[Bill]: "You mean the writer comes out of hiding."
"Am I right that it's thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?"
"Scott would know."
5 -- [Maureen, mother of Karen Janney, direct speech:] "It's as though they designed this to the maximum degree of let the relatives squirm."
7 -- [Rodge, father of Karen Janney, indirect discourse:] When the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith? ...They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fueled by credulousness. They speak a half-language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on.
7 -- Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men setting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come.
9 -- [Karen's indirect discourse] World in pieces. It is shock of shocks. But there is plan. Pali-pali. Bring hurry-up time to all man.
10 -- They feel that space is contagious. They're here but also there, already in the albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with their microcosmic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying to become.
11 -- [Rodge]: "The top man is always in Houston."
13 -- [Karen recollects the cult]: They chanted, We're the greatest, there's no doubt; heavenly father, we'll sell out.
16 -- This is what people have wanted since consciousness became corrupt. The chant brings the End Time closer. The chant is the End Time. They feel the power of the human voice, the power of a single word repeated as it moves them deeper into oneness. They chant for world-shattering rapture, for the truth of prophecies and astonishments. They chant for new life, peace eternal, the end of soul-lonely pain. Someone on the bandstand beats a massive drum. They chant for one language, one word, for the time when names are lost.
Part One -- photo: crowd scene smashing people up against a chain-link fence
20 -- [Scott in a NYC bookstore] He went to the section on modern classics and found Bill Gray's two lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere umbers and rusts. He liked to check the shelves for Bill.
20-21 -- [Scott looking at the Warhols in NY] Scott had never seen work that was so indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it.
21-22 -- [Woman approaches Scott and tries to give him some living thing to carry out of the city; now he perceives it as an animal, later it will become a baby.]
22 -- When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place.
22-23 -- [In the Marriott Marquis (though not so named) and its revolving bar]
26 -- [Brita describes her work as a "species count" of writers]
27 -- [Brita]: "I feel as if I'm being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in the mountains." [Scott]: "Tell Bill. He'll love that..."
28 -- [Bill Gray looking at] ...what he'd written during the day, the scant drip, the ooze of speckled matter, the blood sneeze, the daily pale secretion, the bits of human tissue sticking to the page.
30 -- [The teams of trackers and fans seeking Bill]
31 -- [Scott]: "Someone sent him a severed finger in the mail. But that was in the sixties."
31 -- [Rumors about Bill; issues of quarterlies devoted to him.]
32 -- This was the holy place, the inner book, long rows of typewriter bond buried in a cellar in the bleak hills.
32 -- [Karen makes her appearance as an element of the Gray menage]
33 -- [Karen watching TV]: She sees a great straining knot of people pressed to a fence, forced massively forward." [From context, this appears to be a football riot in Europe. Note the photo on section title page.
34 -- [same context as above]: They show the fence from a distance, bodies piling up behind it, smothered, sometimes only fingers moving, and it is like a fresco in an old dark church, a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it.
35-36 -- [Bill Gray's writing space]: There was a typewriter on a desk and sheets of oversized sketch paper taped to the walls and the lower half of one of the windows. These were charts, master plans evidently, the maps of his work-in-progress, and the sheets were covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words, tiny writing in the boxes. There were circled numbers, crossed-out names, a cluster of stick figure drawings, a dozen other cryptic markings.
36 -- [Brita]: "I guess it's true to say that something else is ending forever."
[Bill]: "You mean the writer comes out of hiding."
"Am I right that it's thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?"
"Scott would know."
36 -- [Bill]: "When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."
"But this is intriguing to many people."
"It's also taken as an awful sort of arrogance."
36 -- [Bill]: "The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face."
37 -- [Bill]: "The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation."
38 -- [Bill, ind. dis.]: He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed too many brandies and little violet pills or placed the nozzle of a revolver just behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.
40-41 -- [Brita on the traveling life]: "...there is no moment on certain days when I'm not thinking terror."
****
41 -- [Bill]: "There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence.... Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."
42 -- [Bill]: "News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before -- what? I don't know."
42 -- [Bill describes himself as "a bad actor" "playing the idea of death"]
43 -- [Bill says the pictures are announcements of his dying; Brita points out that once Bill's picture has appeared, he will be expected to look like it]
***
44 -- [Bill]: "Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it's consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed."
