do?’ I asked in a tremulous voice, for my stomach had constricted into such a knot that I could scarcely breathe. To learn from a knowledgeable editor that my novel, on which I had pinned such exalted hopes, had been deservedly shot down was too painful to accept. She must have seen my distress and did not wish to see my face grow even paler, for she made no reply to my appeal for help. Instead, she twirled her sherry glass: ‘What lovely patterns the Bristol Cream makes.’

  ‘What must I do?’ I asked, more insistently than before, and again she refused to answer. Instead she said brightly: ‘Karl, you and I seem destined to work together on many projects. I think it’s time you called me Yvonne. I’d like that.’

  I don’t know what prompted me to respond as I did, but I blurted out: ‘So you’ve more bad news to deliver?’ and she replied with hardly a change of tone: ‘You’re at a perilous point in your career as a critic when a fall backward would start tongues wagging: “See, he never had it to begin with. Flash in the pan.” ’ She kept her eyes on me to watch how I accepted the kind of criticism I had the habit of heaping on others.

  ‘You don’t believe that, surely?’ I asked, almost pleadingly.

  ‘The judgment, no. But that the judgment will be viciously circulated, yes. I advise you to withdraw your novel. Let’s make believe Kinetic never saw it.’

  In my desperation, I grasped for any support: ‘Professor Devlan had great faith in this novel.’ This was a lie; Devlan had had serious reservations based on what I had told him. ‘And I’d like, in honor of him—’

  ‘You miss him a lot, don’t you, Karl?’

  ‘I do. The novel’s dedicated to him, as you probably noticed.’ I did not tell her that Devlan was dying and that I thought of Empty Cistern, which he had inspired, as my final gift to him.

  ‘I did, and had the feeling that you’d be doing him no honor to attach his name to such an incomplete work.’

  Her device of using Devlan to support her own judgment was so improper that I tried to calm myself by focusing on a Dresden doll representing a Court of Versailles milkmaid. Then apparently realizing how cataclysmic her report had been to me, she asked softly: ‘Karl, what do you propose?’

  With a firm voice I said: ‘We’ll publish it as is,’ but as soon as I uttered the words I realized that this was not my decision to make. ‘That is, if Kinetic will permit me.’

  ‘With your record, Karl, you have the right to demand publication, and we’ve agreed to accept your decision.’

  ‘You went so far in your office? To discuss rejecting it?’ I was aghast.

  ‘The vote was three to two against. I was one of the two, but since my vote counts triple, it was three against, four in favor. And there it will remain until you decide.’

  ‘I just decided. I could do no less for Devlan. He fathered this book.’

  Yvonne was a tough editor, one of the hardest grained in New York, and she had not acquired that reputation by being afraid of her writers, no matter how famous they became. Her motto was: ‘If I don’t tell them, who will?’ In pursuit of that custom she asked a most damaging question: ‘I must ask again: Do you really believe that a noted critic like Devlan will want you to attach his name to an amorphous book like yours?’

  I must have blushed, for she did a most unexpected thing. Reaching out, she pressed my hand as if I were a child needing reassurance: ‘Let’s change the subject. I’d like to see what your phenom Tull has accomplished. If he’s half as good as you say—’

  ‘Let’s not change the subject. I’ve definitely decided in these last few minutes that I will publish,’ and she said quickly: ‘Then I’ll help, and I wish you a world of …’ She drew back from finishing with the word luck, which would have been demeaning, as if that were the only way of salvaging my manuscript. She had the decency to express her wish as good fortune, which sounded more civilized.

  But she did want to dig into the Tull manuscript. Putting the box in front of her, she lifted the lid and confronted a collection of 256 pages that bore no numbers; some pages were printed upside down, others sideways on the page. As she shuffled them, taking out four arbitrarily, I said: ‘It’s a true hodgepodge, but not a chaotic one. It really is a kaleidoscope, which your mind begins to arrange in meaningful patterns.’

  ‘Did you help him devise the plan?’

  ‘Heavens, no! This young fellow does his own devising!’

  It was early next morning when my phone at the college rang: ‘Karl! Yvonne here. Your boy really has constructed a kaleidoscope, and I’m completely taken with it. The boy’s clever. It’s intriguing, the way proper names appear arbitrarily and without definition, and the way the rich array of themes comes and goes. It’s a bravura performance, and if I can get it properly presented and supported, we could have a big winner.’

