Peter Selgin

Tell me: how would you feel if you saw yourself hanging by the neck from a crossbeam? How would you feel, confronted by those gasping dull eyes, that hanging slack jaw, that skin gone a pale shade of yellowish-gray, those palms turned outward as if to answer the question—why—with a shrug? The same love handles, the same knobby knees, the same flat, clumsy feet with the same long, crooked, widely-spaced toes, the same hairless arms, the same bony wrists. Even the facial hair—a month’s worth of hoary stubble—was the same. I might have been looking in a mirror except for three things: the gold wedding band on the ring finger of the right hand, the belt around the neck, and the fact that, unlike me, my double was dead.

I’d driven all day and night. Fifteen hours on the highway. I couldn’t afford motels, so I drove and drove, mostly through miserable weather, the wipers beating, heater blowing, the constellations of taillights shifting in the darkness before me, the red blurs contorted into lozenges by a combination of raindrops, a worthless defroster, and exhaustion.

And preoccupation. I was preoccupied. By the trip and by what instigated it. By other things, too. My life had come apart. My life! As I write those two words a smile worms its way into my lips, an ironic smile, though six months ago I wouldn’t have seen the irony any more than I would have entertained the possibility that “my life” could be exchanged, traded in for another the way you trade in a used car or a lousy poker hand.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I can’t help it. The urge to confess is strong. I have to resist an overwhelming urge to blurt things out of sequence, to dispense with the finer points (the devil, as they say, is in the details) and cut to the chase, when the whole point of this undertaking, assuming it has a point, is to put things into context, not to make allowances or excuses, but to explain, to shed a modicum of light on things that would otherwise be obscure forever. How else, dear reader, can I begin to hope to make you understand why I did what I did, how, far from being an act of madness, of diabolical duplicity, of hysterical greed (or whatever pejorative adjective-noun pair you care to throw at it), it was an act of mercy, of devotion, of redemption. Of salvation.

Again I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to slow down; I have a lead foot; I have to ease off the gas pedal. That’s right, I’m in a car. You and I, dear reader, are in a car, my car: a beat-up late model Toyota Celica headed down Interstate ———, taking the ——— route from Maine to —————. Of the two of us I alone am a corporeal entity; you’re only here in spirit. The opening paragraph you just read happened a day and a half ago. As I’ve already said, it rained much of the way there, with the first drops striking my cracked windshield a few miles north of Hartford, and some of the heaviest downpours occurring just beyond the state line in New Hampshire. Now all that rain has turned to snow. I am not a fan of driving in any kind of weather, or anytime at all, for that matter, having lived in New York City for over twenty-five years, most of my adult life. It was only two years ago that I “bought” the Toyota—used from a journalist friend who’d been offered and had accepted a job in Paris, one that paid so well she was more than willing to surrender her rent-controlled apartment and part with most of her friends and possessions. She offered me the Celica for a token $200. At first I demurred. What did I need a car for? I’ll have to move it twice a week or pay for a garage, I explained. I rarely leave the city, and when I do there’s always Avis. But then she convinced me. Why rent a car at $35 (then) dollars a day when you can own one for a couple hundred? In less than six trips it will pay for itself. Besides, she said, once you’ve got a car you’ll see: you’ll leave the city more often. You’ll take weekend jaunts. You’ll drive down to the Jersey Shore or out to the Hamptons. You’ll go to Vermont to watch the leaves turn. Who knows, she said, you may even decide to leave the city altogether when you realize it’s not surrounded by a mote full of dragons. My friend smiled; I smirked. Like most New Yorkers I was defensive about my special provincialism, one that refuses to recognize itself, feeling that, while true provincials ignore the wide world, New York City is its own world, or rather it is the world, the only one that counts. My friend was all too willing to point this out to me, she who had just landed this cushy job with the Paris bureau of a major news outlet and would be living in a city as cosmopolitan as New York, but with better food and more parks. Anyway I took the car; I don’t like to argue. In the end she didn’t even want the $200. When she handed me the keys the Toyota was still in good condition, with just a few scratches and dents. Within two months it would bear testimony to my inability to parallel park. A bottle fallen from the hindquarters of a sanitation truck cracked the windshield. I’d driven it less than a thousand miles when the clutch went; the muffler soon followed suit. A pen in my back pocket tore the driver’s seat upholstery; the vinyl dashboard split; the bright red paint faded to a dull diluted burgundy, the color of a wine-stained tablecloth; lurid pimples of rust erupted from both rocker panels. But the car still ran. It succeeded in carrying me to my fate.

