Brightness Falls (11 page)

He did not think of his own mind as being particularly American, however, though he was spawned in Boise, Idaho, the product of a taciturn Swedish mother and a Russian Jewish father who taught high school English and claimed kinship with the great story writer Isaac Babel. Victor had not remotely felt at home in Boise and had begun to find his place in the world only when he arrived at Yale at the age of sixteen and discovered Europe in the comp lit department. While he did not, like fellow Idahoan Ezra Pound, remove himself across the ocean, he did imagine that he stood outside the culture, critical and aloof, quarantined at an Ellis Island of the spirit with the disease of his art. A hundred years after Henry James had fled the raw continent, Victor mused, the consciousness of his native land remained barely half forged. Americans were still radical materialists. More innocent than Kalahari bushmen, who were adepts at reading signs and symbols, Americans took everything at face value—words, signs, rhetoric, faces—as if reality itself were so much legal tender. For Victor it was a treacherous text composed by a necromancer, diabolically resistant to analysis. Even the phrase "face value" suggested to a mind like Victor Propp's a labyrinth of interpretation, of masks and falsity and deceit, divergences of appearance and reality, rancorous divorces between signifier and signified, the apparent solidity of the words collapsing underfoot, feathering out and deliquescing into Derridean twilight, surfaces giving way suddenly, like the street along which Victor's taxi was bucking at this very moment, ripped up and peeled back after a gas main explosion to reveal networks of pipe and wire and rat-infested tunnel.

In a small notebook, Victor wrote
Free Lunch... Manifest Destiny... American Mind.
This brought his total output for the morning to some forty words, the past three hours having been devoted to the fashioning of a thirty-three-word sentence fragment and six parenthetical phone calls. Writing was self-inflicted torture,
déjeuner
a blessed relief.

Young Calloway was paying for today's lunch. Propp was intrigued by Calloway's mind precisely because it was so American, so different from his own, standing as if on firm ground where Victor descried quicksand. Calloway reminded Victor of those cartoon characters who were able to walk on the air so long as they didn't know there was an abyss underneath them. Naive, in a word—but an interesting, almost exemplary naivete, having to do with youth and an admirable brashness. Like an athlete, he had a pure, practical kind of knowledge upon which Victor wished to draw. He had launched the careers of Jeff Pierce and several other not insignificant writers at an age when most publishing slaves were still typing letters. Approaching sixty, Propp often worried that he had waited too long to make his decisive literary move, and he was reassured by the rapt interest of the bright young man. Harold Stone and his peers still ran the show, but Propp knew which generation would pass judgment on his own. And in his darker moments he suspected he had exhausted Harold's faith in his genius, as well as his patience. Russell might just accomplish something noteworthy or even spectacular, particularly if given a push, and Victor had an idea he wished to set into motion. Having renounced the world for his priestly vocation, Victor cultivated a Jesuitical interest in the mechanics of power.

As for the price of lunch, Calloway and his employers expected Propp someday to deliver the book on which he had been working for twenty years; in the meantime the young man considered himself amply rewarded with the company and conversation of the legendary novelist, while Victor tried to probe Russell's innocence, his representative nature as one of the best and brightest of a barbaric native culture. It was a pleasantly disguised system of exchange and credit in which, by Victor Pröpp's reckoning, he came out way ahead. Propp estimated he had dined five or six hundred times with editors in the course of writing his second novel.

For Russell, the planning and execution of lunch could consume half a day. He didn't doubt that early hunter-gatherers had had it easier— step outside the cave and pick some berries, impale a mammoth on your spear, wait for lightning to strike a nearby tree in order to provide cooking fire, no problem. The late-twentieth-century editor, by contrast, faced daunting logistical problems. If you were the instigator of the meal you had to choose a restaurant—not as easy as it might sound, questions of the status, expectations and physical location of the diners arising at every turn. Also questions of your own ability to command a reservation. Although Victor Propp lived fairly modestly, he was a snob when it came to spending other people's money, and he'd put in a specific request today for the local branch of Harry's Bar in Venice, located in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which he liked for its Levantine literary associations and its Himalayan prices.

