Bookends Page 10

  The pregnancy had been unplanned and with our crowded lives already dominated, even swamped, by the work of rearing the two children we already had, was not, at first, entirely welcome. After four months, however, the sheer habit of joyful expectancy formed the first two times around had softened if not entirely allayed our anxiety. With the baby’s growing presence easily inferred from the considerable swell of my wife’s third-time belly, the four of us had begun to prepare a place for Rocketship and his little story in the overarching narrative of our family, like people on a sofa sliding over to let another person sit down.

  I remember that I buried myself deeply in baseball that season, which culminated with my team, the San Francisco Giants, winning their division, then losing the National League pennant in a sweep to the Mets. I was already a devoted Giants fan and a lifelong lover of baseball, but that season I watched every game the Giants played, in the stands of their perfect new ballpark or on television. When I could not watch I would listen on the radio. If the Giants had the day off, I took in another game—the Devil Rays, the Brewers, I didn’t care. I took out a subscription to Baseball America, so that I could keep apprised of events and portents down on the farm teams, and pored every morning over the box scores.

  All this deep immersion into the baseball season of 2000 was not intended to help me take my mind off the fact that my wife and I had terminated her pregnancy, to keep me from dwelling on the loss of that baby and on the space that we had made for him and his story in our lives; on the contrary. A father, it seemed to me in those months, had one essential job: to protect his children against harm. In that one job I had failed. I did not try—I could not hope—to escape the contemplation of my failure. And the longer I contemplated it, the more steadily baseball returned my gaze; the more eagerly baseball seemed to rise to meet the daily aching in my chest.

  “It breaks your heart,” as the opening sentence of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s baseball lamentation “The Green Fields of the Mind” famously declares. “It is designed to break your heart.” The notorious sentimentality of twentieth-century Red Sox fans notwithstanding, Giamatti had it right. As has often been observed, baseball makes legends out of hitters who fail, over the course of their careers, nearly seventy percent of the time. A single run, a single hit, a lousy passed ball, can ruin the masterwork of a pitcher’s afternoon. So congenial to loss is the game of baseball that a team who lose almost as many games as they win can take a division, as the San Diego Padres did in 2005.* Baseball was not my means of escape in the summer of 2000; it was my support group. Baseball understood.

  When Summerland begins, the father of its protagonist, Ethan Feld, has already failed Ethan in the clutch, having been powerless to protect the boy from the loss of his mother. Over the course of the book, partly out of shame over that powerlessness, but also for all the usual fatherly reasons—overwork, mental abstraction, inability to communicate love and tenderness—Mr. Feld withdraws into his failure, haunted by it like a snake-bit hitter going 0 for 20. At last he becomes so immured that he is transformed into something quite horrible (I remember seriously spooking myself when I wrote those passages). I did not want that to happen to me and the two living, growing, watching, listening, waiting, wondering children who squeezed up against me on the couch in the living room every night, one on each side, trying to figure out what it was about their father that would make him want to sit there scowling back at the Giants’ pitcher—killed the next year when his car collided with a tractor—as the poor man fell behind in the count with the bases loaded and, with the next pitch, earned himself a demotion to Fresno.

  With my children over the course of that season, like a hitter scuffling at the plate, I struggled, every day, to connect. It was inevitable, I suppose, that I should begin to consider trying to do so in the form of a story; isn’t that, after all, what stories are for? Inevitable, too, perhaps, that the story assembling itself in my imagination seemed to want to play itself out on a baseball diamond.

  6.

  BASEBALL AS WE KNOW IT WAS CODIFIED AND POPULARIZED IN the United States just as the balance was tipping forever from the rural and agrarian to the urban and industrialized; it came of age as a national game during the Civil War, disseminated by city-boy soldiers from New York and Massachusetts, often played across enemy lines on the rolling green battlefields of summer. Within walls and grandstands of brick and steel—like the case filled with cigars, resplendent in their boxes, that gave me an early taste of belatedness—ballparks have always seemed to enclose, and thus to preserve, the bright grass and golden dirt of some lost arcadia.