45 -- He [Bill] couldn't understand how any of it had happened, how a young man, inexperienced, wary of the machinery of gloss and distortion, protective of his work and very shy and slightly self-romanticizing, could find himself all these years later trapped in his own massive stillness.
****
45-46 -- [Bill]: "When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play. I was the players, the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn't been a moment since those days when I've felt nearly so good."
He had a smoker's laugh, cracked and graveled.
"I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I've been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There's no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it's completely spontaneous. It's the lost game of self, without doubt or fear."
[Brita]: "I don't know, Bill."
"I don't know, either."
"It sounds like mental illness to me."
47 -- [Brita]: "You like being a little fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it's just a metaphor, and innocence, but isn't this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you've been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it's not so lost. What you say you're writing toward, isn't this what people see in your work?"
48 -- [Bill]: "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I've worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. ...I've forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill."
51 -- [Scott on Bill's writing]: "He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten." [Brita]: "Yes. Sentences with built-in memories."
51 -- [Brita mentions Winogrand photo of child in driveway]
52 -- [Bill's attacks of self-doubt; having to find a passage that reassures him, though he can no longer find any such passages.]
52 -- [Scott]: "Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn't published in years and years and years. When his books first came out, and people forget this or never know it, they made a slight sort of curio impression. I've seen the reviews. Bric-a-brac, like what's this little oddity. It's the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. ...We could make a king's whatever, multimillions, with the new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a myth, a force. Bill gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens."
53 -- [Bill, ind. dis.]: I'm a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick.
55 -- [Image of the book as hydrocephalic monster-child, dragging itself through the house and seeking to fasten on its author]
62 -- [Scott brings a reproduction of Warhol's "Mao II" to Karen as a present]
67 -- [On the tangled etymology of "guest" and "host."]
[Scott]: "Keep this book out of sight. Build on it. Use it to define an idea, a principle."
"What principle?" Brita said.
"That the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left."
68-69 -- [The theme of Four; and lamb in mid-April, paschal lamb; suggesting the theme of Sacrifice, not to put too fine a point on it]
69 -- [Karen--?]: "I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold." [Compare the German nuns at the end of White Noise]
71 -- "I believe in the God of the stumblebum," Bill said. "The waitress with a throbbing tooth."
71 -- Bill looked at this food, seeming to know it was changed somehow. [... time to transubstantiate, as Tom Lehrer always says]
71 -- [Scott]: "The book disappears into the image of the writer."
***
72 -- [Scott]: "The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings."
73 -- [Bill]: "As Many books as a writer has published, those are the books he keeps on writing plus the one in his typewriter. Old books haunt the blood."
73 -- [Scott points out that Bill's latest effort is so bad that it will contaminate the well-received earlier works]
77 -- [Scott meets Karen (story retold on drive back to NYC with Brita)]: Then he knew what was familiar here. It was like something out of Bill Gray and he should have seen it earlier. The funny girl on the tumbledown street with an undecidable threat in the air, stormlit skies or just some alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence.
80 -- [Scott reflects on his passage home from the midwest as echo of his original quest for Bill, though now he is returning "with a character out of Bill's fiction."]
82 -- [Karen's ind. dis.]: They told her, The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the fate of mankind.
83 -- [Brita describes an Eve Arnold photograph of White Cloud, the place where Scott met Karen -- everything is documentary, photographic or fictional]
84 -- Bill lay smoking in bed, the ashtray resting on his chest. Every time he did this he thought of old rummies in single-residence brownstones expiring in the slow smoke of mattress fires. [Well, it's a natural enough reflection, but see the "Viking's funeral" passage in Lot 49]
85 -- [Bill]: "Did I ever tell you what my first wife?"
[Karen]: "Don't think so. What?"
"She used to say I was all dick. I spent so much time locked up and was so tight-lipped about my work and eventually about everything else that there was nothing left but raw sex. And we didn't talk about that either."
[Well, yes, common enough. But recall the "inside his own cock" passage in Gravity's Rainbow]
86 -- He saw how absorbed she was in the task, dainty-fingered and determined to be expert, like a solemn child dressing a doll. [Compare Metzger trying to undress Oedipa in Lot 49, like some "poker-faced" child with a doll]
89 -- [Scott interprets the Moonie wedding]: "The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark. Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can't survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can."
91-93 -- [Bill's phone-machine soliloquy played out for Brita. It is also his hail and farewell. Meanwhile Scott puts the moves on.]
