J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

Next Tuesday I’m going to start teaching high school seniors creative writing. I guess we’ll find out if J.D. Salinger still means something to kids today. He meant a lot to me.

Whenever I’m asked who my influences are, I’m always a little embarrassed to say, mostly because I’ve never been all that avid a reader of fiction. I’ve done my assigned share, but my answers still tend to be suspiciously stock: I like Nabokov. I like Tolstoy. I read a lot of Steinbeck when I was young. Roald Dahl definitely had an influence. I like some Fitzgerald (not all). Joyce, of course, is a pain in my ass. Sometimes I admit I liked J.D. Salinger.

Why should this be an admission? Because it’s too obvious, I suppose, but the fact is, I enjoyed Salinger much more than any of those others, something his passing yesterday brought into stark relief. He at least is the one who provided me the purest, most unaduleratedly pleasurable reading experiences of my life, and I’m not just talking about Catcher. In fact, that’s the one I’m talking least about. I’m talking about the others, which I place in no particular order, but whether I had Raise High in my hands, or Franny and Zooey, or pretty much any of the nine stories -- or Catcher -- I felt more personally and intimately engaged than I have ever felt with any other author. There was never a single word of struggle between the two of us. Salinger’s wit, his intelligence, and his abiding leeriness of his own intelligence and the intelligence of his favorite characters -- the sense throughout that what makes them so engaging is what spells their spiritual doom -- all of that spoke to me, in my formative years, directly and immediately and to a constant involuntary nod of assent.

And it’s certainly not surprising that this should have been the case. After all, I was known on occasion to come home from boarding school -- to an apartment in Manhattan, no less. We had a tub. I had a sister. I may not have been all that curious about where the ducks go in the winter, but I can see why someone might be. The point is, my reasons for enjoying Salinger were the oldest in the book: I related to him. His settings, his tone, his characters were all the same as I was surrounded by, and so I found in him a friend, an advisor and confidant, someone I liked hanging out with even if all I got out of the exchange was a bouquet of parentheses. They remain one of my favorite gifts.

But Salinger has had a more lasting impact on me as well, influencing me and the course of my writing more directly than any other writer living or dead. To anyone glancing at my output, that might sound a little strange until one accepts that influence can happen in one of two ways. One way is to be influenced toward something: We see something we like; we want to do that, too. (God, how I wish I’d gotten to play jai alai just once) The other is to be influenced away from something, even when that something is something that excites us, stimulates and speaks to us directly (and if the reader is wondering why I spoke of Joyce as being “a pain in my ass,” this too would be the reason.) Sometimes when we encounter art that moves us on that level, our reaction is simply to want to say thank you, to confess that even as much as it inspires us to want to create, what the artist has offered is so good, so true, so absolutely the sort of thing that we ourselves might have wanted to express if the artist hadn’t come along and expressed it much better than we ever could have, we cede that path. We set down our pencils because it would feel presumptuous of us – of me -- to think that I have anything useful to add to what (say) Salinger had to say about the lives and sensibilities of spiritually aspirant, slightly insane late 20th century metropolitan easterners with Buddhist wings and Judeo-Christian shoes who are a little too clever for their own good and know it.

I don’t imagine Salinger would have been comfortable with that reaction to his work. There is something cardinally stupid about it – the idea that honest voices ever compete. I know that and I knew it all along, but it’s not something I can really change at this point, and the truth is, if I could go back and devote myself to a more domestic setting and find a voice to compare with his, I don’t think I would. Salinger, by inhabiting the rooms of my youth as magnificently as he did, opened the window to my imagination and shoved me out, and I’m glad for it. My fiction has taken me places far more exotic than I ever dreamed I’d go – sometimes for better, often for worse. Often the road has been slow and fraught, and Lord knows I have gotten lost from time to time, but for all those same reasons it has been a tremendously rewarding and surprising journey to me – it has been my life -- and I know that I would never have taken it if not for the man who died yesterday.

That said, it should be said that he, in his Zen-like wisdom, having ousted me, also invited me back in – to the room where I drink my coffee, I mean -- and I knew that too when I set out. Cruelly, he left us all mid-sentence, depriving us the pleasure of knowing what becomes of that voice as it grows into its middle and later years. But to me that was a kind of gift as well, the knowledge that if, in my middle years, I should choose to climb back in the window, at least I needn’t fear his shadow. There will be space, and I intend to take it, yes I do I swear I will I swear that was the plan all along.