  (pages from Kaleidoscope)

  purchased by his great-grandfather in the early 1880’s and kept thereafter as a work of honor in the family’s library den. Scores of visitors during the intervening century had tested the remarkable chair and given enthusiastic testimony to its merits, some spending two or three hours in it, their fundaments at ease, their eyes gratified by the practicality of the attachment, which relieved the tedium of reading heavy books.

  In this generation Albertina had made the chair her personal possession, ‘her throne,’ Dortmund had called it, ‘from which she dispensed her obiter dicta.’ She smiled at such comment and diverted it by handing anyone interested a one-page sheet on which she had Xeroxed an explanation of the chair, its essential paragraphs reading:

  THE MARVELOUS UTILITY OF THIS FAMOUS CHAIR IS A TESTIMONY TO THE FACT THAT ANY HUMAN ACTIVITY TO WHICH RAW HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IS APPLIED HAS A FIGHTING CHANCE OF PRODUCING SOMETHING FINE AND LASTING. AND IF A SENSE OF ART IS ALSO FACTORED IN, THE POSSIBILITIES FOR GOOD RESULTS ARE DOUBLED.

  WILLIAM MORRIS (1834–1896), AN ENGLISH POET, ARCHITECT, BUILDER, FURNITURE MAKER AND SOCIAL REFORMER, APPLIED ALL HIS TALENTS TO WHATEVER JOB HE ATTACKED. WHEN HE DESIRED A CHAIR HE LISTED THE CHARACTERISTICS THAT WOULD MAKE IT SUPERIOR. THESE SEEMED TO BE: COMFORTABLE TO THE BUTTOCKS. HENCE THE PADDED CUSHION. RESTFUL TO THE ENTIRE BODY, HENCE THE AMPLE ARMS, AND ADJUSTABLE TO THE MODE EITHER OF LEANING FORWARD INTO ONE’S WORK OR WELL BACKWARD TO REST. HENCE THE MOVABLE BACK WITH A HINGE AT THE BASE, AND ARMS EXTENDED BACKWARD WITH SLOTS SO THAT A CROSS STICK CAN BE MOVED FORWARD OR BACKWARD IN THE SLOTS TO MAKE THE BACK UPRIGHT OR SLANTED TO THE REAR. IT PROVED ONE OF THE BEST CHAIRS EVER MADE.

  WHEN THE FIRST MORRIS CHAIR APPEARED, THE PUBLIC APPLAUDED, AND MY GRANDFATHER BOUGHT ONE OF THE EARLIEST, BUT HE QUICKLY SAW THAT AN IMPROVEMENT COULD BE ADDED, ONE THAT MADE IT POSITIVELY IDEAL. HE BUILT ONTO THE LEFT ARM A BROAD DESKLIKE AFFAIR MADE OF OAK, WHICH COULD BE SWUNG ACROSS THE KNEES, BRINGING WITH IT A LECTERN ON WHICH A BOOK COULD BE RESTED, WITH CLAMPS TO HOLD THE PAGES OPEN. WOULD THAT MEN WOULD APPLY SIMILAR INTELLIGENCE AND INVENTIVENESS TO ALL THINGS THEY MAKE.

  Sometimes she spent entire days in her chair, books piled beside her as she alternately leaned forward to compose her poems or leaned far back to rest and stare out to sea for the refreshment it brought; occasionally toward the end of a creative day Laura would enter the study to find her mistress sleeping in the laid-back chair as soundly as if she had been tucked into bed.

  Albertina said: ‘When I die, give this chair to that museum in Doylestown,’ but this proposal so enraged Dortmund that he

  the late afternoon heavy with gloom, made more ominous by the howling of the wind and the whipping of a rope-end against the shingles. But this was the kind of storm she relished, for as she bad told him several times when they walked together inland toward the glade they had discovered: ‘Storms remind me of meaningful blood hammering through my veins,’ and it was during such a storm that they had taken refuge in the sback under the oak trees and engaged in the tender lovemaking that had now grown so perilous.

  As this day’s storm increased and she lay back in her chair, watching t
he rain beat against the windows, she caught herself wisbing that she might be in that other storm and in the sback with him once more: ‘Let it thunder!’ she cried aloud, testing her voice against the tempest.

  ‘In playful mood?’ came the voice from the hall, and before she could reply, Dortmund entered, stood before her and asked brutally: ‘Is this the kind of storm you were thinking about when you wrote him this letter?’ and with thumb and forefinger he dangled the gray-colored paper before her.

