The Book of Illusions Page 6

  In late April, I wrote to Smits and asked him to extend my leave of absence through the fall semester. I was still undecided about my long-range plans, I said, but unless things changed dramatically for me in the next few months, I was probably finished with teaching—if not for good, then at least for a long while. I hoped he would forgive me. It wasn’t that I had lost interest. I just wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me when I stood up and tried to talk in front of students.

  I was slowly getting used to being without Helen and the boys, but that didn’t mean I had made any progress. I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know what I wanted, and until I found a way to live with other people again, I would continue to be something only half human. All through the writing of the book, I intentionally put off thinking about the future. A sensible plan would have been to stay in New York, to buy some furniture for the apartment I had rented and begin a new life there, but when the moment came for me to take the next step, I decided against it and returned to Vermont. I was in the last throes of revising the manuscript then, getting ready to type up the final draft and submit the book for publication, when it suddenly occurred to me that New York was the book, and once the book was over I should leave New York and go somewhere else. Vermont was probably the worst choice I could have made, but it was familiar ground to me, and I knew that if I went back there I would be close to Helen again, that I would be able to breathe the same air we had breathed together when she was still alive. There was comfort in that thought. I couldn’t go back to the old house in Hampton, but there were other houses in other towns, and as long as I remained in the general area, I could carry on with my crazed, solitary life without having to turn my back on the past. I wasn’t ready to let go yet. It had been only a year and a half, and I wanted my grief to continue. All I needed was another project to work on, another ocean to drown myself in.

  I wound up buying a place in the town of West T——, about twenty-five miles south of Hampton. It was a ridiculous little house, a kind of prefab ski chalet with wall-to-wall carpeting and an electric fireplace, but its ugliness was so extreme that it verged on the beautiful. It had no charm or character, no lovingly wrought details to delude one into thinking it could ever become a home. It was a hospital for the living dead, a way station for the mentally afflicted, and to inhabit those blank, depersonalized interiors was to understand that the world was an illusion that had to be reinvented every day. For all the flaws in its design, however, the dimensions of the house struck me as ideal. They weren’t so large that you felt lost in them, and they weren’t so small that you felt hemmed in. There was a kitchen with skylights in the ceiling; a sunken living room with a picture window and two empty walls high enough to accommodate shelves for my books; a loggia overlooking the living room; and three identically proportioned bedrooms: one for sleeping, one for working, and one for storing the things I no longer had the heart to look at but couldn’t bring myself to throw away. It was the right size and shape for a man who meant to live alone, and it had the further advantage of complete isolation. Situated halfway up a mountain and surrounded by thick stands of birch, spruce, and maple trees, it was accessible only by dirt road. If I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t have to. More important, no one would have to see me.

  I moved in just after the first of the year, 1987, and for the next six weeks I devoted myself to practical matters: building bookcases, installing a wood-burning stove, selling my car and replacing it with a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. The mountain was treacherous when it snowed, and since it snowed nearly all the time, I needed something that would get me up and down without turning every trip into an adventure. I hired a plumber and an electrician to repair pipes and wires, painted walls, laid in a winter’s worth of cordwood, and bought myself a computer, a radio, and a combination telephone–fax machine. Meanwhile, The Silent World of Hector Mann was slowly making its way through the circuitous channels of academic-press publication. Unlike other books, scholarly books are not accepted or rejected by a single in-house editor. Copies of the manuscript are sent out to various specialists in the field, and nothing happens until those people have read the submission and mailed in their reports. The fees for such work are minimal (a couple of hundred dollars at best), and since the readers tend to be professors who are busy teaching and writing books of their own, the process often drags. In my case, I waited from the middle of November until the end of March before I had an answer. By then, I was so absorbed in something else that I nearly forgot that I had sent them the manuscript. I was glad that they wanted it, of course, glad that I had something to show for my efforts, but I can’t say that it meant that much to me. It was good news for Hector Mann, perhaps, good news for antique-movie hounds and connoisseurs of black mustaches, but now that the experience was behind me, I rarely thought about it anymore. On the few occasions when I did, I felt as if the book had been written by someone else.