Everything is a metaphor. The sharp edge of a knife, a shallow stream, that ache in your back or belly. Three days ago I bought a boat. A row boat, that’s what I wanted, but not one of those bulky aluminum jobs favored by lifeguards at the Town Park. Nor was I interested in a racing skull, too tippy, and no room for passengers. A kayak or canoe wouldn’t do. I’d rather row than paddle.

Wooden watercraft, no matter how small or simple, are expensive. Put the words “wood” and “water” together so they float, and you’re talking real money. Even a used wooden row boat will set you back three grand—not counting freight. Then there’s the weight problem. I wanted a boat I could handle alone, something under 50 pounds. That put the kibosh on wood. Yet I didn’t want some mass-produced fiberglass or aluminum tub.

At last I found what I’d been searching for, a variation on an Adirondack guide boat designed and built by a man named Steve Kaulback out of his small Vermont shop. Called a “Vermont Packboat,” it’s a double-bowed, 12-foot boat with fixed bronze oarlocks and adjustable cane seats, perfect for leisurely lake rowing, though built for speed and good in rough water. While the hull (molded from a mixture of fiberglass and something called Kevlar) requires little maintenance, the cane seats and cherry gunwales give the boat its artisanal look. Complete with hand milled oars, at under $3,000, believe it or not, it was a bargain. In the parking lot of the Motel 6 where I met Steve and his trailer full of demo boats, I picked out a blue model and wrote him a check.

The lake I live on, Lake Sinclair, is 24 acres. That’s a lot of lake. Most of the houses lining its shore are summer homes, others are occupied by retirees. Just about everyone has a boat. Fishing boats, power boats, pontoons, jet-skis. Next to fishing, waterskiing and tow riding are the two most popular activities. In two years here I’ve rarely seen anyone swim. Sightings of sailboats, kayaks, canoes, or other vessels not powered by motors are equally rare. Frankly, I don’t understand it. Among the retirees especially you would think that small boats would be a popular form of relaxation and exercise. Nope. The only thing my fellow lake dwellers seem intent on exercising is power—not their own, but that of some big, loud, stinking, fuel-guzzling gasoline engine. The same people who work out in gyms and partake in aggressive physical sports are for reasons mysterious loathe to exercise on water. Rowing a boat is too damn peaceful; it doesn’t properly engage their masculine aggressions. It lacks violence. It’s too damned quiet. (True, fishing is just as quiet; but its silence is mitigated by the chance to capture and torture an innocent creature).

Something about rowing a boat goes against the status-quo. In an age of engine-powered aggression, it is an act of rebellion, of quiet insurrection. I feel that way about my writing. When agents reject me, they almost always say the same thing: that my books are “too quiet.” One used the word “meditative,” another said “brooding,” a third said “reflective.” Often these words are preceded by the adverb “too,” though they need not be, since the fact of being “meditative” (or “reflective” or “brooding” or “quiet”) is in itself damning; the current climate in commercial publishing simply won’t permit it. Books that don’t make a loud enough noise or a big enough splash, that aren’t, in other words, driven by big, loud, stinking engines, are anathema to agents and editors, who cannot foist them on a public that likes its entertainment AGGRESSIVE. Here I am launching my gentle little row boats (read: “quiet books”) into a sea of roaring, spluttering, screaming powerboats. I want to put up a sign saying “NO WAKE!” Alas, my fellow boaters have beat me to the punch: “NO OARS!” “NO MEDITATING!” “NO BROODING!”