  ‘Whom did you pay to steal it?’ she asked quietly, deftly maneuvering the backrest so she could sit upright and face him directly, but she had not completed the shift when he dropped the letter and sprang upon her, forcing the rest so far backward and with such sudden force that the guiding staff, more than a century old and the veteran of much use, shattered with a resounding crack.

  ‘Damn you!’ she cried, struggling to free herself from his enormous weight and feeling her arms and legs pinned bopelessly into the chair as he raised his right fist to smash her in the face as he had done the other night.

  ‘No, by God!’ she cried from her helpless position and shifted her pinioned shoulders at the last moment to avoid the blow to her face.

  This so infuriated Dortmund that he thrust his left elbow across her throat and prepared to hammer with great force, but at this moment her right arm worked free and in its mad fumbling came upon the letter opener that she kept at hand as she worked. Gripping it firmly, she raised it as high as she could and with all the force in her imprisoned body brought it down into the middle of her husband’s back. There was a gasp, a convulsion, and a roar: ‘What have you done?’ Before she could answer or exult in her release from imprisonment she fainted, while he remained unconscious across her body, slowly staining with coagulating blood his clothes, and hers, and the cushions of the Morris chair in which the

  pulled remorselessly by the tide ever father from the shore. Between gasps

  he caught sight, over his left shoulder as it cleared the waves, of headland

  on which Albertina’s green cottage stood, and his first taste of panic

  came when he was assailed by the wild thought: Will I ever see her again? Fighting

  to repress such destructive reactions, he burrowed his head into the waves,

  kept the saltwater from his eyes and nostrils, and drove his frantic arms so

  powerfully that he could see the cottage growing larger as he progressed toward

  the shelving sand on which he would ultimatly gain a foothold. But as he began

  mentally to exult in that surge of hope, physically he caught a fearful message from

  his aching muscles: I’m not going to make it! and dissolution set in, as if all

  his muscles and nerve centers had fallen into wild confusion. “Help!” he tried

  to shout, but when he opened his mouth a torrent of waves knocked him and his arms

  birds from the taller trees swooped down, adding their melodies to the chorus

  until the entire meadow was swept by song. As the sun rose ever higher above the

  horizon, bathing the area in a cascade of red-gold light that muted even the

  greenness of grasses, he felt a tremendous identification with this secret

  haven that he and Albertina had discovered and cherished. ‘They’re doing this

  for me,’ he shouted to the heavens. ‘The birds, those noisy frogs, the bending

  trees, the stars as they say farewell when light attacks them, and even that rolling

  sun elbowing all things aside as it strides through the sky. look at it muscle

  its way along, telling the shadows where they must fall.’ And as he reveled in

  his proud possession of the glade and watched the trees as they teased the birds

  back to their bosoms while sun-burst peace desended over the area, he reasoned:

  I am like that sun. I must rise, dispel the night, bring order to this meadow,

  and build a refuge here for Albertina. Lure her away from that lonley headland

  and turbulent sea. The sun controls life, not the swirling ocean tempests

  ‘You think Kinetic will want it?’

  ‘It’s my job to make them want it. We really must not plod along publishing one Grenzler after another.’ She must have realized what an improper thing she had said, for she quickly apologized: ‘It was dreadful of me to say that. Forget I did.’

  ‘I shall remember only that you published my novel.’

  ‘Yes. Kinetic’s going to publish Cistern and Kaleidoscope, whether they want to or not.’

  Kinetic’s 1988 publishing season was a hectic affair whose gyrations I followed closely. As might have been expected, Lukas Yoder’s seventh Grenzler novel, The Fields, with its amber cover showing the spacious farms of Lancaster County, was a sensation; its first printing was 750,000 and there was a quick reprinting of another quarter million. It won honors in four nations, was translated immediately into eleven languages and was a total bore.

  The sensation of the season, of course, was the publication of Timothy Tull’s Kaleidoscope, the random collection of loose leaves providing no story line, no physical setting, no identifiable characters, and no ideological thread. Handsomely presented in a fabric-covered box whose top showed an artist’s conception of an old-time children’s toy displaying a wild mix of colors and forms, it was an inviting item in a bookstore and a focus of comment when taken home and left on a coffee table.

