The Karpiad

Between 1985 and 2001 I wrote fifteen novels that were published under someone else’s name. They constituted a “legal thriller” series about a New York prosecuting attorney named Butch Karp, his wife, a private security consultant named Marlene Ciampi, and their three children. Unlike many such series, they were embedded in real time; that is, time passed, the characters changed and accumulated experience, the kids grew older, and so on. They were set about ten years prior to the time I wrote them, the 70s and 80s in New York City, with some occasional visits elsewhere. Allowing for the necessary repetitions required by such projects, the series is really one long novel, totaling about a million eight hundred thousand words. It’s certainly the largest project I will ever do in my life. The books were extremely successful, and even though I only received half the advances, these were so large that I did better financially then than I have since publishing under my own name, which never appeared on the cover of any of these fifteen books.

This is an unusual situation. Famous writers certainly hire ghosts, or “research assistants” as they are sometimes called, and we continue to see books appear from dead authors, written by others, either attributed or not. But I can’t think of another case where someone produced a substantial literary success without writing a single word. You would have to be crazy to be the writer in this scheme. I was.

The person whose name does appear on these books is Robert K. Tanenbaum. His mother and mine were sisters of unusual closeness and until we were teenagers we were raised essentially together, along with my brother and his. In 1985 I was working as a bureaucrat at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, and he had just completed a stellar career as a homicide prosecutor at the New York D.A.’s office, and was setting up in private practice in Los Angeles. We had drifted apart owing to the peculiar nature of our family (don’t ask!) but when our paths crossed we were friendly and I sensed that he wanted to cultivate that friendship.

He had published a ghosted true-crime book about one of his spectacular cases, on the strength of which he had been contracted to write a fictionalized version of another such case. He had written about a hundred pages of this and he asked me to take a look at them with a view toward doing a little editing. I should add here that although I was a writer in college and was at the moment writing speeches for the administrator of the EPA, I had not been able to write fiction for a long time and had never done any sustained fiction writing. So I took a look at this ms. and it was unreadably bad, at least in my view. I suppose it was no worse than some books that are best-sellers. In any case, I told him that I thought it was un-editable, but that if he liked, I would write him a novel from scratch on the theme of his case, in return for half the advance. He agreed and I set to work.

Looking back, I suppose I regarded it as something of a lark. I was a civil servant, he was a lawyer. We both had real work to do, and the Karp novels were a nice source of income and also fun. I got to write fiction without the burden of being a writer and he got a chunk of nice money for going on book tours. In my imagination, as I recall, he would go on to a career in politics—his goal then—or else make a major career as a litigator, and after a while, my name would appear on the books (why not?) and I would slide into the life I should have been living all along.

This did not happen, obviously. First the partnership was pleasant, then less so, then unpleasant indeed. The Karp books still come out from time to time, written by another, but they no longer command huge advances. I should have schadenfreude about this, but I do not. It’s entirely possible that I would have spent my life in the civil service and duly retired, and done wisterias or golf instead of novels had I not engaged in this hideous enterprise, so I must be at least partially grateful. As a life lesson I guess it cost me about a million dollars and thus takes pride of place in my forthcoming memoir, Diary of a Schmuck; but the real reason I mention the Karpiad here is that I assume people who like my own stuff seek out this website and that they might also like the Karps. When I published Tropic of Night I wanted to include these books on the Also By page, but the publisher wouldn’t go for it and they were right, I guess. Nevertheless, I did write these books, they are part of my opus, they took up sixteen years of my life, and, compared to the typical legal thriller, they are pretty good.

The ones I wrote are:

No Lesser Plea
Depraved Indifference
Immoral Certainty
Reversible Error
Corruption of Blood
Material Witness
Justice Denied
Falsely Accused
True Justice
Reckless Endangerment
Irresistible Impulse
Act of Revenge
Enemy Within
Absolute Rage
Resolved

I believe they are all still available.

Halvah scholarship

When I have been writing for a while and stop there is a certain inertia remaining, as with a heavy object that continues to roll along, or something in outer space. Occasionally this inertia is expressed in silly bits of writing. For some reason, now forgotten, an on-line discussion I was party to began to discuss halvah, a kind of candy of mid-eastern origin, and this resulted in the following parody of wikiesque scholarship. It’s the kind of thing one could continue forever, but that way lies madness.


The Story of Halvah (excerpted from Masters of Confection, Richard Krumpf, ed., 1975, McGraw-Hill, New York.)