  In mid-February, I received a letter from a former graduate school classmate, Alex Kronenberg, who now taught at Columbia. I had last seen him at the memorial service for Helen and the boys, and although we hadn’t spoken to each other since, I still considered him to be a solid friend. (His condolence letter had been a model of eloquence and compassion, the best letter I received from anyone.) He started off his new letter by apologizing for not having been in touch sooner. He had been thinking about me a lot, he said, and had heard through the grapevine that I was on leave from Hampton and had spent some months living in New York. He was sorry that I hadn’t called. If he had known that I was there, he would have been immensely glad to see me. Those were his precise words—immensely glad—a typical Alex locution. In any case, the next paragraph began, he had recently been asked by Columbia University Press to edit a new series of books, the Library of World Classics. A man with the incongruous name of Dexter Feinbaum, a 1927 graduate of the Columbia School of Engineering, had bequeathed them four and a half million dollars for the purpose of starting this collection. The idea was to bring together the acknowledged masterpieces of world literature in one uniform line of books. Everything from Meister Eckhart to Fernando Pessoa would be included, and in cases where the existing translations were deemed inadequate, new translations would be commissioned. It’s a mad enterprise, Alex wrote, but they’ve put me in charge as executive editor, and in spite of all the extra work (I don’t sleep anymore), I have to admit that I’m enjoying myself. In his will, Feinbaum made a list of the first one hundred titles he wanted to see published. He got rich by manufacturing aluminum siding, but you can’t fault him for his taste in literature. One of the books was Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe. I still haven’t read the cursed thing, all two thousand pages of it, but I remember what you said to me one night in 1971 somewhere on the Yale campus—it might have been near that little plaza just outside the Beinecke—and I’m going to repeat it to you now. “This,” you said (holding up the first volume of the French edition and waving it in the air), “is the best autobiography ever written.” I don’t know if you still feel that way now, but I probably don’t have to tell you that there have been only two complete translations since the book was published in 1848. One in 1849 and one in 1902. It’s high time someone did another, don’t you think? I have no idea if you’re still interested in translating books, but if you are, I would love it if you agreed to do this one for us.

  I had a telephone now. It wasn’t that I was hoping anyone would call me, but I figured I should have one put in just in case something went wrong. I had no neighbors up there, and if the roof fell in or the house caught fire, I wanted to be able to ring for help. This was one of my few concessions to reality, a grudging acknowledgment that I was not in fact the only person left in the world. Normally, I would have answered Alex by letter, but I happened to be in the kitchen when I opened the mail that afternoon, and the phone was right there, sitting on the counter not two feet from my hand. Alex had recently moved, and his new address and number were written out just
below his signature. It was too tempting not to take advantage of all this, so I picked up the receiver and dialed.

  The phone rang four times on the other end, and then an answering machine clicked on. Unexpectedly, the message was spoken by a child. After three or four words, I recognized the voice as that of Alex’s son. Jacob must have been around ten at that point, roughly a year and a half older than Todd—or a year and a half older than Todd would have been if he had still been alive. The little boy said: It’s the bottom of the ninth. The bases are loaded, and two men are out. The score is four to three, my team is losing, and I’m up. If I get a hit, we win the game. Here comes the pitch. I swing. It’s a ground ball. I drop the bat and start running. The second baseman scoops up the grounder, throws to first, and I’m out. Yes, that’s right, folks, I’m out. Jacob is out. And so is my father, Alex; my mother, Barbara; and my sister, Julie. The whole family is out right now. Please leave a message after the beep, and we’ll call you back just as soon as we round the bases and come home.

  It was a cute bit of nonsense, but it rattled me. When the beep sounded after the message was over, I couldn’t think of anything to say, and rather than let the tape run on in silence, I hung up. I had never liked talking into those machines. They made me nervous and uncomfortable, but listening to Jacob had spun me around and knocked me off my feet, pushed me into something close to despair. There had been too much happiness in his voice, too much laughter spilling out from the edges of the words. Todd had been a bright and clever little boy, too, but he wasn’t eight and a half now, he was seven, and he would go on being seven even after Jacob was a grown man.

  I gave myself a few minutes, and then I tried again. I knew what to expect now, and when the message came on for the second time, I held the phone away from my ear so that I wouldn’t have to listen to it. The words seemed to go on forever, but when the beep cut them off at last, I brought the phone to my ear again and started to talk. Alex, I said. I’ve just read your letter, and I want you to know that I’m willing to do the translation. Considering how long the book is, you shouldn’t count on seeing a finished manuscript for two or three years. But I assume you’re aware of that already. I’m still settling in here, but once I learn how to use the computer I bought last week, I’ll get started. Thanks for the invitation. I’ve been casting about for something to do, and I think I’ll enjoy this. Best to Barbara and the kids. Talk to you soon, I hope.

  He called back that same evening, both startled and happy that I had accepted. It was just a shot in the dark, he said, but it wouldn’t have felt right if I hadn’t asked you first. I can’t tell you how glad I am.

  I’m glad you’re glad, I said.

  I’ll tell them to send you a contract tomorrow. Just to make everything official.

  Whatever you say. The fact is, I think I’ve already figured out how to translate the title.

  Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave.

  That feels awkward to me. Too literal, somehow, and yet at the same time difficult to understand.

  What do you have in mind?

  Memoirs of a Dead Man.

  Interesting.

  It’s not bad, is it?

  No, not bad at all. I like it a lot.

  The important thing is that it makes sense. It took Chateaubriand thirty-five years to write the book, and he didn’t want it to be published until fifty years after his death. It’s literally written in the voice of a dead man.

  But it didn’t take fifty years. The book was published in 1848, the same year he died.

