Thad was forty when he wrote Sea Horse. While the book showed promise, it was still very much a first novel — there are far greater sins. At the exact same age, his father had produced Radiant Light, Come to Morning, Death of a Translator, Jonas and the Whale, The Man at the End of the Booth, and so on, already winning a clutch of Guggenheims, Pulitzers, and National this-and-that’s. (Dual citizenship would eventually allow him a Booker.) Michelet saw the runt’s efforts as blasphemous exposure of family business, a tabloidal assault dressed up in the pathetic gown of magical realism which was then in American vogue, lazily diluted by its long, northern migration. His rage knew no bounds or boundaries.
I did some Netsurfing and found an interview Black Jack gave in the New York Review of Books, at the time of Chrysanthemum’s publication:
NYRB: Your son has written about Jeremy in his book, The Soft Sea Horse.
MICHELET: It’s god-awful! So clearly an attempt to stab at me. What’s galling is, his publishers know it. That’s how cynical the game’s become. I doubt they even read the manuscript, such as it is. The thing has no value whatsoever, except as literary curiosity. Please to put quotes around literary. It’s obscene. All the needy stuff one prayed to have gotten off one’s chest a lifetime ago while battling acne. Or on the frigging couch. You write it, yes — of course you do, but then you burn the pages. If you’ve got any sense! Look, we’ve all done it, I’ve burned reams of juvenilia. But to enshrine, as a man? The towering stupidity of it — that kind of unforgivable hubris. If it were any good, I’d be the first to — hell, I’d haul it out like a piss-proud grandpa and do the book fair circuit with him, kit and caboodle. But see, I cain’t, cause it’s so much shite.
It was piercing to read.
The devilish thing was, I found myself suddenly blackjacked. With the collegiate nonchalance of an armchair freelancer I dismantled Thad’s inferior prose, tropes and longueurs, stylistic shibboleths and high-minded canards. There on the boardwalk, hard by clusters of sinister halfway-house junkies and hardbodied skatergirls, I smugly took him to task for daring to attempt a dissection of family tragedy through the refracted lens of a borrowed genre that in order to transcend parody would have required genius. I excoriated the man for the grandiloquent gall of embarking on such a voyage, knowing full well his ship would founder on remaindered shoals—he had to have known. On that Saturday afternoon, dusk approaching, my blood and eyes grew cold, and I seemed not to care a whit about the fortitude, the sheer, steely gumption required for Thad to have taken up his own dare. Then I wondered: Had I ever done anything equally ambitious or recklessly poetic? Had the pathetic, unrealized, revenue-driven scribblings of Bertram Valentine Krohn even faintly approached the boldness of this monumentally disruptive, violent, seminal act? My remorse compounded as I recalled Michelet’s single-minded determination to devour his remaining son. How could anyone have survived such a father? Or such a reader as I was turning out to be…
Yet the legacy of Jack Michelet’s genius will outlive our days — the ironic curse promised and delivered, it seems, by all monstres sacrés. I stopped at the bookstore tucked behind the Sidewalk Café and found a thin volume of poetry that put the old man in good graces again; I hated myself but what can be done? I wandered to the fiction shelf. The absence of Thad’s novels alongside his dad’s seemed a grievous wrong — an unmarked, looted grave, a desecration and ugliness perpetrated by that child killer, cannibal, madman. Thus I seesawed back and forth, pro-Thad, pro-Jack, pro-Thad, finally leaving the paper cemetery to take in the ambient exultation of seaside tourists, natives and buskers.2 I was at odds with the carefree crowd, wading against their currents while stewing over the House of Michelet, surprised at how far off the deep end I could go when it came to other peoples’ bad juju. Maybe it was the writer in me. But that sounds so—
Let me leave it at that.
1 On Sunday, the four of us were supposed to have lunch at my folks’ in the Colony. It was a busy weekend.
2 A moment oddly reminiscent of hours spent listening to NPR during the Iraqi invasion: the commentators’ ceaselessly articulate, impotent point-counterpoints and my own irrelevant internal tug-of-war, syncopated to the jazz riffs bridging ads and pledge pleas.
~ ~ ~
MIRIAM GOT TICKETS FOR US to see a guru in Culver City.
She traded in her Taurus for a Mustang convertible. The wind was warm and gusty, and Meerkat1 smelled of sea, sex, and rosewood oiclass="underline" a stone summer groove. It was good to be on our own, away from “the kids” (that’s what we called them). Though it went unspoken, we were half spooked about any craziness they might get into while out of our immediate supervision. Regardless, we made a concerted effort to chill. We felt like parents playing hooky from their A.D.D.’d brood, except in this case we hadn’t found a sitter.
Tough titties.
The hall must have held a thousand people. There were a few celebrities — Garry Shandling, Cheryl Tiegs, Jeff Goldblum — nothing heavy. It was festival-seating, with everyone on folding chairs and lots of SRO overflow in back. A thin, leprechauney guy came out and spoke two hours, nonstop. I liked him right away. He said what I thought were typical guruish things but I really seemed to connect. He talked of that great stillness already in our possession from which truth and happiness emanate (yes, Badwater came to mind), a stillness we seemed intent on ignoring. Pain and suffering came from the inexhaustible need for money, food, sex. The guru said that merely becoming aware of the “forgotten stillness”—the stillness of the moment, the power of Now — was enough. “Why can’t people see how simple it is?” he asked, and everyone laughed. Funny but true. Apparently, he’d investigated all manner of disciplines and “men of knowledge.” One day, upon hearing a Zen master say “No thought!” the budding avatar realized he’d been deliriously happy the last few years for precisely that reason: he hadn’t been thinking. (The audience laughed again.) Thoughts were like clouds, he said, the difference being that no two clouds were alike… whereas thoughts were usually the same. “The sky would be quite boring if filled only with thoughts,” he said. The elfin sage jerked back his head, pointing to the heavens like an everyday Joe. “Look! Those two clouds are exactly alike.” Playing the part of another curious pedestrian, he exclaimed, “Hey! There’s that same cloud I saw yesterday—and the day before. Strange, but I saw it the day before that, too.”
I kept thinking about Thad and his father. Was I becoming obsessed? I dismissed the notion as merely another cloud. Then others blew in on the horizon: the thunderheaded cumuliform of Clea and her mom… the cirruslike wisp of Leif Farragon — you didn’t need a weatherman (or a guru) to see the sky was filled with spirits. To my surprise I had truly begun to care about Thad, just as I cared for Clea, and Miriam too for that matter. They were the special creatures who had fallen for whatever karmic reason (to use the contagious jargon of the acolytes) into my orbit and I into theirs. I suppose I was obsessed — by making meaning of it all. Perhaps that was foolish. As the wise and ageless sprite spoke, I meditated on the brevity of life’s duration and the significance of the drama that played out on one’s personal stage. I don’t mean to get corny or metaphysical but I couldn’t help thinking I’d be derelict not to further investigate the path upon which my own heart had led me.