Chaim "Halvah" Hod, 1889-1972, b. Znieczwriercz, Poland, par. Zev & Zelda Vnin Hod; m. Ida Messer (1923) three ch. Peter, (1924) John, (1926) Ira(1928); Hod emigrated to New York, 1903; after working as a seltzer bubbler and a derma machine operator, Hod apprenticed himself to the famous halvah impressario Noachim Karaganovsky (q.v.) in 1910, rising to foreman of the Orchard Street works (1918).With the entry of the US in the Great War, vital supplies of sesame essence from the Ottoman Empire were curtailed, and the halvah industry collapsed. Hod, however, discovered that an acceptable essence could be derived from a byproductof synthetic rubber manufacture, and that halvah filters were proof against deadly mustard gas. Several War Department contracts followed, and by war's end the Karaganovsky concern was the pre-eminent halvah producer in the US.

In 1924, Karagonovsky's failing health (he had contracted sticky lung during the early days in the halvah mines of Lower Silesia) caused him to pass the reins to Hod. In 1925, Hod bought out two smaller producers, founded The Universal Halvah Corporation, and took the company public. He also founded (1927) the Halvah Research Laboratory, in Littleton, New Jersey. In 1931, Jerome Silverman (q.v.), working at the HRL, first described the crystalline nature of halvah, a discovery upon which the entire science of halvonics is based. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937.

Although Hod had been a life-long Democrat, an anti-trust suit filed against UHC in 1936 and agitation by the CIO among the halvah miners enraged him and he switched parties. He supported Landon in 1936, and thereafter backed a number of right-wing causes. With the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Hod made himself available to the government and was appointed head of the Strategic Confectionary Board. He was a successful administrator, although his project of constructing a bomber entirely out of stressed halvah never got past the experimental stage. Halvah production rose 230% between 1941 and 1945, an achievement for which Hod deserves major credit...

After the war, UHC continued to expand under Hod's direction, branching out into such disparate areas as railroads and plastics. Hod and his wife were active in the New York cultural scene, and the great south wall of Lincoln Center, a mosaic of preserved halvah, was the gift of the Hod Foundation. In 1968, UHC was purchased by Ling-Temco-Vought for $1.9 billion and stock. Hod retired the next year, and devoted the remainder of his life to writing his memoir, _You Shoulda Been There_, published posthumously in 1974.

The article in Who's Who in Sugary Treats covers much the same ground, but deals with the current Hod offspring in more detail. Aficionados will recall that John "Lolly" Hod was the first person to market an all-day-sucker that actually lasted for twenty-four hours, thus obviating a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit for false advertising.

For those interested in halvah itself, its history and uses, there is, ofcourse, J.L. Magruder's magisterial The Technology of Halvah. At 1213 pages this may be somewhat dense for the average reader, in which case, Armand Rothstein's amusing but accurate It's Not Just a Candy may suffice. Halvah is My Life by Preston T. Anderson has some interesting illustrations, but the text is often inaccurate. For example, he states that the double-boiler halvah proving-mill was introduced in Utica, NewYork, in 1914, although the Smithsonian exhibit of halvah technology displays a Petersen-Weigs rotating double-boiler rig with a brass plate clearly marked '1910'! History buffs will wish to consult the large collection of early printed tracts and incunabula at the Hod Research Center in Littleton, NJ. I would especially recommend the account of Sir Ralph Maxwoodie (1507-1569) in his True Historie of a Journey to the Greate Cham, (1527), which many scholars regard as the first mention of halvah in English. The relevant section begins:

'Therein we did see divers Persons of Dress and Equipage most odde, the which when asked, our guide named them, Halvah-thegghs, which meaneth in theyre Tongue, the ones who maketh Halvah. From these ones we purchased for two Sequins a Lumpe of ye Substance about ye size of an Heade-cheese. They do saye that it is wholesome to eate, being sweete, and also that it improves the ardent Humours and maketh the Privy Parts swelle up. It is therefore much used by the Greate Cham and other haughty Personagges at ye Sublime Porte. It is said, too, that ye Women of ye Towne do use it as Unguent for theyre lascivious Sportes; also, ye Drivers of Camels and Asses, feed it to theyre Beastes, to promote swiftnesse of Foote; also that it may be lette dry, and become harde, therafter mixed with Naptha and Eelroote and divers other luciferous Principals, and made into Balles for the Bombards and Culverins of ye Cham his Army, which when hurled at the Foe, do burste in flames. This, though, we saw not. We did partake of it, a little. It is passing sweete, and maketh a great stickynesse in the Mouth, so it is harde to passe down ye Gullet. As to ye efficacie in ye listes of Venus, I cannot saye, for in theyre Graces and saucy Wiles ye Women of this realm surpasseth all others, so that each Nighte our ardent Partes were mayde to perform such Feates as never would I have believed possible had the Soothest Man in all Christendom vouchsafed it mee; so we judged us that the properties of ye Halvah, if reale, had been a superfluitie, and doe us Harme…”