  People railed against it, scorned it, parodied it, took it back for refunds, but rarely stopped talking about it. Young people saw what their contemporary was trying to say and applauded both his efforts and his daring. On television George Will cited Kaleidoscope as proof that American society was speeding toward total degeneration, and Bill Buckley said the Ayatollah had fingered the wrong writer. Cartoonists had a field day, especially those on the papers in the heartland, the best one showing Leo Tolstoy in muzhik costume and fur cap leading a pair of readers to a huge disorderly pile of loose manuscript pages marked War and Peace with Tolstoy telling the women: ‘Grab yourself a handful.’

  Yvonne, no novice in the handling of books, knew how to keep controversy bubbling, and behind the scenes she orchestrated efforts of Kinetic’s publicity department to line up quotes in support of the book. She also drafted a statement she hoped Lukas Yoder might adapt for his own comment: ‘America needs bold young voices and I am pleased to see that one of my neighbors, Timothy Tull, has come out with his version of the contemporary world.’ Yoder, who loved the hustle and bustle of publishing, surprised us all; he gave a ringing endorsement, concluding: ‘If I were a young man in today’s world, I would certainly not write the way I do now. I might not mimic my gifted neighbor Mr. Tull, but I would surely come up with something more contemporary than my own Fields.’ When Yvonne received Yoder’s letter, she phoned me: ‘The Dresden Cabal—you, me, Yoder—is operating full force to give Tull’s book a powerful send-off.’ When she read me Yoder’s endorsement she said: ‘It illustrates why I love that dear old man. Ancient history but a man of character.’

  Yoder’s statement, reprinted throughout the nation and in Europe, did much to gain Tull a hearing, and when the season ended, with twenty-seven thousand boxes sold, our Dresden Cabal could take credit for having launched a new force in American letters, the brilliant, highly trained and disciplined young revolutionary who knew exactly what he wanted to achieve. As a result of the fanfare the Mecklenberg faculty approved a recommendation that he be invited to become my assistant in our growing department of creative writing, an assignment that pleased me, since it meant that I could keep helpful watch on his progress.

  Kinetic’s conspicuous failure on its 1988 list was my novel, The Empty Cistern. What reviews did stagger in were so blistering that not even Yvonne’s strong supportive efforts could give it life. However, Yvonne was manipulative enough to ensure that it was noticed by some of the little magazines, and a few of their editors, inoculated by
the Devlanian theory of dialogue among elites, recognized what I was shooting at and gave the book strong notices. The major reviewers, responsible to the general reading public, turned thumbs down, with two of them, The New York Times and Time magazine, stealing the imaginary Jean’s apt line: ‘It really is empty,’ meaning, one supposed, that there were no murders, no colossal thefts, no steamy love affairs and not much else except interminable conversations on the nature and responsibility of the arts.

  But Yvonne, who had a keen nose for the realities of publishing, was able to write me: ‘I would be a fool to mask the fact that in the general field Cistern has been a disappointment. Many copies shipped back from the stores, as you must have expected. But I can assure you that in the arena you seek to conquer and which F.X.M. Devlan defined so neatly, you’ve not suffered. Those you wanted to reach, you have reached and quite effectively. I want you to capitalize on that forward movement, slight as it may seem to you right now. Start work immediately on the task you can do better than anyone else, that is, your championing of Timothy Tull. Do a short book of criticism, Our Bold New Voices, and I will guarantee your prompt publication. All is not lost, not by any means. You’re a powerful voice, Karl, one worthy to be heard.’

  Yvonne’s wise counsel prevented me from making an error that might have finished me as a critic, for when Cistern failed, I had taken an oath, which revealed my bitterness: ‘Since they’ve rejected my novel, I’m going to hold those they accept to damned high standards. Drones, beware!’ And I sharpened my knives to do some scalping. Her letter brought me back to basics; personal revenge had no place in criticism.

  Walking by the Wannsee, I pieced together a philosophy that I hoped would serve for the rest of my life: I had written what I considered a fine novel and was desolated by its failure. But it’s useless to argue that the public failed to applaud because it’s been spoiled by the easy fiction of the best-seller lists. The fault was mine, for I could hear Devoan’s words rushing back at me: ‘The job of fiction is to bring to life real human beings in a real setting,’ and his sage advice: ‘Any novel about an abstract idea is bound to be bad—write about people, not prototypes.’ It was a lesson I had repeated to my students but not listened to myself.