Albert Schmidt, that is, but he prefers to be called
"Schmidtie" and Louis Begley's trilogy captures the
essence of a complex modern man.
It
bothered me that a movie had been made of the first novel,
About Schmidt (1996), with Jack Nicholson playing the title role,
and it took a while to get the image of good ole' Jack out of my mind.
I also don't like seeing a film first and
then reading the book, but years had intervened by the time I read the book
last summer. Thus I had a hard time associating it with the film (other than
Jack).
But as it turns out the book is
entirely different (it would be best to say the film was "suggested"
by the novel) and in fact when I now think of what Schmidtie might look like,
I see Louis Begley, a remarkable writer and with a remarkable personal history.
Begley came to writing late in life and like Joseph
Conrad and Jerzy Kosinski, English is a second language, Polish being the
language of their birth. The similarities
to Kosinski are striking, Begley having to exorcise his demons about the Nazi
occupation of Poland by writing Wartime
Lies. It is a thinly
autobiographical account of the protagonist's attempt to avoid persecution as a
Jew . I remember reading Kosinski's Painted
Bird when it was first published, a profoundly disturbing holocaust
novel. I haven't read Wartime Lies, but it is now on my list.
I've dealt with enough attorneys in my career, mostly
corporate ones and those specializing in intellectual property, to know that
their work depends on the careful execution of language. Most of the attorneys I worked with thought that crafting a legal
document was like building a fine piece of furniture or even creating a work of
art. No, that did not make them
automatically eligible to start a second career as a creative writer as one
needs something to say as well. In fact
Begley, by his own admission, did not pursue a career as a writer at first for
that very reason, although he enjoyed a creative writing class at Harvard where
he earned his AB in 1954. It took him
decades to find his voice, and now that he has, he is, thankfully, writing full
time.
Interestingly, his class of 1954 included none other than
the late John Updike, my favorite writer.
They both graduated summa cum laude and they must have known each
other. Whether they kept in touch over
the years we will find out when Begley's son, Adam Begley, is finished with the
biography he is writing of John Updike.
I will be lining up for the first copy!
After finishing All
About Schmidt, I promptly turned to the second novel of the trilogy, Schmidt Delivered (2000) and now have finally
finished the third novel, Schmidt Steps
Back (2012) and have been profoundly affected by it. Although these were written years apart, I
had the good fortune to read all within a few months and, therefore, I almost think
of them as one work.
For me, Begley sort of picks up where Updike left off,
following one character and setting that character against the backdrop of the
times in which he lives. Updike updated
us every ten years in the Rabbit tetrology while Begley's trilogy is a more
compressed time frame. Nonetheless,
there are many similarities, particularly the novel as memoir, a kind of
history of our times, and the intellectual level at which both Updike and
Begley operate, their erudite prose befitting of their excellent educations.
Rabbit is more of an "everyman" whereas
Schmidtie is moving in the upper echelon of society, certainly the upper 1% to
borrow from the recent election. And
that should not be surprising as Begley's legal work put him front and center
in that stratum of society.
In terms of style, Begley writes like an attorney in many
respects; his sentences sometimes complex but finely crafted and I like his
dispensing with quotation marks for dialog.
It takes a little getting used to, but it seems so natural. I felt neutral to the protagonist in the
first novel, moved a little closer to him in the second, and by the third felt
simpatico.
Rabbit and I shared many commonalities, and now I find
myself in Schmidtie's shoes, thinking similar thoughts and of course witnessing
the same events. It makes these
novels living breathing documents to me.
Begley covers so many topics and themes in these novels, the
ambiguity of memory, Jewishness, moneyed privilege (consider this beautiful crafted
passage on that topic: "Tim had it
all, every quality required to make him, as the younger partners put it, the
complete package. Handsome, imperially
slim, arrayed in discreet made-to-order suits and shirts that did not shout
their Savile Row and Jermyn Street provenance, he trailed an aura of old New
York money."), mental illness, homosexuality, the publishing industry
and the legal establishment, the death of a spouse (his wife, Mary dies early
on in the first novel), spring-winter romance, divorce and infidelity, the
tragic relationship with his only child, Charlotte ("His short-lived happiness had been added to the monstrous
inventory of Charlotte's resentments.
There was no doubt: the ever-deeper -- he was beginning to fear
permanent -- estrangement from his daughter was his life's principal
liability.") and, finally, sex scenes worthy of Updike's Couples.
He throws down the gauntlet in the opening pages of Schmidt Steps Back (the best of the
three novels), Schmidtie speculating as to how many years he has left (he
guesses ten) and how death might come calling. Dr. Tang is his physician and
Gil his best friend from college. I was fascinated by this long paragraph, as
if Begley was listening in on my own private thoughts as they pertain to the
inevitable. He also sets up some of the
basic themes in the novel, the prospect of happiness (and his ability to have
sex) with a woman he had romanced thirteen years before the opening of the
novel, Alice, and the consequence and obligations of money:
"Silly
business, Schmidt thought, Dr. Tang's attention to his diet.... He had asked
Dr. Tang whether she could foresee the form in which death would come for him.
