In January, as each energetically compiled his list, they had high hopes.
In February they traded lists. By March all the books were in hand.
But when the son opened the first book recommended by his father and read the first sentence, up to the first comma, he realized he would never understand his father’s worldview. One introspective tear fell onto the page. Same for the father: he opened the first book, read the first clause of the first sentence, gave up on the possibility of ever understanding his son, and shed a single biochemical tear onto the page.
The son threw his father’s books in a dumpster, and the father jammed his son’s books into a charity drop box. Through an astonishing and amusing sequence of events, too illogical and unlikely to relate here, all twenty books ended up several years later at the same insane asylum library in Wisconsin, where they were discovered in two stacks of ten by an ingenious psychopath named Herbert.
Herbert read the books with great interest and incredible intensity. It was clear to him that all twenty books said exactly the same thing. One stack restated the other stack. No twenty books, Herbert felt, had ever been so akin, so harmonious, so complementary as these twenty books. He wrote down his conclusions in a four-thousand-page document, using unfortunately a grammatical system of his own invention. No publisher, needless to say, took more than one glance at the manuscript. Herbert has since published it on his blog, Herb’s Place, at herbsplace.blogspot.com. It seems unlikely that the father or son — who actually no longer speak — will ever come upon Herbert’s Blogspot site, and even if they did, I doubt they would recognize it as the meeting point of their minds.
17: NO
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A hedge fund manager shot himself dead on the traffic island at the center of our town rotary. A subsequent examination of his finances found that this once-affluent man had gone bankrupt. It seems that he’d squandered his fortune on a series of failed films and fashion ventures by his son, a failed filmmaker, and his daughter, a failed fashion mogul. His wealth had seemed inexhaustible, but after only four of his son’s terrible films and five of his daughter’s profoundly misguided fashion ventures, it was all gone.
A suicide note taped to his chest read: I tried to make you happy. — Dad.
The son and daughter spoke to a reporter. “He never knew how to say no to us,” said the daughter. “He should have said no to my films and no to her fashion ventures,” said the son.
18: THE DEATH OF INSPECTOR PIRENNE
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A 1977 profile in Le Figaro revealed that the Belgian author who, under the pseudonym Philippe Plateau, had created the enormously popular Inspector Pirenne novels was also responsible, under the pseudonym Ingrid Nève, for the similarly beloved erotic romance novels centering on the insatiable florist Gisèle Simonet. This revelation, combined with another in the same article — that the author was dying — threw his two readerships into a panic, a panic eased only by the rumor that the author’s son, already established as a novelist in his own right, was poised to take over and carry on with both series, the crime and the erotic romance.
The origins of this rumor, much less the truth of it, were unknown. Some said that the son, eager to inherit the two lucrative franchises, had started it, but that the father was reluctant, either because he didn’t want to let go of his characters or because he didn’t want to burden his son with them. Others believed it was the father, anxious to see his characters live on and for his son to profit from them, who had started the rumor, and the son who was reluctant to take possession.
In any event, either the father or the son, or both, must have declined the handoff, and seemingly at the last minute, for on the final page of the last Inspector Pirenne novel, which came out months after the author was buried, crime devotees were stunned to read that their cherished Pirenne, who’d survived so many close calls, strolled out of his office one day “in high spirits,” stepped on “something,” and “exploded irreversibly.” Romantic-erotica fanatics were similarly stunned to read that their darling Gisèle, fresh off a vigorous tryst with a young theology student, strolled out of her flower shop one evening, stepped on “something, like a mine or something,” and “permanently exploded.” Whether these lines were written by the author or inserted after his death by his son remains, to the one or perhaps two scholars still interested in the question, a mystery.
The son, who died himself just a couple of days ago, went on to write some extremely original poetry that attracted extraordinarily few readers. No one, as it happens, reads the Pirenne or Gisèle novels anymore, either. They aged poorly and have fallen, for the most part, out of print.
19: THE SULFUR BATHS
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A very promising career was cut short in 1837 when one of Russia’s finest young poets, on whose lungs an ominous black spot had been found, traveled to Tiflis per the urgent recommendation of his doctor to soak in the sulfur baths there. He left Moscow in May. That summer his spirits soared, the Caucasus agreed with him, his lungs, as he wrote to his father, a high-ranking military officer, “suddenly remembered what it is to breathe.” Each morning he soaked for precisely forty-five minutes in the scalding baths and each afternoon he hiked in the hills ringing Tiflis, sketching landscapes and writing many of his most memorable verses. In August, however, his father — jubilant at his sickly son’s rapid convalescence — took a monthlong leave to visit him in the Caucasus. We do not know exactly what transpired during the visit, but we can deduce that the father and son sat together in the sulfur baths at least once, an experience that evidently perturbed the young poet, since thereafter his poems — formerly filled with the most extravagant array of imagery this side of Gogol — feature just a single image, of a fat Russian colonel delicately lowering his large genitalia into the sulfur baths of Tiflis. From September 1837 until his untimely death at Sevastopol (1855), the once-promising poet returned again and again to the seconds just before, and just after, his gingerly squatting father’s big genitalia touched the steaming surface of the Tiflis sulfur baths—to the exclusion of every other possible poetic theme.
The poet, as one biographer correctly notes, did make an effort to conceal, or vary, the nature of his fixation, referring in some poems to the “genitals of the Muscovite lieutenant,” in others to the “Russian captain’s cock,” here to the “testicles of a foreign adjutant,” there to the “northern brigadier general’s balls.” But these minor variations were merely the poet rattling the bars of his obsession; he remained trapped by it. We see this perhaps most poignantly in an 1838 poem that begins, promisingly, with a charming description of a Dagestani shepherd leading his flock over a high mountain pass, follows the shepherd, worrisomely, to an alpine lake, and concludes, inevitably, with the abrupt appearance of “an old cavalry officer from Nizhny Novgorod” crouched “naked on his haunches” in the shallows of the lake, lowering his genitals “into the cold, clear water.” The poet returned to Russia that year, completely recovered, but his new preoccupation returned with him. “The black spot,” as the biographer puts it, a little melodramatically, “had migrated from the lungs to the poems.” His star fell very, very quickly. Not he but Lermontov — with whom he had actually overlapped briefly in Tiflis but whose father, notably, had never come to visit — was now considered Pushkin’s heir.