The New York Trilogy

  “Maybe. At least it’s an idea. The thing that puzzles me is how you can be so calm about it.”

  “Because I’m married to you and I love you, that’s how. If you decide it’s something you want to do, then I’m for it. I’m not blind, after all. I know you’ve been having trouble with your work, and I sometimes feel that I’m to blame for it. Maybe this is the kind of project you need to get started again.”

  I had secretly been counting on Sophie to make the decision for me, assuming she would object, assuming we would talk about it once and that would be the end of it. But just the opposite had happened. I had backed myself into a corner, and my courage suddenly failed me. I let a couple of days go by, and then I called Stuart and told him I would do the book. This got me another free lunch, and after that I was on my own.

  There was never any question of telling the truth. Fanshawe had to be dead, or else the book would make no sense. Not only would I have to leave the letter out, but I would have to pretend that it had never been written. I make no bones about what I was planning to do. It was clear to me from the beginning, and I plunged into it with deceit in my heart. The book was a work of fiction. Even though it was based on facts, it could tell nothing but lies. I signed the contract, and afterwards I felt like a man who had signed away his soul.

  I wandered in my mind for several weeks, looking for a way to begin. Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge—none of that tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another—for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

  I thought back to something that had happened to me eight years earlier, in June of 1970. Short of money, and with no immediate prospects for the summer, I took a temporary job as a census-taker in Harlem. There were about twenty of us in the group, a commando corps of field workers hired to track down people who had not responded to the questionnaires sent out in the mail. We trained for several days in a dusty second-floor loft across from the Apollo Theatre, and then, having mastered the intricacies of the forms and the basic rules of census-taker etiquette, dispersed into the neighborhood with our red, white, and blue shoulder bags to knock on doors, ask questions, and return with the facts. The first place I went to turned out to be the headquarters of a numbers operation. The door opened a sliver, a head poked out (behind it I could see a dozen men in a bare room writing on long picnic tables), and I was politely told that they weren’t interested. That seemed to set the tone. In one apartment I talked with a half-blind woman whose parents had been slaves. Twenty minutes into the interview, it finally dawned on her that I wasn’t black, and she started cackling with laughter. She had suspected it all long, she said, since my voice was funny, but she had trouble believing it. I was the first white person who had ever been inside her house. In another apartment, I came upon a household of eleven people, none of them older than twenty-two. But for the most part no one was there. And when they were, they wouldn’t talk to me or let me in. Summer came, and the streets grew hot and humid, intolerable in the way that only New York can be. I would begin my rounds early, blundering stupidly from house to house, feeling more and more like a man from the moon. I finally spoke to the supervisor (a fast-talking black man who wore silk ascots and a sapphire ring) and explained my problem to him. It was then that I learned what was really expected of me. This man was paid a certain amount for each form a member of his crew turned in. The better our results, the more money would go into his pocket. “I’m not telling you what to do,” he said, “but it seems to me that if you’ve given it an honest shot, then you shouldn’t feel too bad.”

  “Just give up?” I asked.

  “On the other hand,” he continued philosophically, “the government wants completed forms. The more forms they get, the better they’re going to feel. Now I know you’re an intelligent boy, and I know you don’t get five when you put two and two together. Just because a door doesn’t open when you knock on it doesn’t mean that nobody’s there. You’ve got to use your imagination, my friend. After all, we don’t want the government to be unhappy, do we?”

  The job became considerably easier after that, but it was no longer the same job. My field work had turned into desk work, and instead of an investigator I was now an inventor. Every day or two, I stopped by the office to pick up a new batch of forms and turn in the ones I had finished, but other than that I didn’t have to leave my apartment. I don’t know how many people I invented—but there must have been hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. I would sit in my room with the fan blowing in my face and a cold towel wrapped around my neck, filling out questionnaires as fast as my hand could write. I went in for big households—six, eight, ten children—and took special pride in concocting odd and complicated networks of relationships, drawing on all the possible combinations: parents, children, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, common law spouses, stepchildren, half-brothers, half-sisters, and friends. Most of all, there was the pleasure of making up names. At times I had to curb my impulse towards the outlandish—the fiercely comical, the pun, the dirty word—but for the most part I was content to stay within the bounds of realism. When my imagination flagged, there were certain mechanical devices to fall back on: the colors (Brown, White, Black, Green, Gray, Blue), the Presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Fillmore, Pierce), fictional characters (Finn, Starbuck, Dimmesdale, Budd). I liked names associated with the sky (Orville Wright, Amelia Earhart), with silent humor (Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd), with long homeruns (Killebrew, Mantle, Mays), and with music (Schubert, Ives, Armstrong). Occasionally, I would dredge up the names of distant relatives or old school friends, and once I even used an anagram of my own.

