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Editor’s Note

“Is it a book then . . . that you’re working on?”

“I wouldn’t call it a book, really.” Felix replied evenly, his knuckles white on the balcony railing.

“But through all our talks, you’ve never once mentioned it!” the Professor, now truly hurt, blurted mournfully. “How can that be?” Then the question authors dread above all others:

“Pray, what’s it about?”

Like his stand-in Felix, my uncle abhorred the Professor’s question, and my mother warned me never to ask him. The first time was the summer of 1989, when Charlie rented a house near ours on Cape Cod. Charlie didn’t quite fit on the Cape—he had no affinity for water (“the sea means stupidity”), nor a family to indulge at the mini-golf courses—and his sleek black Acura with its trunk jammed full of Deutsche Gramophone CDs stood parked all summer in the sandy driveway of his cottage like a rebuke to the entire peninsula. Afterward, though, we inferred that it had been a good summer for work. The book he was writing then, this book, was at that point only a little behind schedule. Charlie had averaged a new book every three years since his late twenties, and now, in his early fifties, at his peak, his career should have been moving along briskly. Only four years earlier, in 1985, he had produced a volume of essays, The Post-Modern Aura, which despite being called “Hegelian” for its “daunting” prose and “exquisitely complex argument,” had been reviewed in over thirty publications and mentioned in mainstream magazines like Time. His previous novel, White Jazz, had been a bestseller. Every few months his byline appeared in some publication—an essay, a book review, even a profile of George Brett for Sport.

Don’t ask what your uncle is writing about—but I was eighteen at the time and less intimidated than I should have been. One day, a few months after that summer on the Cape, while visiting Charlie in St. Louis, where he taught in the English department of Washington University, I waited until he went to campus and slipped in his office. Charlie’s goal when he started each day was to come up with one or two, possibly three sentences he liked, and to get there he handwrote his initial drafts, then sent those pages to an assistant, who returned them typewritten on plain white sheets, which Charlie then cut into slivers, isolating individual sentences before reinserting them with Scotch tape in the handwritten notebooks or tacking them to a wall. Those tacked-up sentence slivers were before me now, along with dozens if not hundreds of pink and yellow note cards scrawled with phrases, lists, and snatches of dialogue. The book, in other words, was in front of my face, vertical and spread out. No drawers had to be opened, no papers shuffled. The office itself was surprisingly clean and easy to move around in, the only clutter being fifty or so briarwood pipes and an astonishing number of library books.

I stayed in the office until the Acura pulled in the driveway an hour or so later, by which time I still had no idea what the book was about. Charlie’s heavily stylized shorthand (it’s no accident that Ainoha, Felix’s wife, wonders of the Professor, “how you could sleep with a man with such bad handwriting”) was often indecipherable even to assistants who had worked with him for years, and as for the sentences that had been typed, they were typically fragments (“army of deserters,” “mad for sanity”) or mystically oblique pronouncements such as “History has a way of happening a little later than you think” or “In Russia you always have to buy the horse twice.” Sometimes they contained no more than a single word. (“Deungulate.”)

However, the question also has to be asked, even if I had found some synopsis for the unfinished book, would it have made a difference? Charlie’s books resist summary—how, for example, would you distill the plot of White Jazz? (“Sandy, a young man who works for an information technology company, sleeps around”?) How would you describe The Post-Modern Aura—as a book about art, literature, history, or simply the human condition? Even sympathetic readers can find themselves struggling to say what Charlie’s books are about. (Paul West, attempting to describe The Promisekeeper in a 1968 review for The Times, called it “not so much a story as an exhibition, not so much a prophecy stunt as a stunted process, not so much a black comedy as a kaleidoscopic psychodrama.”)

Over the next several years Charlie continued to work on his mysterious book in St. Louis and New York (where he lived when he wasn’t teaching), as well as various parts of Europe, Russia, and the US. He and my parents frequently traveled together: all of us sat with him in restaurants and walked through museums in places like Santa Fe, Chicago, and Kansas City and did not ask him about the book.