95 -- [Charlie Everson to Bill]: "You look like a writer. You never used to."
96 -- The traditional loud tie that preserved a link to collegiate fun, that reminded people he was still Charlie E. and this was still supposed to be the book business, not global war through laser technology.
96 -- [Bill]: "I find myself recalling scraps of dialogue from 1955." [Salinger's heyday, of course, but also the very year in which the "contemporary" bits of V. are set.]
97 -- [Charlie]: "You have a twisted sense of the writer's place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margins, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere." [This seems apropos of Salman Rushdie.]
[Bill]: "I've done no dangerous things."
"No. But you've lived out the vision anyway."
"So my life is a kind of simulation."
"Not exactly. There's nothing false about it. You've actually become a hunted man."
98-99 -- [Charlie springs the trap on Bill: now that he's been photographed, why not help out the poet chained to the wall in Beirut?]
104-105: Part Two -- [photograph of Iranians in a street demonstration below an enormous mural or poster of Khomeini. Lest we forget Rushdie.]
112 -- [Julien, the kidnapped Swiss poet, ind. dis.]: He had tumbled into the new culture, the system of world terror, and they'd given him a second self, an immortality, the spirit of Jean-Claude Julien. He was a digital mosaic in the processing grid, lines of ghostly type on microfilm. They were putting him together, storing his data in starfish satellites, bouncing his image off the moon. He saw himself floating to the far shores of space, past his own death and back again. But he sensed they'd forgotten his body by now. He was lost in the wavebands, one more code for the computer mesh, for the memory of crimes too pointless to be solved.
Who knew him now?
[Compare "lost in the wavebands" to the "waves and radiation" passage in White Noise.]
114 -- [Bill Gray's daughter Liz pokes a few holes in the inflated ego of "the Mythical Father"]
119 -- [Description of Karen]: She was thin-boundaried. She took it all in, she believed it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air. Scott stared at her and waited. She carried the virus of the future. Quoting Bill.
120 -- [Bill pays no attention to London, having been there before; the city is consumed in "aura."]
121 -- [Bill's "foreboding," familiar from the uncertainties of his writing career.]
122 -- [Bill:] "Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid."
122 -- [Bill's manifold medications.]
125 -- [The bomb goes off in London; Charlie Everson's uncannily adroit reaction.]
126 -- [Bill:] "You showed presence of mind, taking that protective stance."
[Charlie:] "Actually that's the recommended air-crash position. Except you don't do it standing up."
127 -- [Charlie:] "You need a major house that also has a memory. That's why they hired me. They want to take a closer look at tradition. I represent something to those people. I represent books. I want to establish a solid responsible thoughtful list and give it the launching power of our mass-market capabilities."
127 -- [Bill:] "Got a girlfriend?"
[Charlie:] "I had some prostate trouble. They had to reroute my semen."
"Where did they send it?"
"I don't know. But it doesn't come out the usual place."
"You still perform the act."
"Enthusiastically."
"But you don't ejaculate."
"Nothing comes out."
"And you don't know what happens to it."
"I didn't ask them what happens to it. It goes back inside. That's as much as I want to know."
"It's a beautful story, Charlie. Not a word too long."
129 -- [Bill's "wound" -- a fragment of glass in his palm, compared to a childhood scrape or beesting.]
130 -- [George Haddad:] "And isn't it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?"
130 -- [Slogan of a Neo-Nazi group in Germany: "The worse the better."]
***
132 -- [Haddad:] "Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting."
[Bill:] "Poor bastard, you're beginning to sound like me."
134 -- [Brita goes to see a painting called "Gorby I"]
137 -- [George Haddad asks Bill about word processors, heavily advocating use of same.]
140 -- Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance.
140 -- [Scott remembers Bill saying:] "Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."
140 -- [Scott realizes that Bill had his picture taken in order to disappear more completely and irrevocably.]
141 -- [Photograph as departure point.]
144 -- [Bill's real name revealed: Willard Skansey, Jr.; Scott ponders on "what kind of man his father might have been" -- a detail not deducible from Bill's novels, which are not autobiographical.]
147-48 -- [Karen has a migraine.]
149 -- [Karen discovers Tompkins Square Park.]
152 -- This wasn't a public park but some life-and-death terrain where everything is measured for its worth.
153 -- [Karen begins to forage for the homeless in the park. End of chapter: "Only those sealed by the messiah will survive."]
