1.
The house was packed to bursting. It was a simple enough premise, yet I had never been to a reading structured the same way: favorite passages delivered by a long list of participants, both published authors and anonymous enthusiasts. Nobody occupied the podium for significantly longer than five minutes. Covered in the panorama: the opening of “Little Expressionless Animals,” the introduction of mathematically intricate Everything and More (about getting out of bed in the morning), self-loathing reflections on the cruise-ship hypnotist from essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” a few pages of “Good Old Neon,” a good deal from the diving board in “Forever Overhead,” one of the more fiendish relationship monologues in “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” an introductory, in-flight sequence from The Pale King (its then recent release, the ostensible spark for the event) and several selections from Infinite Jest, including, most memorably, Don Gately’s dialogue with the specter from his hospital bed and the footnote on the fate of Avril Incandenza’s beloved dog.

The David Foster Wallace Memorial Readathon spanned three to four hours in the basement of Greenpoint bookstore WORD. Not everyone saw it through; the crowd thinned just a little for the latter half. Now and again my own attention took trips around the block and back.

But can I say this? You could feel the love. Here was a group turned out to commemorate the brilliance of one guy’s colossal strivings, his dogged humility, the beautiful nuance and intricate recursions of a mind pushing past the simple given, which mind was everywhere and nowhere in the spaces between those of us gathered to follow his words as they were given life, and enlivened in turn, by each speaker, the glittering humor in their eyes, a sense of having been found. What experience the author mined at extremes of individual solitude gained in the audience a forgiveness, a redemption, a gentle receptivity of spirit. That feeling belonged to everyone.

The point, it became enormously clear, was not that David Foster Wallace stepped wretchedly into the inky hereafter, leaving us only to mourn, to puzzle the question of his life, or to take heed by seeing around his work to “The Depressed Person.” It was that he first succeeded at writing volume on volume of powerful prose, fiction and non, the concentrated, interwoven achievement of which we could feel, supersedes — present tense — the fragmenting wonder-farm telenexus in which every last one of our imaginations dissolve on the descent to wherever it is we will land in our desire to pass on whatever it is we will pass on.

And by “us,” zooming out now in my longing from that one room in Greenpoint, I mean, people. Everyone.

2.
To anchor a marathon reading an author must have created a singular story. As it happens, the Wallace reading at WORD registered among the first in a decided upswing in recent marathon literary events. In the past year, New York City has seen and heard readings of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and, to bend genres, which the marathon reading inherently does, Elevator Repair Service’s productions of The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby.

As these things usually go, lit marathons happen during the holiday season and June 16th AKA Bloomsday. The New York City marathon reading in longest standing is actually not of fiction but poetry: the St. Mark’s Church New Year’s event during which scores of poets give breath to their own verse and that of others. It dates to the ’70s. When they opened a new community space in Greenpoint, editors at lit journal Triple Canopy were well aware in choosing to organize a reading in late January (duration: 53 hours) that a motley group of NYC artists had once gathered every New Year’s Day at the Paula Cooper Gallery to orate Stein’s The Making of Americans; the practice began in the ’80s, going on hiatus with the new millennium’s arrival. On both the East and West Coasts, Bloomsday inspires numerous lit marathons around Joyce, whether the text is Ulysses or, for the more fearless, those willing to snatch beauty and truth from the mouth of nonsense, Finnegans Wake. With the holiday in mind, the Housing Works in Soho stages a four-hour reading of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In response to popular sentiment, the same organizers played a part last November in bringing to fruition a reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” near what was then occupied Liberty Square.

As well, the novelist Jonathan Lethem undertook, with help, a marathon reading of his own Chronic City over several nights in the fall of 2009.

Lynne Tillman, author most recently of novel American Genius, A Comedy and story collection Someday This Will Be Funny, has participated in several recent marathon events. When asked what might illuminate the trend, she spoke to an unlikely source of interest: “The Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954-003064: A Public Reading” conducted initially in 2007 and subsequently reenacted annually at MOMA (see the current video installation, “9 Scripts from a Nation at War”). As the prison camp at Guantanamo continues to operate, a collective of artists bring unedited transcripts of U.S. military tribunals to the public eye.

Another source from the art scene is performance artist Marshall Weber, who, since 1994, has delivered solo lit marathons of titles ranging from William Vollmann’s The Rifles to Homer’s The Odyssey to The Bible. As for what might spur such a marathon into being, Weber writes on the Brooklyn Artists Alliance’s website: “The cycle is an evocation of the hope contained in human literature and the joy of street reading as well as an exorcism of the demonic forces of illiteracy, fundamentalism and textural literalism.”

3.
Regarding the marathon reading, poet Barbara Swift Bauer offers by e-mail: “I think what’s important is that it is a way of publicly honoring the writer.” There is something wonderful about how a great author’s voice refracts through a reading audience gathered for such an observance. Writing is a solitary activity; writing a novel especially so. Just imagining the effort required is enough to make many readers, or reading attendees, go pale. We think of novelists almost as advertisements of individuality, exemplary studies of what a person can achieve in solitude. In a marathon reading, something of the division between individual and collective is closed: see anonymous members of the audience glow as the author’s individuated voice carries through them. Not coincidentally, such readers’ own individuality stands out all the more: which passage of the author’s work did the reader choose? How does the reader deliver the given passage that so many of us looking on have read before?

In Constantine’s Sword, his epic history punctuated by memoir, novelist and historian James Carroll envisages the birth of Christianity unfolding. In the chapter called “The Healing Circle,” he correlates how he and other loved ones grieved the loss of a friend with the methods those nearest to Jesus might have followed in commemorating his passing:

Lament. Texts. Silence. Stories. Food. Drink. Songs. More texts. Poems. We wove a web of meanings that joined us…Our circle was an extended American version of the Irish wake, of Italian keening, of African drumming in honor of ancestors. It was a version of the Jewish custom of ‘sitting shiva,’ from the Hebrew word for seven, referring to the seven days of mourning after the death of a loved one…To imagine Jesus as risen was to expect that soon all would be.

With its immersive, beatific reach the lit marathon stands in funny relation to organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. At a time when church attendance in many parts of the country is down, even as the voting power of the evangelical bloc stands in ever sheerer relief, children of the heartland and of the South continue to head for the coasts, where lit marathons multiply.

There exists a definite likeness with organized religion’s governing impulse in the reverence inherent to the marathon reading. In one sense, carrying on to an audience like a non-ordained minister is the height of Christian heresy (though, certainly, most fiction is less offensive than, say, your average goth rocker’s sacrilegious imagery); in another, a novel might be the brilliant lived sermon that found no root in organized religion as currently composited. Faith and doubt exist in dialectic, after all. It is difficult to believe the person who claims to know one while having no experience of the other.

Perhaps it is the seeming disproportion of a full novel’s demands that gives readers in the heartland pause. On his having steered clear of the lit marathon phenomenon, one Midwestern-based novelist writes, “People here don’t seem to think that they should make a lengthy claim upon your attention.” Another, raised in the South, reflects that perhaps he has never participated in a lit marathon for the simple reason that he has “always been inclined toward an early bedtime.” A veteran of many a writers’ conference and their attendant readings refers to the marathon variety as “a perfect storm of not-likingness.”

In that inclination for avoidance, we can recognize that the work of an artist must remain a thing apart. Tillman shakes off religious connotation in describing the pull of the marathon, even as her language borders it: “There’s so little ritual in our lives, or at least in my life, and there is an aspect to these marathons that’s ritualistic. It’s about as close to ritual as I get. Myself, I don’t use that kind of language, but there’s something, I would say, about participating in a reading in a room full of people, most of whom you don’t know, and being part of an event that is one of reverence for books, and love of books. There isn’t all that much love of books in our culture anymore—not the larger culture.”

The marathon reading usually gives fair indication of that intra-fictional divide between the canonical, the career-driven, and the striving — even as any feeling of great division melts away over the marathon’s immersive course. In the latter hours of a long reading, it can feel that the story being told is the only story there is to tell, or at least the only one that could bring together the group with whom you as listener or reader have now weathered so many hours.

“There were maybe 40 people around for the conclusion near midnight Sunday night,” wrote Sam Frank of Triple Canopy. “People kept coming in to this room full of cult members, the Church of Stein, consecrating our new space with half a million words.” Said Amanda Bullock, director of public programming at Housing Works (she dubbed their reading of Dickens’ The Christmas Carol “a 5k”): “It’s fun I think for the readers to read the work of someone they admire, in tribute, and to all hang out.”

Of participating as both reader and listener, Tillman muses, “The distribution of pleasure is greater. You have a more comradely feeling with your fellow readers, and since it’s not your own work, it’s less nerve-wracking. I mean, you want to do a good job because you want to do a good job; but it’s not your work. When I was a kid, I got a lot of pleasure being read to; if you can get into that mood, and because a marathon is so long, maybe it allows you to get there, you can feel more dreamy. Also there’s something about it that may be very comforting, like watching the same movie again.”

Seizing something like a movie’s active engagement, recent years on the West Coast find theater groups such as Word for Word trying on for marathon-size new titles like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, while, out east, the Elevator Repair Service ushered in theatergoers by the hundreds to experience their rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

As imagined by Elevator Repair Service amid the boredom of weird modern office-place pastiche, Fitzgerald’s novel takes possession of the workers and whatever unspoken ambition brought them there: the slump-shouldered drone at the outmoded computer takes on the role of Nick; the janitor becomes Tom, the well-dressed sales rep, Daisy. The distant, slow-speaking boss assumes the guise within the guise of Gatsby himself. The story never leaves the one room.

This particular marathon’s focus is not a novel to the exclusion of all else, but the manner in which we bridge Fitzgerald’s words with our present being. The actors win laughter by calling attention to how their own unique features do — or do not — match the ideal of those described on the page. Jim Fletcher, who plays Gatsby, tilts his head to show a pronounced bald spot as Nick reads of his host’s exemplary head of hair. An antic hive of allusiveness (rarely have sound effects been so integral to a marathon reading), Gatz owes much to the sensibility of a show like The Simpsons: the modernist classic spruced up by myriad post-modern threads. The woodenness with which Fletcher speaks Gatsby’s lines underscores the character’s dubious identity; it also hints at how a novel, that which aspires to stand outside time, cannot but recede, adopt layers of age that will either diminish or augment its resonance. In this way, those famous closing lines of Fitzgerald’s seem to rattle the limitation of their own artifice (“boats against…”), a flair that would ripple outward in the later work of such authors as Barth, Barthelme, Borges, Carter, Coover, DeLillo, Pynchon — and Wallace.