  The sense of loss enfolded within the confines of a ballpark is not a passing wave of poignancy, a wistful pang of nostalgia between beer ads or flats of curly fries. It reproaches us, the way the dead reproach us in our dreams. Ghosts of the great ones and the vanished “glory of their times,” as Lawrence Ritter titled his seminal oral history of baseball’s mythic era, haunt the outfield and the basepaths*—all those titans and paladins and outsized bravos of tall tales, beside whom the current nine are always nothing but a bunch of overgrown boys and worn-out men with crafty eyes and paunches. With its grass and sky and lazy distances, a ballpark itself haunts its neighborhood, even after it has been torn down, surrounded, or swallowed up by a city that is, like all cities, a failure, a falling away from the Heavenly Jerusalem. Tucked into a city’s secret green pocket, lonely as the Lorax’s last truffula tree, a ballpark is an endless green reproach, seconded by ghosts and legends, for our collective failure to deserve them, and a constant reminder of the loss of something we never really had.

  As I scuffled and scratched my way, that summer, toward the story I hoped was going to help me connect with my children, it may have been this constant sense of reproach, of being haunted by the loss of something never possessed, that sent me to that dusty alcove of my writerly memory, where I stumbled across that long-abandoned project for a novel set in an American faerie. Did I feel a weird thrill of recognition as I uncovered it, a sense of time collapsing on itself? I had first conceived it, after all, at the time or in the immediate aftermath of my parents’ divorce, that event which, until April 2000, had for so long held the title of Worst Moment In My Entire Life.

  The period of my belief in fairies, as I’ve said, coincided almost exactly with the years in which my parents were busy adding their marriage, and my family as I had known it, to the world’s august and sorry tally of lost things. Like many children of divorce I had experienced the failure of my parents’ marriage as my own. As with the elf-knot that snarled Rocketship’s DNA, I had failed to do the impossible thing that might have prevented it. At both times—in 1976 and in 2000—hoping to understand, cope with and transform calamity into narrative, my thoughts appear to have turned to the lore of fairies. I think that now I understand why.

  Long before we have the power or the opportunity to give offense to it, the world has already set itself against us. We are like the occupiers of a battered fortress abandoned by an enemy who, before retreating, took care to salt the grounds with mines and rig the rooms and corridors with booby traps. Fairies, the remnant of a departed grandeur, a fallen race, a regretted creation, help to explain the way the world that has been left to us so often feels hostile to our presence.

  In the tricks and mischief they delight in playing—souring our milk, tangling our horses’ manes, captivating our spouses, blighting our infants—fairies embody the experience of living in a world that we have been obliged, even though someone else broke it, to buy. Fairies were here first. They had the world, and lost it. Now, in their ruin, they try to ruin what they can. They are the secret hostility that haunts creation like Tolkien’s barrow-wights among the rubble of fallen Arnor.

  It was this Tolkienesque duality in my lifelong sense of belatedness, the way there always seemed to be something both poetic and inimical in my inheritance, the way lost things had the power both to haunt and to exalt, to move and to reproach, that steered th
e book I decided to write, about fairies and baseball, toward epic fantasy. Epic fantasy is the literature of our innate consciousness that we have inherited a world in ruins. The Lord of the Rings is a record, finally, not of the destruction of the One Ring in the fires of Mordor but of the departure of the Elves, and thus of magic, from the world. That story, though I did not really believe in elves, had always struck me as fundamentally true; at any rate it helped to explain the sense of loss that appeared, from earliest childhood, to be my patrimony.