Advantages of selling ceiling tile over being a writer

1. At 5:30, when the ceiling tile store closes up, you are done, and you never have to think about ceiling tile again until the store opens the following morning.

2. It is unlikely that you will have the urge to sell ceiling tile in a bar at 1:30 am, and desperately search around for some tile to sell, ignoring the attractive person you are with.

3. No ceiling tile salesmen make $5,000,000 a year while you make only $1200 a year selling ceiling tile.

4. The difference between real good ceiling tile and mediocre ceiling tile is clearly marked in the catalog, subject to no dispute, and, in general, you get more for the good stuff.

5. Neither repressive redneck assholes nor effete New York publishing capons will get on your case if you sell ceiling tile, and neither will attempt to prevent your installation of it.

6. People who own bookstores know when they need ceiling tile and will call you on the phone. You will not have to make a multi-city tour to inform them that they need your particular ceiling tiles.

7. Your customers will not confuse you with your ceiling tile; they will understand that you are a person and you just sell it, nor will they try to divine your biography from the little holes in the ceiling tile.

8. After you sell some ceiling tile, it stays sold. You will never call up a customer to cancel an order or break into his property to rip out and replace those tiles, nor will your customers ever call you and demand in insulting terms that you improve the ceiling tile you have installed.

9. Your parents will understand what you do for a living, and be proud of you, and not make snide or hurt comments at family gatherings. Also you can do favors in the tile line for your friends and relatives, even if they are illiterate, and they will appreciate it a lot more than a signed copy of your collection of short stories.

10. Most important: you will not ever have anything to do with the motion picture industry, even if you are the best ceiling tile salesman in the nation..

Obsolete

When I was a kid my father got me summer jobs as a mechanical man. Not that kind. A ‘mechanical’ was a term of art in the printing business. Basically, if you wanted to produce a four-color display of any kind—a magazine ad, a movie poster—you had to construct upon a large piece of illustration board a physical model of the page, which was then photographed and made into a plate or plates for a printing press. Suppose a magazine ad for let’s say shampoo. All the decisions about the ad would be made upstairs, by Mad Men-type account executives, art directors and copywriters. The mechanical man would get a layout—a double-sized sketch of where the taglines, logos, body copy and photographs were supposed to go, and the mechanical man would reproduce the layout as camera-ready boards.

The first step was ordering type. The art director would have ‘specked’ the type, that is, determined the typeface font and size that would fit in the spaces indicated, but the mechanical guy (me) had to actually order the type from the typography house. If you ordered it in the morning, it might come after lunch. It appeared as sheets of glossy paper with printing on it, set in the same way that Ben Franklin had set his almanac, with metal type, and then run off on a hand-operated proof press. If there were no typos, I would cut the blocks of copy out of the sheets and glue them into the proper positions with rubber cement, being careful to make the lines of type precisely square, and for this I had a transparent ruler that ran on a track along one side of my drawing table. Or I could use a plastic triangle. The display type might come from a different company, or might even be a photoreproduction of hand-lettering. This too was pasted into place, and then came the art work, drawing or photograph, and the company logo, if any. If the AD wanted a hairline between, say, the ad and the logo at the bottom of the page, I had to draw the line in with a ruling pen, a medieval device that left blobs upon the pristine board, which had to be scraped off with a razor blade or covered with China white. Later in my mechanical career they invented thin rubber tape you could stretch and use to make hairlines. but the old mechanical guys I worked with never used the stuff, and never blotted with their ruling pens either.

After the mechanical was complete it would go to production, where it would be placed on an easel in front of a camera the size of a refrigerator and a enormous negative would be made, and this would go in turn to the color separation guy, who would make four different negatives from it and these would be used to burn an image onto a metal lithographic plate. Each plate would be inked a separate color and the page would run through the press multiple times, and there was your four color ad.

