Blue Eyes (28 page)

The book had a morphology I happened to admire—as if Ross Macdonald were in the habit of undressing bodies to find the skeleton underneath. Nothing was overwrought: landscape, language, and character were all laid bare. But this was no simple-minded accident. It was Macdonald's particular craft, that “wild masonry of laying detail on detail to make a structure.”
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Wild masonry.
That's what Macdonald's work was all about: sad, strange histories that crept between the tight, closed spaces. The lost son who surfaces out of a brutal, murderous past, and then is transformed into an impostor boy whose indentity is bom in the act of murder itself. And in the middle of all this searching is Macdonald's detective-narrator, Lew Archer, who is neither Marlowe nor Nick Charles, but a kind of deadly angel, the observer with genuine feelings who only invests a portion of himself in the text Half of him is always elsewhere. Or, as Macdonald says: “Certainly my narrator Archer is not the main object of my interest, nor the character with whose fate I am most concerned. He is a deliberately narrowed version of the writing self, so narrow that when he turns sideways he almost disappears.”

This narrowing lens allows Ross Macdonald to deliver both a landscape and a past widiout the least hint of sentimentality. Macdonald is able to murder while he lulls us through the book.

I returned to my dinosaur novel,
King Jude.
But things were still rotten in the republic of Andorra. I had nowhere to go with my barber king. I couldn't squeeze him into a narrative that made sense. Not wanting to abandon my barber king, I decided to scribble a crime novel and let Jude the barber boil inside my head. But I didn't have Ross Macdonald's lulling sense of line. My writing was scratchy, secretive as a snake. I couldn't undress bodies with my prose. And I didn't love California the way Macdonald did. I'd lived in California for three years. It held no mythic properties for me. I remembered rocks and redwood trees. I'd have to find my detective hero and bring him to New York.

I'd been a bodybuilder and a ping-pong freak. My sense of the underworld came from pool halls and street gangs in the Bronx. I was something of an extortionist at twelve, but I outgrew the habit and by fourteen I was studying French irregular verbs at the High School of Music and Art What the hell could I write about crime? I'd have had to go to the library stacks and pull out dossiers on the most memorable thieves of Manhattan and the Bronx, but I didn't want a crime novel that stank of research. So I depended on my one bit of luck. I had a brother who was in homicide. I went out to the wilds of Brooklyn where he worked. I sat with Harvey Charyn in his station house near the beach. I saw the cages where all the bad guys were held. I visited the back room where cops would sleep after a midnight tour. I was Charyn's kid brother, the scribbler, and radio dispatchers flirted with me. I met a detective whose ear had been chewed off in a street fight, another who boasted of all the wives be had, a third who twitched with paranoia, but was reliable in any combat zone.

My brother drove me to the Brooklyn morgue since I needed to look at dead bodies for my novel. The morgue attendant took me and Harvey around. All the dead men looked like Indians. Their skin had turned to bark. I distanced myself from the corpses, pretended I was touring some carnival with refrigerated shelves. It was Harvey who sucked Life Savers and seemed pale. I was only a stinking voyeur in the house of the dead.

But I had the beginning of a history of crime: the sad gleaning of a few Brooklyn homicide detectives. I traveled with them in their unmarked cars, listening to their hatred of the street. They weren't much like the warriors I'd imagined detectives to be: they were civil servants with a gun, obsessed about the day of their retirement And because I'd grown up with my brother, remembered his muscle tee shirts, his longing to become Mr. America, Harvey seemed the saddest of them all. He's the one who read books at home and I became the writer. He was the artist of the family, but I got into Music and Art and Harvey never did. I'd replaced my brother somehow, bumped him out of the way. I sat scribbling at a university and he had to stare at corpses. He told me about a renegade rabbi who lay rotting in his bathtub for a month, a fourteen-year-old pros who was trampled to death by a gang of pimps because she happened to labor in their territories, the victim of a gangland murder whose arms ended up in New Jersey while his legs were buried in a potato farm somewhere on Long Island. The guy's torso was never found.