  I did believe in magic, the magic I learned at the hands of Tolkien and Cooper and Alexander, Louise Fitzhugh, Ursula K. Leguin, E. L. Konigsberg—all the wizards and enchantresses who cast their spells over me as child. It was the kind of magic that, at least while you remained between the covers of a book, could bind up and repair all the cracks in the world, relight the lamps, restore what had been lost, heal what had been broken. Of course, it was only sleight of hand, a trick of ink on paper. But it was better than nothing; it was better, really, than almost anything else.

  I began to write the book that became Summerland, which includes, in addition to the story of Mr. Feld’s redemption, a lost little fairy boy named Nubakaduba, and it was not very long (a year or so, about as quickly as I’ve ever managed) before I arrived at the book’s final pages. There I found, at least while I was writing them, a measure of genuine solace, as I circled the bases with Ethan Feld on the field at Applelawn, and broke the window of heaven. I hope that old readers have found and new ones will find a little solace of their own, between its covers, for all that they may have lost. If not, then I hope they find it elsewhere. As for the children to whom the book is dedicated, and for whom it was written—four of them, in total, by the time my wife and I were through—I’m sure they’ll get around to reading it one of these days. I know they know that, like their father, it’s always there for them when they need it. (2002)

  Fountain City, excerpt

  I WAS LOST. FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS I HAD DREAMED A LONG and private dream about Pittsburgh and the mysteries of summertime, but now, as if by means of some pulp-madman ray gun, the solitary dream had escaped my head. Recently, by the strange alchemy of a judge’s words acting upon our own stubborn refusal to swerve at the last minute (how poignant and sweet, already, was the memory of the night on which we briefly decided to call the thing off!), my new wife and I had avowed our poor judgment under the gaze of our loved ones and the state of Washington, in a ceremony that itself unfolded with the mistaken inexorableness of a dream. Now, a few days later, our honeymoon bed in a hotel in Venice was a place of operatic vastation and woe. I was twenty-four, rootless, feckless, homeless, and mapless; a child of divorce; raised in the broken Utopias of the 1970s and Columbia, Maryland. I stood in a narrow ruga somewhere in the Cannaregio, solo, abbandonato, perduto, briefly and prefiguratively separated from my bride (we would separate in earnest, for the first time, later that fall), baffled, literally not knowing which way to turn.

  That was when I saw the mirage. It hovered, small, golden, rectangular, in a shop window, adorned, in modest serif type, with a question that felt inexplicably pertinent at that moment: What Is Post-Modernism?

  I went into the bookshop and asked to have a look at the book. I flipped through its pages as if searching for a clue, a way home, a cool drink for a thirsty soul. The first thing that caught my eye seemed, in the way of all mirages, to promise all that. It was a reproduction of a watercolor painting by Leon Krier, an architect famed for his unrealized visions of ideal cities, depicting a place that might have been Washington, D.C., or Washington as it might have been, if the original baroque urban plan, as devised by Pierre L’Enfant, had been realized. It offered a bird’s or rather aeronaut’s view of that imaginary city, placing the spectator above and slightly to the right of an old-fashioned propeller plane whose wing was dipped in playful farewell, implying that this more perfect capital was receding beneath one as one left it behind. The colors—green boulevards, blue tidal basin, white monuments—were at once intense and wistful, as if the picture were not even a view at all but a recollection: the memory of a place that never was.

  I was born in Washington, and raised in the “planned community” of Columbia, Maryland, a city that, like my birthplace, had first existed as a prediction, a grandiose diagram of itself when at last perfected. Washington’s plan and Columbia’s were always linked in my mind, not only by their primal nature as idealized, impossible map-selves but also by the mythic presence throughout my childhood of the enigmatic black astronomer, inventor, and surveyor Benjamin Banneker, who lived somewhere in the vicinity of Columbia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who, according to legend, had reconstructed L’Enfant’s drawings from memory after the intemperate Frenchman stormed off the job in a Frenchman-like huff. As with Washington, D.C., however—and like the doomed novel that now, in that Venetian bookstore, began to kindle in my mind—Columbia was never to know completion, at least in the form its original planners so fervently imagined. Columbia was a dream, too; a Great Society, “Kumbaya” dream of racial equality and ecumenical coexistence, open space and open classrooms, and I dreamed it for eleven years. But Columbia had fallen short of its projections, my parents had divorced, and we all abandoned Columbia, for California or the decidedly non-Kumbaya city of Pittsburgh. Yet it was not until I saw that little painting by Leon Krier on page 20 of What Is Post-Modernism?, and caught a half-remembered glimpse of a never-was city, that I understood, truly felt, the loss of home: that endless, ongoing sense of longing for a place that never quite came into being, which is the answer, finally, to the question posed by the title of Charles Jencks’s book.

