The Hair of Harold Roux
Read The Hair of Harold Roux Online
Authors: Thomas Williams
HAROLD ROUX
A Novel
THOMAS WILLIAMS
Koi sureba abata mo ekubo
.
(If there is love, smallpox scars seem as pretty as dimples.)
—Old Japanese saying
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
—Emily Dickinson
When a man tries himself the verdict is in his favor.
ContentsAs easy as lying.
I HAD NOT YET begun to write fiction, or to even think of it, when I first met Thomas Williams. It was the fall of 1981, and I was twenty-two years old. A few months earlier I had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and I was living in a two-r oom apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, working as a carpenter’s helper by day and reading social theory by night. I was taking a year off before heading to graduate school where I’d been accepted into a Ph.D. program in Marxist social science. I hated cruelty and injustice of all kinds, and I thought then that only Karl Marx had figured out how to weed these evils out of us.
On weekends, I would drive northeast to Haverhill, Massachusetts, the mill town on the Merrimack River where I’d grown up. Sometimes I’d sleep at my father’s house on the Bradford College campus where he’d been teaching since 1966. One Saturday morning, he asked me if I wanted to go with him and his wife Peggy to spend the night with his friends Thomas and Elizabeth Williams. They’d all be staying
in a cabin the Williamses had built themselves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire two hours north.
Over the years, I’d heard my father speak of Thomas Williams. I knew he was a fiction writer and that he wrote more novels than short stories, which were my father’s chosen art form. I learned that Thomas Williams had won a National Book Award for his novel,
The Hair of Harold Roux
, a hardcover title I remembered seeing on our bookshelves in the rented house across the river where my mother had raised us. There were other novels of his there, too:
Whipple’s Castle, Town Burning, The Night of Trees
. Like most of the books on those shelves, I hadn’t read them and knew little of this man and his work. But I heard again the reverence and affection in my father’s voice when he spoke his name, so I went.
At the end of a rutted dirt road was the Williamses’ place, a shaved-timber cabin with a steeply pitched gable roofed with cedar shingles. Beyond it was a sloping field of wild grass, then the deep woods that rose into a mountain ridge. In the last light of the afternoon, Tom and Elizabeth Williams stepped off their porch to greet us, and they were warm and welcoming and I liked them both. Tom Williams wore a faded work shirt and jeans and work boots. His face was clean-shaven, deeply lined, and handsome, and when he shook my hand it was like shaking the hand of a carpenter, the thick pad of calluses just beneath the base of the fingers, the kind you get from swinging a hammer.
Elizabeth and Peggy went inside, and Tom Williams, my father, and I stayed out near a worn picnic table and took turns shooting a .380 semi-automatic at a playing card clipped to a branch. When he wasn’t shooting, Thomas Williams sat on the picnic table, his feet on the bench, smoking his pipe and
chatting with my father. They were talking about the shed down the hill from their cabin, one he’d built as a place to write.
“You wrote
Town Burning
there, didn’t you?” My father was reloading the .380, again his voice reverent. Williams was ten years older than he was, and it was clear my father saw him as a mentor of some sort. This was strange to see, for whenever I visited the campus where my father wrote and taught and lived, I could see how students and even fellow professors looked at
him
in that way. In the presence of these two men, I felt like a puppy among veteran hunting dogs.
That night, after a grilled steak dinner on their porch overlooking the darkening mountains, I hiked up a trail and slept in my sleeping bag between two boulders. For weeks now, I’d no longer felt pulled toward Marxism or the study of people as subjects of social science. Lying there in the dark, the smell of moss and pine in the air, I did not know that in months I would begin to write fiction for the first time, that I would feel more like myself than I ever had before, that I would be tentatively stepping into the same river my father and Thomas Williams swam in so gracefully, so truly.
I saw Thomas Williams only one more time. It was the winter of 1989, and my father was throwing a publication party for me for my first book, a collection of stories I’d been working on in the eight years since I’d first met Mr. Williams. This was at my father’s small house in the rural section of Haver-hill, and it was full of people I barely knew, writer friends of my father’s from over the years. Ella Fitzgerald was singing on the stereo, and there was laughter and cigarette smoke in the air, the clink of bottles and glasses, men and women talking in the joyous tones like-minded people fall into when in each other’s company.
Over all this, there came a knocking on the sliding glass door out to the porch. In the light from the exterior lamp, I could see Thomas and Elizabeth Williams in winter coats, their breaths visible in the air. Behind them were the novelist John Yount and a woman I did not know, and I walked over and invited them in. Tom Williams grasped my hand and squeezed: “Congratulations on your triumph.” The lines were a bit deeper in his face, but he was still handsome and looked to me not like a man who wrote books but like one who built houses, a leather carpenter’s apron around his waist as he balanced himself on the ridge of some roof he’d framed. I thanked him and the others for coming, and they walked in and greeted people they seemed to know.