But then a surprising thing happened: Charlie began to talk about it. I can’t quite remember when it became clear that he was not going to lunge across the table if we brought it up, but some part of him softened, something opened up, and if you didn’t press him too much you could extract a few details—which of course weren’t always that enlightening.

“It’s the great un-American novel,” he would say in a cheerful mood, or “it’s a novel for people who hate novels, a novel pretending to be a memoir that’s really a history”—or something like that. Sometimes he would go on at length, easefully sketching out major characters, including the most important character of all, Cannonia, the invented country in which the book was set. Sometimes he would simply say “it’s indescribable—nothing like it has ever been written,” and there’d be nothing to do except let the conversation move on.

The openness could have been reassuring, a sign that Charlie was on top of his book and didn’t fear talking it away. The more he spoke, though, the more I worried, in part because the book he was describing sounded not just indescribable but unwriteable. First, there was its premise: Charlie said he was going to write the history of a place which did not exist but wherein virtually everything described—characters, events, locales—was real, drawn from actual sources. That alone explained why the book was taking so long: Charlie had gotten bogged down in research. (A grant proposal I later discovered listed the primary texts he was using as “obscure diaries, self-serving memoirs, justifiably forgotten novels, carping correspondence, partisan social and diplomatic histories, black folktales and bright feuilletons.”) But it wasn’t the only reason to be nervous; there was also Charlie’s intention to somehow merge his fake-but-real history with a spy thriller, a cold war novel of suspense. Was such a book even possible? Wasn’t a spy thriller supposed to be brisk and plotted, and history (even pseudo-history) ruminative and disjointed? How would you blend the two genres? And then there was Charlie’s insistence that the book, despite its writerly ambitions, would somehow be “accessible and commercially viable,” containing not one but “several” movies. This seemed least fathomable of all—the most uncompromising writer ever, compromising? Bowing to conventional taste? Altogether the project seemed impossible, even for Charlie, who once vowed to “write books that no one else could write” and who would have rather changed careers than give up the pursuit of new forms.

“You must push your head through the wall,” Kafka says in an essay quoted at the end of The Post-Modern Aura. “It is not difficult to penetrate, for it is made of thin paper. But what is difficult is not to let yourself be deceived by the fact that there is already an extremely deceptive painting on the wall showing you pushing your head through it.”

Maybe this time Charlie was pushing too hard.

* * *

About eight years later and a month or so after Charlie’s death in 2006, I went back to his office—not the one in St. Louis but the one in New York, which was in a high-rise on West 61st Street called The Alfred. The space was as Charlie had left it before he died, and at the bottom of a closet, underneath an assortment of blankets, Italian suits, and hunting clothes, I found an old television still murmuring, its picture tube faintly aglow. It had been five months since Charlie was there, but I had the sense that the inflamed set had been attempting its manic, muffled communication even longer. The temperature inside the closet was at least one hundred degrees.

Unlike the office I had been in fifteen years earlier, this one was chaotic and even a bit squalid, cluttered with foldable picnic tables, overstuffed vinyl chairs, and still-running air purifiers clogged with De La Concha tobacco dust. The couches were stained and burned. Every level surface had been covered by manuscript pages, notebooks, disassembled newspapers, quackish-sounding financial newsletters, and advertisements for pills, potions, and vitamins. The entire Central European history and literature sections of the Washington University library seemed to be on hand, plus hundreds of books on espionage and psychoanalysis. I made a list of titles near Charlie’s desk: “Freud and Cocaine,” “Werewolf and Vampire in Romania,” “Escape from the CIA,” “A Lycanthropy Reader,” “Mind Food and Smart Pills.”

Back in the 1990s, when Charlie moved into the Alfred, the feature of his apartment he had been proudest of was a custom-built series of cubbyholes spanning one entire wall, which he would use to organize the Cannonia manuscript. Like his openness when discussing the book, the shelves had a reassuring aspect—after all, they were finite (you could see where they ended) and therefore so must be the book!