  When I returned home from that honeymoon trip I did some research into the work of Leon Krier, and began to imagine writing a novel about a grieving or at least poetically sad young man who apprenticed himself to a visionary, postmodern architect out of a longing for some vanished home or notion of home. That was all I began with. Over the course of the next half decade I wrote fifteen hundred pages and incorporated into the plot and fabric of the novel everything from messianic Zionism to French cuisine to radical environmental activism. And baseball. Oh, and Japanese monster movies. But when at last I abandoned work on the damn thing, stepping out on it to begin what became Wonder Boys, that was still, in some way, all that I had: the lost kid and the illusory vision of home. If only, I have since often thought, I could have found some way of being truer, of hewing closer, to that kid and that longing—in fewer than, say, four hundred pages. If only I possessed whatever was required to finish that book, to redeem that lost promise, to finish what I had begun. If only I could have found, to paraphrase Beckett, a better way to fail.

  Because I believe in failure; only failure rings true. Success is an aberration, a random instance devoid of meaning. The extraction from my head of the summertime Pittsburgh novel by the dream-thieving ray of the New York Publishing Entity, and its subsequent “successful” publication, taught me nothing useful about the world, nothing (apart from some fresh lessons in my own vanity) that felt remotely useful to understanding myself, that floundering, temporizing, procrastinating, rationalizing, frequently inert waster of time.

  Furthermore, as with the scientist, the chef, the parent, as with anyone caught up in the practice of art—that distillation of the human enterprise, which is, at its simplest, a business of paying attention—failure instructs the writer. Every novel, in the moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written; but in the long dying fall after we have finished it (if we finish it), every novel affords us, with the generosity of a buffalo carcass affording meat, hide, bone, horn, and fat, the opportunity to measure precisely, at our leisure, the distance between it and that L’Enfant-esque dream. Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes.<
br />
  And so for a long time after that novel failed I tried, as nature fitted me to do, to extract some valuable lesson, some use, from the failure of Fountain City:

  Write smaller books. Fountain City took place on three continents, in two cities (one fictional), over a long period, with an omniscient narrator, and featured numerous characters and settings. Wonder Boys, my first novel, took place in sweet, little old Pittsburgh, with a small cast of characters, over an even narrower scope of time: a single weekend.This lesson was ignored in favor, and failed to stand up to the example, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and so I subsequently discarded it for:

  Trust your gut. I had known fairly soon after beginning work on the book, within the first twelve to eighteen months, that something about it was, in the technical parlance of writers, fucked. My hero was too passive. His grief was too vague. I knew nothing about how architects really worked and yet was, myself, too passive to figure out how to remedy my ignorance. Et cetera. Often when I sat down to work I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.But I had taken a sizable advance for Fountain City from the publisher of my first novel. If I abandoned the book, I worried, I might have to repay that money. I might fall prey to the black arts of lawyers. On the other hand, I used to worry, sitting down to try to render less vague my protagonist or less germane my ignorance of the practice of architecture, what if the only reason that I daily persevered, in spite of my regular massage sessions under the Hand of Dread, was fear, mere financial panic? How could such a motive possibly be the healthy basis for artistic creation? Clearly, therefore, when Fountain City failed, the lesson of that failure was: