Leaving the World (7 page)

But, on one level, he was telling the truth. In order to cover his hours with me – and to prove to Polly that he was writing – he started getting to his office most mornings by eight and turning out a page of his book (he was a very slow writer) before his first class at eleven.

It took him over two years to finish it. He never talked about its contents – except to say that it was set in the 1960s and had a somewhat experimental structure. He wouldn’t show it to me for several months after finishing the first draft. Even then, he seemed hesitant, especially as his agent was getting quite a number of passes from the major New York publishing houses to which it had been submitted.

‘They’re all saying it’s too damn out-there,’ he told me after the sixth rejection rolled in.

‘Well, any time you want an outside opinion . . .’ I said.

‘I’ll let you read it after it’s accepted.’

‘You know, David, it doesn’t matter to me whether some publisher has given it the thumbs-down.’

‘Let’s just see what happens,’ he said, sounding very much as though he didn’t want to be pressed further about it.

Finally, after months of thumbs-down, a small but highly respected publisher, the Pentameter Press, gave David’s novel the thumbs-up. He showed up at my apartment that day with champagne and a wonderful gift: a first edition of H.L. Mencken’s A
Little Book in C Major
, which contained one of my favorite of his aphorisms: ‘
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that somebody may be looking.
’

‘That edition must have cost you a fortune,’ I said to David, after telling him just what a fantastic surprise it was.

‘That’s my worry.’

‘You’re far too generous.’

‘No, you’re far too generous – on all levels.’

‘So . . . this novel of yours. Do I get to read the damn thing now?’ I asked.

He hesitated for a moment, then said: ‘All right . . . but you must take the whole thing with a Lot’s wife-sized grain of salt.’

He wouldn’t elaborate on this point, but it did raise my suspicions that he’d been writing some sort of a
roman-à-clef
, in which our relationship played a certain role. The very fact that he had been so tight-lipped about it heightened my concerns, as did the way he gave me the manuscript during our next afternoon together: literally pulling it out of his shoulder bag just before leaving, placing it on a kitchen counter and saying nothing more about it except: ‘See you Friday.’

The novel was entitled
Forty-Nine Parallels
. It was quite a short book – two hundred and six pages of double-spaced manuscript – and quite a long read. Ostensibly it was the story of a man in late middle age – simply referred to as ‘the Writer’ – who is driving across Canada (hence the play on the 49th Parallel) to see a brother who’s had a nervous breakdown while doing some property deal in Vancouver. The brother is rich. The Writer teaches in a middling university in Montreal. He has a wife – referred to always as ‘Wife’ (no definite article) – whom he no longer loves, and who keeps talking about seeing ‘Visions of the Divine’. The Writer has been having an affair with a younger writer, known only as ‘She’.
She
is a young professor at McGill – brilliant, self-contained, willing to be his mistress, but unwilling to handle his ‘emotional dynamite’. The Writer adores her because he knows that, though he can ‘have’ her, he still can’t
have
her . . .

Though the basis of the story might sound linear and conventional (adultery and disaffection among the intelligentsia), David’s narrative – or perhaps his anti-narrative – completely obliterated all accessible elements in the story. Instead what we had was a sort of extended interior monologue as the Writer points his ‘venerable, but fading’ VW Karmen Ghia in a westerly direction and negotiates the ‘Great Elongated Nowhere’ that is the Canadian Prairies. The Writer – suffering from guilt, depression, ‘the nihilism of the everyday, the illusory exhilaration of escape’ – drives and thinks about the two women in his life in an extended stream-of-consciousness way. There was a lot of tortured imagery, not to mention three-page-long sentences describing the ‘mesmeric nothingness of the plains’, and (now this was interesting) ‘the peach-compote tang of the cunt of She’.

Working my way through it – and it was most definitely
work
– I didn’t have the shock of recognition that I feared. David did not reinvent our relationship per se. No, what surprised me the most about
Forty-Nine Parallels
was its inherent badness. It was deliberately obscurantist, making the reader struggle to maintain some sort of comprehension of the Writer’s stream-of-consciousness; his wild shifts in cognitive direction; his endless digressions on everything from Wittgenstein to Tim Horton doughnuts.

