On The Pleasures and Solitudes of Quiet Books

1.
In Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty, a louche writer named Jep Gambardella, spends much of his time strolling through the cobble-stone streets of Rome and soaking up impressions and experience, that will figure, we assume, in a long-delayed follow-up to his first acclaimed novel. He reflects on the ineffable qualities that mark good writing.

“As kids, my friends always gave the same answer: ‘Pussy’,” Jep recalls. “Whereas I answered ‘The smell of old people’s houses.’ The question was ‘What do you really like the most in life?’

“I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.”

At another point, while responding to the flattery of a beautiful, young female admirer, who quotes from his book, Jep says the sentiment he was expressing had been better written by the Italian prose master Alberto Moravia.

Born in 1907, Alberto Moravia achieved at 21 critical and commercial success with his first novel, The Time of Indifference, a cause célèbre eschewing middle-class mores. Before his death in 1990, he would publish over 40 novels, including The Conformist (1951), the adaptation of which in 1970 by Bernardo Bertolucci has the unusual distinction of being both a classic of post-war Italian cinema and of early-1970s zeitgeist.

In his recollections to the Paris Review, after Mussolini came to power, he struggled to get his books published (though Mussolini himself approved the 1940 publication of The Dream of the Lazy) and eventually fled for refuge to the Apennine mountains in 1943. He spent the war years trying to get his scandalous novels past Fascist censors:

I sent Agostino to them two months before the fall of Fascism, two months before the end. While all about them everything was toppling, falling to ruin, the Ministry of Popular Culture was doing business as usual. Approval looked not to be forthcoming; so one day I went up there, to Via Veneto — you know the place; they’re still there, incidentally; I know them all — to see what the trouble was. They told me that they were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to give approval to the book. My dossier was lying open on the desk, and when the secretary left the room for a moment I glanced at it. There was a letter from the Brazilian cultural attaché in it, some poet, informing the Minister that in Brazil I was considered a subversive. In Brazil of all places! But that letter, that alone, was enough to prevent the book’s publication.

Moravia himself spent most of the second half of the 20th century strolling along the Via dell’Oca (which means “Street of the Goose”). Anna Maria de Dominicis and Ben Johnson, in the introduction to his Paris Review interview, describe the street as “houses of working-class people: a line of narrow doorways with dark, dank little stairs, cramped windows, a string of tiny shops; the smells of candied fruit, repair shops, wines of the Castelli, engine exhaust” on one side and on the other side “the serene imperiousness of unchipped cornices and balconies overspilling with potted vines, tended creepers: homes of the well-to-do.” His fiction would explore both sides of Italy.

In an introduction to Moravia’s Boredom, William Weaver says, “Moravia was a great friend to walk with: a born Roman, he knew every brick of the city; even the most drab apartment block or the scruffiest little church could set a sparkling train of associations and memories. But, on encountering him, I would first, automatically, ask him how he was.

“’Mi annoio,’ he would usually reply, in his clipped telegraphic way.

“’I’m bored.’”

2.
NYRB Classics has recently republished Moravia’s early novella Agostino, in a fine translation by Michael F. Moore. Agostino is a young boy who has an unusually close attachment to his widowed mother, and the novel takes place during their extended stay at a beach resort. His sensitivity and jealousy drive them apart in the first chapters of the book, a closely reworked Swann’s Way:

Agostino’s mother was a big and beautiful woman still in her prime, and Agostino was filled with pride every time he got in the boat with her for one of their morning rides.

The novel, though, soon plunges from Proust into the hard-knock fringes of the beach resort. Driven away by his mother’s interest in a “tanned, dark-haired” young man, Agostino falls in with a group of working-class boys who are inarticulate, violent, inscrutable. He is drawn to them, as a kind of foil to his predictable upper-middle-class universe:

For a moment Agostino felt happy as he swam while the cold powerful stream tugged at his legs, and he forgot every hurt and every wrong. The boys were swimming in all directions, their heads and arms breaking through the smooth green surface. Their voices echoed clearly in the still air. Through the glassy transparency of the water, their bodies looked like white offshoots of plants that, rising to the surface from the darkness below, moved whichever way the current took them.