My only hesitation is in knowing that he never actually did stop writing. The now famous safe is there with the manuscripts inside. If it turns out that what he’s done in the mean time is even a fraction as valuable and funny and human as what he left us some fifty years ago, then that is another path that I will happily, gratefully cede.

May it be so, and may your immortal soul rest in peace.

JOHN reactions

For the BAPTIZER file, some more interesting reactions to the book, one at Kevin Holtsberry's site, Collected Miscellany, (which picked it as one of the best books of the year), Jeff Sharlet's Killing the Buddha, and, of course, Library Thing.

Happy Birthday, John and book

Today marks the feast day of John the Baptist. It also marks the official release date of my new book of John the Baptizer. In recognition, I am cross-posting here the piece I recently wrote for the Powell'sblog, the link to which can be found in the prior post.

*

The abiding impression of working on my latest book John the Baptizer was of walking down a very familiar, and yet strangely untrodden, path.

Most of us know at least something about John the Baptist, whether from sermons we’ve heard, movies we’ve seen, or museums we’ve wandered through: that he wore a camel skin coat and ate locusts and honey; that he was Jesus’ cousin and baptizer; that he was beheaded at the apparent whim of a girl and her stepfather the King. These images are familiar to us, as is the idea that John was the forerunner, the one who came out of the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord.

And yet despite all this, and despite the fact that John is the character who sets in motion what is, at least by measure of influence, the most significant drama in the history of the Western hemisphere, there exist remarkably few comprehensive accounts of his life; none, at any rate, which has managed penetrate the culture and establish John’s saga as one that stands on its own, worthy of our attention in its own right.

The animating idea behind this book was simply that: finally to set John at the center of his own story, and to tell that story from beginning to end in service of no particular religious or anti-religious agenda, but simply to try to see who this man was, and whether our impression of him and of history changes at all when we look to him as the central charisma of his own undeniably extraordinary drama.

The bulk of the material in John the Baptizer is drawn from three wells: The gospel accounts, of course; the writings of great Jewish historian Josephus; and finally the sacred stories and scriptures of a still practicing sect called the Mandaeans, who by certain reckoning may be the last living Gnostics on earth, and who also happen to be devoted followers of John the Baptist.

There were many other sources as well -- including historians, archeologists, non-canonical gospels, hagiographies and apocrypha – but in addition to these, I made sure to include as wide a range of relevant art, music, and literature as I was able, in the explicit hope that it too would inform my thinking and the story I was trying to tell. The reader may as a result detect the influence of Oscar Wilde in certain of my depictions, and of Gustav Flaubert, of Caravaggio and Da Vinci and even Arvo Pärt, inasmuch as they all had something to say, some light to shed on the subject of John’s life and legend.

I adopted this more open approach because I realized early on that, though my overriding purpose in writing the book was still to fill what seemed a gaping hole in the record, I was not going to be able to – nor did I want to -- offer a traditional biography or anything remotely like a “search for the historical John.” Too much sand, too much wind, and frankly too many different agendas have treated themselves to John’s name and legend for me to pretend that I would be able to reconstruct with any academic certainty the paths he walked, the precise mechanisms of his influence, or the absolute nature of his relationship with his followers, his disciples, and with Jesus. As a matter of record, John’s life is and will probably always be something of an unknown to us, a subject of endless surmise, conjecture, and frustration.

But no less vital for that. The various mysteries we encounter in trying to weave our way through what we do know of John’s life – questions having to do with his youth and upbringing, his own religious influences, his disciples, the doubts he harbored about Jesus -- are far too compelling, and John himself is far too significant a figure to languish as he has, the disembodied sum of various notorious episodes. Revisiting his life and his legend, and trying at long last to put all those pieces together is part and parcel of the same organic process going on all around us, wherein the ecumenical explosion wrought by technology, archeological discoveries, and the ever-flattening landscape of our new world compels us to revisit and revise many of the assumptions we bring to our history, our traditions, and our faith, whatever our faith may be.

By that token I understood that though the archive of trustworthy history and artifact regarding John was not great, I nonetheless stood at the receiving end of nearly two millennia of inspired thought and reflection on the subject of this man's life and death, coming in the form not only of prayers and sacred stories, but paintings as well, and dramas and sculptures and song. Given that extraordinary endowment, it struck me that to confine myself to the meager province of “what really happened” would not only have been futile, it would have deprived me and the reader of far too much beauty, too much possibility, too much of what draws us to John in the first place, which is the mystery, the magic, and the beauty of the tales that have been attached to him, and the ongoing appeal that he makes to our imaginations precisely because he is at once so important and so elusive. Literal truth can be a wonderful thing, no question, but there are other truths that we discover when we set aside the fetish for “known facts,” and allow a story to come down to us through the centuries, and witness how it has managed to survive and grow and evolve in the disparate prayers and hearts of so many distant, different, and far-flung seekers.

