Private Novelist (8 page)

DANIEL DERONDA IS A SORT OF
young, beautiful Jewish Mr. Pickwick. Critics actually say, “This novel is unrealistic because no one is as adorable as Daniel Deronda.” Obviously, these critics are boys. I have a friend who's every bit as nice as Daniel. Plus, he's never been married, has a master's degree, a good job, and wants kids. He lives in Washington, D.C., and you can reach him at [address redacted, even though it's all still true].

Daniel lived with his mother, a narcissistic and sexy actress, until he was two years old. She was a Sephardic aristocrat, something that turns up again and again in English literature. The most fabulous and intellectual Jews in European myth are the ones who escaped from Spain, late and in small numbers, bringing with them the mysterious spiritual culture of the ancient world—orange blossoms, fiery chariots, numerology, the Alhambra, etc. The paler native Jews, shrill and irritating, insist on trying to pass for white, and constant vigilance is required to keep them out of our swimming pools. Daniel attended Eton, then went off to college, but it wasn't until he was twenty-two that it occurred to him that there was something just a little tiny bit unusual about his penis. His
strange penis then leads him on a voyage of discovery that ends in cabalistic studies, intimate involvement with a beautiful Jewish singer, estrangement from his adoptive family, and ultimately the realization that he was born a Jew.

Actually, of course, George Eliot doesn't mention Daniel's penis. I think of it only because I am not Jewish, and if I were to have a son, he would not be Jewish, so I see no particular reason for circumcision unless he asks for it by name, but Zohar thinks an uncircumcised Israeli child would be beaten to death in the first year of kindergarten. There is nothing I can say to refute him—I don't really know how much time and energy boys devote to examining each other in the bathroom and punishing deviants—except to present to him the shining example of Daniel, whose unusual penis, far from handicapping him socially, helped make him the most popular boy in the world and the third most charming character in English literature.

At the end of
Daniel Deronda,
the newly married Daniel heads “East” on a journey expected to take several years, and drops out of the purview of George Eliot. However, we find him again at the First Zionist Congress, giving the keynote address to the Spirituality Special Interest Group and meekly consenting to model for a bust of Aaron. Later that night, he stands with his back to the buffet, scanning the crowd for his wife so he can tell her he's stepping outside for a cigar.

At last he sees her—Herzl's wife has her cornered, trying to talk her out of ten acres near Jaffa that Herzl wants for an experimental vineyard. “I'm keeping it in olives and lemons,” he hears his wife say. “The Lord will save the Jewish people by bringing them to a land where a kosher diet can be fresh, nutritious, and high in fiber. Does Daniel look to you like I feed him nothing but cream sauce, port wine, and strawberry jam?”

“He doesn't look a day over thirty-five,” Mrs. Herzl is forced to admit. “Maybe Theodor should talk to you, he has some digestive problems . . .”

Daniel blushes.

“Seals don't get HIV,” Mary said to me as we rode home on the bus.

“Are you a seal? Be serious.”

“I'm not exactly not a seal,” she said. “I mean, ask me to hold my breath sometime. I'm not like most things, which are what they seem to be, and if you put them under a microscope, you see the same thing, only smaller. I'm different. I think it's like in Platonism where you have substances and accidents, and my substance is to be a seal. I think. My parents were seals. If I look like myself, it's by accident. When I'm a seal, I'm a hundred percent seal, but when I'm human it's not quite a hundred percent.” I begged her to explain and she started over. “Silkies are ancient and immortal, right? But seals and people aren't. And in a sense neither are silkies. You can't be a seal forever, or a person forever. You'd get bored. I'm only like four years old, as a person I mean, I think.”

“How can you be ancient and immortal and four years old?”

“I don't know, people pay attention to stuff like that, seals don't. Nobody cares. I mean, some seals get older, and some don't. And some become silkies, and some don't. I think I seem pretty young. I mean, like the way I can't defer gratification, and this confused way I talk and stuff. I know I look like twenty-five, but I wasn't a little tiny seal when I first came out—I was pretty big—”

“When was that?”

“It was in 1990. I had this crush on this totally cute guy who was a ski bum in Taos, so I came out, but it didn't work out, so I went back in for a while, but now here I am again.”

“You lived in Taos?”

She shook her head. “No, no, no—Santa Fe. I think if we'd lived in Taos, it might have worked out. For him, anyway.” She looked sadly out the window at Rabin Square hung with flags, and began to cry. “Where's Yigal?” she sniffled.

I had to admit, I had no idea.

The next day Osnat called to tell us he was in Amsterdam, whoring around on drugs. She and Mary went out to Café Siach to cry together.

Mary came back angry. “How can she say she loves Yigal, and then say he's going to get hepatitis and herpes? It's like she wants him to be punished. I told that bitch Mr. Francis Ford Coppola isn't going to be needing her services, we're filming in Salt Lake City.”