Eventually, the privileged Agostino whose home has 20 bedrooms (an unimaginable number for the other boys) begins to beg for change. He encounters a father and son, and the father unadvisedly takes the opportunity to teach his son about the have’s and have-not’s.

“And how old are you?” the man inquired.
“Thirteen,” said Agostino.
“You see,” said the man to his son, “this boy is almost the same age as you and he’s already working.” Then to Agostino, “Do you go to school?”
“I wish…but how can I?” replied Agostino, taking on the deceitful tone he had often heard the boys in the gang adopt to address similar questions. “I gotta make a living, mister.”
“You see,” the father turned to his son again, “this boy can’t go to school because he has to work, and you have the nerve to complain because you have to study?”

Moravia maintained an interest in intellectuals who rationalize their own impulsive behaviors and others’. In stark contrast to Agostino, his later novel, Contempt, rereleased a decade ago by NYRB Classics, features a first-person narrator, a screenwriter whose disgust for movie-writing is matched only by his wife’s inexplicable contempt for him. Throughout, the narrator interrogates his wife, and by extension the mystery of attraction itself:

Suddenly, the suspicion that she no longer loved me sprang into my mind again, in an abrupt, haunting sort of way, as a feeling of the impossibility of contact and communion between my body and hers…And I, like a person who suddenly realizes he is hanging over an abyss, felt a kind of painful nausea at the thought that our intimacy had turned for no reason at all, into estrangement, absence, separation.

Since so many of his themes touch on the unconscious and taboo sexuality, it might be surprising how skeptical his novels are to psychoanalytic techniques. Throughout Contempt, Moravia satirizes a character who has embraced a very schematic version of Freudianism.

Moravia suggests that ratiocination is a poor substitute for taste. One of his great themes is how sensibility is wrecked by negotiations with other people, other classes, other individuals, and thereby reinvigorated. As the screenwriter-narrator of Contempt says of his wife when she tells him she despises him, “It was the tone of the virgin word that springs directly from the thing itself and pronounced by someone who had perhaps never spoken that word before, and who, urged on by necessity, had fished it up from the ancestral depths of the language, without searching for it, almost involuntarily.”

Both Contempt and Agostino have an almost Neoclassical form, unlike, say, The Leopard. Lampedusa and Moravia point toward two very different directions for Italian fiction, though Contempt, a bracingly austere book that harkens back to naturalism, was published in 1954, and Lampedusa’s inventive, comic experiment was published in 1958.

Though his work deeply engaged with early-20th-century social and intellectual concerns, he claimed his fiction was informed most by the big “C” Canon. In his conversation with the Paris Review, he comes across as alternately fusty and cantankerous in his observations on the Moderns. He rejects O’Neill and Shaw as major dramatists because they “resorted to everyday language and, in consequence, by my definition failed to create true drama.”

If the first chapter takes off from Proust, the last movement of Agostino is a poignant revision of the ending of Sentimental Education. In Flaubert’s novel, Frédéric and Deslauriers, after several intervening years of disillusionment and disappointment, reminisce about a youthful visit to a brothel. During the visit, Frédéric becomes embarrassed and flees into the street, and his friend follows him. They are both seen coming out, and it causes a “local scandal which was still remembered three years later.” The novel ends with the two failed romantics remarking on the story:

“That was the happiest time we ever had,” said Frédéric.
“Yes, perhaps you’re right. That was the happiest time we ever had,” Deslauriers says.

In the final pages of his novella, Moravia has the prepubescent Agostino visit a brothel with his piggybank savings. When the encounter at the brothel predictably ends badly, he goes back home and demands of his mother that he be treated like a man. It is a moving depiction of a young person’s thwarted autonomy.

“But he wasn’t a man,” Moravia writes, “and many unhappy days would pass before he became one.”

As a child, I thought of myself as a prodigy.