This, then, was the task I set myself – not to invent, not to hypothesize or imagine what else might have been – but to try to combine and to distill what was already there; to take what we know, take what we have found, what we have been told and what we have imagined to be so, and to try give it some coherence; to ascribe privilege to no one source over another, but assume that all contain elements of truth, all contain elements of fiction, and that all could be used to serve the same end: of informing a single, comprehensive account of a story that, remarkably, no one had yet tried to tell.

Of course, that experience -- of standing before that mountain of paint and prose and song – was a daunting one, and chastening, too, but in all the right ways. To find that Rembrandt or Khalil Gibran, or Ernst Renan has already been where you are trying to go is undeniably humbling to one’s sense of mastery or worthiness, but rightly humbling to one’s sense of purpose as well. In wading though all that material, I couldn’t help developing my favorites. Of the painters, Caravaggio probably loomed the largest in my thinking, for reasons having as much to do with lighting and aesthetics as with his portrayal, and I can’t really say that there was any one image in particular, or singular passage that stood out to me as having captured the essence of the John that I was seeing. Rather what was most instructive and moving about looking through all these different treatments was seeing how distinct they were (the best of them), and how in every instance, though the artist had made sure to include the tell-tale iconic details that would identify the subject as John – the pelt, the staff, the accompanying lamb – they each had had to apply something individual as well; something, that is to say, of their own world, their own sensibility and selves in order finally to imbue the image with life.

It was good thing to be reminded of this, that as lofty and impossible a task as I sometimes felt I’d set myself, that ultimately my account would be rendered – that is, made possible -- by the inescapable limitation of my own perspective and experience. I am no less a product of my own baggage and beliefs and tastes than any of the authors and artist and composers who came before, or who will come after. Whether squinting at the world around us, or at a legendary figure from the distant past, all we can ever really do is offer our own particular reflections on what we see through our own little lens. So it is I offer the book not as the definitive portrait of John, not as the last word, but something much closer to the first; the first, at least, to try to take all the separate chapters of this man’s story, and give them a single spine. John the Baptizer is a starting point, an introduction and an invitation to consider anew this profoundly important, profoundly troubling, and profoundly beautiful life.

John the Baptizer: a guest blog

I certainly don't want to advise anyone on how, when, where, or even whether to purchase, but PowellsBooks has been kind enough to run a piece of mine about my new book, John the Baptizer, which is now available for purchase on-line, and which should begin appearing in stores very soon.

The piece, which concerns the overall impetus for the book, as well as the research that went into preparing it, can be found here.

John the Baptizer: a Q & A

This spring will see the release of my newest book, JOHN THE BAPTIZER. Below is a recent Q & A prepared by W.W.Norton concerning some of the salient issues surrounding John's life, John's legend, and my effort to present it as fully and as coherently as I was able.

For more on the book, and early reactions, the reader can click here.




Q: You suggest in your author note about the origins of JOHN THE BAPTIZER that you are a practicing Catholic. How do you think the Catholic Church would respond to your portrait of John? What about other Christian denominations?

BH: I’m not sure it’s fair to practicing Catholics to call myself a practicing Catholic. Safer to say that I identify with Catholics and Catholicism and probably will to the end of my days. The happiest church-going situation I, or my wife and I, ever found ourselves in was at a Jesuit church in Chelsea with a largely gay congregation. That or a New Church (Swedenborgian) over on 35th and Park. I suspect that either one of those institutions would be quite open to what I’ve done, or tried to do, inasmuch as both are essentially embracing and inclusive institutions, devoted more to the process of questioning than with providing clear-cut, dogmatic answers.

Within the broader community of Catholics, and Christians, I suspect there might be more misgiving, insofar as mine is a portrait that does trouble the orthodox perception of John, as the long-prophesied forerunner of the messiah. I think the simple gesture of moving John to the center of the story, and letting Jesus be a supporting character, is in itself a little disorienting; letting John’s birth be the holy birth; letting his death be the passion play; reminding the reader just how many of the ideas that we normally associate with Jesus were spoken at that same time by John, and that these ideas hardly originated with him either; and that the crew of followers, and listeners, was a motley one, not all of whom were so quick to leave John and embrace Jesus.