If it has happened yet, no one told me, but to imagine a marathon reading around Infinite Jest makes for an entrancing pause. (Make it in summer when teachers are free; encourage costume; start working on those pharmaceutical pronunciations.) Few novels parade an aesthetic of such exhaustive intelligence, the humor of All Too Much; the characters on its pages grapple with their own slides and recoveries in the way of All Too Much.  The book’s addictive depths were built to give ballast.

Where Fitzgerald casts feeling across the brow of novelistic self-consciousness, Wallace revels in oiling and refashioning the squeaky wheel of novel-ness, to arrive at what the enterprise represents at its core, the entire literary lineage. The lit marathon tempts a similarly immense question by bringing the reader out of seclusion. Of the way it wraps around us, exhausts our capacity to pay attention while also abiding our coming and goings — we can drop in, drop out, and when we get back, chances are good it will still be there — the poet Susan Terris, echoing Tillman, reflects, “I guess the singular joy of the marathon reading is being read aloud to, which most of us love — exactly in the same way we did when we were children.”

Image Credit: Flickr/Elvert Barnes

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It was a strange night. The Village Voice reporter likened the Kronos Quartet to the band on the sinking Titanic, but it wasn’t as bad as all that — and he admitted as much, too. It was definitely an experiment, interesting at times, nerve-wracking at others, but the thing that struck me was the conversational clash that followed, like when Jabreal asked Satrapi what she thought the 2012 election looked like outside the United States, as the quartet plowed on in the background, and a clearly frustrated Satrapi said that she was elated by the music — and really wasn’t interested in talking about Mitt Romney. The declaration earned her the biggest applause of the night.

They both had fair points: the event was ostensibly about music; the program didn’t promise a dissection of American politics. But it was an opportunity for two Middle Eastern women to talk about their vantages from abroad, specifically from such cosseted places as Iran and Palestine — views that are a fair bit harder to find than most in the American literary landscape. This was the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival, which brings together writers from around the world to, according to this year’s introduction, “celebrate the power of the written word in action.” It purports the values of PEN itself, whose charter states that: “Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.”

PEN World Voices is one of the foremost international literary events in New York City, a place that, as the center of American publishing and home to a basically alarming number of writers, looks inward — celebrates the local, perhaps — more often than not. I’m as guilty as any of literary jingoism: I attend maybe one reading per week in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and it may be partly my own fault, but the writers I encounter nearly always hail from the Anglophone world, whether they’re native-born or have emigrated here or to the UK. Most of the authors I read fall into the same category. The topics I’m interested in, the regions in which I’d like to see a story set — all of these fall within the confines of English-speaking lands. And I think this is probably a personal failing. Maybe I don’t need to know how Mitt Romney comes off in Iran. But so little writing from the vast majority of the world penetrates the American literary scene, and my own personal literary scene. It’s an age-old complaint, but things don’t really seem to be changing. You can seek out literature from just about anywhere — and now it’s easier than any previous point in history — but it’s a hell of a lot harder to bring it into the conversation.

There’s that famous and damning statistic: translated works make up just three percent of the American book market (and, in contrast, sixty percent of all the translated literature in the world comes from English). The University of Rochester, who named their translated literature site, Three Percent, after the fact, suggests that when narrowed down to literary fiction and poetry, the number drops to a paltry 0.7 percent. There contemporary notable exceptions, from genre (Stieg Larsson and the European crime-novelist wave that has sprung up in his stead) to mega-bestsellers (Paulo Coelho, Umberto Eco) to the literary masters (Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk, José Saramago, and a handful of others) that have become permanent fixtures in our canon. And of course there are the hippest of the modern-day literary heavyweights, Haruki Murakami and Roberto Bolaño. But the majority of translated literature remains largely obscure, lauded in niches within the publishing and reading worlds but failing to impact the broader public.

The translation question is an old and thorny one. Foreign books, anecdotal wisdom suggests, are a big gamble: “There’s a general perception in the trade that these books can be difficult to sell,” one publisher told the Guardian. “As long as that persists it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Reading in translation is often a tricky prospect: the conflict between readability and remaining faithful to the original language lies at the heart of the ethics of translation. Look at the line-by-line differences between Murakami’s translators, Jay Rubin, Alfred Birnbaum, and Phillip Gabriel. Some passages are wildly different, clunky with too-literal translations, or, on the other end of the spectrum, full of Western idioms and surprisingly liberal interpretations of Murakami’s words. It leaves the reader in translation feeling a little distrustful, and inadequate. I can’t imagine learning Japanese — I only got past high-school level French!

And perhaps part of the trouble is that translation means more than replacing a word with its foreign equivalent: there’s a broader cultural undercurrent at work when we talk about Americans and international literature, a question of how a book will read on this side of the Atlantic. Take, for example, Tim Parks’ diatribe against Jonathan Franzen and Freedom, from the New York Review of Books about a year ago. He begins with an absurd press release from the American publisher of Thomas Pletzinger, a German novelist: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.” Parks is incredulous:

What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! We want something worldly, but if it seems too German, or perhaps just too foreign, we become wary. As my mailbag indicates, the literary community is very much an international phenomenon, but not, it would seem, a level playing field. To make it in America Pletzinger must shed his German-ness as if he were an immigrant with an embarrassing accent.

Parks quickly moves on to Franzen, whom he accuses of aggressive, list-heavy American-ness: he takes fault with the European fascination with Freedom, saying that there are no Italian words for half of Franzen’s lists, from foosball table to “mechanized recliner.” The Italian translator chimed in, indignant, in the comments, giving exact translations for foosball and La-Z-Boy and insisting that, despite Parks’ claim, the Italian for “mechanized recliner” is just as ugly as the English. But I think that the broader point still stands. Reading The Corrections last year — that’s a solid decade after everyone else read it, which I quickly learned when I tried to discuss it with people — I couldn’t help but feel like all those cultural references were incredibly dated, a lot of otherwise engaging prose weighed down by Y2K-era jargon. Cultural references are tricky, whether they’re traveling across geographical or temporal borders. But is something substantial lost with their removal?

Three Percent is trying to revive May as “World in Translation Month,” and it’s an obviously laudable goal. But it remains to be seen how they — or anyone — can effectively market an entire world of literature that’s still failed to catch on amongst the majority of the American reading public. I’ve seen the attempts: articles, blogs, word-of-mouth from friends or booksellers, offering up blind recommendations, the author’s name, title, and original language, and I don’t know how to parse it. I’m guilty myself: just the other day, halfway through Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, the first book in translation I’ve read in a long while, I found myself trying to talk about it with a few friends. “He’s Senegalese,” I said. They looked at me expectantly, waiting for something more helpful than nationality. “It’s about colonialism.” They nodded. “It was translated by the woman who did The Little Prince,” I tossed in. “Ah!” one said. A relief: a cultural frame of reference. I give most books a hard sell, but I had so few tools at my disposal, reading a Senegalese book translated from French half a century ago, and fault here lies with me, not with Kane, whose book is extraordinary and subtle and philosophical and unlike anything else I’ve read about the colonial experience, which, coming from a person who essentially majored in postcolonialism, is saying something.

Ambiguous Adventure is part of a Melville House series called the Neversink Library, which “champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored.” I’m taking that last designation to heart. There’s a danger in become too prescriptive with foreign literature: we should be reading it, that it’s good for us, that it’s our duty as citizens of the world to read books from every corner of it. The Neversink project seems to offer an antidote to that: titles carefully chosen and offered up with the simple explanation that these books are so good they never should have slipped past or from the public consciousness. All good books transcend the place and time in which they were written: the whole point is to write something specific that becomes universal, after all. So perhaps the best way to transcend the barriers of international literature is to no longer market it as such. A good book is a good book. We need to read more in translation — and we simply need to read more. Maybe dropping all of these labels is a good place to start.

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“It’s more intense every time I think of him,” said the woman in line behind me.

We were waiting to get into the opening panel at last month’s David Foster Wallace Symposium in Austin. She wore a black and white sundress (more appropriate for 90-degree Texas-in-April weather than, say, my blazer and wrinkled gray wool pants), and spoke in the elevated volume of someone who wants her private conversation to be heard by a crowd of strangers.

“The longer he’s dead,” she continued, eliciting reflex-type coughs from her audience, “it’s like he’s more dead.”

To be honest, before the conference, I imagined that my task as an observer would consist mainly of plucking quotes like this from the air — of eavesdropping my way into conversations among Wallace devotees that would seem, both in the moment and on further reflection, cliché and naïve and, like, ten percent crazy. I think I expected to vindicate my own normal-seeming degree of Wallace fandom by exposing myself to the extremist sect of his readers — folks who wear Enfield Tennis Academy t-shirts (ETA being the fictional setting of Infinite Jest), or who are apparently in the process of trying to memorize the entirety of that 1,000-page novel (endnotes and all), or who participate regularly in the longstanding Wallace email listserv (1,200 strong, according to its creator and moderator Matt Bucher), and have ready responses to questions like “How do you characterize the influence of Lacan on Broom of the System?”

In one of the weirder moments during the proceedings, JT Jackson (who apparently makes the rounds on the circuit of DFW events) asserted to a panel that Wallace had been an un-credited writer of Good Will Hunting, and that if we wanted the truth, we should all “ask Matt about it.” Jackson has long gray hair and spindly gray mutton chops. He wore an olive green military-style jacket and introduced himself to me as a “good jarhead” that served during Vietnam. A classmate of Wallace’s in the MFA Program at the University of Arizona, he seems very invested in exposing hidden truths about Wallace’s life. [Ed. Note: Please see Jackson's comment at the end of this piece for his responses.]

