Charlie had several helpers at The Alfred — unofficially, the doormen, who knew he only left the building to go to the Greek diner two blocks away, and to call the diner’s manager when he did to make sure he arrived. There was also a young woman he had hired to fix his virus-flooded Gateway and provide data entry — in the office I found her flyer with its number circled, the services it advertised including not only computer repair but martial arts instruction and guitar lessons. I met her a few times after Charlie’s death and we talked about the book, which she claimed Charlie had finally finished. “I know because we wrote it together,” she said. “He thought up the ideas for the scenes and I wrote them.” But she never showed me the completed, final manuscript, and a few weeks after we met she stopped returning calls.
* * *
Here is the story of Charlie’s book, I think. In the 1980s Charlie wrote a novel, the story of Felix, the bankrupt “breaker of crazy dogs and vicious horses,” and the Professor, a certain Viennese psychoanalyst who brings Felix neurotic animals and theories of the mind. This modestly-sized, thoroughly old-fashioned book “split the middle,” to use one of Charlie’s favorite phrases, between fantasy and autobiography — Charlie, of course, being neither a Central European aristocrat living on an abandoned royal hunting preserve, nor an acquaintance of Freud. He was, however, a one-time breeder of dogs who in his forties owned an expansive farm and kennel in one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia (near Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia), where, like Felix, he imported trees and animals from all over the world and satisfied his desire to live in isolation from other intellectuals. Losing the farm, as he did in the mid-1980s (to inflation, as he described it — inflation also being the scourge of several of Charlie’s books, it is worth noting), was surely the novel’s impetus.
“I wanted to write a long novel about the farm,” he once told an interviewer, “but the farm was so hurtful to me in many ways, not only economically but in terms of the loss of beloved animals,” as well as what he called a “nineteenth-century” existence. So he wrote a short novel instead, one that was a throwback as much as the farm. In many ways it is a response — positive and hopeful, for all the unhappiness it apparently came out of — to the wrenching blankness of White Jazz and The Post-Modern Aura, works that depict spiritual suffering in an age of multiple, overlapping determinisms. For if nothing else, Felix lives in a world where his own agency matters, and where meaningful connections (with his wife, his animals, the Professor, and perhaps above all the land he lives on) are possible.
Charlie could have published the story of Felix and the Professor in the early ’90s, roughly maintaining his schedule of a book every few years. But one of Charlie’s idiosyncrasies as a writer is that he would often write something, then put it aside, and eventually find an unexpected way to combine it with other material he was working on. In the case of the book inspired by the farm, he decided to hold off in favor of incorporating it within a massively enlarged work to be harvested from the book’s fantastical setting — Cannonia. Now instead of one book there would be roughly nine, divided into three volumes, the first being In Partial Disgrace, which would contain the story of Felix and the Professor, though pushed all the way to the end. The second, “Learnt Hearts,” would take place in Russia a decade or so later and center on Felix’s relationship not with Freud but Pavlov. And the third, “Lost Victories,” would move to postwar America.
Having thus reenvisioned his tidy coastal steamer as a three-decker battleship, Charlie set out to write an introduction of suitable vastness, providing centuries of background and introducing characters who would not reappear for thousands of pages. The nature of the project all but required him to take this approach, if he was to create the world necessary to sustain an epic. The story itself could wait. Characters could get away with announcing themselves in the grandest possible manner, then vanish. Charlie’s passion for history and obscure primary sources could be indulged. It was all part of the excitement, the buildup, the setting of an appropriate tone.
Ten years later, Charlie was still writing the overture to his symphony, as Joshua Cohen notes. And not surprisingly, the time it was taking, plus the future amount of work he could surely see coming, not to mention the embarrassment of attempting such a behemoth, weighed on him as much as the unpayable generations of debt from Semper Vero weigh on Felix. Physically he was a wreck. A lifelong alcoholic who frequently stunned even the people who knew him best with his capacity for self-destruction and recovery, Charlie had curtailed his drinking in the 1980s through Alcoholics Anonymous and white-knuckle effort, then lost control in the ’90s, undoubtedly in part due to the stress of Cannonia. Toward the end of the decade his body began to break down, and he spent much of the following years in the hospital, where doctors at first thought he might have suffered a stroke or the onset of Parkinson’s. Intermittently unable to speak or walk, he put aside the trilogy for long stretches, struggled with depression, and when the wherewithal to write eventually returned, started a pair of new books instead (a history of American education and a long essay on terrorism.) He also became estranged from family, saw his marriage end, and reduced his teaching to the point where he was scarcely seen on campus.
During these years Charlie seemed to answer conflictingly every time he was asked if the book was done. In 1998, it was three-quarters finished, in 2005, only two-thirds, while in 2002 it was complete. His assistant in St. Louis believed he might never stop rearranging the table of contents and inserting new pages, and in fact he never did.
The first time I read a draft of In Partial Disgrace, Charlie was still alive, and reading it all but put me into despair. Page after page after page, nothing but setting or background. Cannonia was certainly a fascinating place, but it appeared to be one in which things only happened, usually in the distant past — there was virtually no present, no now. I was confused also because so much of the novel Charlie had talked about for so long seemed to be missing. Where was Freud? Where was Pavlov? Where were the battle scenes, and where, other than Rufus, who vanished from the story almost as soon as he appeared, were the spooks? After four hundred pages I put it down — obviously I held only a fragment of the overall work to come, and there was nothing to do but wait.
Then after Charlie died I found the story of Felix and the Professor, a self-contained, fully formed novel that was alive in its language, arresting in its ideas, and humanly engaging in its depiction of a friendship between two painfully isolated men. Like the television at the bottom of the closet, it pulsed with warmth, and the task became how to disentomb it. Mostly it was a question of moving material around rather than discarding it. In Partial Disgrace does have some elements of a conventional novel — the story of Felix and the Professor is an actual story, told in a relatively straightforward way — but Charlie hadn’t gotten into it quick enough, as his own notes on a late draft seemed to suggest. Felix did not even appear until a third of the way into the book, and the Professor not until a hundred pages further. So we took some of the Psalmanazar family back story — a considerable chunk of the book, which Charlie had stacked up front, posing a blockade to even the most patient reader — and found points later on where it could be inserted naturally.