It was the age of nonfiction, my father told me. “Maybe stop trying to make sings up. Ask in any bookstore,” he said, “iss de books on de nonfiction tables dat move while de made-up stories languish.” But that was the world of books. In the movies it was the age of superheroes. For nonfiction we had Michael Moore’s polemics, Werner Herzog’s Woodcarver Steiner, Wim Wenders’s Pina, some others. But the big bucks were in fantasy. My father admired and commended to me the work and ideas of Dziga Vertov, the Soviet documentarist who detested drama and literature. His film style, Kino-Eye or Ciné-Eye, aimed at nothing less than the evolution of mankind into a higher, fiction-free form of life, “from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man.” Whitman would have liked him. Maybe I-am-a-camera Isherwood too. I, however, resisted. I left the higher forms to my parents and Michael Moore. I wanted to make the world up.
A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.”
In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.
I miss them more than I can say.
Time passed. I acquired a girlfriend, lost her, acquired another, lost her as well. My secret movie script, my most demanding lover, disliked my attempts at these misconceived relationships with human beings, and sulked, and refused to yield up its secrets. My Late Twenties were steaming toward me, and I like a swooning nickelodeon hero lay helpless across the tracks. (My literary parents would no doubt have preferred that I refer, instead, to the climactic railway-tracks scene in Forster’s The Longest Journey.) The Gardens were my microcosm, and every day I saw the creatures of my imagination staring back at me from the windows of houses on both Macdougal and Sullivan, hollow-eyed, pleading to be born. I had pieces of them all but the shape of the work eluded me. At #XX Sullivan Street, on the first floor, with garden access, I had placed my Burmese—I should say Myanmaran—diplomat, U Lnu Fnu of the United Nations, his professional heart broken by his defeat in the longest-ever battle for the post of Secretary-General, twenty-nine consecutive rounds of voting without a winner, and in the thirtieth round he lost to the South Korean. Through him I planned to explore geopolitics, to dramatize the push by some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world toward the outlawing by the UN of the giving of religious offense, to bring to a head the vexed question of the use of the American veto in defense of Israel, and to arrange a visit to the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens by Aung San Suu Kyi herself. I knew, too, the story of U Lnu Fnu’s personal heartbreak, the loss of his wife to cancer, and I suspected that, derailed by the double defeat of his upright life, he might fall away from probity and finally be undone by financial scandal. When I thought of this the hollow-eyed man at the window of #XX Sullivan shook his head in disappointment and retreated into the shadows. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.
My imagined community was an international bunch. At #00 Macdougal Street there lived another solitary individual, an Argentine-American to whom I had given the temporary, working name of “Mr. Arribista,” the arriviste. About him, whatever his name finally became, Mario Florída, maybe, or Carlos Hurlingham, I had this treatment:
Arribista, the new citizen, plunges into the great country—“his” country, he marvels—as a man does who reaches a promised ocean after a long journey across a desert, even though he has never learned how to swim. He trusts the ocean to bear his weight; and it does. He does not drown, or not immediately.
Also this, which needed to be expanded:
Arribista has been, all his life, a square peg pushing sweatily against a round hole. Is this, at long last, a square hole for him to fit squarely within, or has he, during his long journeyings, become rounded? (If the latter, then the journey would be meaningless, or at least at its end he would have fitted in well where he began. He prefers the image of the square hole, and the grid system of the city streets seems to confirm that reality.)
And perhaps it was because of my own romantic failures that Arribista, like the gentleman from the UN, had been abandoned by the woman he loved:
His wife is also a fiction. Or, she crossed over many years ago from fact into fantasy, when she left him for another man, younger, more handsome, in all respects an improvement on poor Arribista, who is, as he well knows, in all ways that women like—looks, conversation, attentiveness, warmth, honesty—only averagely equipped. L’homme moyen sensible, who reaches for inexact hand-me-down phrases like that one to describe himself. A man clad in old familiar words, as if they were tweeds. A man without qualities. No, that isn’t true, Arribista corrects himself. He has qualities, he reminds himself. For one thing, he has this tendency when lost in the stream of consciousness to denigrate himself, and in this respect he is unfair to himself. As a matter of fact he is something very like an excellent person, excellent in the way of his new country, which celebrates excellence, which rejects the “tall poppy syndrome.” Arribista is excellent because he has excelled. He has done well; very well. He is rich. His story is a success story, the story of his very considerable success. It is an American story.