I guess this is to say that the symposium had its share of characters one might expect to find in a David Foster Wallace novel.

But thinking back to two days of talking about suicide, love, literary commitment, illness, perfection, and grief, it seems silly to sneer at the earnestness of readers who understand Wallace’s work much more deeply than I could ever hope to. I can’t report feeling any closer to a resolution about how writers should carry forward Wallace’s considerations of the constitutive struggles of ordinary life.

The symposium did repeatedly drive home the obvious fact that I don’t miss him as badly (and can’t miss him as badly) as the people who knew him personally. Not just as a spectral, textual, complex set of sometimes life-changing ideas about the world, but rather as a fleshy, six-foot-plus, pain in the ass, bandana-ed human dude who once asked Rolling Stone to provide a special caregiver for his dogs with “emotional issues” before covering the McCain campaign in 2000, and who left behind friends and family and a heap of paper that now sits in catalogued boxes for the rest us all to decipher, dissect, and translate.

More importantly, it revealed something of the motivating force behind our collective desire to discover for ourselves the ordinary humanness of writers we admire, and the ways we go about trying to do it by opening those boxes full of paper.

The event was made up of a series of moderated discussions among some of Wallace’s closest literary collaborators and friends, and was being held to consider the archive of unpublished story drafts, correspondence with editors, excised chapters of Infinite Jest, personal copies of John Barth novels, etc. It’s the kind of collection that the Harry Ransom Center — which acquired the steroidal volume of material for more than half a million dollars and meticulously prepared it for public use — will have to marshal serious ingenuity to protect against the drool of rabid pilgrims that visit their headquarters on the UT-Austin campus during the coming years.

Among the conference’s participants were Bonnie Nadell (the agent who stumbled across Wallace’s work in a slush pile in 1985 and worked with him for the subsequent 23 years); Michael Pietsch (the Little, Brown editor who helped Wallace bring Infinite Jest into the world, and assembled the posthumous Pale King from pieces that Wallace left behind); critics and writers (some of whom openly expressed their intimidation at having to face a crowd of hyper-smart DFW junkies); and Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, whom I talked with after the final panel.

As the room emptied, I asked her what it felt like to know she wouldn’t ever find another DFW story in her inbox.

I immediately regretted it.

Yank back the curtain around Wallace’s genius and one finds a cast of fairly normal-seeming smart literary characters — people who pull the levers of the publishing industry’s machinery and who started careers hoping to work with someone like Wallace. I don’t think they ever expected to expend publicly this kind of emotional energy to describe the loss of a friend, and the question seemed crass, insensitive, stupid.

“It’s an intense sadness,” she said, as I felt the blood come to my face, “and being here brings it back. We haven’t spent too much time talking about that today. But it’s really sad.”

I stood there, pretending to be a real-life journalist, inspecting the pattern of the carpeting and managed to capture her last sentence: “He wasn’t going to give us something easy.” She was referring to his stories and the challenges that Wallace presented his editors.

But I ended up wondering whether this could stand as an encapsulation of a sentiment that ran throughout the symposium. It’s not easy — especially not when so many readers still feel the pain of personal loss with regard to Wallace. Many found it hard enough to say the word “suicide.” They said “early death,” “untimely death,” “untimely end,” “unfortunate end,” “tragic way that he died,” and even “the way he resolved himself.” They want to get into the archive to find a personal version of an answer to “why?” or alternatively, simply want clues about his writing process and about the way that his written work evolved — to look over his shoulder.

Christopher Gordon flew down from Boston to attend the conference with his son Noah. Together, they embodied these two most prevalent reasons for wanting access to the material. The elder Gordon, a mental health professional who has read Infinite Jest three times (the number of times one has gotten through the book has become a sort of currency — everyone gives you their “number”), wants to know more about Wallace’s use of psycho-pharmaceuticals. Meantime, Noah teaches high school English in New York and told me that the archive would help him demonstrate to his students the difficulty of creative activity.

“I want to expose how much work goes into writing,” he said, adding, “When you’re a student, you only see the gift.” He was talking about the polished final products that we hold in our hands and store on our e-readers. In other words, we can too easily assume that writing “just happens.”

The party line throughout the entire conference was that this new archive would precisely help us understand the evolution of Wallace’s ideas, and that this in turn would help us comprehend his life, his work, his mind. All of this has clear academic value and it’s the kind of thing that places like the Ransom Center put in their website mission statements. But the symposium made it plain that most of us also go to archives, or attend conferences on the lives of authors, or coordinate desperately with Public Relations professionals in the hopes of meeting the friends of authors (totally hypothetically, of course) to experience a sense of enhanced emotional proximity to the person we knew only in book form.

Despite our coolly intellectual association with the “death of the author,” the freedom of the reader, the independence of the text (as a friend of mine puts it plainly: “fuck biography”), we cling to the shards of evident ordinary humanity that an archive lays out for us.

On page 30, Wallace corrects the age of one of the characters in the book. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

“Any time you go into an archive, you get this burst of excitement,” said D.T. Max, whose biography of Wallace Every Love Story is a Ghost Story will be published this September. We sat outside the Ransom Center underneath its large trees during a break in the symposium. “You see how somebody writes. You see their handwriting. There’s nothing like that moment of delight.” When I asked if he thought that Wallace fans are unique in the depth of their desire to see this kind of material, he answered unequivocally in the affirmative.

Some of these fans will be disappointed because not all of the material will be available. Wallace’s personal collection of self-help books has been quietly removed. Shortly after the appearance of an online article analyzing the marginalia in those books, they were closed off. It seems understandable — though I identify with the frustration of researchers who contend that the self-help books would offer insights into Wallace’s own reflections on his mental illness. The archive will tell an incomplete story and this fact reminds us that its contents are contingent on raw and real emotions: that there’s a hierarchy in which readers come second (personal bias here, having met Wallace’s wife Karen Green and having observed the rigidity of grief in her posture as she patiently answered an attendee’s questions about her husband’s views on religion: rightfully so).

I’m not an expert on Wallace’s work. But I remember sitting on the curb outside an aquarium-themed bar in Washington, DC (one of the five worst establishments in the world) on a September night in 2008. I’d just learned about his death via text message from an ex-girlfriend. It was awful. I was blubbering with disbelief and shock and an unexpected sense of loneliness and stupidity that I’d be this upset about the death of a stranger. I remember thinking that there were other people out there who deserved to be more upset — people who knew him as more than a dust-jacket picture.

Yet as it turns out, even for some of the people who knew Wallace personally, the most difficult memories to talk about are the ones dealing with his writing.

Pietsch choked up when he described the process of editing The Pale King. He told his audience that Wallace was trying to unlock the “hallucinatory possibilities of boredom” — to explore ecstatic human freedom in desolate-seeming moments of mental life. It was tough to watch him characterize the almost unfathomable difficulty of this challenge, and to describe the degree to which his friend fought it. He had to cede the floor to Nadell, looking down at the stage as she picked up the thread of the conversation.

Over breakfast the next morning, Pietsch told me about reading the first 250 pages of the manuscript, which began from the perspective of a character named David Wallace.

“Reading those first words,” Pietsch said, “I was able to forget he wasn’t alive for a little while.”

How strange this moment must have been: the aliveness of the character and the realness of the voice strong enough to overshadow actual death (though one hesitates to concede that he was less dead). Isn’t the achievement of this kind of togetherness the motive force behind reading itself? Don’t we hope to connect at an irreducible level with the consciousness of another person in this way? And doesn’t fiction offer us the promise that this kind of experience can help us understand how to live?

To his fans, Wallace struggles more mightily in his work with these kinds of questions than any author of his generation, though they’re certainly at the heart of a lot of fiction that Wallace didn’t write. He was, as Pietsch puts it, “an extraordinary mind struggling with the challenge of ordinariness.” But what we seem to be searching for in an author’s archive (or even in a biography, a memoir, or whatever) is precisely an indication of the ordinariness of their struggle. So although we say we go to fiction for what we think is a unique set of experiences, we still crave the tangible evidence that an author was a person: that Wallace made sometimes-unreasonable demands of his editors, that he hid in hotel rooms while on assignment, that it was harder for him than the effortlessness of his prose would suggest.

When I asked Pietsch about the challenges of working with Wallace in everyday life, he responded with a tennis anecdote, telling me about a time when David had ask him to play a few sets.

“I demurred,” he said, “but David said ‘trust me, it’s great. What I’m really good at is putting the ball just outside your range.’”

I grew up on tennis courts (and sometimes think I’m doomed to forever find the overlaps between tennis and literary life). I know from experience that these kinds of players — torture-experts who can, at will, place a crosscourt forehand or down-the-line backhand just two inches beyond your panting body — are the worst people to play. Their befuddling facility with your personal limitations gets inside your noggin. You feel as though they have elemental knowledge, not only of your athletic ineptitudes, but your moral and intellectual shortcomings. They know about the time you peed your pants in first grade, about your unreported short-term capital gains, about your secret belief that recycling is bullshit. Yet to duel against this kind of brain can also provide the best and most fulfilling kind of joys, both on the court, and on the page.

Perhaps this tennis-like skill marks the unique quality of Wallace’s genius and explains the unique fervor of his readers. He rarely overwhelms us or bludgeons us into submission with the sheer force of his intellect. He uses big words and asks us for patience, and drives us nuts with the freaking footnotes. But the fact that his work is so addictive to so many arises from the tantalizing closeness of his observations of ordinary life to our own experience.

He puts the ball just out of reach. When we go up against him, we push our capacities for attentiveness to their limit. We want to see the world the way he does, and feel like we almost do — and maybe an archive suggests that by seeing the remainders of his ordinary life, we might get closer. It might reveal that his effortless-seeming performance requires an enormous amount of effort.

But we might have to come to terms with the fact that he’ll remain out of reach.

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Last weekend I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books as both a reader and an author. This means I bought too many books and longed for about a zillion others; made eyes at Susan Straight and Cheryl Strayed; ate free food in the green room; and moderated a panel about fiction writing. After two days of rubbing elbows with my fellow bookworms (and eating so many tiny sandwiches I began to smell like one), I was ready, come Monday, for my role as solitary book giver on World Book Night. It was going to be just me, a box of books, and Pico Boulevard. I was kind of scared.