But the actual filing system I discovered after Charlie’s death bespoke madness, the cubbyholes having been neglected or filled with items that had nothing to do with Cannonia. The actual manuscript was stored in dozens of sealed Federal Express boxes which had apparently been sent back and forth from New York to St. Louis and vice versa—draft after draft after draft after draft, so many that it was impossible to tell which one was the most recent. The endlessly revised and unrevised manuscripts piled up under the picnic tables and filled up closets, many of them unopened, possibly going back years. Also in the apartment were hundreds of sealed manila envelopes containing those cut-out, typed-up sentences—“Angry hope is what drives the world,” “He had brains but not too many,” “Women fight only to kill”—which it appeared Charlie had also been mailing, one tiny sliver per envelope, whether to an assistant or himself wasn’t clear.

Charlie had several helpers at The Alfred—unofficially, the doormen, who knew he only left the building to go to the Greek diner two blocks away, and to call the diner’s manager when he did to make sure he arrived. There was also a young woman he had hired to fix his virus-flooded Gateway and provide data entry—in the office I found her flyer with its number circled, the services it advertised including not only computer repair but martial arts instruction and guitar lessons. I met her a few times after Charlie’s death and we talked about the book, which she claimed Charlie had finally finished. “I know because we wrote it together,” she said. “He thought up the ideas for the scenes and I wrote them.” But she never showed me the completed, final manuscript, and a few weeks after we met she stopped returning calls.

* * *

Here is the story of Charlie’s book, I think. In the 1980s Charlie wrote a novel, the story of Felix, the bankrupt “breaker of crazy dogs and vicious horses,” and the Professor, a certain Viennese psychoanalyst who brings Felix neurotic animals and theories of the mind. This modestly-sized, thoroughly old-fashioned book “split the middle,” to use one of Charlie’s favorite phrases, between fantasy and autobiography—Charlie, of course, being neither a Central European aristocrat living on an abandoned royal hunting preserve, nor an acquaintance of Freud. He was, however, a one-time breeder of dogs who in his forties owned an expansive farm and kennel in one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia (near Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia), where, like Felix, he imported trees and animals from all over the world and satisfied his desire to live in isolation from other intellectuals. Losing the farm, as he did in the mid-1980s (to inflation, as he described it—inflation also being the scourge of several of Charlie’s books, it is worth noting), was surely the novel’s impetus.

“I wanted to write a long novel about the farm,” he once told an interviewer, “but the farm was so hurtful to me in many ways, not only economically but in terms of the loss of beloved animals,” as well as what he called a “nineteenth-century” existence. So he wrote a short novel instead, one that was a throwback as much as the farm. In many ways it is a response—positive and hopeful, for all the unhappiness it apparently came out of—to the wrenching blankness of White Jazz and The Post-Modern Aura, works that depict spiritual suffering in an age of multiple, overlapping determinisms. For if nothing else, Felix lives in a world where his own agency matters, and where meaningful connections (with his wife, his animals, the Professor, and perhaps above all the land he lives on) are possible.

Charlie could have published the story of Felix and the Professor in the early ’90s, roughly maintaining his schedule of a book every few years. But one of Charlie’s idiosyncrasies as a writer is that he would often write something, then put it aside, and eventually find an unexpected way to combine it with other material he was working on. In the case of the book inspired by the farm, he decided to hold off in favor of incorporating it within a massively enlarged work to be harvested from the book’s fantastical setting—Cannonia. Now instead of one book there would be roughly nine, divided into three volumes, the first being In Partial Disgrace, which would contain the story of Felix and the Professor, though pushed all the way to the end. The second, “Learnt Hearts,” would take place in Russia a decade or so later and center on Felix’s relationship not with Freud but Pavlov. And the third, “Lost Victories,” would move to postwar America.

Having thus reenvisioned his tidy coastal steamer as a three-decker battleship, Charlie set out to write an introduction of suitable vastness, providing centuries of background and introducing characters who would not reappear for thousands of pages. The nature of the project all but required him to take this approach, if he was to create the world necessary to sustain an epic. The story itself could wait. Characters could get away with announcing themselves in the grandest possible manner, then vanish. Charlie’s passion for history and obscure primary sources could be indulged. It was all part of the excitement, the buildup, the setting of an appropriate tone.

