The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (35 page)

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At the end of my talk that day at the Baltimore Book Festival, two friends, Kurt and Cindy, came up to say hello, and then two young girls came up and joined us. One of the girls, who was almost breathless, told me she had always liked books, that she would find secret places to read them and she underlined and “made a mess” of her favorite books. “Who’s your favorite?” she asked. I was about to tell her what I usually say—that when it comes to books I am promiscuous—but somehow I didn’t want to say that to her—there was such glow and glitter in her eyes, and she was just a book lover, wanting in on a treasure. She surprised me when she told me that one of her “finds” was Jean Rhys, the author of
Wide Sargasso Sea
. “My God,” I said. “I used to love her. A friend sent me all of her novels when I was living in Tehran, and for a long time I kept going back to her. I didn’t know anyone here would read her still.” She said, “I do. Isn’t it awesome?” And I could not help but think that, yes, it was awesome.

So I didn’t dismiss her question. Instead I said, “My favorite right now, because I am reading and thinking about him, is James Baldwin, but there are so many others.” She told me she had not read Baldwin, but she had a good friend who was crazy about him and had read everything he could get his hands on. Her friend had told her that there was a James Baldwin Society in Baltimore. We talked a little more about Baldwin, and I mentioned Zora Neale Hurston, whom she in fact had read in high school. At first she found it hard to understand because of the language, and then, yes, she had liked it very much.

She and her friend went their way after that, and I followed my sponsor to the car, talking about books and festivals and the fate of our much beleaguered bookstores. I still had in my pocket the quote from James Baldwin. I had been meaning to mention it at the end of my talk, but instead I had spoken about Mark Twain. I unfolded the piece of paper in the car on my way home and read the quote again: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” Can there be joy without peril? Light without darkness?

Those days, for me everything was Baldwin, as it had been with Twain, Nabokov, Lawrence Sterne, the Brontë sisters, Flaubert, Svevo, Austen and Gogol, and as it will be with the younger writers I am still discovering: David Foster Wallace, Gary Shteyngart, Ann Patchett, Jeffrey Eugenides. . . . Was I choosing them or were they choosing me? For thirty years, Baldwin had been waiting patiently in a corner of my mind, or heart, waiting for me finally to hear his voice. And I had come back to him, here in America—not by way of any of the writers he was generally affiliated with but by way of my interest in Mark Twain.

That is the way it is with stories: they hinge on unexpected connections and mysterious coincidences. It is funny how writers, no matter where they come from or from what age or era, all acknowledge the darkness before the light, the risks and rewards of fiction and of life. I thought of Edwidge Danticat, whose book I had recently read and who herself was deeply moved by Camus. When I got home from Baltimore, the first thing I did was try to find her book, but I had misplaced it. I did find the quote I was after in my diary, right under the words “Call Sunny,” with a circle around it. I typed up the quote before I could lose it again: “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously . . . knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”

A vague kind of happiness bubbled slowly to the surface, something I am not sure how to define. I felt a bit like Alice when she first saw the White Rabbit and started to run after him and jumped down that hole. Alice! Another book I want to write about. The true lure of a great book is not that sugarcoated candy house offered by the witch but the mysterious whisper that beckons, saying, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once did, “Draw up your chair to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”

Acknowledgments

The first word that came to my mind when I started thinking about writing the acknowledgements for this book was “patience,” for which, first and foremost, I thank my husband, mate and first critic, Bijan Naderi. I thank him also for his love, support and sense of humor. Our children, Negar and Dara, were a constant source of inspiration; along with their partners, Jason Guedenis and Kelli Colman, they provided me with new insights gleaned over long discussions and debates about being young in America and about the role of imagination and culture in their lives. Bryce Nafisi Naderi has once again been my silent and gentle companion through the most painful as well as the most joyous hours of writing this book.

My brother, Mohammad Nafisi, as always, supported me and worried about my work. I am grateful for his insights and endless curiosity and for introducing me to his beloved Robert Bellah (
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
). My thanks also to my niece, Sanam, and nephew, Sina, and my beloved friend Shahran (Shasha) Tabari.

I have always been fascinated by my close childhood friend Farah Ebrahimi’s story and even tried unsuccessfully to integrate it into my last two books. Farah used to tease me about this. Neither one of us could have known, as we spent hours talking about our fascination with literature and the challenges we faced in life, that she would finally appear in this book, along with our favorite American hero, Huck Finn.

I would like to thank Farah’s family, all of them storytellers in their own right, beginning with her wonderful children, Neda and Nema Semnani. (It was Neda’s e-mail and my long phone conversation with her about her mother’s shared fascination with Huck that convinced me to include Farah in this book.) Hamid, Farah’s brother, generously offered his time and his own stories, at times more fantastic than the fictional works he and I both loved. And my friend Mahnaz Afkhami, Farah’s sister and most trusted friend, was an enthusiastic supporter throughout the writing of this book. Despite having to resurrect at times painful memories, she generously gave a great deal of her time and allowed me to quote from her book
Women in Exile
. I am grateful for her careful and perceptive reading of the Huck chapter, for providing me with missing details and information and for her insights into Farah and her life. Mahnaz and I got into the habit of talking for hours on the phone, just as we both used to talk with Farah all those years ago about our passion for literature, our frustration with politics and our anxieties and love for our two homes, Iran and America. I also want to acknowledge other members of Farah’s circle: her sisters-in-law Roshanak Semnani and Niloofar Ziaie Ebrahimi; Jaleh Behroozi, her friend, mate and comrade; Habib Lajevardi, her beloved second husband and Gholam Reza Afkhami, her good friend and brother-in-law.

