The Great Good Thing (15 page)

My money began to run out. I took odd jobs and managed to sell an article here and there for added cash, but I couldn't stretch out my funds forever. I became frustrated and the tide of depression began to rise in me again.

The city, meanwhile, was in a tailspin. The serial killer Son of Sam was terrorizing the public. I sold an article about the effects of his attacks, interviewing some of the traumatized friends of his victims. I can still remember their shocked and gutted gazes. The sight of them never left me. A winter of brutal cold had given way to a summer of relentless heat. Puerto Rican nationalists were disrupting the workday with bomb threats. Ellen was forced to come home from her summer job more than once when her building was shut down.

On my twenty-third birthday, July 13, the metropolis was plunged into darkness during a citywide blackout. Ellen and I had saved up painfully for a special birthday dinner in a fancy restaurant. We were eating when I glanced out the front window and saw a cascading shadow wipe the brilliance from the skyline. The restaurant management strove to keep the customers happy by handing out free wine in the dark. Poor as we were, we were only too eager to take advantage of the offer. Riots and looting were breaking out in the northern slums, but it was quiet enough where we were. As the blacked-out city burned around us, we went dancing home together along
the sidewalk with me singing “They All Laughed” at the top of my lungs.

One of the local tabloids ran a cartoon soon afterward that showed the island of Manhattan sinking into the harbor while businessmen paddled for shore on their briefcases. That was pretty much how I felt about the city. New York can be a wonderful town, but it's never really suited me. Too much stone; too much noise; not enough opportunity for solitude. I wanted out. I was relieved when my older brother helped me land a job on a newspaper in a bureau in the rural exurbs, a hundred miles away. Ellen had graduated college by then, so we moved north. We took up residence in a gatekeeper's cottage on an estate. It was little more than a shack really, but it was up on a hill with a view of a horse paddock and the fields beyond. I loved it there.

I loved newspaper work too: the excitement and, of course, the Experience. Working the county's small towns, I got to cover every kind of story from murders to political shenanigans to the occasional county fair.

One morning I was sitting in the run-down, smoke-filled cubicle that was the bureau's office just off the main street of the county seat. I heard a call come in over the fizzling police radio that sat on top of an old filing cabinet. I rushed out the back door into the parking lot, jumped into my elderly Volvo, and raced to the scene. I got there just in time to see state troopers and sheriff's deputies carrying the body of a young woman out of the woods. She had been hitchhiking, just as my Ellen once had.

The police caught her killer quickly. It turned out he was the boyfriend of one of the richest girls in town, the wayward daughter of a local horse breeder. She lived with her lover in a house on her dad's vast estate. Her friends on the estate knew the guy was creepy. They'd begged her to break up with him, but she wouldn't do it. She liked the fact that the relationship made her father angry. At one point, desperate, her friends had called the newspaper—called me specifically. The boyfriend had been arrested for exposing himself in the local pornographic bookstore. They wanted me to write about it. They hoped that seeing the story in the paper would bring the girl to her senses. It wasn't news, so I couldn't run it. Too bad. Eventually, the horse breeder's daughter and her crazy boyfriend had a quarrel. He stormed off and took his anger out on the hitchhiker, beating her to death. It was a story straight out of Raymond Chandler.

The horse breeder was eager to avoid being connected to the murder. The powerful head of a prominent family, he turned to the county sheriff for help. The sheriff was a dour man, who hated nothing so much as the local press. He was only too willing to protect the horse breeder from any pesky and intrusive reporters, namely me. He ordered that roadblocks be set up, manned by deputies in patrol cars, blocking every entrance to the horse breeder's sprawling estate. No one could get through without being identified by the deputies. And no one on the farm was answering the phone.

There was, however, a young woman working for the Sheriff's Department who had taken a liking to me. We used
to chat with each other over the pinball machine in the local diner. One night soon after the murder, as I was sitting alone in the bureau, the phone rang. When I answered, a woman's voice said, “Step out the back door. A black car will pull up. Get in the backseat.” I hung up the phone. I laughed out loud. I thought,
I've been waiting to get a phone call like that my whole life!
I felt as if I had actually become Philip Marlowe. Experience!