I'd watch my brother's face when he told me his stories. There was no ghoulish delight. He was delivering the simple facts of his life as a detective. I felt like the brutal one, feeding off his homicide lists. And so I began my novel about a blue-eyed detective, Manfred Coen. This Blue Eyes was an odd amalgam of Harvey and me, two brown-eyed boys. Coen was a ping-pong freak, like I had been. And if he didn't have Harvey's coloring, he did have my brother's sad, gentle ways, a wanderer in Manhattan and the Bronx who dreamt of corpses, like Harvey did. I allowed Blue Eyes a mentor, Isaac Sidel, a honcho in the First Deputy Police Commissioner's office who grooms Coen and later gets him killed. Isaac was the sinister chief, and Coen was his blue-eyed angel, a kind of Billy Budd.

I scribbled a good part
of Blue Eyes
in Barcelona. I was thirty-six and I'd never been abroad. I'd landed in Madrid, wanting to devour every balcony on every street. I saw the Goyas in the basement of the Prado and felt as if my own life was being recast on enormous blood-dark canvases: the giant who devoured his children could have been born in the Bronx. I settled in Barcelona and wrote for six weeks.

I finished
Blue Eyes
in New York and carried it to my agent, Hy Cohen. He looked at the title page. “Who's Joseph da Silva?”

I'd decided to use a nom de guerre after having written seven novels as Jerome Charyn, and all seven sinking into invisibility. I'd invented a tribe of marrano pickpockets in
Blue Eyes
called the Guzmanns. Isaac Sidel is feuding with this tribe, and the Guzmanns become the agents of Manfred Coen's fall. Wanting my own sense of tribe, I'd picked a marrano name for myself,
Joseph da Silva
, hoping that his books might sell better than Jerome Charyn's.

But Hy Cohen convinced me to stay with Jerome. “Kid, you've had seven books. That's something of a feat. If you go with da Silva, you'll be starting all over again. A first novelist is a much more endangered animal than the author of seven books. They'll kill you out there.”

So I published
Blue Eyes
widiout my nom de guerre and returned to
King Jude.
I scribbled on it in Paris, London, Edinburgh, Connecticut, and the upper West Side of Manhattan. The novel thickened to a thousand pages and I still couldn't find a home for my barber king. While I collected pages, my mind seemed to be at work on another book. I was bothered by Blue Eyes' death and needed to revive him. Sol started
Marilyn the Wild
, which brought Manfred Coen back to an earlier time of his hie. Isaac Sidel had a daughter, Marilyn, who keeps getting married and unmarried and is half in love with Coen. Isaac's ambivalence towards his blue-eyed angel was becoming clearer to me. The old chief resented Marilyn's attachment to Blue Eyes, though he keeps this to himself He's a coward when it comes to his daughter and won't risk alienating Marilyn the Wild. We can smell the evil begin to build. Isaac is crazy about Marilyn, but she's much too independent for a deputy chief inspector. He can find no means of manipulating her, so he manipulates Coen. And by allowing Coen to get killed, he punishes Marilyn, Blue Eyes, and himself.

I still couldn't put Coen to rest I had to write another book, one that continued after Coen's death. Isaac has become the chronicler of Coen.
The Education of Patrick Silver
is about Isaac's own self-affliction. Isaac had inherited a tapeworm from the Guzmanns and it flares up soon as Coen dies. He blunders through the city with that worm in him and dreams that Coen is still alive. Coen's death has taken him out of his neat little universe, hooks him with pain. Manfred and Marilyn were his only connection to feelings outside the police. They were Isaac's history. Now he has the worm.

I was hoping I'd finished the story. I had my barber king to dream about. But the Andorran novel stayed dead. It was invention that evolved without a personal myth. I performed magnificent pirouettes on the page. I danced from line to line and was left with boring decoration.