If the ad was for something like carpeting or flooring, they would supply tiny squares of the actual stuff, and you would have to paste them neatly into place. A mere photo of an avocado carpet was apparently not vivid enough to entice the buyer, so they had to use actual swatches. It is difficult to cut a perfect one inch square from a carpet swatch, but one summer I had to do it dozens of times and at last got pretty good at it. I never became a really good mechanical man—that took years, and the field didn’t have years left.

Are you bored yet? I am. And I was even when I was doing it: tedious work, although with reasonable pay. Some guys spent their whole working lives doing it, from the invention of four-color photo-offset lithography in the early century to the coming of computers, which destroyed a whole range of jobs in the printing trades. It took most of a day to do a single mechanical, and I imagine everything I did is now done in fifteen minutes on a computer, with PhotoShop and other tools. Progress, of course, and there have been any number of similar advances, and the trouble is that my head is full of obsoleted stuff as is the head of anyone else my age, and so will all the stuff in your modern head be obsoleted, and sooner than you imagine.

Which brings me to my point.

The great American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, once pointed out that cultures sort into two distinct types, which she called prefigurative and postfigurative. People in prefigurative cultures, assume that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday was. People will do the same sorts of tasks with the same sorts of tools. In such cultures—and humans lived in them for 99.9 per cent of our history—the information contained in the heads of old people is of prime survival value. The old have relevant experience. They know a lot about how to catch game animals and how to avoid the dangerous ones. They know how to plant crops, and make useful things, and who the enemies of the group are and how to defeat them, because they have done all these things in the past, and the youth are completely dependent on this information for their own survival. So old people are honored and protected and carefully attended when they speak. They have the wisdom.

In postfigurative cultures, on the other hand, tomorrow will be nothing at all like yesterday. That’s the central given of such cultures. The tools of survival are new and ever changing and therefore the young are called upon to lead. The old are seen as stumbling blocks, hidebound, ignorant, not worth listening to. In prefigurative cultures the introductory phrase, “when I was your age” is fascinating to the young, because it could be the difference between survival and death. In postfigurative cultures it has become boredom itself. We, of course, live in such a culture. It’s not the structure of the population or some quirk of demographics that does this, it’s the culutre itself, and the trend—the postness of it all—is accelerating. The people we honor and cherish and reward are the ones on top of the last new thing, who inhabit the future more than others.

The transition from pre-f to post-f has been happening for a long time but most of us who lived through the changes that took place in the sixties of the past century understand when this transition became truly apparent to the meanest observer, comparable (to use an appropriately obsolete metaphor) to the moment when a piece of photographic paper in a tray of developer solution reveals its latent image. Obviously, lots of causes involved, but the main thing that struck me about the upheaval was just that transition. You would have had to have grown up before that time to understand how absolutely authority of a particular kind dominated the world then, and how connected that authority was to the past. If you got out of a first-rank college in the early sixties, you had much more in common--in respect to what you learned, the style of the teaching, the social expectations, the relations of the sexes, your career goals—with people who graduated in the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, the 20s than you did with people who passed through a few years later.

What a remarkable thing that was to experience, and the odd thing about it was that it never went back to normal. The current existence of the youth culture has economic and demographic roots, but clearly its not a simple function of the Baby Boom. If you watch movies made before 1960 or so, you will see that relations between youth and age are not as they are now. Everyone looked and dressed more or less the same after a certain age, and the costumes of youth marked an inferior status. There is, of course, an accent on youth in the old films, because youth is romance and young flesh is lovely, but there doesn’t seem to be the contempt for the old shown, which is one of the characteristics of the modern post-f culture we live in.

We also observe this contempt also in the old themselves, and perhaps this is its ultimate source. The old feel themselves obsolete too, and in many of them, especially those prominent in society, it provokes a hectic desire to appear young and potent and “creative” in the manner of the young. We can’t even say old any more: the very word has been killed by euphemasia. We expect the old to detach themselves from the real culture, to dwell in enclaves and “retire” to a world of amusements, if rich, and isolation and misery if not. As a result, the particular qualities the old bring to a culture are self-devalued; so why should the young listen?

Are there any such qualities in a post-f culture, or is everything like my example of an an obsolete technology? In other words, are there any aspects of a post-f culture that remain pre-f? Is there anything that is like the best hunting grounds or the useful herbs? There certainly used to be, and our ordinary name for it is wisdom. Do people believe in wisdom nowadays, or if they do, believe that the old have it?   To an extent. There are cultural artifacts—we can find movies where the old guys outsmart the whippersnappers—but this seems like pandering to a niche audience. The focus of society is heavily on the new, the original (in this era, at least), the future, when everything will be better.

