I suspect that William Shakespeare—a serious and ambitious man, by all accounts, although a hardy-party sort, if Ben Jonson is to be believed—had times when he just had to grin to himself that they (Queen Elizabeth, James I, the patrons, the groundlings, the actors) allowed him to get away with it.
Yale professor and critic Harold Bloom has been my literary mentor in recent years, my Virgil to guide me through not just the glorious maze of Shakespeare and the Western Canon, but also through the concentric circles of confusion that this Age of Resentment—in politics and academic ideologies—has insisted on turning into either hell or an intellectual wasteland. This too shall pass—this age of semiotic deconstructive assaults on both the tale and the teller, this age of immature feminist fury and new-historicist contempt and post-Marxist vandalism aimed at any excellence that piques their political resentment.
Back through the lonely voice of Harold Bloom to sound Romantic criticism of Harold Goddard and A. C. Bradley, then back further to that always-enjoyed voice of William Hazlitt, and we realize that even Shakespeare had his pets. Shakespeare—that master of what John Keats called “Negative Capability”—will never let us know his own thoughts on politics, or religion, or royalty, or madness, or love, or despair—but his characters encompass the most brazen and subtle facets of all those human emotions (I agree with Bloom’s Bardolotous premise that Shakespeare, in a very real sense, invented the modern human concept of personality)—and some of his characters must represent the creative singularity that was William Shakespeare more than others.
Falstaff does not embody vitality; he is vitality. Hamlet does not reflect depths of personality; he redefines human personality. Iago does not play at being a villain; he out-Satans Satan in villainous creativity. Rosalind does not just exercise her wit; she extends new frontiers of joyous wit. King Lear does not encounter nihilism; he falls into a black hole of it and pulls us in with him.
I plan to spend however many decades or years that are left me rereading and rediscovering Shakespeare (along with a very finite number of my other favorite authors), but I already know the sad truth. As one scientist described quantum physics and another scientist described the workings of ecology—“It is not more complicated than we think; it is more complicated than we can think.”
We don’t really know diddly-squat about the man who was William Shakespeare and we never will if we search for him through his characters. Was he as self-conscious as Hamlet? As ambitious as MacBeth? As wise as Rosalind? As anti-Semitic as his portrayal of Shylock would have us believe? As contemptuous of the idea of redemptive love as so many of his plays would have us believe? Or as in awe of the destructive power of unleashed love as so many of his plays would have us believe? Or as bisexual as the Sonnets would have us think?
Why am I talking about Shakespeare? Or about Stephen King?
While I’m not trying to hobnob with either man, I share the same union card with them. While our abilities are light-years apart, we three have the same concerns. And sooner or later—sooner for us, later for those who read us after we’re dead (so few of us are read after we’re dead!)—those who look for us will have to look in the tidepools of energy we leave behind in our characters.
As I write these words in the early hours and months of the 21st Century, the great, grinding, resentful machinery of academic criticism is being run by the dead hands of a few French midgets with names like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. France—a nation that most probably has given us no great writers or great literature in all of the 20th Century—nonetheless controls the discussion of literature at the beginning of the 21st Century by the simple sophistry of denying the centrality of writers or the reality of characters or of the transcendent power of language and literature itself. As Tom Wolfe put it in a recent essay—“They [Foucault and Derrida and their lycanthropic legions since] began with the hyperdilation of a pronouncement of Nietzsche’s to the effect that there can be no absolute truth, merely many ‘truths,’ which are the tools of various groups, classes, or forces. From this, the deconstructionists proceeded to the doctrine that language is the most insidious tool of all. The philosopher’s duty was to deconstruct the language, expose its hidden agendas, and help save the victims of the American ‘establishment’: women, the poor, nonwhites, homosexuals, and hardwood trees.”
Shakespeare seems to have left behind no opinion on hardwood trees (although his favorite larks, such as As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were set in lovely forests, dark and deep). What Shakespeare did leave behind was a sense of his unique consciousness, as well as his own intellectual preoccupations and human appetites—preserved in the time capsule of his plays like a multifaceted mirror that gives us (and gave him) our glimpses of human potential named Hamlet and Iago and Falstaff and Cleopatra and Rosalind and Lear.
My own characters, dear to me only, may be—must be—wildly lesser in degree and kind, but they are still made central to me by the very similarity of their varied distortions, and that cracked mirror of my own invention shows me people—(all right, characters, not people, but never just words or the spent social energies Foucault would have us substitute for humanity)—shows me characters with the names of Richard Baedecker and Melanie Fuller and Joe Lucas and Jeremy Bremen and Duane McBride and Cordie Cooke and Paul Duré and Raul Endymion and Aenea and Dale Stewart and Robert C. Luczak.
And now Norman Roth.
Samuel Johnson once gave a simple recipe for clear thinking that serves just as well for clear seeing—“First, clear your mind of can’t.”
What Norman Roth sees in “The End of Gravity”—what he tries to see, what he fails to see and yet intuits as truth through his own failure to see—may not be a compelling vision in any sense of that word “compelling,” but it is an attempt, by a dying man at the end of one short human era, at clear sight, at Rembrandt’s fierce gaze across worlds and time, at whole sight.
Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
THE END OF GRAVITY
A Story for the Screen
THIRTY-EIGHT thousand feet above the northern polar ice, Norman Roth dreams about floating.
He is four, perhaps five years old, and his father is teaching him how to swim in the ocean near their summer rental cottage on Long Island. Roth lies on his back in the salty water and forces himself to relax in the firm cradle of his father’s arms. The waves break against the shore and the boy forces his nervous breathing to match the cadence of the surf. “Relax,” says his father. “Just float. Let the ocean do the work. I’m going to let go.”
His father releases him, keeping his arms ready to support the child if he goes under. He does not go under. The small boy floats, rising and dropping on the long waves, eyes fiercely closed, skinny arms firmly extended, skinny legs wide on the water. Eyes still closed, the child smiles in terror and joy. The noise of the surf is very loud.
Roth opens his eyes. The sound of the surf becomes the sound of the air moving through the ventilator in the darkened first-class cabin of the 747 and Norman Roth is no longer a child, but a tired, middle-aged man. He rubs his eyes, adjusts the ventilator above him, and closes his eyes again.
A darkened hospital room. Roth, apparently the same age as on the plane, is sitting next to his father’s deathbed in the darkest hours of the night. The old man has been in a coma for days now. Exhausted, alone in the dark, Roth listens to his father’s labored breathing—not so different from the sound of the surf sliding onto the long-forgotten Long Island beach. Roth glances at his watch in the dim light.
Suddenly his father sits straight up in bed. The old man’s eyes are open and staring at something beyond the foot of the bed. His gaze is not frightened, but interested—very, very interested.
Startled, Roth leans closer and puts his arm around the older man’s cancer-sharpened shoulders. “Dad?”
His father ignores him and continues to stare. Slowly, his father’s right arm comes up and he points at something beyond the f
oot of the bed.
Roth looks. There is nothing there. The sound of the surf is very loud.
ROTH is met at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport by an attractive woman who identifies herself as Dr. Vasilisa Ivanova, his liaison and interpreter during his stay. In the middle of shaking hands, she sees his expression freeze. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Roth?”
“No, no…nothing. It’s just that you remind me of someone.” Roth has never said that to a woman.
Vasilisa smiles dubiously.
“You remind me strongly of someone but I can’t think of who,” continues Roth with a rueful smile. “Jet lag, perhaps. Or just age.”
“Perhaps,” says Vasilisa. “At any rate, it is an honor to have such an esteemed author to visit and write about our program. The winner of the American Pulitzer Prize and someone who came close to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. We are honored.”
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” Roth says tiredly.
“Pardon me?”
“A stupid American idiom,” says Roth. “Your English is excellent. Are you from Energia or the Russian Space Agency’s public relations?”
It is Vasilisa’s turn to smile without humor. “Actually, I was a flight surgeon at TsUP. After Mir was brought down the number of surgeons was reduced in the Russian Space Agency and I moved to administration rather than be forced to leave the program. I volunteered for this chance to show you around.”
“Soup?” says Roth.
“TsUP,” she says, explaining the acronym for the Russian Space Agency’s mission control center.
They come out into the blowing snow where a Mercedes and driver wait for them.
“You have been to Russia before, Mr. Roth?”
“Call me Norman. Yes, once. In the early eighties. For a literary conference.”
“It has changed to your eye?” asks Vasilisa as the car carries them out into traffic.
Roth looks at the traffic—so much more traffic than during his first visit almost twenty years ago, Mercedeses and other foreign luxury cars cutting each other off in the high-speed lanes—and then looks beyond the highway at the Stalinist apartment buildings and frozen fields and abandoned construction beyond. “Changed? Yes and no,” he says.
“We will go to the Hotel National and get you—how do you say it?—settled into your suite,” says Vasilisa as they approach the city. “You are tired? You would like to sleep?”
“I am tired, but I will not be able to sleep. It’s morning here. I’ll wait for tonight to try to get on a regular schedule.”
“Then perhaps you would like to see TsUP?”
“By all means,” says Roth. “Let’s see soup.”
ROTH in the brightly lighted office of his editor at The New York Times Magazine.
“Norman, we’re excited about you doing this piece for the magazine, but I feel bad about asking you to spend your Christmas vacation in Moscow.”
Roth shrugs. “What do I know about Christmas vacations?”
“If it’s any consolation,” says feature editor Barney Koeppe, “you end the week with a big-deal New Year’s Eve party at one of the cosmonaut’s dachas. Everybody you need to talk to is going to be there. They say that Gorbachev is on the guest list.”
“Whoopee,” says Roth. “I’d like to know why you thought of me for this piece, Barney. I don’t give the slightest shit about the space program and I know even less. You’re sending a humanist and a Jew and an anti-business liberal and a technological illiterate into this den of post-marxist hyper-capitalist possibly anti-Semitic techno-weenies. Why?”
“Remember Mailer’s book about the moon landing—Of a Fire on the Moon?”
