The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (16 page)

The night before she died, Bijan and I were invited to Christopher Hitchens’s house with Ian McEwan and his wife for dinner. I decided not to call Farah until the next morning; I thought she would want to hear every detail of the dinner and instruct me in what I should have said and not said. McEwan was one of the writers we loved to discuss, his clear and precise lyricism a reflection of his ability to condense so much into an image or scene, while his impartial empathy prevented his stories from becoming merely sentimental. But of course, that night at dinner we talked mainly about the issues of the day and not about McEwan’s new novel or Hitch’s memoirs. I have never found a good way to discuss writing with my favorite authors; I think you have to be on very intimate terms to talk about such things truthfully.
I will call her in the morning,
I thought,
to give her a full report.
Only there was no call in the morning. Farah died shortly after dawn.

If I were to find a connection between Farah and Huck, it would be not only what Farah’s daughter, Neda, suggested: the vagrant life, part of which was not of her own choosing. There was something deeper. She possessed the kind of courage that shies away from being publicly acknowledged, that does not lend itself to headlines. Unlike some other exiles, Farah did not bank on her misfortunes or boast about her resilience. In fact, she seldom if ever spoke about her experience. Her attributes were of the kind you find represented in the best novels, those that celebrate “ordinary” people, heroic in the struggle to preserve their individual integrity, their right to a life of their choosing, with no other claims. In this sense she could join Dorothy and Huck and all those other “small and meek” protagonists of America’s fiction.

We talked so many times about
Huck Finn,
and yet it wasn’t until after she was gone that I really understood the source of her fascination. I had been focused on the most obvious aspect, the homelessness. But I had chosen to leave home, she hadn’t. All through our discussions, she was fascinated by the idea of Huck’s journey, but what was her main focus in her own life? What was it that she most talked about? Her lack of public ambition, her satisfaction with having led an otherwise ordinary life.

Farah wanted time for her garden, she wanted a dog, she wanted to travel, to be with the people she loved most. She wanted Obama to win, and she wanted the Iranian people to have a chance to properly choose their own leader. There was no discrepancy between her wanting a good life for herself and a good life for her people. Being “civic-minded,” it used to be called, an attribute that Farah cherished and that so many in America seem to have forgotten. This is what Tocqueville warned us against: a time when Americans would be prosperous and comfortable enough to withdraw from the public domain and satisfy themselves within their own private interests. This was not Huck Finn’s idea of America, nor Farah’s.

In my experience, in Iran and over here, some of the best people are those who go unnoticed, those who are heroic without knowing that they are, without winning public rewards and recognition. Farah did not want to be a migrant, or without a home, but she would not give in or compromise about certain principles in order to have a home. It was an existential act. Mahnaz was right: she never accepted her role as a tragic heroine, although she had far more reasons to do so than many others. In fact, she was often dismissed by so-called activists and academics, who thought of her only as Mahnaz’s little sister.

Contrary to what its ideologically inclined critics claim, the significance of
Huck Finn
is not only a matter of its position on slavery—although Twain made his feelings on that subject abundantly clear—but of how it shifts responsibility for slavery onto us, ordinary people, who can so unwittingly participate in the implementation of unspeakable crimes. Good people, ordinary people, will often fail to protest what society condones. As the Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina once said, “If a member of the Gestapo can have a normal face, then any normal face can belong to the Gestapo.” For Twain, the antidote to this propensity for evil is to be found not in extraordinary heroes—supermen and -women who risk all in search of justice—but in ordinary people, often ignored in real life but celebrated in American fiction. In the end, Tom gets the glory and Huck moves on. The ordinary people, the small and meek, get their rewards in literature, where their moral courage, quietly celebrated, is enduring.

“Why do you insist on springing these weird subtitles on me?” Farah asked me once, impatiently. “‘Perfectly Equipped Idiots’ . . .”

“Failures,” I said. “‘Perfectly Equipped Failures,’ not idiots.”

“Anyway,” she said, “it doesn’t work. It may have worked for Henry James, in that heavy, convoluted style of his, and I know you love the expression, but it doesn’t work as a subtitle. And what does it have to do with Huck Finn?”

I said it seemed to me significant that James and Twain, two very different authors who did not like each other, became the founders of two different schools of American realism and that they both found a common ground in this idea of the successful failure. That is the main point about Huck and his progenies, I insisted. The mongrel is always marginal, never successful in reality or fiction, and then comes Twain, who transforms failure into success, giving us two protagonists (Huck and Jim) who belong to the lowest ranks of society and showing us that their failure to cope with that society, to follow its rules and become successful in a conventional fashion, is their biggest achievement. At the end of the novel, conventional success belongs to the villain of the story, the one who imposes his fantasy on others: Tom Sawyer. But the moral victory is Huck’s, and this idea of moral victory is what will become so central to later American fiction, right up to the present, in the writings of Marilynne Robinson, Dave Eggers or Mona Simpson.

Our ordinary heroes have to choose between their heart and their conscience, between what they are told they should do and what they feel to be right. This, to me, is what American individualism, at its best, is all about—not phony adventurism of the kind advertised by
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
but a quiet and unobtrusive moral strength. Huck introduced a new conception of individualism, far more complicated than that of the lone cowboy coming into town, killing off the black hats and moving on while sitting a little askew on his horse. Huck and his progeny fight conformism, as well as the Ayn Randian concept of the superman who rises up against the inconsequential and vulgar mob and is free to implement his own self-serving conception of justice. It was Huck Finn who shaped our moral principles, Huck Finn—solitary but not alone—who desired to be independent but knew that in order to be truly independent he would have to be in constant contact with others, and that he would be shaped through this interaction, both with those he opposed and those he loved.
Huck Finn
is a scathing critique of the kind of society we live in today, not just because racism still exists or because we tolerate it passively, but because of the degree to which we have turned reality into entertainment and embraced the numbing, sanctimonious high-mindedness of Miss Watson’s facile indignation.