It has to make a Christian uncomfortable to ponder such things. All I’d say to those who do find such inquiry troubling is that nearly all of the most radical ideas that I explore in this book – having to do with the doubts that existed about Jesus and his motives, the rivalry that existed between his and John’s followers, the cross-pollination of their ideas and practice -- are drawn directly from the gospel itself.

Q: Is there an “orthodox” view of John that diverges from what you’ve presented here?

BH: I won’t claim to have read any encyclical on the topic, but John is generally understood to be the One Who Comes Before. This was foretold, that before the Savior there would come one to prepare the way, and I think that’s an idea that can be understood both historically – that someone would come to announce the entrance of the Messiah and identify him – but also more personally, that before we can accept the Light of the Saviour, whoever he may be, we first must be opened and purified. And this, by most orthodox reckonings, is who John is. This was the function he performed. That is why one is (or was, back in the old days) supposed to confess before one took communion. You’ve got to visit John before you get to Jesus. Otherwise, it won't take.

I guess the fundamental question that underlies my book is whether that is true, whether that is an adequate explanation of who John was, or whether he was offering something slightly different -- or radically different -- from the faith that evolved from the mission of his most prominent heir, who was Jesus.

This struck me as a rather obvious question, and yet in having sat and talked with a number of different clergymen about John (and having sat through my share of sermons as well), I was more often than not struck by the almost milquetoast quality of their explanations. Setting aside John's function as a “preparer of the way,” they tended to focus on his selflessness, the willingness to see and accept his role, and accept his own diminishment in light of Jesus. That’s all well and good. I don’t even necessarily disagree with that, other than to want to stress how fraught that process must have been, both for him and for his disciples.

And in general I’ve come away with the sense of contemporary preachers and teachers just not being all that comfortable with the topic of John. When confronted with the issues and the questions to which John and John’s mission naturally give rise – why did he doubt, what about Jesus offended John’s followers, to what extent might he have been used by early Christians to legitimize Jesus' claims -- I consistently found their answers to be a little canned. One gets the impression that most priests, reverends and the like would just as soon not discuss John, which is understandable if you take a step back.

Q: Why?

BH: Well, in the first place, the essential feature of his mission – to purify – is one which has largely lost purchase in the Western tradition. We speak of what we believe. We speak of what we might do in support of, or as the exercise of that belief. We don’t talk much about preserving our purity. Purity and purification is frankly a much more potent and living idea within Islam, say, and a largely un-remarked element of the conflict that exists between us and the Muslim world right now.

Moreover, I think that John, or the idea of John, functioned best and most naturally within the more prophetic tradition -- or really the prophetic mindset -- that held sway at the time of his birth and during the time that the New Testament was being assembled. If one is familiar with that tradition, and accepts John as being the last of the prophets, he’s a much easier character to make sense of. He fits.

In, fact, one wouldn't have to be too too cynical to suggest that the only reason we talk about John the Baptist at all these days is because the early Christians, (and even Jesus himself, if the gospel is to be believed) understood that Jesus’ messianic claim depended on there having been a forerunner of some kind -- a prophet to fill Elijah’s shoes – and that John most closely filled the bill. Without John and John’s voucher, Jesus really had no claim to being the Saviour.

Today, I don’t think most Christians are quite so conversant with, or mindful of, the prophetic tradition that assigned John that role. Christians are by definition post-prophetic and have been for two-thousand years. As such, a character like John just doesn’t make as much sense, or serve as clear a purpose. Today we are more liable to approach John as a stand alone figure. When we do, we are more liable to be troubled, or confused, by all the questions that follow.

Q: You say that you tried to harmonize many divergent strands of canonical, historical, Gnostic, arcane, popular and artistic “information” about John. What did you discard and why? As there anything in particular that refused to “harmonize”? Did you intentionally leave in anything you yourself find “discordant”?

BH: What did I discard? Well I’ll just come right out and admit, Mallarme wrote a poem about Herodias that I can’t make heads or tails of. I tried, and maybe I used it on some osmotic level, just don’t ask me how.

More controversially, one could argue that I might have held back on, and elided, certain passages is the gospel of John (the evangelist), but only because I found his gospel to be the most coercive, and therefore the least credible, when it comes to John’s role and significance. That’s a horribly presumptuous thing to say about a document to which I am so indebted, and which obviously transcends anything I could hope to offer. That said, there are moments when its author gets out the shoehorn that I just wasn’t comfortable using.