Later, a little drunk, I walked up to Thomas Williams and asked him what he was working on. He said he was writing some short stories set in Leah, New Hampshire. I did not know this was his fictional landscape, a place he’d invented in the same way Faulkner had invented Yoknapatawpha County. I asked him about his most recent novel. I had read something good about it but forgot where. “What’s the title of that novel?”
“
The Moon Pinnace
.”
The room was louder with talk and laughter. I had to lean closer to him as he spelled the word
pinnace
. He must have seen the incomprehension in my face. He said, patiently, “It’s a kind of sail boat.”
“Oh.”
He nodded at me and sought out less ignorant company. He did not do this rudely, but he was probably beginning to sense the depths of my ignorance about many things, his work included. I still had not read any of his fiction. He was one of those writers whose body of work, for some reason, I
was saving for later. I did not know that
The Moon Pinnace
had been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, an honor of which I was also ignorant. I knew Thomas Williams was respected and highly accomplished, but because I had not yet read him I did not know I was standing in the presence of a true master novelist. It was like being a young boxer and chatting with Sugar Ray Leonard without even once having seen him dance around the ring throwing those miraculous flurries of punches with such passion, and with such grace.
Twenty-one years later, I read
The Hair of Harold Roux
. If I’ve read a finer novel, I don’t remember when or where; it is, quite simply, a masterpiece, and like all great works of art, captures and illuminates a myriad of things all at once. Set in 1970 New Hampshire, the Vietnam War still five years from its end, the blood from the shootings at Kent State still fresh, this novel ostensibly explores two days in the life of Aaron Benham, a novelist and professor, husband and father, a man who has devoted his life to making art and in the opening pages is struggling with the nascent novel that awaits its birth on his desk. “He has always thought of a novel, before it has taken on its first, tentative structure, as a scene on this dark plain, the characters standing around a small fire which warmly etches the edges of their faces. Distant mountains are turning moon-cold and blue as the last light fades as if forever. It is that small fire he must constantly re-create or these last warm lives will cease to live, will never have lived even to fear the immensities of coldness and indifference around them. Absolute Zero is waiting, always.”
We feel, through Williams’s precise and evocative sentences, that Aaron Benham is capable of tending that small
daily fire and bringing these people to life, but in addition to his own procrastination, there are distractions from the world: the mother of a missing student calling Aaron Ben-ham’s house; a depressed friend’s wife (who Benham clearly desires) calling and asking for help, and so he goes and we worry about those “last warm lives who will never have lived.”
But very soon Aaron Benham begins to imagine the novel he must write, and it is this vision that gives us the novel within the novel that is the story of Harold Roux and his friend’s, the lovers Allard Benson and Mary Tolliver and the gleaming post-World War II years they inhabit, though there is no nostalgia here, only a clear-eyed realist’s view. Allard Benson is modeled on the young Aaron Benham, and because he is not romanticized by Benham—his nearly predatory lust, his youthful sense of immortality, his physical and emotional recklessness—we come quickly to trust Benham the novelist, and we find ourselves falling into the novel he can’t quite bring himself to sit down and write. On the way back to this unfolding story, Thomas Williams serves us other stories, which both feed us yet also make us hungry for the one Aaron Benham is avoiding: There is the ongoing story of Aaron’s distractions from the desk, all of which capture the texture of 1970 America—its dumbfounded marriages, its cultural and class divisions over our involvement in Vietnam, so many of its college students radicalized and stoned; there is the mythical story Aaron recalls telling regularly to his young daughter and son a story they insist be told the same way again and again; there is the novel within the novel within the novel,
Glitter and Gold
by Harold Roux, a weak romance built on the hopes and delusions of Allard Benson’s tender and solitary friend; and there is the short story Aaron Ben-ham reads to his depressed friend’s class, a first-person, thinly
veiled literary manifesto by Benham’s alter ego, Allard Benson, that ends with this: “I will use G. and all the rest for my own purposes, use them coldly and without mercy, more coldly than their own needful selves could ever understand.”
This line comes fairly early, and we are already so taken by Williams’s ear for voice, for his stunning balance between the sensual and the ethereal, for his naturalistic insistence on painting things as they truly are but also his impressionistic sensibility as well (“the hips’ heartbreaking generosity”), that we want Benson’s and Benham’s, and ultimately Thomas Williams’s, cold and merciless purposes to be realized. For at the heart of
The Hair of Harold Roux
is this: the speeding train of one’s own mortality against the slow apprenticeship and blossoming of art, in this case, story itself and our universal human need for it.
“Aaron Benham, it seems, is also running as fast as he can … running as time runs, no matter what you do, toward the bad news. His problem is always doubled, however, because there is his life and there is also that thing that is of his life, the thing he is making, whatever it happens to be at the moment, and he never knows what it happens to be … What future there is is the work he will do, the chaos of the past he will somehow make into form, all the fragments swirling just out of reach, the excitement inside him somewhere he can’t scratch, a pain he can’t locate.”