In Partial Disgrace hunts its elusive prey through landscapes that resemble the Great Plains—if they’d been treated to their own Treaty of Trianon—through lessons in obedience theory (“‘The animal, like society, must be taken into liberality without quite knowing it,’” Felix avers), ethnologies of the nomadic Astingi, Cannonia’s sole surviving indigenous tribe (“They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats.”), lectures on art, music, theater, dance, and entr’acte harangues (“Cannonia and America had a special and preferential historical relationship, [Iulus] insisted, beyond their shared distaste for oracles and pundits, as the only two nations in History of whom it could be truly said that all their wounds were self-inflicted. And what could Cannonia offer America? The wincing knowledge that there are historical periods in which you have to live without hope.”).
“History” appearing thrice in one sentence—and once even capitalized, Germanically? but what of that other word, “disgrace”? Grace is for the religious, disgrace is for the damned. Humans once hunted for sustenance, now they hunt for sport. To go through the motions of what once ensured survival, now purely for entertainment, is ignominious, but vital—the ignominy is vital. Even if the rituals have become as hollow as rotted logs, or as unpredictable in their ultimate attainments as the rivers Mze—Newman’s Danubes, whose currents switch from east to west to east—the very fact that we remember any ritual at all is enough to remind us too of a more essential way of being. Our various historical, racial, and ethnic selves are cast in a masquerade, which makes a game of integration. Yesterday’s work is play today, as contemporary life converts all needing to wanting. That’s why when the hound points and we squeeze the trigger, when we slit the knife across the quarry’s throat, we experience disgrace—a fallen estate, an embodiment of Felix’s Semper Vero, his ancestral holdings lost to laziness and debt. Agriculture has become a hobby for us millennials. Just like reading has, and writing. But “Once upon a time,” everything was sacred. The traditions haven’t changed—only our justifications of them have—and so though when we’re faced with tradition we’re disgraced, our disgrace is only partial. The holiness remains.
Partiality
But, again, to be partial is to be polysemous, and another meaning is “to favor,” “to incline”—as a valley becomes a hill becomes a mountain, where a settlement is raised, around an empty temple. Newman’s disgrace brings solace, as the spring brings not flowers but storms, which bless us with power outages, salutary loneliness, full wells. Newman’s disgrace is secular grace. “Not even a curtain of iron can separate Israel from its Heavenly Father,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said in third century Palestine. “An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Winston Churchill said in 1946 at a college in Missouri. The eiserner Vorhang—the iron curtain, or firewall, an innovation of Austro-Hungary—is a sheet of civic armor, able to be dropped from a theater’s proscenium to prevent a conflagration that starts onstage from spreading to the audience. Newman lifts this barrier—and invites his readers to ascend and bask in the flames.
JOSHUA COHEN
New York, 2012
Editor’s Note
“Is it a book then . . . that you’re working on?”
“I wouldn’t call it a book, really.” Felix replied evenly, his knuckles white on the balcony railing.
“But through all our talks, you’ve never once mentioned it!” the Professor, now truly hurt, blurted mournfully. “How can that be?” Then the question authors dread above all others:
“Pray, what’s it about?”
Like his stand-in Felix, my uncle abhorred the Professor’s question, and my mother warned me never to ask him. The first time was the summer of 1989, when Charlie rented a house near ours on Cape Cod. Charlie didn’t quite fit on the Cape—he had no affinity for water (“the sea means stupidity”), nor a family to indulge at the mini-golf courses—and his sleek black Acura with its trunk jammed full of Deutsche Gramophone CDs stood parked all summer in the sandy driveway of his cottage like a rebuke to the entire peninsula. Afterward, though, we inferred that it had been a good summer for work. The book he was writing then, this book, was at that point only a little behind schedule. Charlie had averaged a new book every three years since his late twenties, and now, in his early fifties, at his peak, his career should have been moving along briskly. Only four years earlier, in 1985, he had produced a volume of essays, The Post-Modern Aura, which despite being called “Hegelian” for its “daunting” prose and “exquisitely complex argument,” had been reviewed in over thirty publications and mentioned in mainstream magazines like Time. His previous novel, White Jazz, had been a bestseller. Every few months his byline appeared in some publication—an essay, a book review, even a profile of George Brett for Sport.
Don’t ask what your uncle is writing about—but I was eighteen at the time and less intimidated than I should have been. One day, a few months after that summer on the Cape, while visiting Charlie in St. Louis, where he taught in the English department of Washington University, I waited until he went to campus and slipped in his office. Charlie’s goal when he started each day was to come up with one or two, possibly three sentences he liked, and to get there he handwrote his initial drafts, then sent those pages to an assistant, who returned them typewritten on plain white sheets, which Charlie then cut into slivers, isolating individual sentences before reinserting them with Scotch tape in the handwritten notebooks or tacking them to a wall. Those tacked-up sentence slivers were before me now, along with dozens if not hundreds of pink and yellow note cards scrawled with phrases, lists, and snatches of dialogue. The book, in other words, was in front of my face, vertical and spread out. No drawers had to be opened, no papers shuffled. The office itself was surprisingly clean and easy to move around in, the only clutter being fifty or so briarwood pipes and an astonishing number of library books.
I stayed in the office until the Acura pulled in the driveway an hour or so later, by which time I still had no idea what the book was about. Charlie’s heavily stylized shorthand (it’s no accident that Ainoha, Felix’s wife, wonders of the Professor, “how you could sleep with a man with such bad handwriting”) was often indecipherable even to assistants who had worked with him for years, and as for the sentences that had been typed, they were typically fragments (“army of deserters,” “mad for sanity”) or mystically oblique pronouncements such as “History has a way of happening a little later than you think” or “In Russia you always have to buy the horse twice.” Sometimes they contained no more than a single word. (“Deungulate.”)
However, the question also has to be asked, even if I had found some synopsis for the unfinished book, would it have made a difference? Charlie’s books resist summary—how, for example, would you distill the plot of White Jazz? (“Sandy, a young man who works for an information technology company, sleeps around”?) How would you describe The Post-Modern Aura—as a book about art, literature, history, or simply the human condition? Even sympathetic readers can find themselves struggling to say what Charlie’s books are about. (Paul West, attempting to describe The Promisekeeper in a 1968 review for The Times, called it “not so much a story as an exhibition, not so much a prophecy stunt as a stunted process, not so much a black comedy as a kaleidoscopic psychodrama.”)
Over the next several years Charlie continued to work on his mysterious book in St. Louis and New York (where he lived when he wasn’t teaching), as well as various parts of Europe, Russia, and the US. He and my parents frequently traveled together: all of us sat with him in restaurants and walked through museums in places like Santa Fe, Chicago, and Kansas City and did not ask him about the