Where the old are generally considered fools and obsolete, especially when they so consider themselves, the culture will be unbalanced. We can all feel this when we look at ourselves and compare ourselves to cultures where this has not yet occurred. The surviving traditional cultures have their problems, some of them grave, but their family relationships are stronger, their roots are deeper, they are, paradoxically, more flexible and self-reliant under stress. I suppose the solution to our unbalance is to recognize that, just as youth is prized for its creativity, its novelty, its energy, which the old have only to a diminishing degree, so the old possesses mental attitudes vital to any society, which youth has not got.

This is a hard sell, I know. If an explorer wandered into the National Geographic Society with a tale of having been to an alien culture strangely similar to our own, but with different goals, mores, entertainments and achievements, the world would be astounded. This explorer would be invited to write books and address august assemblies. If he then said that this fascinating culture had been completely destroyed and was no longer available to visit, imagine the consternation! What a loss, we all would say. But this is what the past is. All the aged have lived in a world now dead, are explorers returned from a world beyond reach. And few wish to hear their stories about ‘when I was your age.’

Is this forever? Probably not, first because a culture that makes so little use of wisdom and regards the aged as a problem will not survive. It will focus so entirely on the youthful demands for sensation, novelty, the satisfaction of ferocious appetites, the lust for competition, that it will become more and more like high school infinitely extended: cliques, nastiness, materialism, all based on profound ignorance. Secondly, there is no guarantee that the post-f culture will go on indefinitely. The last few centuries were the most innovative in history, but this innovation is slowing down, because science is slowing down. Some believe that we are on the verge of a colossal scientific-technological breakthrough that will make us all as gods, at least in physical terms. I am not holding my breath.

Because I don’t think we will see in physics the sort of advances that led to the computer telecom revolution nor in biology an advance equivalent to the genomic revolution. Physics is limited in its probing of the universe by impossible energy requirements and by the lack of money and interest. Biology is tangled in a level of complexity shown by living organisms far greater than we had supposed only thirty years ago. The popular science outlets will continue to cry progress and guarantee that we will eventually live forever, but we won’t, and we won’t have natural language interactions with machines, or antigravity, or recording your brain in a computer, or interstellar travel. We are starting to see the limits, and that bodes ill for a culture based on the belief that innovation will save us.

Typo of the Week

From the ABC News website:

Fire officials said 21 people at an event hosted by motivational speaker Tony Robbins suffered burns while walking across hot coals, and three of the injured were treated at hospitals.

The injuries took place during the first day Thursday of a four-day event at the San Jose Convention Center hosted by Robbins called "Unleash the Power Within." Most of those hurt had second and third degree burns, said San Jose Fire Department Capt. Reggie Williams.

Walking across hot coals heated to between 1,200 to 2,000 degrees provides attendees an opportunity to "understand that there is absolutely nothing you can overcome," according to the motivational speaker's website.

Sorry, I had to stick that in while it was fresh.

My Government Career

I went into government service because of the parsley. As I noted in a previous post, I had taken my PhD, in biology not to a prestigious post-doc appointment, but to the restaurant kitchen. After many merry adventures, I found myself in the kitchen of a four-star hotel in Miami, working as a stage, which is what they call the grunts who actually carry out in physical foodstuffs the brilliant creations of the celebrity chefs. I was chopping parsley, a mindless task that I rather liked. After you chop the parsley, you put it in cheesecloth and rinse it, and then dry it out with paper toweling so that it is nice and fluffy and sprinkles well. I was just about to do this rinse when the chef walks by my station. This chef was a short, fat drunken megalomaniac—that is, he was similar to many of the chefs I had worked for—and he looked at my parsley and was not pleased. He felt my parsley and declared that it was not chopped finely enough. He screamed at me. He grew red in the face and vented upon me the unhappiness of his existence. What could I say? The parsley was not fine enough to exhibit quantum effects, but it was pretty fucking fine.

I was starting to feel bad and wondering how long a jolt I would have to do in Raiford if I stuck my eight-inch Sabatier through this asshole’s gut, when it hit me: I have a Ph.D. I don’t have to be yelled at by people like this. I could get yelled at by a superior class of asshole! So in this dawning light I left my station and made a phone call to the wife of a friend of mine who worked for the Metro Dade County government and told her I needed a job. Those were the days when you could get a job by calling a friend with a job.

