In Partial Disgrace (3 page)
Ten years later, Charlie was still writing the overture to his symphony, as Joshua Cohen notes. And not surprisingly, the time it was taking, plus the future amount of work he could surely see coming, not to mention the embarrassment of attempting such a behemoth, weighed on him as much as the unpayable generations of debt from Semper Vero weigh on Felix. Physically he was a wreck. A lifelong alcoholic who frequently stunned even the people who knew him best with his capacity for self-destruction and recovery, Charlie had curtailed his drinking in the 1980s through Alcoholics Anonymous and white-knuckle effort, then lost control in the ’90s, undoubtedly in part due to the stress of Cannonia. Toward the end of the decade his body began to break down, and he spent much of the following years in the hospital, where doctors at first thought he might have suffered a stroke or the onset of Parkinson’s. Intermittently unable to speak or walk, he put aside the trilogy for long stretches, struggled with depression, and when the wherewithal to write eventually returned, started a pair of new books instead (a history of American education and a long essay on terrorism.) He also became estranged from family, saw his marriage end, and reduced his teaching to the point where he was scarcely seen on campus.
During these years Charlie seemed to answer conflictingly every time he was asked if the book was done. In 1998, it was three-quarters finished, in 2005, only two-thirds, while in 2002 it was complete. His assistant in St. Louis believed he might never stop rearranging the table of contents and inserting new pages, and in fact he never did.
The first time I read a draft of
In Partial Disgrace
, Charlie was still alive, and reading it all but put me into despair. Page after page after page, nothing but setting or background. Cannonia was certainly a fascinating place, but it appeared to be one in which things only happen
ed
, usually in the distant past—there was virtually no present, no
now
. I was confused also because so much of the novel Charlie had talked about for so long seemed to be missing. Where was Freud? Where was Pavlov? Where were the battle scenes, and where, other than Rufus, who vanished from the story almost as soon as he appeared, were the spooks? After four hundred pages I put it down—obviously I held only a fragment of the overall work to come, and there was nothing to do but wait.
Then after Charlie died I found the story of Felix and the Professor, a self-contained, fully formed novel that was alive in its language, arresting in its ideas, and humanly engaging in its depiction of a friendship between two painfully isolated men. Like the television at the bottom of the closet, it pulsed with warmth, and the task became how to disentomb it. Mostly it was a question of moving material around rather than discarding it.
In Partial Disgrace
does have some elements of a conventional novel—the story of Felix and the Professor is an actual story, told in a relatively straightforward way—but Charlie hadn’t gotten into it quick enough, as his own notes on a late draft seemed to suggest. Felix did not even appear until a third of the way into the book, and the Professor not until a hundred pages further. So we took some of the Psalmanazar family back story—a considerable chunk of the book, which Charlie had stacked up front, posing a blockade to even the most patient reader—and found points later on where it could be inserted naturally.
Next was sorting out the book’s multiple narratives.
In Partial Disgrace
begins in the voice of Rufus, then shifts, at times disorientingly, between the accounts of Iulus, Felix, and the Professor. Rufus is clearly meant to return at some point but never does; Iulus, meanwhile, has a habit of talking about events in the future that never happen. Given Charlie’s fervent desire that the book be accessible, a certain amount of streamlining seemed warranted, as long as it preserved the essential thrust of each chapter and section. Like all of Charlie’s work,
In Partial Disgrace
shows a carefully balanced interplay of ideas, and as much as possible I wanted to preserve that balance, while giving it its fullest expression.
A note about sourcing: late in the editing of this book it was discovered that a small number of passages were borrowed from primary sources without attribution, which is not surprising given that the project was to write the history of an imaginary place based on real places and events. Whether Charlie intended to eventually provide credit is impossible to say—that is, unless some answer turns up in his papers, which hasn’t happened yet. However, the papers are vast and dense, and there may be more to come from them, including further adventures in Cannonia.
The publication of this book was helped by many people, including: Jeremy M. Davies, John O’Brien, Marie Lay, Paul Winner, Lawrence Levy, Norma Hurlburt, Sharon Griffin, and James, Nicolas, and June Howe.
B
EN
R
YDER
H
OWE
Staten Island, 2012
The Secret Memoirs of the Triple Agent Known as Iulus: A Report to History
Translated, with alterations, additions, and occasional corrections by Frank Rufus Hewitt Adjutant General, U.S. Army (Ret.)
IN THIS BOOK YOU WILL FIND ONLY REAL PEOPLE AND REAL PLACES, BUT NO REAL NAMES
LIST OF PRINCIPAL PERSONALITIES
F
RANK
R
UFUS
H
EWITT
, Adjutant General; U.S. Army, (Ret.) Historian, Counter Intelligence; former operative, and sometime educationist.
C
ORIOLAN
I
ULUS
P
ZALMANAZAR
, Ambassador Without Portfolio for Cannonia, and inadvertently, the last casualty of the last war of the twentieth century, and the first great writer of the twenty-first.
F
ELIX
A
UFIDIUS
P
ZALMANAZAR
, Hauptzuchtwart Supreme, thinking man’s dandy, historian of the Astingi.
A
INÖHA
A
EGLE
A
PAMEA
, Fairest of the Naiad line, Goddess of Fogs, Muse of the Living, Mistress of the Dead.
P
RIAM
A
SCLEPIUS
A
PAMEA
, founder of Semper Vero.
Ö
SCAR
Ö
LIVIER
Ö
ZGUR
, citizen soldier, loyal retainer, and exemplary gardener.
C
OUNT
M
ORITZ
A
CHILLES
Z
ICH
, Foreign Minister of Cannonia, patron of the arts, the greatest one-armed pianist of all time, and the most intense admirer of the female sex in Europe.