Sure enough, when I stepped out the back door into the parking lot, the woman from the Sheriff's Department drove up in a long black car. When I got in the backseat, she instructed me to lie down on the floor. I fitted my body uncomfortably over the drive shaft tunnel and she covered me with a blanket, head to toe. Then, with me hidden from view, she drove past the sheriff's roadblocks up to the horse farm. I sat with the horse breeder's daughter's friends and they told me the whole story of her ill-fated romance. The next morning, it was splashed all over our front page. The sheriff was furious. I loved newspaper work.

But it was an all-consuming job, morning to midnight. For the first time in years, I was unable to write fiction every day. The most disturbing thing about this was how happy it made me. Getting out of the house, working an interesting job, being with colleagues I liked, making money—these things gave me enormous pleasure, as they would any young man. The newspaper forced me to realize that writing novels, the work I knew I was born for, was not good for me, psychologically speaking.

The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection.
Emotional wounds heal in other people's hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people's minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul's shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags. When you're working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed. There are plenty of harder jobs, I know. Homemakers, soldiers, cops, firemen, laborers—they all put in tougher days than writers do. But the writing life, so help me, could drive even a sane man crazy. If you're half crazy already, as I was, it will drive you completely out of your mind. It was healthy for me to be away from it.

I should have stayed away. I should have enjoyed the time. I should have put in a few years, five years, say, as a journalist. I could have learned more about politics, crime, and business from the inside. Established a reputation. Then I could have written a novel—probably a better novel than I was capable of at the moment. I just couldn't do it that way, though. Again, I was so ignorant of how a career works, how a life works. My father had always told me that a writer who takes a job will never get around to writing. One day, he'll wake up and he'll be sixty-five with a gold watch for retirement and an unfinished novel in his desk drawer. Writers write, Dad always said; and if you're not writing, you're not a writer. I sort of half understood that this was more of his bad advice—why he presumed to know anything about it at all, I can't say—but the
idea frightened me nonetheless. As much as I loved the newspaper, every day I spent there felt to me like another day closer to that gold watch and failure.

Then my girlfriend sold my novel. Ellen had taken a secretarial job at a literary agency in Manhattan. She asked her bosses if she might send
Face of the Earth
around to publishers and they said yes, go ahead. To everyone's surprise, including mine, she got an offer on the book—a tiny offer but from one of the most famous editors at one of the best literary houses in town. With a check for a hot $7,500 in my hand, I did what any mentally unbalanced young writer would do under the circumstances: I quit my job and began to plan my next novel.

That was pretty stupid, but I did something else at the same time. I married Ellen—and that may have been the single best idea I ever had.

We'd been living together for four years. My original sense that we were interlocking pieces in some cosmic jigsaw puzzle had never left me. I didn't think much of ceremonies and rituals, of course. They were relics of an outmoded past, and I was far above such things. But I agreed to a gathering of about a dozen family members and friends at the cottage, and a few quick words from a preacher out on the lawn. It drizzled all that day. But just before the ceremony was due to begin, the rain stopped and a single golden beam of sunlight shone down on the spot by the willow tree where the ceremony was to take place. Ellen and I stood together in that light while a minister from a Unitarian church pronounced us man and wife. “We gather together in the presence of that power
whom some people call God and others call nature and for whom some have no name at all . . .,” he said. “The Church of Amorphous Rambling,” one of my brothers called it.

The moment the service was over, however, I realized I had been wrong, utterly wrong. It struck me full force right away: the ceremony
did
matter. It was like a living story representing a truth that could not be otherwise told. It changed something in me on the instant. It created a mysterious but tremendous difference in the relationship between my girl and me.

I left the lawn. I walked back into the cottage. I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I looked at myself in the mirror, a married man. Dazed but euphoric, I raised my hand and gave myself the high sign: thumb and forefinger curled together into an
o
for
okay
!

I was a fool in so many ways and really half insane by then. But somehow—and not for the last time in my life—I had managed to stumble into the great good thing.

O
ur wedding day—then our honeymoon in Italy—were just about the last happy days I would have for the next four years.

The publication of
Face of the Earth
was a disaster. My famous editor was a brilliant and courtly gentleman but also a raging drunk. When he invited me to his apartment so we could go over the manuscript together, I was thrilled—until I saw the shambling, quivering wreck of a man he became in his off hours. Before the book made it to the stores, he left the publishing house and went into rehab. Without the famous editor to shepherd my novel into the world, it was universally ignored. The blow to my already fragile ego was so catastrophic I didn't even feel it. I simply buried the broken pieces of myself in comforting and increasingly grandiose fantasies.

These fantasies had been growing in me over the years, winding round my mental life like cobwebs and vines. The
darker my internal world became, the more I soothed myself by hunkering within these dreams. My father's caustic and belittling voice had become an inner voice to me now, and to counter it I developed a defiantly overblown sense of myself, a brittle narcissism not unlike his own. This grandiosity even crept into my prose style. I had tried hard to teach myself to write sentences that were clean and clear, but now my work was becoming flowery and pompous. My ambitions grew flowery and pompous too—cosmic; impossible. I'm sure this was not the first time this ever happened to a young artist, but I couldn't break out of the prison of my own conceit. Its atmosphere slowly stifled not only my sense of humor but my sense of reality as well.

I had started out wanting to be a writer of suspense and adventure stories. Yes, I wanted my stories to be fresh and rich and original. Of course, I wanted them to be full of the stuff of life. I had seen this done in Hitchcock's movies and Chandler's novels and in supernatural thrillers like
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It was not so far-fetched to think I had the ability to make good things in those traditions. But now, to say I began to see myself as a talent of Shakespearean genius would be to understate the grandeur of my delusions. I began to imagine my vision was prophetic, even salvific. I began to feel I might be born to utter things kept secret since the foundation of the world.

This thought closed over me bit by bit. It came to obsess me. Over the years, my writing became unreadable and unpublishable. Even Ellen, a ceaseless supporter of my ambitions,
began to admit she could not always understand what I was trying to say. She did not know how deranged I was becoming, but she could see how unhappy I was.

The more my work was rejected, the more windy and insistent my ego became. If I was a failure always short of money it must be because the world did not understand me, and if the world did not understand me it was because my genius was too incomprehensibly great.

I don't remember when I first conceived the notion of writing a novel about Jesus Christ. I think the underlying motivation was this: if the public could not discover my unique brilliance in the subtleties of a lyrical mystery novel like
Face of the Earth
, then I would bludgeon them over the head with it by deconstructing the intricate psychological and cultural meanings lodged in the central figure of human history. That ought to do it.

Since my first reading of the Bible, I had continued to study Christianity from time to time and other religions as well. My interest was always cool and intellectual. I was not religious in any way and I was not drawn to faith. I called myself an agnostic at this point, but like most agnostics, I was a functional atheist.

I did think religion mattered, though. I thought of it as a living myth that shaped the human mind and expressed our innermost fears and desires. Many of the thinkers I knew and read dismissed the power of religion over people's lives. They thought faith was just a relic of mankind's superstitious past, something we were growing out of now in our scientific age.
I thought that was wrong. I agreed with the literary critic M. H. Abrams who wrote, “Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought.”
¹

I thought that to be ignorant of Christianity was to be ignorant of the underpinnings of our own worldview. So when I began my research into mythology for
Face of the Earth
, I paid special attention to the gospel story. I saw it as the foundational myth of the West, the Great Narrative that had expressed and fashioned the Western mind-set more than any other.

Which was true enough, as far as it went. Christianity
is
the great Western narrative, whether you believe in it or not. And the idea of reinterpreting that narrative through fiction wasn't necessarily outlandish either. It had been done brilliantly and provocatively by Nikos Kazantzakis in his novel
The Last Temptation of Christ
, a book I admired very much.

In me, however, the scheme was simple madness. It was an act of narcissism, sorrow, and rage, at once grandiose and petty. Though Kazantzakis's novel was radical and shocked the religious authorities of his day, it was at least a serious exploration of Jesus as God incarnate, the savior of mankind. My book, on the other hand, simply sought to disassemble this Christ figure and explain his influence away. Fraser in his
Golden Bough
had shown us that Christianity was just one more death-and-resurrection cult among many. Freud in his
Totem and Taboo
and
Future of an Illusion
had shown us it was merely a projection of our father fixation on the heavens.
And now I—glorious, brilliant, postmodern I—would bring the source of that psychological mythology living to the page.

My Jesus would be the tortured vessel of our signifiers, the miserable expression of our existential angst. He would find enlightenment, yes, but it would be the enlightened acceptance of material existence, death, and suffering. In denial of this revelation, the mob would reject him, kill him, and then deify him as a way of silencing his existential truth. My Jesus would be myself, in other words—a rejected genius—and I would become he in the creation of him: the failed storyteller resurrected as the Greatest Storyteller of All Time.

It was still early in my self-education. I didn't really have the wherewithal to take on such a task, if anyone ever could. To my credit, I approached my work seriously. I holed myself away and read and researched and thought and wrote and outlined—which sent me crazier by the day. The failure of my first novel and the sudden shock of having pulled myself from a job I loved to lock myself up again in solitary study, threw me into horrible troughs of dissociation and melancholy. I would lose track of myself for half an hour at a time. I would come around to find myself in my car on some strange forest road without knowing where I was or how I had gotten there. I would have to find a gas station with a pay phone and call my wife so she could talk me through the process of getting home. For the first time, serious thoughts of suicide began to come to me. Nothing vivid or specific yet, just the notion:
a moment's suffering and then this pain would end.
But I went on working. What was madness, after all, but the burden of genius in a world of fools?

Ellen got a job with a small magazine in Boston. We moved there. I didn't care where I lived, or thought I didn't. We found an apartment in a house in Somerville, a working-class suburb that had been hit hard by the worsening recession. My money was almost gone and Ellen wasn't making much. Our apartment was large but we couldn't afford to furnish it so its rooms were all but empty. We had to put cardboard boxes in our secondhand refrigerator because we couldn't afford to buy shelves. We ate noodles for dinner almost every night, except when we splurged and went down to the corner for a fast-food hamburger. In the street beneath our windows, angry drunks, out of work, screamed at their wives and at each other. In the neighboring house, pressed close to ours, an old man coughed up the last of his smoke-riddled lungs.

Ellen's boss was a nasty tyrant and so her job made her increasingly unhappy. I found weekend work as a security guard in a bank, standing idle in uniform through empty hours, bored and depressed.

And during the week, day after day, at home alone while Ellen was at work, I sat tailor-fashion on the carpet of one of our unfurnished rooms, with books and notebooks spread out all around me. Gripping my fountain pen, I wrote for hours, feverishly. I once produced more than 150 handwritten pages in a single session. I kept the blinds drawn to block out the neighborhood. It drove our two cats insane and they fought each other viciously, climbing up the windows and slashing the blinds to ribbons while I worked on. In the afternoons, I would walk aimlessly around the city, dejected, daydreaming.
I would haunt Harvard Yard, yearning to be part of the college life I had always despised. I would wander into pinball parlors and feed precious quarters into the machines.

By the time the book was finished, I was an emotional cripple, barely able to think or speak or do anything but wander the city and dream. Was the completed work any good? I don't know anymore. I threw the manuscript away many years ago, so I can't go back and read it now and make an honest assessment of its qualities. I think I did as good a job at what I set out to do as I could. I can't really say any more than that.