154 -- [Bill begins dicussions with George Haddad in Athens.]
156-57 -- [Bill:] "For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."
"Interesting. How so?"
"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."
"I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured."
***
157 -- [Haddad:] "Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him."
158 -- [Haddad sees Mao as "a figure of absolute being."]
159 -- [Bill resists Haddad's Maoist vision, claiming the novel as a quintessentially democratic form.]
163 -- [Haddad:] "You could have been a Maoist, Bill."
164 -- [Haddad once again advocates the word processor; and suggests that Bill not travel to Beirut, which means more or less certain death.]
168 -- [Thinking about the hostage in the locked basement, Bill begins to recover his interest in writing.]
170 -- Measure your head before ordering.
173 -- [New Yorkers describe their disintegrating city as "just like Beirut."]
175 -- [Karen encounters the name "Sendero Luminoso."]
176 -- [Images of the Tienanmen Square incident (though never indentified as such)]
181 -- [Brita:] "There is a tendency of men to disappear."
182 -- [Karen:] "Did you husband disappear?"
"He went on a business trip."
"When was this?"
"Eighteen years ago."
"It's like what's the name of that myth?"
"Exactly. And he has a series of adventures and performs legendary feats and he comes back with a contract for a million spare parts."
185 -- [Scott will keep the secret of Bill's name.]
187 -- [Karen has another migraine, this accompanying TV reports of Khomeini's funeral.]
189 -- [Iranian mourners say, "We have lost our father."]
191 -- [Karen's ind. dis.:] If others saw these pictures, why is nothing changed, where are the local crowds, why do we still have names and addresses and car keys?
193 -- [Karen fugues back into her Moonie phase.]
200 -- [Bill's ind. dis.:] He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility. This poet you've snatched. His detention drains the world of one more thimble of meaning.
201 -- There's always something you're not supposed to see but it's a condition of growing up that you will see it.
204 -- [The prisoner's ind. dis.:] Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was. ...The only way to be in the world was to write himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words and he would come into being once again.
205 ff. -- [Bill's encounter with the British veterinarians; have they read anything by him? Possibly in an airport? Has he written a movie-book? Has he been on television?]
208-209 -- [Bill gets his diagnosis from the vets under cover of asking about a fictional character. The trip to Beirut ruled out as "Completely and totally implausible."]
211 -- [Conversation with the vets manifests "a two-hearted mood," and yes it does seem rather in the Hemingway.]
215 -- Bill has never walked into a place and told them who he is.
215 -- [Bill realizes that his fragment on the prisoner should have been about the boy, his captor.]
215 -- [Bill recollects an unused fragment, a N.Y. cabdriver of the forties or fifties:] "I was born under the old tutelage the earlier the better."
216 -- [Bill Gray dies:] Measure your head before ordering.
His father. We need to have a confab, Junior.
He knew it completely. The glow, the solus. And it became the motion of the sea, the ship sailing morningward toward the sun.
216-17 -- [Bill's identity papers are lifted; he dies anonymous.]
220-- [Brita will not publish the pictures of Bill without his or Scott's consent; so the solitude remains unbroken.]
223-- [Scott quotes the Beatles to Karen -- the line about Mao from "Revolution"]
224-- [Scott's ind. dis.:] But the manuscript would sit, and word would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill's legend, undyingly.
The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
[Final Part (epilogue?): In Beirut]
229-30-- [Brita has stopped photographing writers. The project has died for her.]
231 ff.-- [Brita's interview with Abu Rashid.]
233-- [Abu Rashid provides an identity for the children he protects and raises, abolishing any identity they may have had previously.]
234-- [Brita scolds Abu Rashid for dropping his chin, just as she did Bill.]
***
235-- [Abu Rashid's unnamed interpreter:] "Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch."
235-- [The Swiss poet has been sold to the fundamentalists.]
236-37-- [Brita unmasks the hooded boy, who turns out to be Abu Rashid's son. She takes his picture. Confrontation ensues.]
239-41-- [The wedding party and the tank. Brita's salute.]
241-- [Brita's ind. dis.:] What could it be then if it's not the start of the day's first exchange of automatic-weapons fire? Only one thing of course. Someone is out there with a camera and a flash unit. Brita stays on the balcony for another minute, watching the magnesium pulse that brings an image to the strip of film. She crosses her arms over her body against the chill and counts off the bursts of relentless light. The dead city photographed one more time.
[End.]