“Look what I got,” I said. I sat her down in front of the computer. I had thought to ask for his e-mail address from Osnat, and I already had an answer.

Dear Nell, don't mention things like Trident missiles in unencrypted messages. This part is for Mary. My dear Mary, I am still wandering around Switzerland, but you are in my apartment in Tel Aviv. Why? Yigal.

Mary wrote him some sort of reply.

I also had a disquieting message from Shats in response to chapter five.
There was a low humming sound outside just now,
he wrote,
like some huge engine in the distance, and what sounded like occasional underground explosions far away. I went to the window and there's this blazing sunset, the sky was very gray and the sea dark blue gray, and on the horizon bright orange strips of light. A
satil
—a navy missile boat—was sailing southward along the shore, then changed course and started sailing toward the sunset. It doesn't make sense—the distance's too long—but it seems the sounds came from the boat.

Could it be, I wondered, that the stress of reading
Sailing Toward the Sunset
has unhinged Shats' mind as the labor of writing it seems to be unhinging mine? My friend Mary (no relation to the Mary in this novel) remarked that I seem frazzled, and whenever I leave the house I find the outside world fantastically large and three-dimensional compared with the tiny world of the computer screen. And, Shats says, his English is good, but not entirely second nature; I think he put it,
To see Hebrew is to read it, but English still requires concentration.
In short, it may be that he spends more time reading each chapter than I spend writing it. It is possible.

I fear I may lose artistic momentum, and even as I do, Zohar's joyful faith in me as an artist for art's sake reaches new heights daily. “You are working! You are obsessed!” he cries, taking the opportunity to, for example, eat all the blueberry jam, knowing I may not think of going anywhere near the kitchen for hours.

I asked him why the outside world seems so lovely now, as though I were naked at midnight on a golf course having eaten a big handful of psilocybin mushrooms, and he said, “The outside world is more beautiful than any art.” He ducked into the Justy (I had come outside to see him to the car) and arranged himself for a trip to the
Helicon
editorial board meeting. “But your art is very cute. You are cute!” He revved it to 4,500 rpm and sped away.

In one sense I am delighted by Zohar's transformation. For years he had seen me only as art's detractor—the sourpuss sure to say, “Are you sure writing a poem requires staying drunk for a week with ninety-nine channels of cable?” Now I have taken the role of art's disoriented, preoccupied hermit, and he—my gentle patron.

Meanwhile, down in the Gulf of Aqaba, Nachum's new
glass-bottomed boat skimmed across the small, frothy waves, followed by Sissy and friends, out to approximately the point from which the Trident missile had emerged on its mission of dangerous vandalism. He was busy preparing a bucket of dead fish when he heard one of the tourists say, “Will you look at that!”

Below them was only darkness. But it was a solid sort of darkness, punctuated with rivets, a huge hulk, immense and black—the submarine, still there. “I'll be damned,” Nachum said.

“Get the dolphins to go down and tell us what it is!” someone suggested. Everyone agreed that would be the best thing.

“Oh, I don't think so,” Nachum said, turning toward Eilat. He called me twenty minutes later and made me promise to stay out of my apartment whenever I could.

“Just let me know when it leaves, so I can relax,” I said. I told him to tie a float to it, one of those little fishing buoys with a flag. Nachum protested, but that's what he did. The next day he called to say it had moved about a hundred yards closer to Eilat. The next day, it was gone.

IT WASN'T MARY WHO BROUGHT
Yigal back to Tel Aviv—it was a syndicated newspaper story he found in a bus shelter in Konstanz.

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING ISRAEL: THE SPECTER OF “MR. PICKWICK”

Inhabitants of Tel Aviv are reporting sightings of a mysterious submarine—the first UFO (Unidentified Floating Object) of its kind. A British “house” DJ active in the port of Tel Aviv has dubbed the object “Mr. Pickwick,” calling it “rotund” and “jovial,” and the name seems to have found resonance in the popular mind.

      
All official sources are denying reports of the vessel, which witnesses say is approximately 100 meters long and 20 meters in diameter. “A whale,” scoffs a bored clerk at the Ministry of the Interior. “Crude oil,” says an idle receptionist at a customs office. “A mass hallucination,” adds the press secretary to the minister of culture.

      
Ordinary Israelis are not so sure. “A Trident missile submarine, without a doubt,” says Amit, 22, a lifeguard on Tel Aviv's Hilton Beach, relatively near where most of the sightings have taken place at Tel Aviv's defunct shipping port. “Definitely one of the black submarines,” agrees Maya, 24, barista at Sheinkin Street's Café Kazeh, echoing the American penchant for sighting “black helicopters” connected with U.S. government covert operations.

      
No one yet claims to have circled or touched the craft. Fishermen in the port of Jaffa say it is unobtrusive. None we spoke to had bothered going anywhere near it. A few mentioned a proposal to string an underwater cable across the Yarqon River, to keep the submarine from blocking boat access should it choose to enter the shallow estuary.