O
PHAR
O
SME
C
ATSPAW
, artist-in-residence at Semper Vero.
S
ETH
S
YLVIUS
G
UBIK
, swineherd, prodigy, and future Commisar for Cults and Education.
P
SYLANDER
S
YCHAEUS
P
ÜR
, the village doctor.
T
HE
P
ROFESSOR
(O
RDINARIUS
),
Docent fur Nervenkrankheiten
, A.D. Universitat Therapeia.
D
RUSOC’S
M
ISTRESS
, one of the Professor’s love interests.
Z
ANÄIA
, a princess of Cannonia.
C
ANNONIA
, our ineffable tragi-comic protagonist, superior to tragedy.
Venit iam carminus aetas:
Magnus ab intego saeclorum nascitur ordo
Now is come the last age;
the great line of centuries
begins anew
Virgil
, Eclogues
(Rufus)
I fell into that hermit kingdom carelessly, the chute shuddering above me as the shroudlines cut my hands. Below, the rivers rested in their courses, like wine from a broken urn; above, the stars ran backward in the upper air. Cinching up my harness, I drifted trembling toward the signal bonfire and my contact—a man apart, devoted to his mission, whose realm would become my destiny, as ours would be his fate. But buffeted by cruel crosswinds, blows from the powers of the air, I was dragged toward shores of black milk, skipping like a stone through the dark and empty land. Palms turned to the stars, I cursed my gods, mentally settled my affairs, and muttered an incoherent prayer:
Give me your hand.
Grinding teeth and bloodied mouth a howl, I made out two horrific shapes hurtling toward me, two spotless dogs drawing near with unimaginable speed. One attacked the chute, deflating the billowing silk beneath his body; the other was in the air above me, all red mustachios, golden eyes, and ivory fangs. Was I to be saved from death by drowning only to be torn apart by devil dogs? We rolled and wallowed, my lapels in the brute’s jaws, until we finally came to rest, his forepaws crossed upon my chest, rearquarters raised up, cropped tail awhirr. And then, wise in his negligence, he ringed my ears with openmouthed kisses.
Their master was soon beside us, a giant of a man in a shepherd’s cloak, a conical fur hat concealing his face, and wielding a staff at least ten feet tall. I prepared myself for the blow. Then the cloak parted like a theater curtain, revealing only a wiry boy’s boy very near my own age, standing upon stilts within the felt greatcloak and unremarkable save for his salient gray eyes, the left one half-closed.
The dog stepped off me to join his mate, who trotted up, a bit of parachute silk in his flues, his red beard full of cockleburrs. They seated themselves on either side of Iulus, barrel-chested, taciturn, with heart-shaped buttocks and slightly webbed feet. A handsome brace of superior spirits, radiating the same unpretentious dignity as their young master, even down to the half-closed eye; sly and unsentimental, neither obsequious nor shy.
Their coat, as their breeding, was like nothing I had ever seen in the animal world. A wiry texture, neither harsh nor loose, dark red bristles folded flat across a softer golden undercoat, changing its cast with every modulation of the moonlight. Their squared-off heads sported trim mustachios and goatees, brownish-pink lips and noses, and their immense ocher eyes were garnished with wispy eyebrows. When they shook their heads, the flapping of their ears sounded like distant machinegunfire, and it was only later that I noticed the detailed conchlike enfoldment of their inner ears, their only vulnerability, designed for the worship of natural sounds. And then, each with a single golden peeper trained on me, the dogs allowed their tongues to carelessly loll from the corner of their mouths, as if to say: “You see! One can be great;
and
amusing!”
We put away the chute and the shepherd’s disguise in a hollow tree, buried my shortwave and silver dollars, and walked through the night without a word. It seemed our contact could not have been otherwise; we were of that age that requires no password.
I was in a zone of pure existence, which I would not experience again until the tremors of old age. Part of me was still pasted in the sky, part of me ambled along the unsafe earth, illuminated by faint and mocking stars. And part of me was observing all this from an unknown vantage, calm and imperturbable. Yes, give me your hand.
In Cannonia the dawn is striped. Between great sliding plates of slate and amber in the nervous sky a pallid sun appeared, diffuse and shapeless as a ball of Christmas socks. What I had upon first impact thought to be a carpet of fir needles proved to be a unique ground cover, impervious to frost or scorching. Neither heath nor grass nor legume, but firm and pliant kidney-shaped leaves with stemless white flowers, each large enough to hold a dewdrop, each footfall releasing a strong and refreshing aroma. If one stumbled, there was not the slightest sound, as if we were traversing a great expanse of silent pride which could absorb the rudest insult. Indeed, as I often saw that morning, the ground was so forgiving that bombs often did not explode on impact, but merely buried themselves up to their tailfins, scattered about the landscape like giant clumps of gray-green crocus.
The dogs cast out from us in great looping figure-eights, apparently indifferent to game and involved solely in their role as escorts. Once an immense Icarian crane went up between them in an hysterical imitation of flight, but they paid no more attention to it than if it were a gnat. It was hard to say if their originality or their manners were more impressive.
In an effort at conversation I inquired about their origins. My contact glanced through me, smiled slightly, then gave a transparent shrug, indicating that this was not the time or place for such a long and problematic discourse, and implying that the dogs were only a kind of theme in a larger drama over which we had already lost control. So I changed the subject to the smell of the earth, a bruised tang something between pineapple and spruce, an aroma more incensed than any I had experienced.
“Ah, yes,” he spoke for the first time, wrinkling his nose. “Most of Europe smells of seaweed.”
“A seacoast can come in handy,” I bantered.
“Oceanus is a nullity,” he sniffed. “If a sea should be required,” he added more mysteriously than nicely, “it can always be brought onstage in the actor’s eyes.”