So in pursuit of the daily lunch your assistant called and made a reservation, or, as in this case, pleaded unsuccessfully. Then you panicked. Previously, in another lifetime, you would have called up your boss, Harold Stone, and asked him if he could put a word in, pride-wounding though it was to show him that you, his handpicked successor and an ostensibly happening guy making a name for himself out there in the big world, had not yet made enough of a name to get your own table. But now you doubted that he would get you a reservation at McDonald's. So instead you called Jerry Kleinfeld, the publisher of Cor-bin, Dern. Subsequently you called your lunchmate to confirm, then usually a cab in midday traffic ... a wait for the table, the question of whether or not to order a cocktail, a glass of wine with the meal, a bottle of wine... not wishing nowadays to appear a hopeless alcoholic or unconscious of the whole health issue while not wishing to look like a tight-ass or tightwad, either. Dining with the old martini-drinking boys of the business, and novelists in general, one had to be prepared to ruin the afternoon in an attempt to keep up. But Victor Propp was a one-glass-of-wine epicurean, so that part was easy. Victor didn't cloud his mind; he kept it clear for self-contemplation, syntax aikido, conspiracy theories and other forms of mind-fuck.

Being entrusted the care and feeding of Victor Propp was presumably a mark of being chosen, although Russell sometimes wondered. Victor was a long-term, highly speculative literary investment, a sophisticated instrument—Corbin, Dern's most exotic holding. In 1961, Propp had published a delicate coming-of-age novel called
New Haven Evenings.
The story of a Propp-like second-generation American who goes to Yale to become a poet and falls in love with a duplicitous Daughter of the American Revolution, it collected respectful, encouraging reviews as well as a Prix de Rome fellowship for the young author. Since then Propp had entered an almost purely theoretical realm in which, as someone once said of E. M. Forster, his reputation grew with each book he failed to publish. The word "genius" was increasingly appended to his name.

Propp's work-in-progress gained stature and renown with each passing year in which it failed to appear, while the fame of his contemporaries waxed and waned according to conventional market principles as they predictably published fifth, sixth and seventh novels. Fragments of the untitled novel infrequently found their way into literary journals, fraught with the Promethean labor of their own creation, somehow conveying the sense of samizdat: scratched on the damp rock walls of the author's prison cell, copied and recopied, memorized, swallowed, and discharged after a tortured routing via Baltic cities and tramp steamers to the sub-basement printing house. The subject of this long-anticipated work seemed to be the author himself, in every phase of his development from the embryo, one of the most famous passages to date being the heroic monologue of the embryonic protagonist recounting the tides, rhythms and developmental struggles of the amniotic world as he delivered himself from the womb by sheer force of will. One feminist critic, wondering about his mother's role in all of this strident creation, complained that, in Propp, "ontogeny recapitulates misogyny." What chiefly dazzled Propp's admirers was the language, reminiscent, as one commentator proposed, of "Henry James with bowel movements"—a Propp sentence being a colonic labyrinth of qualifications, diversions and recapitulations—another enthusiast declaring that Propp was the only American writer of this century who thoroughly understood the semicolon.

Almost alone among allegedly major authors in the late century, Victor Propp was his own agent, and though the man who represents himself in court purportedly has a fool for a lawyer, Propp had outperformed every literary salesman in the business. In 1966, Propp had received a modest advance for this second novel. After five years, Corbin, Dern became impatient for delivery, at which point Propp published a piece of the novel in
Esquire
and let it be known to other publishers that he was available for lunch and dinner; under threat of losing the novelist, whose cult was growing, the young Harold Stone had revised the contract and enlarged the advance. This process had been repeated periodically over the years; to date Propp had collected nearly a quarter of a million dollars on the unfinished masterpiece.