“Vaguely. That was thirty years ago.”
“Well, Mailer didn’t know a thing about the space program either, but he was a brilliant writer and the book was a brilliant piece of reportage.”
“Yeah,” says Roth, “but people cared about the moon landing. No one gives a damn about the International Space Station or the Russian Space Agency.”
“That’s why this piece is important, Norman. It’s time to see this space-exploration thing from a different angle—or give it up altogether. NASA’s funding is getting cut again and it’s reviewing everything, including Russia’s part in this space station project. Plus the Russians are sulkier than ever after they had to dump Mir into the ocean last year. Everybody’s pissed at everybody and now the Russian Space Agency is planning to send another paying space tourist up and NASA administrators have their panties in a bunch about it.”
“I can’t even remember the name of the first tourist the Russians sent up,” admits Roth.
“Denis Tito,” says the editor. “He paid twenty million bucks. One of your jobs is to find out how much this new guy is paying.”
“He’s also American?”
“Yeah. Some Wall Street wünderkind with a background in mathematics. The word is that he’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal—certifiably crazy. He wants to watch cloud tops the whole time he’s up there.”
Roth shrugs again. “Sounds like a good plan to me. It’s better than torturing fruit flies or whatever the hell the astronauts do up there.”
The editor puts his arm around Roth. “Are you all right, Norman?”
“Sure I’m all right. What do you mean?”
“I mean—first that long siege with your dad dying last month. And your bypass operation in August. I know from John that you haven’t been sleeping well for a long time, even before the heart surgery. I mean, this damned story isn’t worth killing yourself for.”
“I’m not volunteering to fly to the goddamned space station, Barney. I’m just getting paid to go to Russia to talk to the idiots who do.”
THE Russian Space Agency headquarters is a hulking mausoleum of a building in a northern suburb of Moscow. The Mercedes carrying Roth and Vasilisa bounces over deep potholes and has to skirt stretches of real chasms where roadwork has been started and then abandoned on the dreary sidestreet leading to the center.
The interior of TsUP is drafty, dank, labrynthine, echoing, and dark. Vasilisa explains that most of the lights are kept off to save money. The few technicians and administrators they pass in the wide hallways wear heavy sweaters or overcoats. As they enter the Mission Control room itself, two cats rush by Roth’s legs.
“You allow cats in here?”
“How else to control the mice?” says Vasilisa.
Roth is introduced to flight directors, deputy flight directors, flight surgeons, ground controllers, cosmonauts, former cosmonauts, Energia executives, TsUP administrators, several chain-smoking engineers, and a janitor. No one, not even the janitor, spares Roth more than a few seconds for a cursory handshake before turning back to their conversations or cigarettes. No one seems to be working. On the largest screen against the far wall, a ground track shows the space station’s slow progress around the Earth. It is over the South Pacific. There is a large model of the late, lamented Mir station atop one of the consoles. There is no model of the ISS.
“The American team is currently controlling the station from Houston’s Mission Control,” says Vasilisa. “TsUP was in charge of the first mission when there was only one module. Since the second and later modules were added, most of the space station operation is handled from Houston.”
“What exactly do the Russian ground controllers do then?” asks Roth.
Vasilisa makes a graceful gesture with her hands. “Provide comm support. Plan for the next Soyuz launch and Progress robot resupply mission. Communicate with the Russian cosmonaut onboard. Oversee some of the science experiments.”
Roth looks at her and waits.
“We miss Mir,” Vasilisa says at last.
AS dawn approaches, Norman Roth lies in his chilly Moscow hotel room and dreams about Mir.
He sees it as if from a deep-diving submersible approaching a sunken wreck, the Titanic perhaps. The water is black and the submersible’s spotlights throw only thin be
ams through the cold currents, illuminating seaweed, schools of ugly fish, shifting silt. The only sound is the microphone-rasp of Roth’s breathing. Suddenly there is Mir looming out of the darkness. Transparent sea creatures float in front of the wreck’s airlocks, its docking ports, its darkened solar panels.
Roth moves his submersible closer to the hulk, floating in past the damaged Spektr science module, drifting past the Kvant module, pausing close to the core module where the cosmonauts and astronauts had lived and slept and eaten. There is a round porthole there and the submersible’s beams illuminate it and stab into the darkness within.
A white face stares out. A young girl’s face. The sound of Roth’s breathing halts in shock. The girl opens her eyes. Suddenly there is a second face in the porthole, eyes staring but not at Roth—at something beyond. It is Roth’s father.
Roth gasps awake in his hotel room, holding his chest.
THE flight south to Baikonur takes a little more than two hours in the Tupolev Tu-134 jet and there are only three passengers besides Dr. Vasilisa Ivanova and Norman Roth. He is surprised to learn that Russia’s launch center is not in Russia, but in the nation of Kazakhstan, perched on the edge of the dying Aral Sea. His guide and interpreter explains that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin had been lucky to negotiate a lease for the isolated military base and adjacent city that had been the top-secret launch center and site of the USSR’s space glories for more than three decades.