Friends and family who suffered and supported me, inspired me and offered their company and comments: Ladan Boroumand and Abdi Nafisi, for many, many reasons (we will have a work-free vacation one of these days); Massumeh Farhad (hours of conversation on art and imagination) and Stanley Staniski (opening my eyes to southern art and photography); Roya Boroumand; Parvin, for her friendship, encouragement and unconditional love; Joanne Leedom-Ackerman; Sophie Benini Pietromarchi, my magical friend and collaborator on our children’s book; and Valerie Miles, Jeff Brown and Gail Sinclair of Rollins College. I would also like to thank Michael Feldman, for his commitment to the Republic of Imagination; Carl Gershman, for introducing me to Bayard Rustin; and Amy Matthusen, for being a source of inspiration and for her classes at the Bronx Academy.

A conversation with Rose Styron at Dublin’s Art for Amnesty event led to my almost obsessive interest in the relationship between William Styron and James Baldwin. I would like to thank Rose for igniting that spark and for generously offering her time and thoughts on the relationship between these two extraordinary writers and their work. Although this book ultimately could not do justice to that theme, conversations with Rose and my reading of Styron helped shape my thoughts on Baldwin, and I hope to return to this obsession later.

The School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University has been my intellectual and academic home since I first moved to Washington, D.C., in 1997. I would like to thank the Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS and its director, Carla Freeman, for supporting my work and providing me with the space to write my books and pursue my passions; and Jessica Einhorn, the former dean of SAIS, and Vali Nasr, the current dean, for his friendship, unconditional support of my book and patience while I wrote it. My associate Leila Austin helped make the whole process of writing go smoother.

Especial thanks and gratitude go to my editor and friend Joy de Menil, who also edited
Reading Lolita in Tehran
. Joy believed in this book even when I doubted it. She showed admirable patience and understanding over a protracted period of time when I refused to hand in the manuscript and then again when I made constant changes, a trend that continues even as I write these lines. I am thankful for Joy’s meticulous editing, her third eye of the imagination, her attention to the “divine details” that provide the secret ingredients books are made of and her dedication to doing everything right, all the way down to choosing the right font for the jacket—the kind of focus that comes only with passion and vision.

I would also like to thank Clare Ferraro, my publisher, and others at Viking and Penguin for their enthusiasm and their creative ways of helping this book come into the world: Paul Slovak, Kathryn Court, Nancy Sheppard, Carolyn Coleburn, Lindsay Prevette (my ever vigilant and thoughtful publicist), Kristin Matzen, the ever creative and supportive Winnie de Moya, Elda Rotor, Fred Huber and Alan Walker. I look forward to continuing our collaboration. My thanks to the ever understanding and meticulous Christopher Russell, Joy’s associate editor, who helped in countless ways, finding files I had given up all hope of recovering and gently but persistently reminding me of broken deadlines and missing pieces, bringing calm and order to panic-stricken moments. In Veronica Windholz, my production editor at Viking, with whom I connected when writing
Reading Lolita in Tehran
, I found a passionate reader and dedicated guardian. My thanks also to Veronica’s team for their meticulous reading and helpful comments: Will Palmer, whose copyediting sharpened and improved the book; Christopher Ross, Gabriel Cohen DeVries and Debbie Weiss Geline.

My thanks once more to Andrew Wylie and the Wylie Agency, especially to my agent, Sarah Chalfant, for her friendship, grace, patience, advice and fierce support of her authors. And to Jin Auh, Charles Buchan and Rebecca Nagel for their help and understanding.

Steven Barclay, my lecture agent and my good and trusted friend, I thank for his tender and subtle ways of supporting me during the difficult period of writing, for his honesty as a critic and for introducing me to Philippe Jaroussky, whose voice, along with those of Nina Simone, Bessie Smith and Janis Joplin, was my constant companion throughout the writing of this book. I also want to thank his colleagues at the agency, especially Sara Bixler, Kathryn Barcos and Eliza Fischer, for making life much easier during a difficult period.

From the moment I saw Peter Sís’s magnificent adaptation of the Persian mystic poet Attar’s
The Conference of the Birds
I wishfully hoped he would design the jacket for this book. I never dreamed that Peter would be generous enough to further grace the book with his illustrations. Despite a very busy schedule, including the creation of a tapestry in memory of the great poet Seamus Heaney for the Dublin airport and the publication of his own wonderful new book on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he spent an enormous amount of time, emotional energy and imagination in providing us with art for this book. I now cannot imagine this book without Peter’s images, flying messengers that link our earthbound existence to the skies. He has given physical form to our Republic of Imagination. I would also like to thank Bill Shipsey, the founder of Arts for Amnesty and a passionate citizen of the Republic of Imagination, for introducing me to Peter and for his own infectious commitment and vision, which embodies both human rights and art.