You won't scare me, he had said,
everyone has an appointment in Samarra, and I own a cemetery plot with a view
of Peconic Bay I rather like. She laughed gaily in reply and told him that with
a patient in such good health it was impossible to predict. Schmidt's
simultaneous translation was Don't ask stupid questions, leave it to team
death, they'll figure it out. Ever polite, he had merely laughed back. In
truth, he had his own hunches: stroke or cancer, demonic diseases that don't
always go for the quick kill. But whatever it might turn out to be, no one,
absolutely no one, would get him to move into a nursing home. If he was compos
mentis, and not yet paralyzed, he would find his own way to the exit.
Otherwise, the instructions left with Gil, naming him the sole arbiter of
Schmidt's life and death, should do the job, with a little friendly nudge from
Gil if need be. It was no more than he would do for Gil, who had made his own
arrangements giving Schmidt the power of decision. Dementia, the illness most
likely to cut off the means of escape, held more terror than any other. But he
had not heard of a single ancestor, going back three generations, who had been
so afflicted. The other side of the coin, the agreeable side, was his overall
good health. Once he got going in the morning, he was still quite limber. In
truth, he doubted there was much difference between his condition thirteen
years earlier, when he first called on Alice in Paris, to take an example that
preoccupied him, and the way he was now. Not unless you wanted to fixate on the
deep lines, running to the corners of his mouth, that had only gotten deeper or
the hollow cheeks or the fold of skin sagging from his neck. Taken together,
they gave him an expression so lugubrious that efforts to smile made him look
like a gargoyle. The situation was less brilliant when it came to his libido
and sexual performance. The grade he had given himself when last put to the
test had been no higher than a pass, but as he had told Alice, he had not yet
tried any of the miracle pills that old geezer-in-chief Bob Dole swore by on
television. Besides, the test in question had been unfair: the lady whom he may
have disappointed could not hold a candle to the incomparable Alice. Did his
age and the ravages of time make it reprehensible to keep over- paying the
Hampton mafia of gardeners, handymen, carpenters, and plumbers for the pleasure
of having everything at his house just so? Or to pay the outrageous real estate
taxes that financed town services, neatly itemized on the tax bill as though to
taunt him by proving that he derived no personal benefit from them? Hell, there
were lots of men unable to get a hard-on and lots of women who had faked
orgasms until blessed moment when they could finally declare that at their age
they'd given the whole thing up, living comfortably in houses much grander than
his. Spending more money than he!"
Then there is the notion of the novel as history.
Begley gives witness to the manners and
mores, the foibles, and the likes and dislikes of his times. Updike's characters
are similarly entwined with their periods in American history. I would rather
read a novel in this vein than any history book to get a sense of what people
not only witnessed, but what they felt.
This is why I prefer fiction to nonfiction (although some of nonfiction
could probably pass as fiction!).
We all
remember where we were on certain momentous days.
My older relatives remember Pearl Harbor,
while
I remember where I was when Kennedy was assassinated that moment in time
only to be surpassed by the events of September 11, 2001.
Begley flawlessly describes
the horror and the incredulity of that infamous day in the third novel:
"Tuesday,
September 11, 2001. Perfect blue sky, perfect late-summer temperature. If it
hadn't been for the foundation's board meeting, Schmidt would have stayed in
Bridgehampton. As it was, he had driven in the evening before, got to the
office early to prepare for the meeting, which was to start at ten. His
secretary, Shirley, walked into his room shortly after nine to say good morning
and ask whether he wanted coffee.
By the way, she
added, one of those pesky little private planes has plowed into one of the
World Trade Center towers. There's smoke coming out the building where it hit.
If you come to reception you'll have a good view.
Schmidt glanced at
his papers. For all practical purposes he was ready. He walked down the
corridor to where a large number of Mansour Industries employees already
assembled in the forty-eighth-floor reception area were looking toward the
southern tip of Manhattan, staring at the smoking tower, when the second plane
hit. No one thought any longer that some neophyte aboard his Piper or Cessna
was to blame. The traders who occupied two-thirds of the floor and had been
glued to Madrid's El Mundo on their computers, unable to reach other sites,
dashed in with the news; someone brought in a television set and connected to a
German station. On the screen tiny-seeming figures, some of them holding hands,
could be seen jumping from the vast height of the wounded buildings. Someone
shouted, Look! Look! Schmidt turned away from the screen to look south, and
before his eyes one tower crumbled and, not a half hour later, the second. Then
came news of another plane that had hit the Pentagon and another still that had
crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And the passengers in those planes, men,
women, children-their seat belts buckled-waiting for the moment of impact,
knowing that they were to die in flames of burning jet fuel. Schmidt found that
he could not detach his thoughts from them, as though it were his own nightmare
from which he was unable to awake. Were they praying? Strangers embracing
strangers next to whom they sat across armrests? Recollecting quickly all that
had been good and beloved in their lives? Some of the children must have
understood, but the others? The infants? Did the sound of their wailing fill
the planes' cabins? Did it soften the murderers' hearts or was it their
foretaste of paradise?"
Begley has already written several other novels, ones now
on my reading list. Perhaps he is working
on his fourth Schmidt novel (one would hope!).
He is a worthy writer to be added to my personal pantheon of
"favorites."
Although now ten years old, here is an excellent
interview with Begley from the Paris
Review
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/392/the-art-of-fiction-no-172-louis-begley
The older I get the more I seem to "work" for
Doctors who take charge of my body with tests, medications, procedures, just
about any time they want. And I'm not in it alone: friends, some from childhood
or college days, are going through the same thing, that is the ones who have
made it thus far.
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