Maritime rules give small boats the right-of-way. No such etiquette exists in commercial publishing, where “smaller boats” are routinely swamped by freighters, tankers, and cruise ships, not to speak of heavily-armed (with multi-city, multi-media publicity campaigns) frigates, cruisers, destroyers and dreadnoughts. Against commercial publishing’s vast and powerful armada, what chance has a little row boat—however thoughtfully designed and beautifully constructed—got? Though when it comes to commerce or war it stands to reason that bigger, faster, more powerful vessels should triumph, how so when it comes to pleasure? The pleasure I get from rowing my boat is no less, I’m certain, than that derived from horsing around with a 300-horsepower engine, and may be greater, especially when fuel costs are tallied. And I get more exercise.

Yet here I am surrounded by motorboats, the water choppy with their crisscrossing wakes, trying to steer a course among them that won’t get me swamped. If they see me at all, those in the other boats look upon me as a curiosity, at best something quaint out of the past, at worst an inconvenience that prevents them from pulling back on their throttles and giving full voice to their aggressions. That my little boat inhibits them is in itself a source of pleasure for me. If I can slow this world down just a little, if I can make it stop gunning its engines, if I can get it not only to slow down but maybe to stop and think—to meditate, to brood—then I’ll have accomplished something.

It’s what I’ve tried to do with my “quiet” books: to slow things down. That’s one of the great things a good book can do. Publishers insist that “quiet books” don’t sell. To which I say the reason they don’t sell isn’t that they’re quiet, but because they are drowned out by engines so loud most people don’t even notice they’re there.

Beckett said of him, “More than anyone else he has the instinct for the touching detail.” Anyone who has read the works of Emmanuel Bove (1898 – 1945) would agree. This is especially the case with Bove’s first novel, Mes Amis, translated as My Friends and published when its author was only twenty four. It opens:

When I wake up, my mouth is open. My teeth are furry: it would be better to brush them in the evening, but I am never brave enough. Tears have dried at the corners of my eyes. My shoulders do not hurt any more. Some stiff hairs cover my forehead. I spread my fingers and bush it back. It is no good: like the pages of a new book it springs up and tumbles over my eyes again. … When I bow my head I can feel that my bears has grown: it pricks my neck.

And later, when the unnamed protagonist encounters a fellow tenant:

Every Tuesday Madame Lecoin does her washing on the landing. The tap runs all day. As the big jugs fill up, the sound changes. Mme Lecoin’s skirt is old-fashioned. Her bun is so scanty you can see all the hair-pins.

The whole of Bove’s short first novel, which he divided into brief chapters, most of them titled after a character either befriended by or whom his sad, impoverished, and ashamed hero wishes to befriend, might be described as a compendium of such telling details, details of the sort that I’m forever urging upon my students in my ceaseless campaign to have them inject more authenticity into their work.

And Bove’s work is nothing if not achingly authentic. His position as a figure in literature is peculiar and extraordinary both for the early and significant impression he made on those at the highest levels of the literary scene in Paris after the first World War, and for its catastrophic plunge into obscurity with the advent of World War II, after which he and his work were practically forgotten.

And yet Bove was one of those very rare writers who through their particular voices create a world all their own, in his case one of deep empathy and raw sincerity. He was an obsessively private man who shunned publicity at every turn (how far would he have gotten in this exhibitionist age of blogs, tweets, and facebook pages?).

The child of an impoverished immigrant Jew married to a housemaid, Emmanuel Bobovnikov was born in Paris in 1898. His childhood home was so full of fleas he and his older brother made a hobby of crushing them with their fingers. At regular intervals they faced eviction, with the furniture piled on the steps, their father nowhere to be found and Bove’s penniless mother at a total loss. Things improved (financially, anyway) when his philandering father took up with Emily Overweg, a wealthy English painter. Through her Bove was exposed to a world of artists, paintings, and books. This exposure to culture came at a great cost. While Bove gained an artistic education, he was wracked by feelings of guilt for his forsaken mother and divided family.