As its website explains, “World Book Night is a celebration of reading and books which will see tens of thousands of people share books with others in their communities across America to spread the joy and love of reading on April 23.” The program began last year in the U.K. to great success, and the literary holiday will hopefully reach even more countries by 2013. To become a giver, I had to apply. I recall promising to offer books to my local mechanics and barbers, and to anyone who might be wandering diverse PicFair Village, the mid-city neighborhood I call home. I requested to pass out The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which was just one of 30 titles to choose from.

Last Thursday, I took my 10-month-old son, Dixon Bean, to Eso Won Books in Leimert Park to pick up my copies. Before handing them over, proprietor James Fugate had me sign a form promising to do right by the World Book Night folks. I solemnly swore to pass the novel out on the 23rd, and I was not to sell or dispose of any leftover copies. Outside the store, a playwright named Reginald helped me load the books and the stroller into my car, and when I told him what I was up to, he said, “I should read more.” Why is it that everyone always talks of reading like it’s vitamin-taking?

To be honest, after the nerd-love-in that is the Festival of Books, I was prepared for Monday to be a real letdown. I kept imagining people shaking their heads at my offer, or worse, yelling, “Get out of my face, bee-otch!” (Why do so many of my imagined scenarios star this line of dialogue?). As a way to protect myself, and to disarm strangers, I decided to bring Bean along for the giving. (We changed the name to World Book Day. I think this is allowed.) First, he and I practiced giving out books in the living room. I thought it would be cute if he walked the books in his push-cart, but he’s not the most productive traveler, so after a few rehearsals, we settled on the stroller.

And off we went!

To my delight, the books went fast. As promised, I passed out copies to the mechanics at the auto body shop on the corner, but since it was before 10 a.m. (World Book Morning?), all the barber shops were still closed. I got rid of three copies at the bus stop, one of which went to a woman with a butterfly tattoo — on her face. (So weird and feminine/masculine, you guys!). I handed a few to some dog walkers, and one to my neighbor. I was amazed by how many people said “yes” immediately, without even hearing what the book was. It reminded me of my father’s favorite saying, “If it’s free, take it.” Others eyed me and the baby skeptically, as if trying to discern if we were members of a religious cult. One guy thought I was offering him a book I had written — and it was clear he did not want that. I found myself exclaiming, “This won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago!” – and I was heartened to see that the phrase made a difference. The best thing to say about the book, though, was, “It’s about a fat nerd and there’s lots of Spanish slang.” People loved that.

The goal of World Book Night is to give books to non-readers. The rules specifically state that the books “are not for those who already read books regularly.” This is why, I assume, the selection of 30 books are real crowd-pleasers, from Bel Canto to The Hunger Games. These are beloved books that have already been passed fervently from one reader to the next; they aren’t hard to enjoy. The hope is that someone might fall in love with a book they received from a stranger — and voila, a life-long reader is born. This makes a lot of sense to me, and yet, it’s tricky for a giver. I found it awkward, even condescending, to ask, “Are you a big reader?” before I told a person what I had to offer. And I was uncomfortable with the realization that I was asking this question in the high-end coffee shop — and not to the people at the bus stop. One time, I offered the book to a guy without asking about his literary proclivities, and when he saw what it was, he got so excited. ”Oh! I love his stories in The New Yorker!” I couldn’t very well refuse to give him the book after that, could I?

By the end of our giving, I was exhausted, but also uplifted. It’s hard to approach strangers, but it feels good to give something you love to the world, especially when the world is so thrilled to receive it. I keep imagining one of the people I met opening up her copy of Oscar Wao — perhaps as she sips a Cappuccino, or settles in for a long bus ride — and reading the first sentence:

They say it first came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.

And like that, she’s sucked into Junot Diaz’s strange, funny, naughty, beautiful world. All it takes is one book. And one reader.

Image courtesy of the author.

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In the spring of 1969 on the side of a country road outside Biloxi, Mississippi a blue Chevy Chevelle sputtered out of gas. A thirty-one-year-old English professor lay lifeless in the driver’s seat. One end of a garden hose had been perched in the rear window, the other end placed in the exhaust pipe.

A few hours later the phone rang in the professor’s home in New Orleans.  His mother, who had not heard from him in two months, received the call she had been dreading. Her only child, John Kennedy Toole, had killed himself. She was ashamed and heartbroken, as all her aspirations for him expired into a silent nothingness…

Until she remembered, he had left behind a manuscript.

Toole had written the novel in 1963 during his last few months in the Army in Puerto Rico. Returning to New Orleans, he was convinced it was his masterpiece. He edited it for two years under the direction of Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster. But he eventually gave up as his mind slipped into the snares of mental illness. For years the manuscript lay abandoned in a box atop a cedar armoire. But in 1972 his mother retrieved it and began submitting it for publication. It eventually found a champion in novelist Walker Percy. And eleven years after Toole’s suicide A Confederacy of Dunces was published.

As he had always wished, Toole’s book traveled to book shelves and into the hands of readers all over the world. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. It’s been translated into 22 languages with over 30 editions. All of this came from that document he crafted in Puerto Rico. Yet it is rather remarkable to consider that no one seems to know where the original manuscript is.

I have been researching and writing about Toole for seven years, digging through archives, interviewing his friends and family, trying to decipher Toole’s character, his fears, his desires, his angels and demons. And I have often contemplated that missing manuscript. His mother claimed she discarded all the “Gottlieb edits” in order to showcase her son’s “pure genius.” Still, seeing how Toole altered the creation that he felt defined him would certainly offer insight into his final years. But no one I interviewed seemed to know its whereabouts. The Toole Papers at Tulane University does not have it, nor does the Walker Percy Papers at UNC Chapel Hill. Some of Toole’s friends had heard that Percy’s typist threw the “badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon” away after she retyped it. Walker’s wife, Bunt, didn’t believe that story. She suspected it might be in Walker’s miscellaneous papers that had been boxed-up after his death in 1990. But the family scoured the boxes and found nothing.

I had nearly given up on the question of the original manuscript until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of Toole’s best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.” I nearly dropped the phone as she explained Toole’s mother had given it as a gift to her brother after the novel was published. When her brother passed away in 2008, she acquired it. It had a few penned-in edits, she explained, but not drastic revisions. “I don’t know what to do with it, really” she said. “I considered selling it at auction.” Christie’s estimated its value up to $20,000, if deemed authentic. She hadn’t called Sotheby’s yet. “Please” I begged, “just hold on to it. I’m on my way down.”

In a few weeks I was on a plane, heading to Louisiana, contemplating how I could come up with the money to buy the manuscript from Lynda, or at least convince her to donate it to an archival library. I asked my friend, filmmaker Joe Sanford, to join me on the drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. When we arrived, Lynda, a beautiful blond woman in her early seventies, showed us into her dining room where she had prepared a spread of Toole memorabilia: newspaper articles, a bottle of Dr. Nut, letters from his mother, including the note to Lynda’s brother offering him the manuscript. In the middle of these artifacts she had placed a black binder filled with hundreds of yellowed pages.

I sat down and opened it. The earthy smell of old paper wafted into the air. “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole. I ran my fingers over the letters of the title page. I could feel the impressions of the typewriter keys. I almost lept from my seat. I wanted to grab my phone to call my agent and editor in New York to confirm it was real. They were already contemplating the publicity this could gather. “Biographer Finds Long Lost Manuscript” the headlines would read. And my book would fly off the shelves.

But then, as I turned the page, my heart sank. The letters felt smooth.  On the lower left corner I saw faint specks of toner, the telltale marks of a photocopier. I flipped through the pages, comparing them with images I had taken from the Toole Papers at Tulane. Toole’s mother had gifted Lynda’s brother with a photocopy of a typescript set by LSU Press shortly before publication. The “edits” in red ink were mere typographical corrections.

I sat dismayed. Looking up from the binder, I found Lynda smiling eagerly. But the smile soon left her face. I explained that she had a document with some history tied to the novel, but not twenty-thousand dollars’ worth. It was not the original manuscript, not even a copy of the original. At first she seemed puzzled, perhaps wondering how these pages could fool her and her family for so many years. $20,000 would have helped her immensely. There was a For Sale sign in front of her house. She was moving to Florida to be closer to her children, she explained. But Lynda had lived long enough to understand the limited value of things. What were these pages after all? Even if it was the original manuscript it would not embody her dear friend who had suffered such a terrible end.

We sat through an awkward silence and then she took out a little index card filled with notes. “You asked me about my memories of Ken” she said smiling. “Yes, would you mind sharing them with me?” We moved into her living room, set up the camera, and she talked about her many recollections of a curious and witty young man with aspirations to become a writer.

She told us about how he had remarkable talent for mimicry, his ability to impersonate a person’s voice, accent, gestures, everything with astounding accuracy. She talked about how he used to explore the many neighborhoods of New Orleans, observing the people and how he used to create characters from those observations, characters like Officer Romigary, Tammy from the Irish Channel, and TJ her Italian boyfriend. She laughed as she remembered how Ken, the name his Louisiana friends called him, used to sit in the bathroom listening to Lynda’s elderly next door neighbor, Irene Reilly, yell out the most offensive and colorful obscenities in all of New Orleans. Indeed, Lynda had witnessed Toole as a teenager cataloging the characters that would later appear in his novel: Officer Mancuso, Santa Battaglia, and Ignatius’s mother, Irene Reilly. And for the first time, I realized Toole had been writing A Confederacy of Dunces in his head for nearly a decade before he set it to paper.

Earlier that morning, I thought I was going to find a rare artifact of literary history, which would help me gain a clearer picture of Toole’s descent towards suicide. But Lynda’s memories were far more profound to me than dissecting how Toole edited his famous novel. Of course, I had to report to my agent and my editor that I had not found the manuscript. But I took heart in what Lynda freely offered me: a vivid portrait of a young aspiring artist, exploring a city filled with unique characters. No documents in the Toole Papers offered such a depiction, a depiction far more valuable than his manuscript.