In the sixth grade I picked out a paperback from the school library for no other reason than it appeared difficult to read and would, I imagined, suggest to teachers and classmates a secret literary acumen. I paraded through the hallways at school, holding the book face-out, until finally a classmate asked me about it. I told her it was a novel called Sphere, by Michael Crick-ton. When she tried to correct my pronunciation, I laughed, and in the haughty, dismissive tone my possession of the book was an attempt to justify, told her: “Um, I don’t think so.”

Six years ago today, Michael Crichton passed away. At the time, news of his death was met with little of the laudatory eulogizing you might expect for someone who had such a broad influence on popular culture (at one point in the mid-90s he was responsible, concurrently, for the number one book, movie, and television series in the country). He was only 66, which seemed far too young. Yet he had managed to produce, in that short time, an enormous – and enormously diverse – body of work.

How?

I didn’t know it while I was flaunting his books throughout my elementary school, but forty years earlier Crichton had lived out my dreams of childhood achievement.

As a pre-teen he wrote travel articles for the New York Times; in his early twenties, while attending Harvard Medical School, he published a series of spy novels under the pseudonyms John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. It made sense, then, that as other twelve year-olds practiced stickhandling like Jaromir Jagr and memorizing the lyrics to Nirvana’s Nevermind, I instead spent my evenings in front of the computer attempting to write a best-selling sci-fi adventure novel.

I devoured Sphere, but my obsession with Crichton wouldn’t fully bloom until two years later, when the movie adaptation of his novel Jurassic Park exploded into my cultural consciousness with an onslaught of television ads and McDonald’s promotional tie-ins. I saw the film five times in theaters, and immediately bought a copy of the book, which I adored and obsessed over like nothing else I’d ever read.

The following Christmas, traveling with my family to Houston, Texas, I spent the entirety of my holiday allowance at the airport newsstand, buying up every single Crichton paperback they had in stock (which, if you were in an airport bookstore anytime in the mid-90s, was all of them). Throughout my vacation, as inside my aunt’s house the rituals of Christmas proceeded – turkeys roasted, gifts wrapped – I sat outside in our rented mini-van, listening to a cassette tape of John Williams’s score for Jurassic Park and reading, from cover to cover, every book that Michael Crichton had ever written.

At school, that year, I began handing in short-story assignments with elaborate cover pages based on the Crichton paperbacks I’d gorged on in Texas; perfect reproductions of those gaudy airport-novel covers with massive block letters spelling out my surname and the story’s title, almost an afterthought, nestled somewhere below. Short stories, though, were too easy. A boy genius doesn’t gain notoriety by meeting expectations, only by exceeding them in some impossible way. So, with notoriety foremost on my mind, I decided that I was going to write a novel.

That Crichton’s magnum opus involved dinosaurs – my other great childhood obsession – seemed to dictate that my own should, too. Dinosaurs running amok in modern times; that was the extent of my outline for the sprawling project. The rest, I assumed, would come naturally to a prodigious talent such as myself.

In preparation, I spent hours formatting a Word document to look exactly like the title and copyright pages of Crichton’s books. I transcribed fake ISBN numbers and Library of Congress catalogue data. For inspiration, I clipped a photograph of Crichton from a magazine and taped it to my bedroom wall. In it, he was – as he always seemed to be – leaning against a wall with his arms folded, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up in the business-casual style that embodied his penchant for merging the business of hard science with the casual tempo of pop-adventure.

I wrote in short declarative sentences. I garnished my prose liberally with scientific terms. Leaves were “bifurcated fronds.” The glare of a sunset was “an atmospheric refraction.” I introduced characters in quick expository portions, as if in a screenplay (so-and-so was a thirty-eight year-old investment banker from Toledo, Ohio, blond-haired and deathly afraid of heights).