Ten years later, Charlie was still writing the overture to his symphony, as Joshua Cohen notes. And not surprisingly, the time it was taking, plus the future amount of work he could surely see coming, not to mention the embarrassment of attempting such a behemoth, weighed on him as much as the unpayable generations of debt from Semper Vero weigh on Felix. Physically he was a wreck. A lifelong alcoholic who frequently stunned even the people who knew him best with his capacity for self-destruction and recovery, Charlie had curtailed his drinking in the 1980s through Alcoholics Anonymous and white-knuckle effort, then lost control in the ’90s, undoubtedly in part due to the stress of Cannonia. Toward the end of the decade his body began to break down, and he spent much of the following years in the hospital, where doctors at first thought he might have suffered a stroke or the onset of Parkinson’s. Intermittently unable to speak or walk, he put aside the trilogy for long stretches, struggled with depression, and when the wherewithal to write eventually returned, started a pair of new books instead (a history of American education and a long essay on terrorism.) He also became estranged from family, saw his marriage end, and reduced his teaching to the point where he was scarcely seen on campus.

During these years Charlie seemed to answer conflictingly every time he was asked if the book was done. In 1998, it was three-quarters finished, in 2005, only two-thirds, while in 2002 it was complete. His assistant in St. Louis believed he might never stop rearranging the table of contents and inserting new pages, and in fact he never did.

The first time I read a draft of In Partial Disgrace, Charlie was still alive, and reading it all but put me into despair. Page after page after page, nothing but setting or background. Cannonia was certainly a fascinating place, but it appeared to be one in which things only happened, usually in the distant past—there was virtually no present, no now. I was confused also because so much of the novel Charlie had talked about for so long seemed to be missing. Where was Freud? Where was Pavlov? Where were the battle scenes, and where, other than Rufus, who vanished from the story almost as soon as he appeared, were the spooks? After four hundred pages I put it down—obviously I held only a fragment of the overall work to come, and there was nothing to do but wait.

Then after Charlie died I found the story of Felix and the Professor, a self-contained, fully formed novel that was alive in its language, arresting in its ideas, and humanly engaging in its depiction of a friendship between two painfully isolated men. Like the television at the bottom of the closet, it pulsed with warmth, and the task became how to disentomb it. Mostly it was a question of moving material around rather than discarding it. In Partial Disgrace does have some elements of a conventional novel—the story of Felix and the Professor is an actual story, told in a relatively straightforward way—but Charlie hadn’t gotten into it quick enough, as his own notes on a late draft seemed to suggest. Felix did not even appear until a third of the way into the book, and the Professor not until a hundred pages further. So we took some of the Psalmanazar family back story—a considerable chunk of the book, which Charlie had stacked up front, posing a blockade to even the most patient reader—and found points later on where it could be inserted naturally.

Next was sorting out the book’s multiple narratives. In Partial Disgrace begins in the voice of Rufus, then shifts, at times disorientingly, between the accounts of Iulus, Felix, and the Professor. Rufus is clearly meant to return at some point but never does; Iulus, meanwhile, has a habit of talking about events in the future that never happen. Given Charlie’s fervent desire that the book be accessible, a certain amount of streamlining seemed warranted, as long as it preserved the essential thrust of each chapter and section. Like all of Charlie’s work, In Partial Disgrace shows a carefully balanced interplay of ideas, and as much as possible I wanted to preserve that balance, while giving it its fullest expression.

A note about sourcing: late in the editing of this book it was discovered that a small number of passages were borrowed from primary sources without attribution, which is not surprising given that the project was to write the history of an imaginary place based on real places and events. Whether Charlie intended to eventually provide credit is impossible to say—that is, unless some answer turns up in his papers, which hasn’t happened yet. However, the papers are vast and dense, and there may be more to come from them, including further adventures in Cannonia.

The publication of this book was helped by many people, including: Jeremy M. Davies, John O’Brien, Marie Lay, Paul Winner, Lawrence Levy, Norma Hurlburt, Sharon Griffin, and James, Nicolas, and June Howe.

BEN RYDER HOWE

Staten Island, 2012