In writing the biography of Toole, it was always tempting to bemoan lost documents like the suicide note his mother destroyed or the manuscript, especially since his letters are so few and many of his friends and family have passed away. But Lynda reminded me Toole was not a specimen to dissect. As she spoke there was a glimmer in her eyes and an enthusiasm in her voice, as she tried to capture the ineffable quality of his personality that made him so rare — a quality that readers only catch a glimpse of in his novel. He was not only a talented writer, she explained, but a treasured friend, gone too soon. It was my job to convey the complexities of his life. And Lynda’s recollections proved I didn’t need his manuscript to do that.

I still have hopes someone, someday will uncover the manuscript, hidden in a box in an attic or brought to light during an estate sale. After all, those pages hold the first impressions of the creative wave that had been building in Toole for much of his short life. But whether or not it’s found, the creative energy cranked out of his typewriter in Puerto Rico in 1963 transcends the original pages. It endures translation, criticism and shifts in generations of readers. For his novel is a parade of victorious laughter, just like those famous jazz funerals in New Orleans: the solemn dirges leading to the grave are momentary; once the deceased is laid to rest a celebration erupts, flowing into the streets, a carnival of song and dance, blaring triumphantly.

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In a South Texas parlor room, 10 men eagerly hold shots of bourbon in their hands. The television isn’t on, there are no fantasy football reports in sight, and no fraternity pledges cower in the corner. Together they raise their glasses and down the whiskey in one go.

“Alright,” one says, “who has something to say about Rich Dad, Poor Dad?”

This is the Oil Barons Society, an exclusive, men-only book club in San Antonio. The discussion that follows is lively and cuts across political leanings. The leader of the discussion, Scott Gillette, is a management analyst who favors an entrepreneurial reading of the book, but three of the members are government employees who argue that the author profits from the desire for financial security without providing any effective tools to achieve it. Typical for most book clubs, the discussion eventually gets derailed as people speak longer than their allotted turn and quibble over small differences. But most of the members, or Barons as they’re called, leave enlightened and surprised by the discussion, and they’re ready to do it again.

The Oil Baron Society was founded three years ago by Matthew Shaddock and Tanner Neidhart, a school teacher and a lawyer, respectively. “I found it weird that in today’s society,” Shaddock explains, “an all-girls activity was okay, even seen as positive — think of the Girls Night Out. I figured men should be just as free to do the same thing, celebrate manhood and be manly. I figured that a guys’ book club would be a good excuse to get together, drink some beers, and talk intelligently.”

Neidhart came up with the name and they soon adopted a tongue-in-cheek correspondence with the language of Gilded Age Texas, smacking of top hats and monocles.

“As usual, discussion was lively,” the November meeting minutes record. “Topics covered included the American military, our involvement in overseas conflicts, military culture, and the writer’s political slant. Baron Peterson’s absence due to military deployment in the Afghanistan theatre was duly noted and oft-mentioned.”

A random sampling of their titles by mostly male authors includes The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden, and Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

Driving the club is not just a celebration of masculinity but a search for it. According to John Peterson, the doctor currently posted in Afghanistan: The Oil Barons “is a big idea that struggles with something that any young man in his twenties and thirties deals with. What makes a man? What kind of man do I want to be?”

San Antonio does offer intellectual stimulation and isn’t a cultural desert. The city boasts a world class art museum and celebrated cuisine, where it’s common to awake with a breakfast taco and nibble on Asian fusion for lunch. But men tend to congregate around sports and not books, and life after college anywhere can be devoid of intellectual discussion.

“Seven of the 13 friends I contacted about the idea met and formed the Oil Barons Society at my house in January 2009,” Shaddock says. “The other six wrote back things like ‘book clubs are lame’ and ‘have fun reading the Oprah books.’”

There is no stereotypical Baron. Their professions vary significantly: a real property title searcher, a home renovator, two prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, two Air Force doctors, a management consultant, two high school teachers, and an employment lawyer. They are overwhelmingly professionals but not all of them follow sports, and as brainy as their jobs may sound, several members didn’t read regularly before they joined the club. “Before I joined I didn’t do a whole lot of reading,” jokes Ashley Penix. “In fact, hardly any at all. I like to say, ‘I don’t always read books, but when I do, it’s for the Oil Barons Society. Stay knowledgeable, my friends.’”

The Barons have few rules other than opening the evening with a shot of whiskey, which helps enliven the discussion. This absence of strictures explains why their most strained period happened when they sought to define who, exactly, they were by drawing up a Constitution. Last year, they rented a house in the hill country outside San Antonio and began to hash out the text, but the debate became so heated that three Barons stormed out and drove back to the city. “We found out later that this was much like the actual signing of the Constitution,” one Baron explained. “Sure it was dumb to get upset over, but I think all of us carry a true ownership in the prosperity of the Barons.”

Several of the members already have young children or are expecting children in the near future, making this “the biggest challenge,” according to Alan Petner, as people find it more difficult to accommodate the meetings. The Oil Barons may be a manly take on the Girls Night Out, but the search for companionship will naturally be replaced by the duties of fatherhood.

Another challenge is that the membership is composed of various backgrounds, but the group has struggled to lure other ethnicities. Shaddock teaches history in a local high school with a mostly Latino student body and coaches its soccer team. “It’s not completely lost on our members,” he says. “We’ve definitely talked about it frequently in the past, whining that we’re all WASPs or white Catholics. But we are diverse in many ways. We have top one-percenters, Barons whose parents were blue collar, and Barons from outside of Texas.” The one Latino Baron left the club because of personal commitments.

Recently, the Oil Barons Society has evolved into something more than a book club, now having incorporated activities that complement the readings. “We read Friday Night Lights and went to a high school football game,” explains Scott Gillette, “and we read The Gun by C.J. Chivers and went to the gun range.” These are not necessarily exotic activities in Texas, but not every Baron likes to shoot guns or watch football games.

The Barons have started inviting the featured authors to attend meetings or to join by phone, so far without success. They are also considering dues payments so that they can rent a special Baron Cave, and have any number of other creative ideas, as may be expected from 20- and 30-somethings with ambition.

For now, the culmination of the regular Baron meetings is the annual Baron Ball, held in the former castle of a cattle king that was recently refurbished. The Barons proudly display the year’s book list under their official crest, serve up brisket and chili, and play multiple rounds of beer pong — partners and friends included — and it’s hard not to feel that something different is happening in Texas.

“When I joined it was just a ‘book club’ and sounded like fun and general camaraderie,” says Ashley Penix. “It then turned into something more special, and took on a life of its own. It’s nice being part of something that is unique.”

Photo credit: Mathew Shaddock. Oil Barons Society crest designed by Evan Long.

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1.
Yesterday, for the first time since arriving in Munich 10 days ago, I successfully ordered a glass of water. This is much harder than it sounds. German waiters never offer you water with the menu, which means you have to order it; but make sure to ask specifically for tap water, or else they’ll pop open a bottle and expect you to pay. The major obstacle, of course, is how it’s pronounced. “A glass of water”: Leitungswasser. And that’s without the “Can I please have…?”

I mastered my latte order, but have nonetheless been dying of thirst. (Never mind that a glass of water always comes in what looks like a shot glass.) I even started bringing my very American aluminum water bottle to restaurants and trying to fit it under the tap in the bathrooms’ miniature sinks.

After a week of this, David, my boyfriend, who has been living in Munich for almost two years, made me practice “Can I have a glass of water please?” all the way to the café. “Ich hätte gern ein Leitungswasser bitte. Just keep repeating it,” he said as we trudged through the snow, laptops slung over our shoulders. “Lei-tungs-wasser. That’s how you’ll remember.”

I tried using a mnemonic device: “lie” then “tomb” then, with a British accent, “vase” — lie tombs vaaah-sa — but I kept picturing an Egyptian tomb with some tulips strewn about.

I grew up in Montreal speaking English and French, and, in high school and college, studied Spanish. German, in my view, is much harder than all of those languages combined — although David tells me this is not empirically true.

He is a linguist, which means that he has over 40 language and/or dictionary apps on his iPod Touch. He also knows more than his fair share of languages, and is always eager to pick up another. During our first conversation, I asked him how many he knew.

After a long silence, he finally said, “Twenty or 30?”

I gasped.

“But most of them are dead!”

He claims that English is the only language he can actually speak. This is modesty at its worst. He studies ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and can communicate quite fluently in German, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish. After being in Munich for less than a year, he taught a linguistics course at the university in German. He’s currently teaching himself French and carries a pocket French-German phrasebook wherever he goes. If I leave the room, when I come back he has already figured out how to tell me, in perfectly accented, perfectly conjugated French, that Sarkozy has announced his bid for re-election. He can’t wait for our trip to Paris.

I’m still working on Wasser.

2.
I have come to Munich from New York to live with David while he finishes a post-doctoral fellowship at the Thesaurus linguae Latinae — the Latin equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. David writes entries — or definitions — for Latin words, in Latin. The letter “A” was published in 1900. Right now, the team is working on both “N” and “R” — “Q” has been deemed too difficult and is being foisted on a future generation of scholars. When they completed “P,” in 2010, they had a party. The whole venture is supported by the Bavarian government.

“Who’s the dictionary for?” I asked him when he first told me about it.

“I think we’re writing it for God,” he said.

Since I’m a graduate student in the throes of thesis writing, I sublet my Brooklyn apartment, which I have lived in for 11 years, and flew over with a handful of books and a partially finished manuscript. We’ll go back to the city in June.

Back home, swimming breaks my day in half, so one of our first expeditions was to the local pool. Germans take their pools as seriously as New Yorkers take their gyms and yoga studios — they are open all day, every day. Our pool even has a tram stop named after it: Nordbad. The biggest pool was built for the 1972 Summer Games, and you can watch Olympic-caliber divers perform three or four beautiful flips off the highest platform. The first day I saw this, I immediately flashed to Greg Louganis cracking his skull open in Seoul.

If you think the Germans run their pools the way they run their trains, as I did, you would be wrong. Instead, imagine being dropped into a pen with dozens of people in blindfolds, swimming at each other.