My thanks to the Mason Library at Johns Hopkins University; the Gelman Library at George Washington University; the D.C. Public Library, especially my local West End branch and its wonderful librarian, William Turner; Bridge Street Books’ Philip Levy and the rest of the team; and the Politics and Prose bookstore.

During the course of writing this book, I have benefited a great deal from a number of PBS programs, especially
American Masters,
PBS
NewsHour
’s reports on education and its series with Jeffrey Brown and former poet laureate Natasha Trethewey on the role of poetry in schools, and many fine documentaries on the civil rights movement and other aspects of American history.

I have also greatly benefited from various blog posts and articles on education and other matters, some of which I mention in the book. I started with
The
Chronicle of Higher Education
and the insightful essays in
Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk,
edited by Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, and I read widely on the state of public schools and education in general. Diane Ravitch’s always intriguing views, expressed in her blog and her latest book,
Reign of Error,
have helped a great deal in guiding my understanding of some of the challenges in educational policy.

The underlying concept for this book was first articulated in a lecture at the Rome International Literary Festival in 2004, published in the festival catalog as “Loitering with Intent: The Subversive Power of Literature.” A slightly different and more condensed version of this talk appeared in the Book World section of the December 5, 2004,
Washington Post,
entitled “The Republic of the Imagination,” and I have been building on this concept ever since. A version of the story of my becoming an American, in chapter 1, was published in
The New Yorker
’s April 18, 2011, issue, under the title “Vagabond Nation.”

Note on Sources

This book is not a scholarly work of literary criticism. I had my eye on a certain destination, but rather than focus strictly on that destination, like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, I roamed and deviated from my course, meeting with unexpected allies and foes. I wandered from one field to another, intrigued by the associations between works of fiction and science, politics, technology, education, history and biography. Although for several years I had orgies of reading, both fiction and nonfiction, the books I depended on most were mainly biography and history; the rest helped me re-create the texture and feel of the times and events. Here I would like to acknowledge the biographies and works of history I have specifically relied on.

For Mark Twain, in addition to his own voluminous autobiographies, I relied on Susy Clemens,
Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by His Thirteen-year-old Daughter Susy;
William Dean Howells,
My Mark Twain;
Lewis Lapham, “Mark Twain and the Loss of American Courage,”
Harper’s,
April 2011; Fred Kaplan,
The Singular Mark Twain;
Justin Kaplan,
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography;
Toni Morrison’s introduction to the Oxford edition of
Huckleberry Finn;
Roy Morris Jr.,
Lighting Out for the Territory;
Ron Powers,
Mark Twain: A Life;
and Michael Shelden,
Mark Twain: Man in White:
The Grand Adventure of His Final Years
.

For Sinclair Lewis: Grace Hegger Lewis,
With Love from Gracie;
Richard Lingeman,
Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street;
Mark Schorer,
Sinclair Lewis: An American Life;
James M. Hutchinson,
The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930;
Gore Vidal, “The Romance of Sinclair Lewis,”
The New York Review of Books,
October 8, 1992; John Updike, “No Brakes,”
The New Yorker,
February 4, 2002; and the
Selected Letters of Sinclair Lewis,
edited by John J. Koblas and Dave Page.

For Carson McCullers: Virginia Spencer Carr,
A Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers;
Josyane Savigneau,
Carson McCullers: A Life;
McCullers’s
The Mortgaged Heart,
edited by Margarita G. Smith, and her
Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers,
edited by Carlos L. Dews; Margaret B. McDowell,
Carson McCullers;
and Brooke Allen, “Emotional Vampire,”
The New Criterion,
January 2000.

James Baldwin’s books of essays (
Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, The Cross of Redemption,
The Price of the Ticket
) were the most helpful guides to his life and fiction. In addition, I relied on the following as my main biographical sources: James Campbell,
Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin;
David Leeming,
James Baldwin: A Biography;
Douglas Field,
James Baldwin; Conversations with James Baldwin,
edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt; Magdalena J. Zaborowska,
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile
; and Henry Louis Gates Jr. “The Fire Last Time,”
The New Republic
, June 1, 1992.

On American history, apart from original documents and books, I have relied mainly on the works of Joseph J. Ellis and Gordon S. Wood on the American Revolution and the founding fathers. I am also indebted to Horace M. Kallen,
Culture and Democracy in the United States of America
(with thanks to Leon Wieseltier); David McCullough,
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris;
Ronald C. White Jr.,
A. Lincoln: A Biography;
Drew Gilpin Faust,
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War;
and James McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom
. On literary America at the beginning of the twentieth century, I have used, among others, Malcolm Cowley’s
Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s;
Frederick J. Hoffman,
The 20’s: American Writing in the Postwar Decade;
and
H. L. Mencken’s
Smart Set
Criticism,
edited by William H. Nolte
.