My novel began like this:
A group of tourists are hiking through the jungles of a remote South American island. Noises in the underbrush. Growling. Hissing. Shadows flash within the bifurcated fronds. Suddenly, the group is set upon by an unseen force. Violence ensues. Blood and dismemberment are described in nauseating anatomical detail. One character manages to elude the predators, and just when it seems that he might escape – as he reaches the shore and is blinded by an atmospheric refraction – a shadow rises up in front of him. He can’t quite describe the thing, but it looks familiar. It looks like something he’s seen in a book. Like a…dinosaur!
Genius!

But with the prologue settled and exposition required, I hit a wall. I tried setting the following chapter on a helicopter (characters in Michael Crichton books were always traveling by helicopter to some secret location or another), but without a solid premise my dialogue meandered pointlessly. I tried setting the first chapter in a laboratory, where a maverick scientist processed some seemingly inane specimen only to discover that something was wrong…terribly wrong.

What that terrible thing might be, however, constantly eluded me.

As the Michael Crichton phenomenon peaked in the mid-90s following the release of the Jurassic Park movie and the premiere of an hour-long medical drama loosely-based on his non-fiction book Five Patients (a show called ER, which I followed with appropriate zealousness), 60 Minutes aired a profile on the man behind the magic. Though I’d read his autobiography Travels, this was my first glimpse of the author whose work I’d been trying so hard to mimic, whose career I was so desperate to replicate.
He was tall. Freakishly tall. He spoke in a monotonous, professorial baritone. During the segment, he took the camera crew on a tour of his New York City apartment. I was thrilled to see that his office looked no different than the office in my own suburban home where I sat struggling at the keyboard. Just as I kept paleontology books and encyclopedias open beside me, fat manuals and scientific text were scattered around his workspace (he would have been working on his novel Airframe at the time).

The camera crew then followed him into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator door to reveal, neatly organized, a dozen cans of Coke and a shelf of pre-made ham and cheese sandwiches.

A profound revelation: when Michael Crichton writes a book, he eats the same thing for lunch every day! Finally, an insight in to the mysterious process of writing a novel that my fourteen year-old brain could relate to! I was carried back to my cluttered desk with renewed purpose. I felt, once again, like I was on the cusp of accomplishing something amazing.

In the following years, as I continued to produce clever prologues and aborted first chapters, the premise of my blockbuster novel evolved. To explain the coexistence of man and dinosaur, I incorporated the idea of time travel, borrowing generously from Harry Adams’s layman’s explanation of quantum physics in the early chapters of Sphere. I added an ancient ruins that bore a blatant resemblance to the lost city of Zinj from Congo. Still, I wasn’t able to duplicate my hero’s magic alchemy of fact and fiction.

What fascinated me about Michael Crichton’s books was that they were so utterly, magnificently plausible. It had seemed, at the outset, like an easy thing to accomplish, but I soon faced the unfortunate truth: I wasn’t a novelist…not, at least, in the meticulous, academic manner of Michael Crichton.

I gave up. I was a prodigy in name only, with nothing to show for the reputation I’d cultivated by carrying around impressive books and leaning against walls with my sleeves rolled up and arms crossed.

Decades later, having found a small measure of success as a writer (measured not in bestselling paperbacks sold in airports, but in obscure literary journals sold in specialty bookstores), I purchased an early hardcover edition of Sphere from a used bookstore. Though, as an adult, I instead suggest my literary acumen to strangers by carrying around books by Nabokov and Updike, I felt no less proud to once again parade through public with a Michael Crichton novel face-out.

As I re-read this new copy of Sphere, I was surprised to find that much of the rhythm and timbre I claimed as my own in fact belonged to Crichton: isolating revelatory sentences on a line break between paragraphs (see the beginning of this essay for an example); complex sentences interspersed with short sentence fragments like the dots and dashes in Morse Code. Even in my early twenties, writing bad pseudo-autobiographical short stories, it seems that I had retained, by osmosis, the stylistic habits I’d developed while eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches, drinking Coke, and imagining my name writ large on the shelves of an airport bookstore.

I am too old, now, to think of myself as a prodigy, but I imagine that my twelve year-old self would be proud to know that all these years later, in this very minor way, I am carrying forward some small part of Michael Crichton’s legacy.