Because I am a New Yorker this shocked me. During our inaugural visit, the chaos left me standing waist-deep in chlorine with my hands up in the air and my mouth ajar. Getting to the other end of the pool was like playing a game of chicken: who’s going to yield first?

I’ve been swimming in NYC pools for over six years (Red Hook remains my favorite), and order — signs: fast swimmers here, slow ones over there; and an agreed-upon system: let’s go up this side, down the other  – is the only thing that keeps us from killing each other. When someone passes me without warning (by neglecting to tap my foot), causing a collision, I have more than once stopped and yelled out, “Really?!”

I don’t yet know how to say that in German, nor do I think it’s culturally acceptable. I’m left to muddle through.

During the day, the Nordbad is far less crowded. One wall is made up almost entirely of windows, so the space is doused in white winter light. The swimmers aren’t in a hurry. Young women swim side by side in pairs, chatting as they move leisurely through the breaststroke. They look like old friends on an early morning jog, minus the fanny packs. In a country where no one jaywalks and everyone pays (actually pays) for the subway on the honor system, the loosening of order here in the water is curious.

On the far end of the deck, down a few stairs and through thick plastic flaps of the kind you find at a New York deli, there is a massive outdoor hot tub. Because Europe is in the midst of a great freeze, thick clouds of mist hover and dance above the surface of the water, making it hard to see what company you’re keeping. Clearings reveal old ladies in shower caps doing water aerobics. Under the water, your body is hot, but the air slipping into your lungs is clear and extremely cold.

With language out of reach, it’s hard not to feel as if I’m in a dream, or that I’ve crossed over to another world. The buildings surrounding the tub on three sides are old — peach and yellow, with wrought-iron balconies — and coated in snow. I could have been in 19th-century Russia. Today it was snowing, so we drifted along with our bare shoulders under the water, snowflakes dissolving into our wet hair.

3.
When the tongue being spoken all around you is just a slew of unintelligible sounds — and the signs mere hieroglyphics — your own words seem to mean more, to fall more heavily to the page and into the air. Something about this unnerves me — do I really want what I say and what I write to resonate that loudly, to be the heavy stones that fall all the way to the bottom of the ocean and rest there?

Image courtesy of the author.

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Judging by the dresses on display at the Bronte Museum, Charlotte Bronte was less than five feet tall but, like her famous heroine Jane Eyre, she was the opposite of meek. When she was ten years old her brother, Branwell, appeared at her bedroom door with a box of toy soldiers he’d just been given by their father. Charlotte immediately seized a soldier and named him the Duke of Wellington. Her sisters, Emily and Anne, followed suit, naming their soldiers Gravey and the Waiting Boy. Together the four siblings appointed themselves the Genii and dispatched the soldiers to the Glass Town confederacy in Africa. Later Emily and Anne developed the country of Gondal while Charlotte and Branwell created Angria. All four wrote about these imaginary kingdoms. Their passionate juvenilia, much of it according to the Bronte Museum Guide repetitive and poorly spelled, paved the way for the novels we cherish.

But none of their work would have seen the light of day had it not been for Charlotte. At the age of twenty she wrote to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, sending him some of her poems and professing not merely a desire to write but “to be for ever known.” Southey wrote back, praising her poems and offering his much quoted advice: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be.” Charlotte replied submissively and, in her fashion, heeded his words. Three years later, when she sent some fiction to Hartley Coleridge, (son of the more famous Samuel) she did so under the name of one of her Angria characters: Charles Townsend.

Coleridge’s discouragement did not deter Charlotte any more than Southey’s. She kept writing poems and stories but without, as far as we know, seeking publication. Then, in 1842, she went with Emily to study French and German in Brussels; the sisters planned to open their own school. Charlotte spent much of the next two years, with and without Emily, at the Pensionnat Heger and developed intense feeling for their married teacher, Constantin Heger. By the time she finally left Brussels, she had much of what she needed, in terms of both skill and subject matter, to create her mature work.

Back at the parsonage, Charlotte came upon a volume of Emily’s verses and, struck by their vigor and originality, decided that the sisters should use some of the money they’d inherited from their aunt to publish a collection. She approached the London publisher Aylott and Jones with poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The sisters chose the somewhat ambiguous pseudonyms, Charlotte later recalled, because of “a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine.” For a cost of fifty pounds an initial print run of 1,000 copies of Poems was published in 1846. (To put this in perspective, Charlotte had Jane as a governess earn thirty pounds a year.) Despite some good reviews, Poems sold two copies.

Undeterred, hoping to be more commercial, the sisters turned to fiction. By the summer of 1847 Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey had been accepted but Charlotte’s The Professor had still to find a home. While the manuscript was doing the rounds, she had begun a new novel and when, in August of that year, Smith, Elder and Co. sent an encouraging rejection, Charlotte was able to respond as follows.

I now send you per rail a MS. Entitled ‘Jane Eyre,’ a novel in three volumes, by Currer Bell. I find I cannot prepay the carriage of the parcel, as money for that purpose is not received at the small station-house where it is left. If, when you acknowledge the receipt of the MS., you would find the goodness to mention the amount charged on delivery, I will immediately transmit it in postage stamps. It is better in future to address Mr. Currer Bell, under cover to Miss Bronte, Haworth, Bradford, Yorkshire, as there is a risk of letters otherwise directed not reaching me at present. To save trouble, I enclose an envelope.

Jane Eyre was published on October 19^th of that year and has remained in print ever since.

The details of rejection, of worrying about postage and communication, will surely be familiar to many contemporary writers. What is completely unfamiliar is the speed of publication. Of course publishers can still produce books with alacrity, as we see every year when topical books appear with lightning speed, but for most authors the wait between submission and publication is closer to two years than two months. My own novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, appeared eighteen months after I sent it to my agent.

According to an article in the New York Times the single biggest reason for this tortoise-like pace is marketing. Smith, Elder and Co. was not trying to create a buzz about Jane Eyre; their job was simply to print, distribute, and hope for the best. And in Charlotte’s case the best happened. Jane Eyre was published to huge acclaim and some shouts of moral outrage which probably only increased sales. But nowadays the sheer number of books forces bookshops, reviewers, and readers to make difficult choices; publishers try to influence those choices by creating a buzz and that takes time.  (And of course publishers, too, are making choices: which books will they single out for extra attention.) For the writer these delays have the incidental side effect that most new projects are begun not with total concentration but amid distractions, few or many, internal or external, on behalf of the previous work.

Whatever the buzz, very few writers achieve Charlotte’s success. And very few suffer the subsequent loss of three family members. Branwell died in September 1848, and was soon followed by first Emily, then Anne.

Last December at the Bronte Museum, I stood in the doorway of the modest dining room and pictured Charlotte, aged twenty, circling the table with her sisters, talking about the stories and poems that made their lives vivid, and then, aged thirty-three, walking around that table alone. But happily Charlotte’s life changed again. She found companionship with her father’s curate. She and Arthur Nichols were married in June 1854. In her last letter, written shortly before she died nine months later, Charlotte might have been copying her famous description of Jane and Rochester’s blissful marriage. “No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness.” How wonderful that her life at last imitated her art, however briefly.

Image: Painting of the three Bronte sisters by Branwell Bronte, via Wikimedia Commons

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“And it’s lies you told, letting on you had him slitted, and you nothing at all.”

(The Playboy of the Western World)

Luckily it was not Sunday, so An Dun, the only café on the island of Inishmaan, was open. I had ducked inside for shelter from the storm that was raging outside. The cold Irish rain had been coming down hard all day and my clothes were totally soaked through, but I had been determined to explore the island regardless. In the middle of the afternoon, however, I realized I needed a dry place to rest. So inside the café, I sat near the window and warmed up with a pot of tea and a bowl of soup. Outside, the ivy-covered Bronze Age stone ringfort Dun Conor towered over the road on the summit of the hill. I shared the table with a woman I had met earlier in the day at Teach Synge, the squat thatched-roof cottage where the playwright J.M. Synge had stayed during his sojourns here at the turn of the 20th century. This woman was a fiction writer, and we soon got to talking about Joseph O’Connor’s novel Ghost Light — a fictionalized account of the relationship between Synge and his girlfriend, Molly Allgood.

I had been putting off reading Ghost Light for a while, even though I was anxious to dive into it. Since I was writing my own nonfiction book about Synge, I didn’t want another writer’s vision of him to intrude on my own, even if his was fictional.

In his recent article in The New York Times Magazine, “My Debt to Ireland,” John Jeremiah Sullivan travels to the Irish countryside and the Aran Islands to explore his Irish roots, and he writes that his relationship with Ireland began when he read James Joyce. For me, a Jewish New Yorker with no Irish heritage whatsoever, my love affair with Ireland also began with an Irish writer. Ever since I first read Synge’s Riders to the Sea, a play that was inspired by Synge’s travels to the three Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, I’ve been hooked on him — his writing, his letters, the story of his life, so much so that I traveled all the way to the Aran Islands to see why they prompted some of the greatest literature to come out of Ireland in the early 20th century. The first time I traveled there, the beauty of the landscape had me agape, and I was intrigued by the stories of the people I met, and began to get a taste of what Synge himself may have learned there. I traveled back for two months over the past few summers, during which time I challenged myself in a myriad of ways both physical and emotional, and I was inspired to write about how the islands changed me, and how I believe they changed Synge.

Synge traveled to the Aran Islands when he was in his late 20s. Before going to Aran, he hadn’t been terribly successful as a writer. His poems were usually about his anger with a God he’d rejected, or about pining for a woman who had rejected him. He’d had no real romantic relationships to speak of — he had two undeniable strikes against him, being that he was an atheist and a writer, and the women he pursued tended to want to marry the opposite of that. He had been sickly since he could crawl, and just before traveling to Aran underwent surgery to remove a tumor from his neck. He’d grown up isolated, tutored at home rather than attending school, because of his health. But he loved nature, loved observing rabbits and collecting moths in the countryside surrounding his mother’s estate. Darwin was his higher power, and he felt tremendous guilt over shirking his mother’s Protestant ideals. Synge was the dark horse of his family — his older siblings had acceptable careers and acceptable spouses. Synge was still trying to figure out who he was, and how to comfortably be who he was.