  It was a childish thing to be doing, but I had no qualms. Nor was it hard to justify. The supervisor would not object; the people who actually lived at the addresses on the forms would not object (they did not want to be bothered, especially not by a white boy snooping into their personal business); and the government would not object, since what it did not know could not hurt it, and certainly no more than it was already hurting itself. I even went so far as to defend my preference for large families on political grounds: the greater the poor population, the more obligated the government would feel to spend money on it. This was the dead souls scam with an American twist, and my conscience was clear.

  That was on one level. At the heart of it was the simple fact that I was enjoying myself. It gave me pleasure to pluck names out of thin air, to invent lives that had never existed, that never would exist. It was not precisely like making up characters in a story, but something grander, something far more unsettling. Everyone knows that stories are imaginary. Whatever effect they might have on us, we know they are not true, even when they tell us truths more important than the ones we can find elsewhere. As opposed to the story writer, I was offering my creations directly to the real world, and therefore it seemed possible to me that they could affect this real world in a real way, that they could eventually become a part of the real itself. No writer could ask for more than that.

  All this came back to me when I sat down to write about Fanshawe. Once, I had given birth to a thousand imaginary souls. Now, eight years later, I was going to take a living man and put him in his grave. I w
as the chief mourner and officiating clergyman at this mock funeral, and my job was to speak the right words, to say the thing that everyone wanted to hear. The two actions were opposite and identical, mirror images of one another. But this hardly consoled me. The first fraud had been a joke, no more than a youthful adventure, whereas the second fraud was serious, a dark and frightening thing. I was digging a grave, after all, and there were times when I began to wonder if I was not digging my own.

  Lives make no sense, I argued. A man lives and then he dies, and what happens in between makes no sense. I thought of the story of La Chère, a soldier who took part in one of the earliest French expeditions to America. In 1562, Jean Ribaut left behind a number of men at Port Royal (near Hilton Head, South Carolina) under the command of Albert de Pierra, a madman who ruled through terror and violence. “He hanged with his own hands a drummer who had fallen under his displeasure,” Francis Parkman writes, “and banished a soldier, named La Chère, to a solitary island, three leagues from the fort, where he left him to starve.” Albert was eventually murdered in an uprising by his men, and the half-dead La Chère was rescued from the island. One would think that La Chère was now safe, that having lived through his terrible punishment he would be exempt from further catastrophe. But nothing is that simple. There are no odds to beat, no rules to set a limit on bad luck, and at each moment we begin again, as ripe for a low blow as we were the moment before. Things collapsed at the settlement. The men had no talent for coping with the wilderness, and famine and homesickness took over. Using a few makeshift tools, they spent all their energies on building a ship “worthy of Robinson Crusoe” to get them back to France. On the Atlantic, another catastrophe: there was no wind, their food and water ran out. The men began to eat their shoes and leather jerkins, some drank sea water in desperation, and several died. Then came the inevitable descent into cannibalism. “The lot was cast,” Parkman notes, “and it fell on La Chère, the same wretched man whom Albert had doomed to starvation on a lonely island. They killed him, and with ravenous avidity portioned out his flesh. The hideous repast sustained them till land rose in sight, when, it is said, in a delirium of joy, they could no longer steer their vessel, but let her drift at the will of the tide. A small English bark bore down upon them, took them all on board, and, after landing the feeblest, carried the rest prisoners to Queen Elizabeth.”

