Odd Jobs (156 page)

The ideology of my portrait descends from the impression of pathos and heroic subversion that Michelet communicated to a college student in the early Fifties. Many of the details of ritual and of the Devil’s hollow appearance (for from the testimony of witch trials he would seem to have often been a man in a mask, with an artificial phallus) come from Margaret Murray’s assemblage of evidence. The business of feathers and pins emerging from the mouths of the bewitched was suggested by the strange case of Christian Shaw, as described in
Witch Hunt: The Great Scottish Witchcraft Trials of 1697
, by Isabel Adam. Books by Charles Williams, Richard Cavendish, Erica Jong, Pennethorne Hughes, Montague Summers, Colin Wilson, Peter Haining, Ronald Holmes, A. F. Scott, and others contributed to my picture. But I would not have begun this novel if I had not known, in my life, witchy women, and in my experience felt something of the sinister old myths to resonate with the modern female experiences of liberation and raised consciousness.

Moreover, I once moved to a venerable secluded town, not far from Salem, where there had been a scandal. I was never able to discover exactly what had happened—those old-timers who knew went vague and sly when pressed—but its aura, as it were, still hung in the air above the salt marshes, and haunted me. Among my literary debts let me acknowledge one to the French writer Robert Pinget; his novels admirably capture the spookiness of communities that hold in the crevices of faulty, shifting communal memory a whiff of sulphur, a whisper of the unspeakable. Emboldened by Pinget’s example, I have tried here, in my own style, to give gossip a body and to conjure up human voices as they hungrily feed on the lives of others. The appetite is not trivial; we write and read novels to satisfy it.

A “S
PECIAL
M
ESSAGE
”
for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of
Roger’s Version
(1986)
.

A few years ago, yielding to the times, I bought a word processor, and one evening, in shutting it off, I saw on the screen a curious facelike configuration that sparked into sudden being and then slowly faded away. I had the impression of a mournful countenance gazing out through the scrambled numbers, a squared-off, green-on-green Veronica; and perhaps this was the seed of
Roger’s Version
. To this seed adhered the new cosmology that was in the air and the newspapers not long ago, and my feeling that, after composing in
The Witches of Eastwick
yet one more novel cozily concerning a small town, I should attempt a city novel. And even an academic novel—for if with
The Coup
I dared essay an African novel without being an African, why not an academic novel without being an academic? Interviewers have often enough elicited from me my aversion to that particular vocation, and in truth I do think it cruel to ask a creative spirit to continue being creative while conforming to the needs of students, faculty committees, and the ingrown collegiate milieu. Yet I have been a student, pose now and then as a writer and creature from outer space within academic settings, and treasure learned professors among my friends. Also, teaching runs in my blood; not only was my father a highschool teacher, whose travails were embroidered in
The Centaur
, but, on my mother’s side, my grandfather, the John Hoyer whose name I bear, taught at one-room schools in the Pennsylvania countryside. He walked miles each way, and (my mother recently told me) caught my grandmother’s eye on those long walks, and (she says) carried his entire year’s wages, in the form of the last century’s thin gold coins, in his pocket. His long life overlapped with the first twenty years of mine, and his elegant, explaining, elocutionary voice still echoes in the language-processing part of my brain and no doubt modified some of its loops; indeed, all the people I grew up among aimed, with their various voices, to be instructive.

An academic novel must be, to an extent, about information, and this requires the ingestion of some by the novelist, who should have at least an inkling of how his characters’ heads are stocked. For the sake of Roger Lambert, I delved into ecclesiology and the maze of early heresy, and betook myself to a seminary library to search out Tertullian’s Latin in dusty, untouched volumes. For his antagonist and alter ego Dale Kohler, there was the tough nut of computer science to crack, or at least
take a crack at: the binary electricity of it, and the overlay of Boolean math that shapes the adders and half-adders, and the mind-boggling elaboration of these relative simplicities into the various computer languages and the storms of computation that crackle behind such miracles as vector and raster graphics. Dale’s supply of cosmological and evolutionary data represented long-standing interests of mine, and needed a mere brushing-up. But even relatively brainless Verna knows things about, say, pop music and the welfare system that I do not and that I had to grope my way toward, often by asking simple-minded questions of people in my vicinity. And the city itself, nameless and cavalierly distorted but perhaps not unrecognizable, had to be visited and paced off and viewed from above. All this self-education, of course, is pleasurable in itself; as Joyce Carol Oates once said to me, doing the research for a novel is so
blameless
. The novelist in the library stacks is safe, for the moment, from editors and critics and the intense embarrassment that attends the bringing of his brain-child into the cold light of publication.

