There were two more crucial observations that came out of my reading of Goodbye, Columbus on the heels of The Great Gatsby. One was that Roth’s book was a hell of a lot funnier than Fitzgerald’s, which almost isn’t funny at all, especially when, as in the famous Party-Guest Catalog, it tries its hardest to amuse. The second observation, of the most striking parallel between the two books, got me so excited, once I noticed it, that I rushed through the whole Mrs. Patimkin-finds-the-diaphragm sequence so that I could get up again and resume my caged-bear perambulations: both books, I noticed, coincided precisely with a summer.
This was a parallel both deeply resonant and lastingly useful. I had just been through, in the years preceding my decampment for the West, a pair of summers that had rattled my nerves and rocked my soul and shook my sense of self—but in a good way. I had drunk a lot, and smoked a lot, and listened to a ton of great music, and talked way too much about all of those activities and about talking about those activities. I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him. I had seen things and gone places in and around Pittsburgh during those summers that had shocked the innocent, pale, freckled Fitzgerald who lived in the great blank Minnesota of my heart.
So there was that. At the same time, the act of shaping a novel as Fitzgerald and Roth had done, around a summer, provided an inherent dramatic structure in three acts:
I. June.
II. July.
III. August.
Each of those months had a different purpose and a distinctive nature in my mind, and in their irrevocable order they enacted a story that always began with a comedy of expectation and ended with a tragedy of remorse. All I would need to do was start at the beginning of June with high hopes and high-flying diction, and then work my way through the sex, drugs, and rock and roll to get to the oboes and bassoons of Labor Day weekend. And then maybe I would find some way, magically, really to say something about summer, about the idea of summer in America, something that great American poets of summertime like Ray Bradbury and Bruce Springsteen would have understood. Maybe, or maybe not. But at least I would be practicing the cardinal virtue that my teachers had so assiduously instilled: I would be writing about what I knew. No—I would be doing something finer than that. I would be writing about what I had known, once, but had since, in my sad and delectable state of fallenness, come to view as illusory.
I put Roth’s book back on the shelf and went into Ralph’s room and shut the door. I switched on the computer with its crackling little 4 MHz Zilog Z80A processor. I was cranked on summertime and the memory of summertime, on the friends who had worked so hard to become legends, on the records we listened to and the mistakes we made and the kind and mean things we did to one another. I slid a floppy disk into drive B. I paused. Was this really the kind of writer I was going to become? A writer under the influence of Fitzgerald and Roth, of books that took place in cities like Pittsburgh where people took moral instruction from the songs of Adam and the Ants? What about that sequence of stories I’d been planning about the astronomer Percival Lowell exploring the canals of Mars? What about the plan to do for romantic relationships what Calvino had done for the urbis in Invisible Cities? What about that famous sense of wonder, my animating principle, my motto and manual and standard MO? Was there room for that, the chance of that, along the banks of the Monongahela River? I took a deep breath, saw that I was properly balanced on my perch, and started to write—on a screen so small that you had to toggle two keys to see the end of every line—the passage that became this:
It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up, through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets; to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art-deco summit where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink.
I went on in this vein for several paragraphs, and some of what I wrote that first session ended up, after much revision, at the end of the novel, which I reached in the midwinter of 1987, in the back bedroom of a little house on Anade Avenue, on the Balboa Peninsula, shortly before my twenty-fourth birthday. At some point that first evening, as with the help of Ralph’s ghost, or of the muse who first made her presence known to me there in that room under the ground, with its smell of earth and old valises, I invoked the spirit and the feel and the groove of summers past, I did something foolish: I started rocking in my chair. Just a little bit, but it was too much. I rocked backward, fell off the trunk, hit my head on a steel shelf, and made a lot of noise. There was so much racket that my mother came to the top of the stairs and called out to ask if I was all right, and anyway, what was I doing down there?
I clambered back up from the floor, palpating the tender knot on my skull where the angel of writers, by way of warning welcome or harsh blessing, had just given me a mighty zetz. I hit the combination of keys that meant Save.
“I’m writing a novel,” I told her.
DIVING INTO THE WRECK
IN 1987, IN THE final stages of work on my first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I came upon a little picture that nearly ruined my life. It was a reproduction of an aerial painting of Washington, D.C., by the architectural visionary Léon Krier—a tiny prospect of blue water, white avenues, green promenades, glimpsed from a tantalizing distance, unattainable, ever receding. My reaction to this picture was strange: my heart began to pound, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt a sadness come over me, a powerful sense of loss, which I began at once to probe and develop, thinking that in an attempt to explain the inexplicable ache this little picture caused in my chest there might lie the matter of a second novel.
I didn’t know that what I was feeling was a prefigurative pang of mourning for the next five years of my creative life.