  He ran into financial difficulties. After the revolution of 1830, his political career was over, and he fell into debt. Madame Récamier, his mistress of the past dozen years or so—yes, that Madame Récamier—talked him into giving some private readings from the Memoirs to small, select audiences in her drawing room. The idea was to find a publisher willing to pay Chateaubriand an advance, to give him money for a work that wouldn’t be coming out for years. The plan failed, but response to the book was extraordinarily good. The Memoirs became the most celebrated unfinished, unpublished, unread book in history. But Chateaubriand was still broke. So Madame Récamier came up with a new scheme, and this one worked—or sort of worked. A stock company was formed, and people bought shares in the manuscript. Word futures, I guess you could call them, in the same way that people from Wall Street gamble on the price of soybeans and corn. In effect, Chateaubriand mortgaged his autobiography to finance his old age. They gave him a nice chunk of money up front, which allowed him to pay off his creditors, and a guaranteed annuity for the rest of his life. It was a brilliant arrangement. The only problem was that Chateaubriand kept on living. The company was formed when he was in his mid-sixties, and he hung on until he was eighty. By then, the shares had changed hands several times, and the friends and admirers who had invested in the beginning were long gone. Chateaubriand was owned by a bunch of strangers. The only thing they were interested in was turning a profit, and the longer he went on living, the more they wanted him to die. Those last years must have been bleak for him. A frail old man crippled with rheumatism, Madame Récamier all but blind, and every one of his friends dead and buried. But he kept on revising the manuscript right up to the end.

  What a cheerful story.

  Not so funny, I suppose, but let me tell you, the old viscount could write one hell of a good sentence. It’s an incredible book, Alex.

  So you’re saying you don’t mind spending the next two or three years of your life with a gloomy Frenchman?

  I’ve just spent a year with a silent-film comedian, and I think I’m ready for a change.

  Silent film? I hadn’t heard anything about that.

  Someone named Hector Mann. I finished writing a book about him in the fall.

  You’ve been busy, then. That’s good.

  I had to do something. So I decided to do that.

  Why haven’t I heard of this actor? Not that I know anything about movies, but the name doesn’t ring a bell.

  No one’s heard of him. He’s my own private funny man, a court jester who performs only for me. For twelve or thirteen months, I spent every waking moment with him.

  You mean you were actually with him? Or is that just a figure of speech?

  No one’s been with Hector Mann since 1929. He’s dead. As dead as Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier. As dead as Dexter What’s-His-Name.

  Feinbaum.

  As dead as Dexter Feinbaum.

  So you spent a year watching old movies.

  Not exactly. I spent three months watching old movies, and then I locked myself in a room and spent nine months writing about them. It’s probably the strangest thing I’ve ever done. I was writing about things I couldn’t see anymore, and I had to present them in purely visual terms. The whole experience was like a hallucination.

  And what about the living, David? Do you spend much time with them?

  As little as possible.

  That’s what I thought you’d say.

  I had a conversation in Washington last year with a man named Singh. Dr. J. M. Singh. An excellent person, and I enjoyed the time I spent with him. He did me a great service.

  Are you seeing a doctor now?

  Of course not. This chat we’re having now is the longest talk I’ve had with anyone since then.

  You should have called me when you were in New York.

  I couldn’t.

  You’re not even forty, David. Life isn’t over, you know.

  Actually, I turn forty next month. There’s going to be a big bash at Madison Square Garden on the fifteenth, and I hope you and Barbara will be able to come. I’m surprised you haven’t received your invitation yet.

  Everyone’s worried about you, that’s all. I don’t want to pry, but when someone you care about behaves like this, it’s hard just to stand by and watch. I wish you’d give me a chance to help.

  You have helped. You’ve offered me a new job, and I’m grateful to you.

 
That’s work. I’m talking about life.

  Is there a difference?

  You’re a stubborn son-of-a-bitch, aren’t you?

  Tell me something about Dexter Feinbaum. The man’s my benefactor, after all, and I don’t even know the first thing about him.

  You’re not going to talk about this, are you?

  As our old friend in the dead-letter office used to say: I would prefer not to.

  No one can live without other people, David. It’s just not possible.

  Maybe not. But no one’s ever been me before. Maybe I’m the first one.

  . . .

  From the introduction to Memoirs of a Dead Man (Paris, April 14, 1846; revised July 28):

  As it is impossible for me to foresee the moment of my death, and as at my age the days granted to men are only days of grace, or rather of suffering, I feel compelled to offer a few words of explanation.

  On September fourth, I will be seventy-eight years old. It is full time for me to leave a world which is fast leaving me, and which I shall not regret….

  Sad necessity, which has forever held its foot against my throat, has forced me to sell my Memoirs. No one can imagine what I have suffered in being obliged to pawn my tomb, but I owed this last sacrifice to my solemn promises and the consistency of my conduct…. My plan was to bequeath them to Madame Chateaubriand. She would have sent them out into the world or suppressed them, as she saw fit. Now more than ever, I believe the latter solution would have been preferable….