The informational content of this novel had to be high; the debates between Roger and Dale are meant to be real debates, on issues that are, to me, live and interesting. And the book as a whole, in its novelistic life as an assembly of images, concerns information itself: the intersection of systems of erudition, and the strain of the demands that modern man makes upon his own brain. Pre-scientific hunting man, too, had a busy brain, extensively stocked with plant and animal lore and with memorized mythology—indeed, our utilized memory is surely inferior to his. But he was not oppressed, as are we, by torrents of freshly manufactured input (much of it televised trivia but importunate nonetheless) and by our nagging awareness of vast quantities of information, in books, films, tapes, and journals, that we should, ideally, master. We have surrounded our consciousness with vastness—vast libraries, vast galaxies, vastly complex molecular and atomic entities—and in the miniaturized guts of a computer the complication of God’s (so to speak) world meets an equivalent complication we have created.

In reference to this intimidating vastness, the book was initially called
Majesty;
vestiges of the title can be seen in the epigraphs, and in the recurrence of the adverb “majestically,” usually applied to the city’s skyscrapers. My novel might be mistaken, it was feared, for one more biography of the Queen of England, and I am happy with the new, though less resonant, title in that it makes clear this is
Roger’s
version—that is, Roger Chillingworth’s side of the triangle described in
The Scarlet
Letter
, the one classic from the lusty youth of American literature that deals with society in its actual heterosexual weave. (Hawthorne, indeed, of our classic writers, seems to be, recessive and shadowy as he was, the one instinctive heterosexual—which suggests how uncertain, how vitiated by Puritan unease and the love of freedom, the mating part of the American character is.) I gave Dimmesdale’s version, in an of course updated, askew, and irresponsible way, in
A Month of Sundays
, over ten years ago, and should no doubt some day try to confront Hester’s version. Here, though, we have the villain of the piece, and also the character who encloses the others and modulates, with his arcane potions and malign remedies, their story.

In shaping this story with him, I might add, I have done more adjusting and fine-tuning than, if memory serves, for any other novel. Regulating the recurrence of adjectives and tinkering with the eye and hair color of characters, numbering the incarnations of Pearl,
^‡
meshing theology with pornography and fitting the segments of my imaginary city together, I felt at times like one of the mechanics hopelessly engaged on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the first computer, whose visionary principles quite outraced the era’s resources of machined metal and pasteboard, of cogwheels and jacquard cards. The word processor, in its magical ease of insertion and transposition, and computerized typesetting, in freeing the author from the old constraints of the Linotype’s slug-by-slug replacements, invite the prosist to tinker, perhaps excessively. A novel is, like a computer, a system for the storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information; but its basic analog is the ancient interaction between the human voice and ear, and all our mechanical ingenuities aim at the hope of inducing in another brain a wave, an excitement, an emotion, a movement of the spirit.

U
NSOLICITED
T
HOUGHTS
on
S.
(1988)
.