As if to compensate for the aloofness of his publishing stance, the semiblocked author was deeply involved in the intrigues of the literary world and liked to worry about the accomplishments, reputations and crimes of other writers, and particularly of his enemies, whom he imagined to be legion. Inevitably Harold and Victor had fallen out. Russell wasn't certain of the exact nature of the dispute, but these men of letters were no longer speaking, though Harold still wanted to publish the book. This crisis was resolved by naming Russell as Propp's official editor. Russell had admired Propp since college, when Jeff bequeathed to him, like a man imparting hieratic knowledge, a battered copy of the
Paris Review
containing the embryo's monologue.

They talked frequently—Propp spent half his day on the phone and needed many ears into which to pour the torrent of his verbal overflow —and met for lunch once a month. They talked about Victor Propp and those he liked to consider his peers: Richardson, Flaubert, James, Musil and the later James Joyce. (Russell could have sworn he had on one occasion heard Victor refer to him as "Jim Joyce.") Propp wanted to talk with Russell about marketing and pop culture, whereas Russell wished to engage the great man on the subject of Literature. Russell was reminded of George Bernard Shaw's complaint about his meeting with Bennett Cerf—the American publisher wished to discuss art, while the great playwright wanted to talk only money. Now Russell wondered how much he could count on friendship and mutual self-interest. His relationship with Victor and several other authors gave him some kind of minimal job security at Corbin, Dern. If he got fired, he wondered, would Victor come with him?

"How famous is Jeff," Victor asked, not long after he alighted at the table, his raptor eyes and tall white forehead putting his lunch companion in mind of a ravenous bald eagle (Falconiformes Accipitridae, Audubon, plate 107).

"Compared to what?"

"I mean, do people recognize him on the street? Do girls send him scented panties in the mail? I find it fascinating when a writer crosses over into the field of consciousness of tabloid readers and television viewers. How does this dynamic actually work?"

Russell never quite became accustomed to the suction grip of Victor's gaze. When Victor turned interrogatory eyes and italicized eyebrows upon you there was a sense of hanging on to your seat and everything else, the force of his curiosity threatening to suck the inner organs out through your gaping mouth. Semicolons aside, Russell thought he was a master of the question mark. You really wanted to find the right answer for Victor, even when, as now, the question didn't seem particularly interesting. Unlike most writers of Russell's acquaintance, whose corporeal selves seemed mere pasty shadows of their Platonic essence, Victor had a powerful, space-displacing physical presence, which accounted in part for the proportions of his myth.

"Jeff's not famous," Russell responded, almost testily, as if he were tired of this subject. "He's been on a couple of morning shows—but the guy who reads his electric meter doesn't know him from Adam."

Victor seemed disappointed, but undeterred. "I've been thinking about the uses of fame, about the tension between the private imperatives of creation and the imperative of the artist and the finished art object to force itself upon the world at large, to assume a public dimension. For two-thirds of my life now I've cultivated the private at the expense of the public."

"But you've made a legend out of it."

"Do you think so," he asked eagerly. "But I doubt whether people your age know who I am."

"The literate ones do."

"Does anybody outside of New York or, not to put too fine a point on it, outside the subscription list to
The New York Review of Books
know who I am?"

Russell suffered the momentary illusion that he was sitting across from an aging beauty who has called her charms into question in order to hear them defended. It disturbed him that this man he admired for his uncompromising commitment to writing had lately developed such a keen interest in the mechanics of publicity.

"Look at rock and roll," Propp continued, "the visceral, direct communication with an audience. How many records do the big acts sell? For that matter, who are the big acts?"

This was exactly the sort of thing that Harold Stone could not tell him.

Russell explained that rock and roll had in his opinion been subverted by commercial imperatives and that hits were now created by studio producers using canned formulas. "There's so much money at stake they've oligopolized the industry. It's all product, Victor. That's what's good about books. There's hardly any money involved."

"John Irving makes money, Doctorow makes money."

"Not compared to Madonna."

Victor persisted, wanting to know what music Russell listened to. When he mentioned Dire Straits, who performed a song called "Money for Nothing," Victor's eyes lit up. He asked Russell to recite the lyrics—a handy little text—and took out his notebook to write them down under the
No Free Lunch
heading, failing to note, however, that the band was British.