I went back to Isaac and devoted a book utterly to him:
Secret Isaac.
It was the history of Isaac after his fell from grace. The sadder he becomes, the more successful he grows. The worm is eating him alive, but Isaac is now the Police Commissioner of New York. A peculiar thing happens. Isaac begins to cannibalize himself, to feed on his own worm. He's taken Blue Eyes' ghost inside himself He becomes Coen and barks his own song of innocence and experience.

I thought of other books, a kind of Balzacian series of adventures, with Isaac moving about the country and devouring the United States. What city was a match for him and his tapeworm? But I haven't learned how to be Balzac yet When I call my brother's precinct, the receptionist says, “Ah, you're Jerome. How's Blue Eyes today?”

I'm the celebrity of Brooklyn Homicide. Captains and lieutenants want me to write their stories. I'm their chronicler now. And Harvey? He begrudges the complications of the last three Isaac books. He prefers the purity of
Blue Eyes.
Manfred Coen came from the Bronx, like him and me. Manfred Coen went to Music and Art I'm sure he remembers Coen as a weightlifter, but Coen was too busy being wooed by Marilyn to lift weights. Blue Eyes could have come right out of Harvey's precinct. Blue Eyes would have been one of the boys.

But I regard Manfred Coen in another way. Blue Eyes was a ghost long before he was killed. His mother and father were a pair of suicides, and Coen was the orphan from Music and Art who fell somewhere between Marilyn and Isaac and could never get up. His absence, dead and alive, seems to power the four books.

Isaac goes to Ireland in the fourth book, visits Leopold Bloom's house on Eccles Street He's a police inspector who loves James Joyce, but his pilgrimage is more than literary debt. Isn't Bloom the father Isaac could have been? Isaac had manufactured his own Stephan Dedalus in Coen, but gave him perishable wings. He “makes” Coen, destroys him, and suffers the wounds of that destruction. And why is Blue Eyes drawn to Isaac in the first place? Is he seeking a permanent dad, one who won't abandon him? Or does he know mat all dads are destroyers, the good ones and the bad?

What does an author know? For me the four books comprise a vast confusion of fathers and sons. My own dad was a furrier who never spoke. He grunted some primitive language that was more like the call of a disappointed wolf. But I had Harvey to interpret that wolfs call. He led me out of whatever Bronx wilderness I happened to be in. He was father and older brother and a bit of a mum, though he abandoned me before I was twelve, beat me up in front of his latest girlfriend. He had his muscle tee shirts to worry about. He didn't need a skinny kid on his tail.

And so Isaac's worm had been sleeping in me a long time. It grew out of a rift between Harvey and myself, more than thirty years ago. Forget Brooklyn Homicide. You need Sherlock Holmes to uncover the roots of any fiction. I'd come to Harvey to gather material for an uncomplicated crime novel and ended up scribbling four books about him and me and a meticulous tapeworm.

I finally let go of my barber king. Andorra wasn't that magic place where boys and kings can heal themselves. I'd invented a thousand years of history for Jude, a chronology that was filled with wondrous details, but it was spun out of avoidance, a need to hide.
KingJude
is a cold book, mythology without a worm.

Perhaps I'd used more of Ross Macdonald than I'd allowed myself to admit. Macdonald rocks back into his past in
The Galton Case
, weaves a narrative around his own wound, a gnawing sense of illegitimacy. The impostor boy who pretends to be the lost son of Anthony Galton bears a resemblance to Macdonald himself, or, I should say, Kenneth Millar, since Ross Macdonald was Millar's nom de guerre. “My mind had been haunted for years by an imaginary boy whom I recognized as the darker side of my own remembered boyhood. By his sixteenth year he had lived in fifty houses and committed the sin of poverty in each of them. I couldn't think of him without anger and guilt.”

Like any fiction writer, Macdonald is “a false claimant, a poor-house graduate trying to lie his way into the castle.” I'm another “claimaint,” hoping to get into the castle with Isaac Sidel and Manfred Coen.

—Jerome Charyn

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 All quotes from Ross Macdonald, “Writing the Galton Case,” in
Self-Portrait: Ceasslessly into the Post.
Capra Press (Santa Barbara, 1981).