I titled the book
Son of Man.
It took me weeks of backbreaking labor to type up its hundreds of handwritten pages. Then I sent the manuscript off to the famous editor in New York, now back from rehab. Weeks went by. No answer came. An agony of suspense. Finally the editor called. The book, he said, was a work of genius. Unique, explosively brilliant, revolutionary. But the subject matter was so controversial, he could not publish it without support from the other editors in the house. He didn't want a repeat of what had happened to
Face of the Earth
, orphaned at publication. He needed to get more readings.

Again, weeks passed. Waiting. Terrible. Then the devastating news. The other editors at the publishing house had universally rejected the novel. My editor sent me their letters. They ranged from the outraged to the dismissive.

My editor kindly helped me find a new agent for the manuscript, but the book never sold and I lost faith in it. Years later, I would write an extremely condensed version of the story and
publish it with a small press, but I was just being stubborn at that point, refusing to take no for an answer. I worked hard at the new book, but I could not recover the inspiration of my madness. The version I published was hobbled and unformed. I'm sorry I did it.

Ellen and I decided to flee the scene of our unhappiness. We left Boston and rented a cottage on the edge of a forest preserve in the suburban New York county of Westchester. It was a beautiful miniature three-story house, built in the era of the Revolution. It was set in a secluded rural spot, only an hour out of the city. Ellen went back to work at the literary agency. I was able to pick up freelance assignments from my old newspaper and continue some well-paying secretarial work I'd begun doing for Harvard.

But if I had thought to come here to recover emotionally, it was a mistake. With no money, we couldn't afford cars that worked. Our otherwise elegant driveway was always littered with the shells of broken jalopies. Half the time I was stranded in the cottage and couldn't go anywhere. There was no Internet yet, no cell phones. I was stuck where I was, alone with myself. At another time, it might have been idyllic. I was surrounded by forest, which I'd always loved. I had time to read and write, to hike in the woods and fish in the reservoir at the bottom of the gorge. But I was furious and frustrated and confused by my failures and thwarted ambitions. The solitude turned me in on myself. I descended into painful and obsessive self-analysis to try to untie the tangle of my anguish. My writing became obscure and bizarre.

As my money dwindled, as my books and stories were rejected everywhere, my heart filled with paranoia and rage. It was agonizing. I saw saboteurs like my father all around me. I thought everyone—family, friends, colleagues—was out to hurt me, trip me up, betray me. They tried to hide their hostility—maybe they even hid it from themselves—but I saw the signs. They didn't want me to succeed, and it made me mad.

My wife seemed especially threatening to me, because I had trusted her and we were so intimately close. I was suspicious of everything she did now. Everything she did infuriated me. I remember once coming upon a bath towel Ellen had left lying on the bathroom floor. The sight of it filled me with fury. How thoughtless she was to just leave it there! What an insult to my manhood to be forced to pick up after her! It was obviously purposeful on her part. She wanted to belittle me and render me powerless. Well, I wasn't going to stand for it! I spent the day rehearsing the brutal things I was going to say to her when she got home. My hands fairly itched to get ahold of her . . .

Our marriage saved me here. I wanted so badly to say something cruel to Ellen, even to do something violent to her. But I loved her too much and she was too good to me. An intelligent and insightful woman, she had grown up with a writer father and knew what writers were like and what they needed. She was old-fashioned, feminine, tender, and generous—a dedicated homemaker who took careful care of me. The idea that she was plotting against me made no sense. The idea that she was working against me made no sense. Even I could see that, even then.

Because our marriage was what it was, because my wife was who she was, and because I loved her, my rage came to seem like a stranger to me. It felt to me like some red satanic hand trying to work me like a puppet. I fought it. When my wife came home, I swallowed all my fine, lacerating speeches. I told her what was happening inside me, carefully describing my crazy thought process step by step. As morose and brooding as I sometimes became, as angry as I sometimes felt, I never took it out on her, never even raised my voice to her. This fight was just between me and the devil of my rage.