When in his 17th year his father died, Bove found himself on his own, living in fleabag hotels in Paris, working a series of odd jobs, and even doing time in the Santé prison owing to his inability to pay his bills and a foreign-sounding last name. This period of misery is well-recorded in Bove’s first and subsequent novels. It was relieved by his being called to duty in 1918, an event that must have come as a relief but which was soon cut short by the armistice. The freshly demobilized Bove met and married a young school teacher named Suzanne Valois with whom he moved to Austria. In that war-ravished landscape Bove’s daughter and his first novel were both conceived.

It was the author Colette who first “discovered” Bove through his first novel, which she championed, and which was published to great critical acclaim, with critics comparing Bove to Dostoyevsky and Proust, and Max Jacob, André Gide, and Rilke among Bove’s admirers. Despite all this attention and admiration, or because of it, Bove found himself withdrawing more and more from society. In the summer of 1925 he left his wife and two children to marry a young socialite Jewess named Louise Ottensooser, whose high lifestyle not only made him feel out of place but soon had him working to support three households, including that of his mother and brother. During this period between the wars he wrote nearly a dozen novels, each written in that bold, naked, and direct style informed by intimate, poignant, obsessively observed details:

The falling rain scissored the lights. I pressed my five spread fingers to my throat to keep my overcoat collar up around my neck. I thought of that bare hand of mine gleaming like some star within the strangeness of my appearance. It was only ten-thirty. I walked down boulevard Saint-Michele. “Racing finals, all the racing finals!” the newspaper hawkers were shouting. The finals? Could it be that there were people who had not yet heard them, who had not had time to buy a paper? . . . This lot that had been bestowed to me, what a singular one it was!

In 1928 Bove won the Figuière Prize, the highest honor available to a French author at that time. In response he wrote:

“If one tries to enter literature, one must not have a literary attitude. It is through the force of life that one succeeds in doing so. Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, these famous men were not men of letters, you see. They were men who wrote. Life is not literary. It can enter literature when it is a writer of this standing who makes it enter, even if the writer did not intend to write anything literary.” 

The statement is not only telling with respect to the author in question, but with respect to the whole idea of what it means to be a writer in this world. “Life is not literary.” Were truer words ever uttered? It might even be said that life is the opposite of literary, directly opposed to the self-conscious pursuit that is literature, or anyway opposed to self-conscious literature. Though his protagonists are deeply self-conscious to the point of embarrassment, though nothing escapes their painfully sensitive notice, like Flaubert’s ideal creator their author is everywhere visible and nowhere to be seen. And yet he is there, always, hidden behind each and every one of those touching, magnificently observed details.

The Figuière Prize marked the beginning of the end of Bove’s literary ascendancy, as well as the start of a long period of financial decline, poverty, and ill-health. A stock market collapse ruined his second wife. The couple retreated first to the countryside of Paris, and then, when war broke out once more and following France’s surrender to Germany, to Vichy, where, though he kept writing, Bove refused to publish under the occupation. Unable to tolerate life in the Vichy regime, he and his wife exiled themselves to Algiers, where Bove wrote in a small room overlooking the port, and where he contracted the malaria that would kill him in 1945, at age 47.

Today Bove is remembered, if at all, by a handful of enthusiastic writers who either stumbled upon his work on their own (as I did one day in the dusty stacks of the Mercantile Library in Manhattan), or heard of him from other enthusiastic writers. The term “writer’s writer” packs as much of a chill as those freeze bags you put in coolers, such is its link to obscurity. With Bove there’s no avoiding it. He may be the ultimate writer’s writer, admired by anyone familiar with his work who is dedicated to making meaning out of words, ignored by or unknown to all others.

If one can take him at his word—and Bove was nothing if not sincere—he himself would not have disapproved or resisted this final verdict on his life and work:

“I have not asked anything extraordinary from life. I have only asked for one thing, which has always been refused to me. I have really fought to obtain it. This thing, other people find it without searching. This thing is neither money, nor friendship, nor glory. It’s a place amongst men, a place for me, a place that will be recognized as mine without envy, as there will be nothing enviable about it. This place would not be different from the people who occupy it. It would just be respectable.”
—Bove, Mémoires d’un homme singulier, 1939