By the time I came to write this third installment of what had developed into a trilogy of comic novels based on Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
, the set had acquired certain formal characteristics: each book must be
the first-person narrative of a spiritual pilgrim; American religion and its decay since Puritan New England would be a theme; the prose should be antic—“all out”—and bristle with some erudition; there must be footnotes. Marshfield’s footnotes, in
A Month of Sundays
, were comments upon his Freudian slips, which were in most cases the actual typing errors of his creator;
Roger’s Version
, in academic style, cited some original texts and references. I was well into
S
. before the Hindu and Buddhist terms, proliferating as I became an increasingly enthusiastic disciple of Indian religions, suggested the convenience of a glossary. This appended list served as the obligatory footnote; like any footnote, it forms part of the text, and should be read through. The accidents of alphabetization, if happy, are as legitimate as any of the other accidents we bind into a fictional narrative; from
abhayamudra
(“the gesture dispelling fear”) and
abhinivesha
(“the will to enjoy; the will to live”) to
yoni
and
yuganaddha
the glossary as I worked on it conspired with me, it seemed, to underline and echo the tangled, tinkling themes of the novel. The glossary became the novel’s music, the poetic essence, mechanically extracted, of the preceding narrative, and its final entry, rather than the dying fall of Esther’s last letter—her insincere/sincere “Ever”—to Charles, the book’s true conclusion:

O happy hovering last chord!—“the identity of the phenomenal world and the absolute.” By
yuganaddha
the Sanscrit gurus meant either that there is no supernatural, or else (as in a novel’s hyperspace) everything is supernatural. What is, is absolute. The net of religious and philosophical terminology leaves reality exactly where it was before. Or does it?

A “N
OTES AND
C
OMMENT
”
for
The New Yorker,
published March 23, 1987
.

A writer we know writes:

An American visitor to a Communist country, if the visit partakes at all of publicity and official status, acquires symbolic values for which his native cultural conditioning has ill prepared him. As an American, be he or she fat or thin, conservatively contented or radically unhappy, he is
looked upon, by the regime, as a potentially tricky mini-invasion of unfriendly forces, and, by those dissatisfied with the regime, as a symbol of freedom and opposition. It was as such a symbol, and not on the basis of my agricultural expertise, that I was invited to plant a “peace tree” on a scruffy slope in Prague last spring, in the company of a few American escorts from our embassy and of many more or less young and excited Czechs. They were members and devotees of the Jazz Section of the Czechoslovakian Musicians’ Association, led by Mr. Karel Srp, who led me through the ancient and apolitical procedure of settling a scrawny young sapling (a maple, I think) into a muddy hole in the ground. The sapling erect and on its own, we went inside a very crowded small room in a drab but extensive housing project and drank a toast to something or other (perhaps simply one another) and dispersed, the Jazz Section members and followers to their various duties and fates and I to my next appointment and act of cultural display.

The ceremony, in my swift and distracted experience of it, reminded me of college days—the day when some hastily organized prank was being played. The Jazz Section offices were small rooms holding jazzy posters, flushed young faces, a jabber of hectic and ill-focused excitement, and the smell of white wine in paper cups. Without knowing the language, I could sense the joke in the air, that perennial young-people’s joke of seeing “how much” they could “get away with,” of “how far” things could “go.” As a Western writer I was one of the prank’s props, but not a terribly important one—the prank would go on, in its multitudinous improvised forms, whether I was there or not. Its perpetrators, however, were, some of them, much more than college age, and its possible cost for them was not just a scolding from the dean but years in prison and a life of joblessness. Yet such a reckoning seemed quite remote on the cloudy day of our innocent, amiable, mysterious little occasion.

At the end of the summer (during which the sapling presumably took root on its unpromising-looking slope, in the small thicket of trees previously planted by such other momentary arborists as Kurt Vonnegut and Wendy Luers), Mr. Srp and four other directors of the Jazz Section were arrested, along with the group’s treasurer and landlord, and charged with conducting illegal economic activities. Among their previous offenses, for which they had already been fined, was listed erecting a monument without a permit—a small stone commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations, set among the “peace trees.” Repressive
arrests of conspicuous cultural experimenters and symbol-cultivators are common enough in the Communist world, but this was surprising, because it went against the present tentative trend, set by the Soviet Union’s First Secretary Gorbachev, of
glasnost
, of more openness and permissiveness in the Socialist world, and because the Jazz Section had for fifteen years been ingeniously functioning in a “gray area” of the government’s cultural controls.