To say that it was a curious experience reading David’s novel would be to engage in understatement. I was genuinely thrown by it. You think you know someone so well. Through all your conversations about life and art and the stuff that matters and the stuff that doesn’t matter – and through the intimacies of love – you think you’re pretty damn certain what is churning around in his head; how he reacts to things and sees the world. And then . . .
then
 . . . he turns around and writes something so defiantly weird and unsettling . . . though, at least, it was somewhat of a relief to discover that
She
bore little relation to
me
.

And now I was dreading our next rendezvous. Because he would ask what I thought – and there was no way that I was going to tiptoe around this one. It was too big, too primal to avoid. I had to tell him the truth.

But when he showed up that Friday, he didn’t mention the book at all. Instead, we fell into bed. My ardor was even more intense than usual, perhaps due to the guilt I was feeling about so hating his novel. We lounged in bed afterwards and he talked at length about a new biography of Emily Dickinson which he had been asked to review for
Harper’s
, and how Dickinson’s rigorous virginity so informed her world-view, and how ‘After Great Pain’ remained one of the benchmark poems of American literature and . . .

‘Don’t you want to know what I thought of the book, David?’ I asked.

‘I know that already. In fact, I knew what you were going to think of it before you even read the first page. That’s why I was so reluctant to give it to you.’

‘So you wrote it knowing I would hate it?’

‘Do I detect a hostile tone in your voice, Jane?’

‘I’m just baffled by it, that’s all.’

‘I never knew you were such a creative conservative.’

‘Oh,
please
. Give me credit for a little more literary sophistication than that. Mickey Spillane’s
I, the Jury
is easy to read. James Joyce’s
Ulysses
is hard to read. The thing that binds them together is
engagement
. It doesn’t matter how facile or taxing a novel is – as long as it engages the reader.’

‘Which mine obviously didn’t for you.’

‘Its density is overwhelming; its intentional ellipticism maddening. And then, when you write a line like
‘the peach-compote tang of the cunt of She
’ . . . I mean, David,
really
 . . .’

‘You know, Polly thinks it’s a masterpiece.’

That comment landed like a slap on the face. He went on.

‘And, for some time, she’d been pushing me to make a radical break with traditional narrative structure.’

‘So, to her, it’s a phenomenal novel.’

‘Her praise bothers you, doesn’t it?’

That’s because I didn’t trust it and because I sensed that Polly exerted pressure on David to go all hyper-modern as a way of curbing his success, holding back his once-brilliant career being one of her major preoccupations. Just as I sensed that David – guilty about her depression and about having a long-standing affair with yours truly – wanted to do something to please her. Since he was telling her that he was writing this book while actually making love to me three afternoons a week, well, why not assuage the guilt by doing her bidding and by scaling the thorny edifice of high literary modernism? The wife wins on all fronts. She’s gotten her man to reject popular success for aesthetic marginality. She can call herself David’s amanuensis. Best of all, she can damage him – because I knew that, once the book came out and vanished without a trace, David would have another crisis of creative confidence and wonder if he ever had it in him to write fiction again.

This entire train of thought swirled in and out of my head in a matter of seconds. Even though I could see the ultimate denouement of this story, I felt powerless to articulate anything. To speak my mind would be to lose him. So instead I said: ‘David . . . as you predicted, it’s not my sort of novel. I’m pleased that Polly so rates it. And let’s face facts – I could be wrong about it.’

That was the closest we ever came to a moment of real conflict – and, typical me, I defused it before it could blow up into something terrible and honest. He left that afternoon with the manuscript. Months passed. We continued to have our three afternoons a week. As the late-January publication date approached, David finally did start communicating his nervousness about the novel’s possible reception.

‘Well, one thing you must know already,’ I said, ‘is that high modernism has always divided people. So you will undoubtedly get wildly divisive reactions to it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.’