      
“From what I've heard, it wouldn't even fit,” one fisherman said, shrugging. “So let them try it.”

      
A widely held opinion holds the submarine to be somehow connected with the coming of the Messiah, and the port is now home to a religious revival. Buses arrive hourly from all over Israel, and banners proclaim, “Welcome, Mr. Pickwick, Our Messiah and King.”

      
Sociologists are speaking of a “cargo cult,” formed in response to reductions in U.S. military aid. . . .

“It's funny,” Zohar said, “but not as funny as the Mishna.” He was referring, of course, to the section on a man's duties to his dead brother's wives when there are two of them, both orphans, and one is deaf and the other “small” (a midget? underage?).

I'm trying to remember what book I've read that the present book (
Sailing Toward the Sunset
) reminds me of, and it's not
Possession
or
Dictionary of the Khazars
. I'm afraid it might be
Moby-Dick,
because of all the jumping around.

It is every author's nightmare to provoke comparison to
Moby-Dick,
whose shoelaces he is not worthy to untie.

The poets I knew in my teens called such a feeling the “Anxiety of Influence.” It's what happens when you read “A Child's Christmas in Wales” and get an overwhelming urge to write about your grandfather and snow globes. The term is also applied to the eternal recurrence of metaphors, similes, and rhymes. Its usual form of expression is “Everything has already been written.”

Once I participated in a poetry workshop.

My poem begins:

        
Sea lions hunt all the time.

        
When they're not hungry, they hunt mali mali.

        
Mali mali are big black fish, round in profile.

        
They move glacially through the sunny upper layers of the Pacific.

The sea lions, after biting off a mali mali's fins, bat it around like a volleyball for a while before letting it sink to the bottom where, alive and helpless, it awaits their return.

My poem concludes as the sea lions

        
. . . whisper, while deciding at which end to begin, quoting Artaud,

        
“In the state of degeneracy, in which we live, it is through the skin

        
That metaphysics will be made to reenter our minds.”

“They're called mahi mahi, and they're white,” remarked my uncle Charlie, who had told me about them in the first place. “Otherwise, it's okay.” Years before, he had described to me his harrowing experience watching a seemingly innocent episode of
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
in which the events indicated above transpired, and since then I had retailed “the mali mali story” as frequently as possible, never failing to mention both my uncle and Jacques Cousteau. The story, as I saw it, was so compelling that no artistic failure on my part could lessen its power.

Also attending the poetry workshop, where most of the Anxiety-laden poets strove to combine the stumbling density of Hopkins with the double entendres of Nabokov, was a woman who said her favorite poet was Ogden Nash. Every week she read us her latest oeuvre, generally in eight lines rhymed ABAB CDCD, on the subject of springtime. I considered her hilariously thick, yet illiterate and stupid. How dismayed I was, years later in Washington, D.C., to meet her again and find that she had become an editor of
National Geographic
. In the intervening years she had acquired oval wire-rimmed glasses like those worn by Yigal and a collection of drab coatdresses, and the look of intelligence this gave her, combined with her absurdly sporty body, beautiful skin, piercing blue eyes, and long blond hair, had gained her a career for which others (me, for example—I had tried and failed to get a job at
National Geographic
as a clerk typist) were perhaps better qualified. “If everybody in editorial died tomorrow, we could still put it out for five years,” one of her subordinates told me. He was a homely workaholic who had edited his college paper three years in a row.

In the Anxiety of Influence process, the great literature of the past, by confronting the author with his own mediocrity,
destroys his self-esteem. In reaction, the author does his best to evoke this literature as little as possible, while still feeling he must equal it in quality. At his death, diskettes and notebooks are discovered. Each contains two or three short pieces no one has ever read.

Luckily, I suffer more often from an opposing feeling—the fear of failure to make clear exactly what my unconscious influences are and why I like them so much. Far from publishing a formal disclaimer to the effect that comparisons to
Moby-Dick
are unwelcome, I would encourage the reader to discard
Sailing Toward the Sunset
immediately in favor of
Moby-Dick,
the wit and profundity of which shame all other novels. I welcome any and all influence of my favorite authors, whom I am willing to meet halfway by confessing that if my work ultimately resembles that of Melville in any way, it is as much an accident as if Melville's work resembled mine.

Unlike the Anxious writers, I am free to evoke the great literature of the past as often as possible, and without inviting comparison, in the easiest possible way: I mention it, over and over. I am grateful to my models,
Possession
and
Dictionary of the Khazars,
for demonstrating the ease with which this can be accomplished.

I wish I had a copy of
Moby-Dick
right now, so that I could borrow a few of Melville's epigrams on the subject of the whale so nearly resembling the mysterious “Mr. Pickwick,” which now nestled comfortably, as though it planned to stay for a long time, on the Mediterranean seafloor.