I owned a suit and a pair of shoes that had miraculously survived existence in the duffle bag in which I had carried my worldlies for a decade, and I bought a cheap white shirt and a hideous polyester tie in the K-Mart. I went for an interview, during which my fingernails were examined for dirt. My tie elicited no comment. I was given a contract to prepare a report on the county jail and given a stack of bumf two feet high to read. To someone who has spent half-a-dozen years thinking seriously about marine ecosystems and the survival strategies of their denizens, a jail is not much of a challenge. I was given two months to perform the contract; I finished in two weeks, and was hired on the spot as a policy analyst.

It is the task of policy analysts to make government more efficient and effective by questioning its processes and procedures, typically using observation, interviews and numerical techniques. They evaluate programs and devise new ones for emerging problems. When the kid dies while in the care of the government, when drunks make downtown unbearable for the bourgeois, when the fire department can’t seem to get to the fires on time, the policy analysts get called in. Or not; for no one likes someone with a direct line to the county manager poking into their operations, and so the use and the usefulness of policy analysis depends entirely on whether the chief executive has the balls to stand up to his subordinates and their political cronies.

I had a good time as a PA. I had an actual middle-class salary for the first time in my life, with benefits. I bought a couple of suits, and better ties. I had some successes; I moved to a higher-level job, with a substantial staff, and that was fun too, and then someone from the White House called and asked me to come to Washington and work on a special project. Like a fool, I went, because if you’re in government, then the White House is like pitching for the Yankees is for a minor league hurler.

I didn’t actually work in the White House, of course. The Executive Office of the President is about five thousand or so people, and I was one of them, but I had the gold chicken on my business card, pretty classy, and when I really, really had to get someone to call back I could say I was the White House. But, being a diffident fellow, I usually identified myself as being from the EOP. Practically no one knows what the Executive Office of the President is. I once in the lost era before e-mail called the CEO of one of our great corporations and named that office as my employer and the secretary asked, “President of what?” I said, “Of the United States of America, one nation under God, you’ve seen our ads?” Silence, click, and there was the guy.

Being a tiny pimple on the world’s biggest whale was an interesting experience, glorification and ignominy curiously mixed. You work like a slave, ridiculous hours, at projects of uncertain significance. You row your tiny boat like a madman, pushing against the hull of the immense supertanker, hoping to turn it a fraction of an inch in the direction that you know represents the ultimate salvation of the Republic, and you see the other people in their rowboats shoving in different directions, and there are still others who want to sink the tanker entirely, believing that the failure of government will usher in the earthly paradise.

In fact, I did little governing. As soon as my masters discovered I could write, that’s what I did, policy papers and then speeches. Ultimately I became a speech writer at the cabinet level, which is hot shit in old DC, because what comes out of the boss’s mouth is really significant to his satraps, clients, and foes alike. It is like a dog spraying a tree—all the other dogs must come and sniff. Every phrase is parsed, to see what direction the supertanker is going to turn, and, gosh, if you’re actually writing those phrases then it’s easy to become the most popular girl at the prom. A good speech writer must therefore cultivate obscurity like a rock star cultivates fame; I found this not at all difficult.

It’s nearly fifteen years now since I collected my last sip off the public tit, and I can’t say that I miss it. Writing political speeches was fun, but I prefer my fiction straight up, which is why I do what I do now. On the other hand, it drives me nuts when I hear government described derogatorily as “them” and “that mess in Washington.” In my experience, government is perfectly reflective of the nation at large. There are plenty of dull slugs in it, but there are also people who changed our world for the better (I actually met the guy who pushed through the earliest funding for the silly and government-wasteful idea that computers should be able to send messages to each other.) Anyway, two cheers for the bureaucracy. Like democracy it’s the worst system, except for all the others. When I was a gov slug I had a framed quotation on my wall, from Machiavelli: In the service of princes, great guile, tact and imagination are needed to achieve even modest ends; and still one may fail in ugly ways. Amen to that.

Other times, other customs

I’m finding that writing a historical novel is quite different from writing a thriller. As noted in an earlier post here, you research a thriller to provide supporting atmosphere for an essentially preposterous plot. In historical fiction, the research is actually research: that is, it is a process of trying to find out the truth, and then you build your plot and characters on the truth so revealed. Or at least that’s what I’m trying to do.