When Synge went to Aran just before the turn of the 20th century, he collected the stories and folklore of the islanders in his travel memoir, The Aran Islands. He learned Gaelic, and went rowing with the fishermen in the canvas-covered canoe-like curraghs, and experienced the thrill of being tossed about by the waves. He walked the Aran cliffs in violent rainstorms until his hair was stiff with salt. He drank poteen and played the fiddle for the islanders, and watched the strong, beautiful women of Aran in their work, watched them bathing in the sea. Synge visited Aran five times over the course of a few years, and during those years wrote six plays, inspired by the stories he heard on Aran, including The Playboy of the Western World. Synge’s writing blew into Dublin like a hurricane and forever changed the landscape of the Irish theatre with his daring language and daring women characters (women he probably would have liked to meet). Synge died just before he turned 38 from cancer that was diagnosed too late. But before he died — as Joseph O’Connor would like us to remember — he did finally have a girlfriend.

This past summer after visiting Aran and following my Synge-obsession, I took the bus across the country to Wicklow to attend the Synge Summer School in Rathdrum — a three-day program devoted to talks on Irish literature. Dr. Patrick Lonergan from NUI Galway led group discussions about Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light, and for the most part, the group was very passionate about disliking it. I was surprised — wasn’t Ghost Light chosen as the 2011 Dublin One City One Book that all of Dublin ought to read?

The most prevailing reason people didn’t like it: the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction. Some of the people in the group seemed almost insulted by O’Connor. “If you’re going to write fiction, why not go all the way?” “It seems like he really wanted to write a biography but got lazy.” “There was too much nonfiction in it.” I was about to write this all off as a bunch of academics with no room for creative license, until I remembered that the fiction writer I had met in the café on Inishmaan had the same response: “Why not just make up a totally different story altogether? It’s confusing to people.”

What these naysayers don’t seem to understand is that when you fall for Synge, you fall hard, and you just cannot let go of him. At least one woman (O’Connor might contend) knew this all too well.

Coming from a nonfiction MFA program in America, though, I was shocked. In the States, the trend is to get angry with memoirists and nonfiction writers who don’t stick to the truth. These people were angry with a fiction writer using too much truth to tell a story. To me, the book was clearly called “A Novel” (it’s on the cover), so I was prepared to regard it as fiction.

However.

I told myself to clear my head of my own preconceptions about Synge, his writing, whatever motivations or ideology or emotional life I had given him based on my own research and baggage, but it was nearly impossible for me to do so. I went to Ireland because of him, after all. I’ve read nearly every biography of him, every sappy poem he wrote in his youth, every letter he wrote to his girlfriend (every letter that still exists, anyhow). How could I forget all of this? As I read I resisted. I scowled at the scene depicting how Synge and Molly meet — she sees him standing on the street, looking up at the sky, aloof, and approaches him. This was not what I had imagined their meeting was like (even though there’s no historical record of the meeting). I imagined him noticing her on the stage, her voice, her face, something physical. I vented to my boyfriend about it while he was reading 1Q84 on his iPod. I put the book down for a few days, annoyed and disappointed. This wasn’t what I had hoped for. This was not the Synge I’d come to know and love.

The Synge I’d come to know and love was constantly worrying about his health. He was so insecure about himself and his body that he could barely talk to a member of the opposite sex without fumbling. He was frustrated with feeling lonely, isolated, misunderstood philosophically, and was looking for a new kind of spirituality to comfort him, to soothe his ever-present fear of death and allow him to wake up to joy in his life. The Synge I’d come to know would try just about anything to feel inspired, from studying music and studying socialism to traveling to a chain of weather-beaten islands where the people spoke a language he barely knew. The Synge I’d come to know needed to have an adventure to open himself up to his life, to experience risk and fear and sickness and find out that he was stronger than he thought he was. I realized that the version of Synge I’d come to know and love was actually me.

I’d grown up with an autoimmune disorder, in a family where everyone seemed to get cancer at one point or another, and I always felt incredibly insecure about my health, and consequently, my body. I was painfully shy in school, and just barely started to come out of my shell in college (with men, drink, writing, and otherwise, though constantly in fear of failure). That’s when I first read Synge’s Riders to the Sea, a play about a family who lives on the Aran Islands, and despite all the death and storms around them, they still find a way to be strong, to bear it, and to be at peace with the truth of loss. And the sons still go out to the sea, even though they know how dangerous it is. Whether Synge intended these metaphors or not, they seeped into my bloodstream. So what else could I do? I had to see Aran. Traveling to The Aran Islands, as John Jeremiah Sullivan puts it, gave Synge his voice, though I might argue that Aran did not so much give Synge his voice as enable him to finally hear it for himself, loud and clear. Because I know, from experience, that Aran has the power to do just that.

At the Synge Summer School, I tried to dodge questions about what I was “working on,” saying only that I was writing a book about the Aran Islands, shying away from revealing that I was actually writing about Synge’s experiences there through the lens of my own. I feared the wrath of academics who would no doubt find logical fault in my approach. If I were writing a biography, I’d have no counterargument. But that’s why I’m writing a memoir. In memoir, we can take ownership of the illogical nature of imagination as part of what makes us human, as long as we’re honest about it. So why couldn’t I forgive O’Connor for writing fiction?

During the Synge Summer School discussions, I found myself defensively sticking up for O’Connor’s choices even though I hadn’t even read the book yet. What I heard was that someone who was trying to create art was being attacked for not writing what people wanted him to write. This seemed unfair, and so I’d jumped into the metaphorical curragh with O’Connor and tried to row him over the choppy waves to safety. But when it came time to actually read the book, I jumped ship, because I felt my authority was being challenged.

Is this what all of the PhDs and writers at the Synge Summer School were up against? Was our passionate love for “fact” and “truth” as we knew it getting in the way of our appreciation of modern literature, of enjoying a story? Was clinging to our ideals stopping us from moving forward? Certainly Synge, a feminist and atheist ahead of his time, would not be proud of the lot of us.

And so, about a quarter of the way into Ghost Light, I finally softened my view. I opened myself up to the possibility of this other interpretation, and when I felt my own opinions clanging in my mind (“No no no! Synge would never say that! Molly would never write that! Yeats was not that annoying!”) I realized them for what they were (my opinions), laughed at them, and moved on.

Ghost Light follows the story of O’Connor’s version of Molly Allgood, Synge’s love who is an actress, much younger than he, Roman Catholic and working class, but in the book we meet her in old age long after Synge has died. She’s living in London and is more than a bit of a drunken beggar, semi-estranged from her family, living alone, behind on her rent, doing what she needs to do to get by. She has a final letter of Synge’s that she is thinking of selling. For a while we follow her around London and get a sense of the wreck her life has become, and the chapters alternate between the “present” of the novel in the 1950s and Molly’s past in the early 1900s — meeting Synge, acting in Synge’s plays, and becoming Synge’s lover.

One of my favorite chapters was “Scene from a Half-Imagined Stage Play.” This section is not prose, but written in play format, and, I believe, imagined by young Molly. In the scene, Synge finally meets Molly’s mother (the meeting of the parents, in real life, was problematic given the divide in social status and religion) and in this imagined scene the meeting goes relatively well. I saw it as a sort of wish-fulfillment exercise for Molly, darkened by the realities impeding her fantasy of their life together when Synge has a violent coughing fit at the end of the scene.

While I enjoyed both how the narrative jumps back and forth from past to present and the different modes of storytelling, I found the perspective shifts jarring (some chapters are in second person, some are in third person). Although, as I write this, I find myself struggling with the verb tense — am I writing about real people who lived in Ireland, or fictional characters who live still on the page?

Because neither of the storylines (past nor present) are completely elucidated, I didn’t totally grasp the connection between the love affair and what becomes of Molly later in life. Perhaps the way Synge idolizes (idolized?) her has (had?) something to do with it. O’Connor gives us a picture of a hardy, ambitious young girl who gets sucked into the tormented inner world of her self-proclaimed social pariah of a playwright. He creates her career and stokes the flames of her passion and rage, and when he dies, she’s still got the passion and the rage, only no clue what to do with it and no one’s worshipping her anymore, so she falls into depression and drink. That’s what I got out of the book, but the truth is I enjoyed the scenes about their relationship so much that I wish O’Connor had written more of them — both for my own selfish enjoyment, and also because I think there was room left to explore the complexity of the relationship. We have no concrete information about it out here in the real world, so isn’t that what fiction is for (asks this nonfiction writer)?

I won’t talk much about O’Connor’s treatment of Synge, because that’s not what the book is about, though I will permit myself a paragraph to indulge and say that at times I loved his depiction, and at other times I felt myself cringing at things that felt untrue. But then again I have no basis for my own feelings on the matter besides just that — my feelings. Even though I call my book nonfiction because it’s based on lived experience and research, can I truly claim that mine is an emotional truth truer and therefore better than the one that came from O’Connor’s imagination?

But the real focus of Ghost Light is Molly’s story. As O’Connor often references, the family destroyed her letters to Synge. And so O’Connor’s book itself, to me, is a sort of wish fulfillment — giving us a picture of a woman whom we know so little about, who was such an important figure in Irish literary history, a person that a man named John Synge loved fiercely. And in the academic community, at least, there’s much speculation about their relationship: did Molly really love Synge, or was she using him to further her career? Did Synge really love Molly, or was he preying on a young girl who he could manipulate? Did they ever consummate their love with a physical relationship, or was it all talk (and lots of paper and ink)?

All these questions remain, in actuality, but Joseph O’Connor finally gives us the (fictional) answers that Synge-lovers like me have been craving, culminating in a beautiful letter he conjures — a long letter that Molly wrote but never sent, from some remote place in the West where she is learning Irish, as her beloved had done on Aran:

And everything about you gives me the courage I never, ever had and without you I’m like a ghost drifting through some old house of a life and there’s nothing about you I don’t love.