As it turned out, my worst-case scenario came true. Because it was David Henry’s first novel after such a long period of silence – and because Pentameter Press was such a respected publisher – it received an extensive amount of critical attention. And with one or two exceptions, he was slaughtered. The
Atlantic
was the first review out – and their critic (who was a self-confessed David admirer) pronounced himself baffled as to why he had ‘
slammed the door on his talent as a hip comic novelist with such shrewd compassion
’ to write such ‘
nonsensical contortions
’. The
New Yorker
limited its appraisal to a paragraph on its ‘New and Noteworthy’ page:
‘A campus novelist decides he’s going to out-Finnegan Joyce – on a Canadian highway no less! The result is a novel that reads like a parody of the French
nouveau roman . . .
though it’s dubious whether any French
nouveau roman
had so many references to pudenda and maple-glazed doughnuts . . . which, we think, is something of a fictional first . . .’

But it was the
New York Times
which really trashed him. Their critic – I won’t even mention her name, I am still so enraged by her thoroughgoing vindictiveness – wasn’t simply content to damn the novel for its obvious flaws. Instead she had to use it as a platform to trawl through David’s two previous novels and proclaim that his once-touted brilliance was merely a
‘shabby veneer which allowed him to con a willing public into believing that he was the pumped pectoral polymath of every Radcliffe girl’s dreams . . . whereas close scrutiny of his limited and limiting oeuvre show him to be a second-rate intellect who, in true American huckster style, has conned his way into the upper echelons of the academy . . . and now has the arrogance to think that he can play anti-narrative games and not get found out. If this absurd enterprise of a novel demonstrates anything, it’s that David Henry deserves to be finally found out.’

There are moments when the cruelty of others is simply breathtaking. I read the review in a little café on Brattle Street. As I worked my way through it, I found it difficult to fathom its all-out sadism. All right, David had written a bad book. But to totally decimate his reputation; to call him a fraud in all departments . . .

After putting the review down, I broke one of the long-standing rules I had with David – showing up at his office any time but the arranged hour for our weekly advisory meeting on my thesis. When I got there, the door was closed and there was a notice taped to the door in his own scrawly handwriting:

He was due to come by my apartment that afternoon. It was the first time he missed a rendezvous – and he left no message on my answering machine. I couldn’t ring him at home, but I did leave a very neutral, correct message for him on his office voicemail: ‘Professor, it’s Jane Howard. I need to speak with you about a scheduling problem this week. If you could please call me . . .’ I got no reply.

Two, three days went by. His office remained shuttered, the note – I
Will be Unavailable Today
– still undisturbed on his door. I was growing increasingly worried and frantic, especially as another hammer-blow had landed on David in the days after the
Times
review. A writer with
New York
working for their ‘Intelligencer’ sector, their upscale gossip pages, had been tracking the acidic reception of
Forty-Nine Parallels
and decided to see if there were any antecedents to David’s novel. Lo and behold, he discovered that one of the benchmark works of the French
nouveau roman
, Michel Butor’s
La Modification
, was a stream-of-consciousness account of a writer traveling between Paris and Rome on some trans-Europe express and musing at length about his wife and his mistress.

‘
Yes, Professor Henry does make a passing reference to
La Modification
in his exceedingly obscurantist tome
,’ wrote the uncredited
New York
journalist, ‘
as his narrator does talk about writing a book that “would out-Butor Butor”. But this one buried reference does not really exempt Henry from the charge of essentially transposing the entire structural and thematic idea of someone else’s novel on to his own. Or perhaps the good Professor has a deconstructionist theory about this case of High Modernist Reappropriation . . . also known in plainer English as Plagiarism
.’

As soon as I read this, I rushed out to the Harvard Coop to buy an English translation of Butor’s novel. Like
Forty-Nine Parallels
, it was dense, elliptical and very much an ‘in-his-head’ form of narration. But beyond the basic premise, the two books couldn’t have been more disparate. So what if they had obvious similarities in terms of the man-on-a-journey-caught-between-two-women set-up. Every piece of literature is, in some form or another, a reinvention of someone else’s previous work. Only a vindictive hack journalist – out to debase and wound a talented man – would equate an evident
homage
with plagiarism.