I felt I had stumbled across a kind of treasure map to the barnacle-encrusted wreck of something true and important sunk deep inside of me, and I decided to try to bring it up and expose it to the light. Five years and some fifteen hundred pages later I was still trolling the murky waters of the Innermost Sea in search of that fabled wreck, which by then I was calling Fountain City. In that time I had found fantastic, shattered hulks and ruins down there, helmets and rimy flatware, chests of moldering silk, astrolabes, the skeletons of men and horses, but nothing that I felt could honestly be considered treasure. And when, at the end of 1992, with the help of my editor Doug Stumpf, I tried one last time to hoist the whole rotten caravel to the surface, it all just fell apart.
In the aftermath of this debacle, though I kept it to myself, I felt bewildered, depressed, and, to be honest, terrified. I was not accustomed to failure, nor to the bathyspheric pressures that weigh on a second novel, particularly where the first has met with any kind of success. The pressure I felt while writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had been entirely different in nature. I’d had no readers then, no book contract, no reputation, nothing but an MFA thesis to be written and a vague sense that in stringing together the seven thousand sentences of that thesis I was forging an identity for myself in the world as a novelist—or else failing abjectly to do so. It never occurred to me that if Mysteries didn’t pan out I would be able to try again; I attempted to put into that book everything I had ever learned or felt, and to use every single word I knew. This purely internal pressure—to become, once and for all, a writer—was thrilling, astringent; it whetted the appetite, and I could feel myself succeeding in my ambition, or so I thought, with each new chapter I wrote. Most of the time the work, however slow or difficult, was also a hell of a lot of fun.
Writing Fountain City,
on the other hand, was mostly no fun at all. Where Mysteries had been a kind of Drake’s voyage, a wild jaunt in a trim ship to make marvelous discoveries and conduct raucous pirate raids on the great ports of American literature, Fountain City was more like the journey of Lewis and Clark, a long, often dismal tramp through a vast terrain in pursuit of a grand but fundamentally mistaken prize. Mosquitoes, sweltering heat, grave doubts, flawed maps—and, in my case, no Pacific Ocean at the end.
What was it about? This, unfortunately, is what I could never quite figure out—the great river of the West my large, well-equipped expedition never managed to find. It was a novel about utopian dreamers, ecological activists, an Israeli spy, a gargantuan Florida real estate deal, the education of an architect, the perfect baseball park, Paris, French cooking, and the crazy and ongoing dream of rebuilding the Great Temple in Jerusalem. It was about loss—lost paradises, lost cities, the loss of the Temple, the loss of a brother to AIDS; and the concomitant dream of Restoration or Rebuilding. It was also, naturally, a love story, an account of a love affair between a young American and a Parisian woman ten years his senior. The action was divided between Paris and the fictitious town of Fountain City, Florida. But I could never get those two halves to stick together convincingly, and I knew just enough about most of the above-mentioned subjects to be able to persuade the reader that they didn’t all belong in the same book together.
So, at the beginning of 1993, after sixty-two months of more or less steady work and four drafts, each longer than the previous one, I dumped it. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my wife, Ayelet, though unwittingly she provided the impetus that led me to leave that long-ago ache of architectural longing forever unexplained. We were living in San Francisco at the time, where Ayelet, then a practicing lawyer, was working as a clerk for a federal judge. She was due to take the California bar exam in July of that year, but one morning in January she. announced that she didn’t want to wait that long, and that, if I had no objection, she planned to register for the exam that was being given at the end of February—six weeks away. She felt she could be ready by then.
This came at the absolute lowest point in my years of work on Fountain City. Every night I went down to my computer in the room under our house on Twenty-Ninth Street and sat for hours, staring at the monitor, dreaming about all the other wonderful books I could have written in the last five years. On the day my wife told me she was going to be largely unavailable for the next six weeks, I went down to my office and found myself, inexplicably, imagining a scene. A straight-laced, troubled young man with a tendency toward melodrama was standing on a backyard lawn at night, holding a tiny winking Derringer to his temple, while on the porch of the nearby house a shaggy, pot-smoking, much older man, who had far more reason to want to die, watched him and tried to decide if what he was seeing was real or not. That was all I had, and yet it was so much more than I had started Fountain City with. I opened a new file and called it X. I started to write, and quickly found the voice of that shaggy old watcher in the shadows.
The first fifty pages wrote themselves in a matter of days. I said nothing to Ayelet or anyone else, but privately I had decided that I would take these six weeks of relative solitude and give this new thing, still in a file called X, a chance to grow. If nothing came of it, I would go back to Fountain City, having wasted only a month and half. What was a month and a half out of five years?
The new book seemed to want to take place in Pittsburgh, and thus, in my basement room, I returned to the true fountain city, the mysterious source of so many of my ideas. I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing, whom it would interest, what my publisher and the critics would think of it, and, sweetest of all, I didn’t give a single thought to what I was trying to say. I just wrote. I had characters. I had their story to tell. And, most important, I had the voice to tell it with. Six weeks later, after Ayelet had taken the bar exam, I took a deep breath and told her that while in all that time I’d done nothing to solve the problems of Fountain City, I did have 117 pages of a novel called Wonder Boys. She paled, then gave me her blessing. At the end of May, when she learned that she had passed the exam, I was two-thirds of the way finished with the first draft.