This line speaks to my own love of Synge and how his words swallowed me whole. Reading Synge’s plays and traveling to Aran to seek out the wisdom he found there completely changed me. And without his written words I’d never have had the courage to make journey. John Jeremiah Sullivan ends his New York Times piece, “Whatever comes next, after the crash, Ireland will make itself anew. If it’s smart, that is — if it doesn’t insist, like us, on desperately trying to crawl back to the conditions that made the bubble. A century after Synge’s last works were published, he may be the writer Ireland needs.” I can’t speak for all of Ireland, or even for all of “us,” but Synge was the writer I needed, at least, to get out of my own bubble, to make myself anew.

One night recently, I went to bed after having read a few chapters of Ghost Light, and I had my own dream of Synge. It wasn’t the first time I’d been visited by Synge in a dream (that’s what writing about someone for over four years does to you) but it was the least foggy. I was wandering the halls of a candlelit country estate, and found my way to a grand library, filled with old books and yellowing maps. I waited here, knowing that Synge was coming to meet me.

Soon he arrived, exactly as I have always pictured him: in his 30s but looking 40, a dark face with a trimmed beard and moustache and thick brows and a subtle, half-amused grimace, a hat, a walking stick, a bit of a limp, but dignified. He knew I was coming to see him, and he knew who I was and what I was writing about him and all the things I thought I knew about him, all the things I was so sure of.

I stood up and he took my arm, and we walked out into a beautiful, sunny garden (which I took to be the gardens of his mother’s estate in Wicklow). We kept walking out in this expansive manicured garden, which soon turned into the wild countryside of Wicklow. We wandered the glens and the streams, talking for hours. And he confirmed my beliefs about him, and corrected others. Sadly, upon waking, I could not discern what the truth was — such is the nature of dreams, fiction, and oftentimes memory.

Last summer on Aran, as my boyfriend and I walked the winding roads up the hillside in the rain, drank cider around the midsummer bonfires, climbed over stone walls, and lay silently in the grass in the Bronze Age cliff forts and “let the sea be all our talk” (as O’Connor would say Molly would say), more than once I had the thought: that I was here to honor Synge, to have a great adventure and awaken to the joy in my life, despite the storms that raged above. A wish fulfilled for both of us, perhaps.

Image courtesy of the author.

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The line to see Oprah stretched far down the highway. At the entrance to Diggi Palace, the front of the queue fanned into a thick crowd spread across several police barricades. A row of khaki-uniformed officers stood blocking the entrance. I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd, made eye contact with some police officers and waved my press pass. “Press, okay,” I heard someone say. “Okay?” I said, jumping over the barricade. Perhaps I’d misheard: A group of officers moved towards me, berets and rifles at alert.  It was my second day in Jaipur.

I arrived at the Jaipur Literature Festival a day late. After flying into India from New York, the plan had been to spend a day sightseeing with friends in Delhi — despite many India trips over the years, it had been more than 20 years since I visited north India — before taking an early morning train into the Pink City just in time for day two of the festival. This plan turned out to be a something of a miscalculation. Though I’d been following the controversy around Salman Rushdie’s invitation, I didn’t realize that the real drama of the “the greatest literary show on earth” (in Tina Brown’s words) would play out just hours after the festival opened.

Up until the day before JLF began, there were rumors that Rushdie — who reportedly had been dropped from the official program due to “a very real threat of violence at the venue” — planned to make a surprise appearance. Then, on the first day of the festival, Rushdie issued a statement: “I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to ‘eliminate’ me,” he wrote. “While I have some doubts about the accuracy of this intelligence, it would be irresponsible of me to come to the Festival in such circumstances.”

To voice their disapproval of the circumstances of Rushdie’s absence, four writers, Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, and Ruchir Joshi, read from The Satanic Verses — a book that has been banned in India — in their sessions later that day. They were subsequently advised to leave the festival, and the local police opened an investigation into their activities. There were still four days of panels left.

What was left to discuss? Anything but Rushdie. On guidance from the event organizers, everyone from Shashi Tharoor to David Remnick was talking around the debacle, momentarily alluding to it — knowingly, coyly — but never quite addressing it or the full array of issues it raised on India’s thorny history with censorship, religious fundamentalism, democratic and bureaucratic processes (and Salman Rushdie himself). It was a strange predicament for a symposium of ideas to find itself in. “So many awkward Rushdie references,” I scribbled in my notebook after day three. That’s all they were, though — fleeting references, fleetingly observed.

The show must go on! the organizers seemed to be saying. And, with 200-some authors still lined up to speak, it did. Lively on-stage conversations abounded. High-profile ones did too. Amy Chua debated economic policy. Teju Cole riffed on why it wasn’t necessarily only African writers who inspired him to become a writer. Oprah advocated for women’s rights. Fatima Bhutto discussed the future of Pakistan. Akash Kapur meditated on India’s changing rural landscape. Yet the topic of Rushdie continued to remain largely untouched, and a nagging question lingered in my mind: What kind of real intellectual discussion could go on in a setting that had proved itself so hospitable to self-censorship? When you gathered a hundred-thousand writers and book-lovers and then stripped away the opportunity for a truly free public exchange of ideas, what was left?

At a glance — and, as evidenced by my own exertions to see Oprah in a sari — the answer seemed to be: quite a bit of excitement, and quite a lot of people.  All day long, throngs of festival-goers filed through Diggi Palace. When they weren’t frantically crowding into the next session (securing a seat in any session was a herculean task; I gave up on several panels because I couldn’t find any place to position myself within earshot of the stage), attendees bought lunch, drinks, books, and snacks and sized each other up. College students flirted with one another over cigarettes. Small children chased authors for autographs. Expat journalists and writers mingled. Graduate students sipped chai from clay cups. Sassy aunties traded notes. It was, for all appearances, a happy bazaar — if not strictly of ideas, then, broadly, of culture.

The show went on — and what a carnival it was! — but it was impossible to fail to notice what was missing from the festival. “A panel entitled Creativity, Censorship and Dissent” — sponsored by Google — “made only glancing reference to Salman Rushdie in a list of other authors who have been similarly persecuted,” India Today reported. “After a brouhaha following readings from The Satanic Verses … the silence spoke volumes.” In that silence, the boisterous advertising that littered the whole affair seemed louder and all the more off-key. Panels were listed with their specific sponsors noted by name (a panel on “Reconstructing Rumi” was, poetically, sponsored by the maker of heavy-duty construction equipment). The young literati sported cute tote bags (“The Bag of Small Things” and “A Suitable Bag”) issued by Penguin to mark the publisher’s 25th anniversary in India.  Food stands selling pakoras, paninis, dosas, daquiris, chaat, and chocolate cake were around every corner. Sitting under a Tata Steel beam listening to one more author make one more emphatic marketing pitch for Katherine Boo’s new book (a title that enjoyed a “deafening publicity blitzkrieg” at the festival, as The Hindu put it), it seemed to me that — in the absence of any higher ideal — the pressure to purchase had become an organizing principal.

I wasn’t the only one questioning the festival’s priorities. At an extravagant 25th “birthday” bash thrown by Penguin at The Raj Palace — think tulle canopies floating above a regal courtyard and mini gulab jamuns served by bowing turbaned waiters — an open bar encouraged widespread theorizing. One Delhi-based writer (a panelist himself) told me he suspected the festival organizers had deliberately leaked news of Rushdie’s invitation months in advance as a publicity stunt. They knew they’d provoke hard-liners, he said; that was their intention. I had trouble imagining that the festival’s organizers were so naïve or cynical about India’s history of free speech controversies — or so ready to use a much-celebrated writer and friend for purely mercenary purposes — but it was an interesting explanation for someone so close to the eye of the storm to make. I was reminded of a simple argument put forward by Sunil Khilnani in The Idea of India: “Indians, no more than their counterparts anywhere else, are not virtuous, moderate, principled, or even especially tolerant people: they are deeply self-interested.” India is a capacious and often confusing place — for “insider” and “outsider” alike — so it didn’t seem far-fetched to suggest that the forces motivating the Rushdie fracas were even more complex than they appeared.

“But it is that self-interest — ” Khilnani goes on, hopefully, “so apparent in the conduct of the political elite — which encourages them to make compromises and accommodations.” Indeed, major compromises had been made to keep the festival alive, and through that compromise, many writers and readers had been connected. But in this case, there had been a significant cost.  Although the energy and sense of possibility in Jaipur far surpassed anything I’d encountered at, say, the New Yorker Festival in Manhattan (or even the beloved Brooklyn Book Festival), Jaipur Literature Festival’s inability to send a clear message about the value of free speech was dispiriting.

Take, for example, the cagey statement issued by JLF’s press team after Kunzru’s, Kumar’s, Thayil’s, and Ruchir’s readings:

This press release is being issued on behalf of the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It has come to their attention that certain delegates acted in a manner during their sessions today which were without the prior knowledge or consent of the organizers. Any views expressed or actions taken by these delegates are in no manner endorsed by the Jaipur Literature Festival.

William Dalrymple, one of the festival’s organizers, has since vocally defended how the JLF team handled the fuss. “I for one hope I am never again forced to choose between putting at risk all the principles upon which literary life is based, if I was to cancel an appearance by Salman, or knowingly igniting a major religious riot if his appearance went ahead,” he wrote in The New York Times, “and so putting at risk the lives of everyone who had come to the festival — including the authors who were our guests, and lines of school children in their blazers and elderly couples with their sandwiches and flasks of chai who had come to hear them.”

Lines of school children! Elderly couples with flasks of chai! Yes, it was a good thing the young and old alike had been able to safely partake in the delights of literary life in vibrant Jaipur. On the plane home, though, I found myself daydreaming about how very different my own earliest encounters with the world of books had been in India, on childhood trips to see my grandparents. With my American pastimes on hold for the summer, I’d plant myself under an oscillating fan and read. Some of those books transported me back to the U.S. and others rushed me away to new faraway lands but many took me deeper into the India I was slowly, haltingly, coming to understand and love. When the supply of books in my suitcase ended, there would be a trip to the bookstore, and after that, to the local lending library, where I’d find still more books to burrow into as hours, days, and weeks passed by. Outside my window, a world of activity whirled on — much of it, due in part to my age, gender, and foreignness, still beyond my comprehension and reach. Inside, alone, I quietly read.
image courtesy of the author

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