Henry James’s opinion was that historical novels were all humbug. Authors could only legitimately write novels about the world they knew. Far be it from me to contradict the Master, but War and Peace is a historical novel and it is not humbug. Nor is the Scarlet Letter nor Moby-Dick, nor Les Miserables In fact, if fiction in general is about illuminating the human condition, (a by no means universal opinion nowadays) historical novels use one of the main sources of such light, the confrontation with the Other. Because the past is all Other. We dismiss here the historical novel that is mere quaintness and costumery--moderns dressed up in tights and talking funny--and refer only to those rarer works that make an honest attempt to recreate the lives and minds of people long dead and the physical and intellectual milieu that made them so.

This, I'm finding, is harder than what I've done previously, because while the contemporary world lies open to the novelist's observation (including the world inside the novelist's own skull), the past is dead. Yes, you can study history, read old primary sources, consult memoirs and the fiction of the period, but it's still dead, and only imagination and empathy can restore it to life on the page.

Empathy is the problem, because you need it to make characters live. You write characters from the inside out, and so you have to, in a sense, submerge yourself in values and beliefs not your own. This is particularly hard when it comes to the great bugbears of one’s own society. These are well-known not to be universal. We all recognize that slavery was okay some centuries ago and is not okay now. Still, slavery is so dead (despite the current existence of hundreds of thousands of actual slaves) that somehow creating a sympathetic character who accepts slavery is not that hard. Example: Gone with the Wind. But when you’re dealing with bugbears that are still, as it were, in play, the stuff we know is present and which we mightily despise, the case is different.

Pedophilia, for example. I’ve just finished reading Jacopo Casanova’s Histoire de ma Vie, a twelve-volume memoir of this man’s remarkable life. I spent the time on it first, because I wanted to use him as a character and because it presents one of the best accounts of what the life of an eighteenth century gentleman was like, at all levels of society, from the courts of princes, to the theater, to the demimonde of swindlers, thieves and whores. It’s a classical education all by itself.

Of course, Casanova is famous for One Thing, and that thing takes up a good deal of the twelve volumes, but as I read it I experienced just a little queasiness, because Casanova had no compunction about seducing girls as young as twelve. In one remarkable scene he procures the sexual services of an impoverished but gorgeous thirteen-year-old girl for Louis XV of France. Louis apparently had a whole harem of pubescent girls for his pleasure: he tipped C. generously, and bestowed enough gold on the girl’s sister to set her up for life. C. thought he’d done a wonderful thing; the sister thought so; and so did the girl, as witnessed by her later life, which seemed by all accounts, including her own, to be happy. She was Louise Murphy, the subject of the famous, delicious nude by Boucher.

Today, of course, selling a girl that age to a rich old man would not only be illegal, but most modern people would find it viscerally repugnant. The girl would announce that her life had been ruined, and sue. How come is that? Well, progress, of course, but it’s also true that Louis XV and Casanova would be appalled by many of the things we take for granted. An American city would seem like hell to Casanova: the noise, the stink, the lack of courtesy and interpretable manners, the fact that nearly all the women dress like prostitutes and nearly all the men dress like coal heavers; the speed; the ceaseless battering of images; the collapse of faith; the tasteless, stale food. Unless you believe in general progress—that everything about our present is better than every analogous thing in the past—then an honest account of the mentality of any past era is going to deliver some shocks, and stimulate some questioning of received ideas.

Why, in fact do we hate pedophiles so much? We don’t make killers register their adresses. We don’t out forgers or muggers on the web. And why do the children suffer such apparent damage to their psyches as a result of sexual contact when young? I suppose its because we define it as rape, which is a monstrous crime, and was even in Casanova’s time. (Casanova boasts that he never forced a woman in his life, although he knew plenty who did, and with impunity too.) We’ve decided that when any adult has sex with anyone under 18 (or some other age) it is rape, because people under that age do not have the mental ability to form consent. They have the mental ability to do nearly everything else, but not that.

I see I am approaching a defense of pedophilia, which I certainly don’t intend, but here you observe before your eyes one result of doing the sort of historical research I’ve been doing. It subtly changes your head. Spend your time among 18^th century people, especially charming, witty, lovely ones, and you start looking at the world through their eyes. Sex with twelve-year-olds? Mmm, look at that one! It’s a little creepy, actually. And don’t get me started on racism, castrati, and the divine right of kings!