  I use La Chère only as an example. As destinies go, his is by no means strange—perhaps it is even blander than most. At least he travelled along a straight line, and that in itself is rare, almost a blessing. In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for. In my first year as a student at Columbia, I walked by a bust of Lorenzo Da Ponte every day on my way to class. I knew him vaguely as Mozart’s librettist, but then I learned that he had also been the first Italian professor at Columbia. The one thing seemed incompatible with the other, and so I decided to look into it, curious to know how one man could wind up living two such different lives. As it turned out, Da Ponte lived five or six. He was born Emmanuele Conegliano in 1749, the son of a Jewish leather merchant. After the death of his mother, his father made a second marriage to a Catholic and decided that he and his children should be baptized. The young Emmanuele showed promise as a scholar, and by the time he was fourteen, the Bishop of Cenada (Monsignore Da Ponte) took the boy under his wing and paid all the costs of his education for the priesthood. As was the custom of the time, the disciple was given his benefactor’s name. Da Ponte was ordained in 1773 and became a seminary teacher, with a special interest in Latin, Italian, and French literature. In addition to becoming a follower of the Enlightenment, he took up with a Venetian noble-woman, and secretly fathered a child. In 1776, he sponsored a public debate at the seminary in Treviso which posed the question whether civilization had succeeded in making mankind any happier. For this affront to Church principles, he was forced to take flight— first to Venice, then to Gorizia, and finally to Dresden, where he began his new career as a librettist. In 1782, he went to Vienna with a letter of introduction to Salieri and was eventually hired as “poeta dei teatri imperiali,” a position he held for almost ten years. It was during this period that he met Mozart and collaborated on the three operas that have preserved his name from oblivion. In 1790, however, when Leopold II curbed musical activities in Vienna because of the Turkish war, Da Ponte found himself out of a job. He went to Trieste and fell in love with an English woman named Nancy Grahl or Krahl (the name is still disputed). From there the two of them went to Paris, and then on to London, where they remained for thirteen years. Da Ponte’s musical work was restricted to writing a few libretti for undistinguished composers. In 1805, he and Nancy emigrated to America, where he lived out the last thirty-three years of his life, for a time working as a shopkeeper in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and dying at the age of eighty-nine—one of the first Italians to be buried in the New World. Little by little, everything had changed for him. From the dapper, unctuous ladies’ man of his youth, an opportunist steeped in the political intrigues of both Church and court, he became a perfectly ordinary citizen of New York, which in 1805 must have looked like the end of the world to him. From all that to this: a hard-working professor, a dutiful husband, the father of four. When one of his children died, it is said, he was so distraught with grief that he refused to leave his house for almost a year. The point being that, in the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.

  I don’t mean to harp on any of this. But the circumstances under which lives shift course are so various that it would seem impossible to say anything about a man until he is dead. Not only is death the one true arbiter of happiness (Solon’s remark), it is the only measurement by which we can judge life itself. I once knew a bum who spoke like a Shakespearean actor, a battered, middle-aged alcoholic with scabs on his face and rags for clothes, who slept on the street and begged money from me constantly. Yet he had once been the owner of an art gallery on Madison Avenue. There was another man I knew who had once been considered the most promising young novelist in America. At the time I met him, he had just inherited fifteen thousand dollars from his father and was standing on a New York street corner passing out hundred dollar bills to strangers. It was all part of a plan to destroy the economic system of the United States, he explained to me. Think of what happens. Think of how lives burst apart. Goffe and Whalley, for example, two of the judges who condemned Charles I to death, came to Connecticut after the Restoration and spent the rest of their lives in a cave. Or Mrs. Winchester, the widow of the rifle manufacturer, who feared that the ghosts of the people killed by her husband’s rifles were coming to take her soul—and therefore continually added rooms onto her house, creating a monstrous labyrinth of corridors and hideouts, so that she could sleep in a different room every night and thereby elude the ghosts, the irony being that during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 she was trapped in one of those rooms and nearly starved to death because she couldn’t be found by the servants. There is also M. M. Bakhtin, the Russian critic and literary philosopher. During the German invasion of Russia in World War II, he smoked the only copy of one of his manuscripts, a book-length study of German fiction that had taken him years to write. One by one, he took the pages of his manuscript and used the paper to roll his cigarettes, each day smoking a little more of the book until it was gone. These are true stories. They are also parables, perhaps, but they mean what they mean only because they are true.

  In his work, Fanshawe shows a particular fondness for stories of this kind. Especially in the notebooks, there is a constant retelling of little anecdotes, and because they are so frequent— and more and more so toward the end—one begins to suspect that Fanshawe felt they could somehow help him to understand himself. O
ne of the very last (from February 1976, just two months before he disappeared) strikes me as significant.

  “In a book I once read by Peter Freuchen,” Fanshawe writes, “the famous Arctic explorer describes being trapped by a blizzard in northern Greenland. Alone, his supplies dwindling, he decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm. Many days passed. Afraid, above all, that he would be attacked by wolves—for he heard them prowling hungrily on the roof of his igloo—he would periodically step outside and sing at the top of his lungs in order to frighten them away. But the wind was blowing fiercely, and no matter how hard he sang, the only thing he could hear was the wind. If this was a serious problem, however, the problem of the igloo itself was much greater. For Freuchen began to notice that the walls of his little shelter were gradually closing in on him. Because of the particular weather conditions outside, his breath was literally freezing to the walls, and with each breath the walls became that much thicker, the igloo became that much smaller, until eventually there was almost no room left for his body. It is surely a frightening thing, to imagine breathing yourself into a coffin of ice, and to my mind considerably more compelling than, say, The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. For in this case it is the man himself who is the agent of his own destruction, and further, the instrument of that destruction is the very thing he needs to keep himself alive. For surely a man cannot live if he does not breathe. But at the same time, he will not live if he does breathe. Curiously, I do not remember how Freuchen managed to escape his predicament. But needless to say, he did escape. The title of the book, if I recall, is Arctic Adventure. It has been out of print for many years.”