The hardest part of writing a novel is the contemplation of the distance to the end; and the hardest part of those five years I gave to Fountain City was that every time I contemplated that distance, it was never any shorter; or rather, no matter how close I came to it, I could never seem to arrive. There is no joy like the joy of finishing. “Harry finished the model of Fountain Field,” I wrote of my apprentice architect in Fountain City, who is assigned to the building of a presentation model for a proposed ballpark,
with a week to spare, at three o’clock in the morning. He took off his shirt and whirled it over his head like a lariat, assumed a soul-transporting Jackie Wilson falsetto, and switched from plain old skipping to the cool cool jerk. He jerked past closed office doors, slap, slap, slapping them with his bullwhip shirt. He cool-jerked into the foyer, made a reckless circuit of the receptionist’s desk, banked steeply, and then set off across the drawing room once more. He played the drum solo from “Wipeout” on the drafting tables.
I wrote that passage somewhere in the middle of the fourth year of that expedition, and you can see how thirsty I was. It almost makes me feel sorry for myself, this pathetic attempt to give myself a kind of false taste, four years in, of the sweet nectar of completion. But then I remind myself that if only I’d had more courage, I would have dumped Fountain City years before I ever reached this lamentable state. I would not have given a thought to the money I had already accepted, to the second-novel-savaging critics I imagined I was going to have to face, to the readers, however few or many of them there might be, who were expecting me to take them someplace worth going.
Six weeks after Ayelet passed the bar, I mailed the completed manuscript of a decent first draft of Wonder Boys to Mary Evans, my agent. Then I called her up and told her that I had finally finished my second novel. She said she was pleased, but I thought I could hear a faint note of weariness or wariness enter her voice at the thought of reading yet another interminable draft of Fountain City.
“There’s just one thing you probably should know,” I told her, and then, as I started to cool-jerk my way across my living room, I gave her the welcome news.
THE RECIPE FOR LIFE
THE BEST KNOWN—SHAPED from the clay of the River Moldau, by Rabbi Judah of Prague, to be a servant or protector of the ghetto—is the most dubious, having largely been devised and popularized by a series of novelists and filmmakers over the past hundred or so years. The most ancient is Adam, the original lump of earth into which, on the sixth day of creation, the inspiration of the Divine Name was breathed. But the story of the golem has a hundred variants, from the clay calf that was summoned to life and promptly eaten by two hungry rabbis, Hanina and Oshaya, in Babylonia two thousand years ago to such refinements as Frankenstein’s golem of quilted corpses and Gepetto’s wooden son. As I worked on my novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I discovered that its plot would require the famous Golem of Prague to play a small but crucial role. Once this surprising fact had become apparent to me, I went looking for information on golems, and found an insight into the nature of novel-writing itself.
All golem hunters inevitably end up at the feet of the brilliant Gershom Scholem, whose essay “The Idea of the Golem” (1965) probes dauntingly deep into the remote, at times abstruse sources of the enduring motif of the man of clay brought to life by enchantment. Enchantment, of course, is the work of language; of spell and spiel. A golem is brought to life by means of magic formulas, one word at a time. In some accounts, the animating Name of God is inscribed on the golem’s forehead; in others, the Name is written on a tablet and tucked under the blank gray tongue of the golem. Sometimes the magical word is the Hebrew word for truth, emet; to kill the golem, in this case—to inactivate him—you must erase the initial letter aleph from hi
s brow, leaving only met: dead.
There is good reason, in Scholem’s view, to believe that some accounts of the making of golems are factual. Certain rabbis and adepts during the medieval heyday of kabbalah—those who long pondered the Sefer Yetsirah, or Book of Creation—culminated their studies and proved their aptitude at enchantment by actually making a golem. There were specific guidelines and rituals—recipes, as it were, for golem making. The rabbis did not expect to get a tireless servant, or even a square meal, out of these trials. The ritual itself was the point of the exercise; performing it—reciting long series of complicated alphabetic permutations while walking in circles around the slumbering lump of clay—would induce a kind of ecstatic state, as the adept assumed a privilege ordinarily reserved for God alone: the making of a world. It was analogical magic: as the kabbalist is to God, so is a golem to all creation: a model, a miniature replica, a mirror—like the novel—of the world.
Much of the enduring power of the golem story stems from its ready, if romantic, analogy to the artist’s relation to his or her work. And over the years it has attracted many writers who have seen the metaphorical possibilities in it. On the surface, the analogy may seem facile. The idea of the novelist as the little God of his creation—présent partout et visible nulle part—is a key tenet of the traditional novelist, one that Robert Coover explored and exploded once and for all, it might have been thought, in his The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. But what gripped me, as I read and reread Scholem’s essay, was not the metaphor or allegory of the nature of making golems and novels, but that of the consequences thereof.