You can see Huck’s progenies in Hemingway, in Faulkner, in Fitzgerald and Ellison and also very much in popular culture, in movies like
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
where our hero takes up the fight with all of Congress and is told by the girl that only crazy characters like him are the real heroes. And you can see it in Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s or Sara Paretsky’s protagonists and their descendants, like
The Wire
’s Omar Little.

Farah could not believe that I would place Chandler alongside the greatest geniuses of American fiction. That was one writer I could never persuade her to read. She had, like so many of my intellectual friends, such a fear of detective tales. I remember I once seriously doubted my friendship with someone who hated
The Long Goodbye,
because, as he put it, “it was not realistic enough.” Not realistic? Chandler wrote the best manifesto in defense of realism, an indictment of traditional mystery tales. He followed in Twain’s footsteps and did for the mystery—with “The Simple Art of Murder”—what Twain had done for the novel in his denunciation of the sappy, maudlin stories of James Fenimore Cooper.

Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, is a loner. He lives in shabby rented homes and dusty offices, his sole ambition to indulge his solitary passion: a search for justice. His attitude toward both victims and criminals is complex, and he has genuine contempt, as does Huck, for “respectable” society. He is seen by them as a “gumshoe,” he is condescended to, but it is he in the end who solves the crime, although his success is often bittersweet. In
The Long Goodbye
he takes up the job because of his empathy with the victim, the underdog, but sometimes his empathy deceives him and the victim turns out to be complicit in the crime. Where Chandler falls short is in making Marlowe too perfect. He is
too
moral, and has almost no hesitation. In Marlowe’s world, you don’t get the girl; you give her up—because she is much wealthier than you are or because you discover in the end that she is a traitor and, although you love her, you will still call the police. Time and again, love stories in American fiction don’t end happily. The American novel is a very moral affair, in which love and happiness must be given up for duty, for morality, for honor.

Twain spoofs the immortal Sherlock Holmes in a terribly written and completely biased story called “A Double Barrelled Detective Story,” making fun of “that pompous sentimental ‘extraordinary man’ with his cheap and ineffectual ingenuities.” Chandler’s view was far more generous, although he believed that in fiction, as in life, there should be no neat solution. His characters are murkier, more conflicted about society and its conventions.

Crime is not just about evil, as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are so fond of reminding us. It is about character and motive, about cupidity and stupidity. The American detective tale does not have the luxury of its English counterpart, with its ornate and beautiful backdrops, its stately homes and all the layers that centuries of manners and rituals create. It is more stark, it is angry and it is complicated.

America is a country founded on the noble dream that everyone should be free to pursue happiness, whatever that may be. But happiness and freedom do not always go together, because the idea of the novel, despite everything you hear about “happily ever after,” rests on the concept of the integrity of the individual, and that entails choice. If you are a Jamesian or a Whartonian protagonist, your fate is sealed—by your own hands, principally. We, the readers, will watch you make a series of wrong decisions, based on false premises or a weak understanding of what is fundamental. Even if we are free, we sometimes confine ourselves by our choices to a life of hell. This, too, is American realism. In Hammett and Chandler, the detective protagonist is not a happy man—his success at solving the crime does not make him proud or self-satisfied, nor is he a success in the eyes even of those who hire him. In fact, his vain and misled customers make sure to humiliate him for his shabby office, his worn-out suits, but of course, in the end the joke is on them: he is the one who, without bragging, reveals
their
moral and spiritual shabbiness. However ornate and imposing their homes, they lack an inner anchor, an ethical core.

Marlowe himself is a “perfectly equipped failure,” that American trope coined by Henry James to describe characters who renounce worldly fame, wealth and power in order to follow the dictates of their own “sound heart,” which is, in fact, the most worthy of all achievements. In Marlowe, Huck has returned as a skeptical social critic who might, every once in a while, fall for a classy dame, but who has little respect for society’s elites.

I’ve read detective tales all my life; my father was also a fan, as the saying goes, and the two of us exchanged mystery books, but it was only after the revolution that I realized their significance, when, like so many things I had taken for granted, they suddenly became forbidden fruit. In Iran, mystery tales were popular but despised by the elite, both intellectual and political, the way
One Thousand and One Nights
might have been a few centuries ago. (Farzaneh Taheri, a respected translator of Nabokov and Richard Wright, once wrote an article justifying why she translated detective novels.) I had a theory about why our new leaders were so uncomfortable with scrappy gumshoes like Marlowe. How could such a character be permitted in a dictatorship—someone who stands witness to police stupidity and (in the case of the American detective story) corruption in high places? It was as impossible to imagine as a drama like
Law & Order
in a country where both were sources of most criminal activities.

• • •

Twain was wary of conventional morality, and this skepticism extended to his understanding of what it meant to be American. In his memoirs, an assembly of musings transcribed over many years whose genesis was described in a wonderful essay by Lewis Lapham in
Harper’s
in 2011, he distances himself from politics and politicians and maps out his own conception of patriotism:

I said that no party held the privilege of dictating to me how I should vote. That if party loyalty was a form of patriotism, I was no patriot, and that I didn’t think I was much of a patriot anyway, for oftener than otherwise what the general body of Americans regarded as the patriotic course was not in accordance with my views; that if there was any valuable difference between being American and a monarchist it lay in the theory that the American could decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn’t; whereas the king could dictate the monarchist’s patriotism for him—a decision which was final and must be accepted by the victim; that in my belief I was the only person in the sixty millions—with Congress and the Administration back of the sixty million—who was privileged to construct my patriotism for me.