Otherwise, I’d say I steered clear of the two extremes: Hollywood depictions of John (Charlton Heston, etc) I find for the most part to be embarrassing and laughable, prime examples of just what I’ve been talking about, which is that, as a character, I just don’t think we’ve ever been comfortable with who this man is, or what the point is. John the Baptist is a good time to go buy more popcorn. That’s what I did anyway.

Alternately, if you go on the Internet and get reckless with your mouse, you can run into some pretty extraordinary conspiracy theories about who John was and what actually transpired between him and Jesus. I actually cyber-engaged a guy who believed that John the Baptist was John Hyrcanus. One would have to be a bit of a Josephus wonk to understand just how strange – and kind of pointless -- an idea that is, but trust me, it would be like some insisting to you, two-thousand years from now, that Pete Rose was actually Pete Rozelle. There are other more toxic theories out there, such as that Jesus had John killed in order to overturn the feminine Godhead and install the masculine. Again, I don’t feel that I’m in a position either to dismantle or defend such arguments. If someone out there wants to try, godspeed. But I think at a certain point one has to recognize the line at which one's own brain shuts down. For me, these sorts of theories exist beyond that line.

As for discord, I think there’s a lot of it. Names and angels and cosmologies that draw from different traditions, but as I mention in the author’s note, a large part of my job was to figure out how to incorporate those dissonances into the body of the story itself, how to turn it into dramatic conflict, to let the characters fight it out among each other, and in their own minds.

But even that makes my process sound a little more agenda-driven than it actually was. Frankly, the final arbiter for me in almost all my choices -- and what designates the book as a novel, I suppose -- is personal taste. Aesthetics. As opposed, say, to accuracy, to provability or probability. I assumed there was truth in beauty. On that account I can assure you, if there was anything out there that I found either beautiful or moving – whether it was a painting or a piece of music, a scene in Josephus or the Bible, or Gospel of Levi Dowling -- I tried to find a way to use it. The paintings of the holy family, for instance – of John and Jesus as babies, with Mary and Elizabeth presiding. No one ever claimed that those scenes “happened,” so far as I know. They are not depictions of apocryphal scenes. They are more like heavenly portraits, if you will, but served for me to illustrate and body-out Elizabeth’s “dreams.”

On the other hand, if I found something ugly – by which I mean false, murky, obvious, manipulative, or self-interested – that was really the quickest route to the circular file.

Q: When John is being raised as a young man in the village on the other side of the Jordan – where do you envision him exactly and what inspired your portrait of that community?

BH: I purposefully don’t specify the location because I think part of the point of that chapter of John’s life is that it took place beyond the reach of Israel or Rome or Parthia or Nabataea. Uncounted tribes existed, with their own holy men, their own prayers, their connections to the variety of faiths surrounding them. There is a Gnostic tradition, occupied today exclusively by the Mandeans, which traces back to the time of John, and which can justifiably be connected to the traditions of the Subba and the Sabeans and all the way back to the Zoroastrians. I imagined there being a Babylonian Jewish influence to John’s Subban upbringing as well, but specifically I think I probably leaned most heavily on the portraits of traditional Mandean tribal life that I was able to find.

But again, what I most wanted to depict, in tracing John’s youth and upbringing, was almost a step-by-step progression – one which finds him, as a child, at the furthest possible remove from the tradition of his blood parents (there among the Subba), then moves him closer (with the Essenes, who are patently Jewish but still “set apart”), and then finally introduces him to the Temple of his father, the heart of Israel. I saw him, even despite his lineage, as approaching the Temple as an outsider, and as having to grapple with that same conflict for the rest of his life, as to whether he belonged to the Gnostic, ascetic tradition in which he was raised, or the more orthodox tradition to which he was born, and which he felt “sent” to restore and revive.

Q: Do your consider your view of John ultimately to be iconographic or iconoclastic?

BH: This was a live question for me as I wrote, because I didn’t really know the answer, and I didn’t have a clear desire one way or the other. I suppose, because of my upbringing, I never quite shed the notion that there was something at least renegade about what I was doing, for reasons already stated, for making John the protagonist, for making Jesus (in certain eyes) the “bad guy”; for asserting the legitimacy of the Gnostic approach alongside the more traditional; for pointing out that Jesus really was a student of John’s, etc etc.

However, on finishing, on stepping back and hearing what readers have had to say, it’s my sense that the portrait ultimately ends up being more iconic – again, probably because of my upbringing and because of my approach. I didn’t take this story on because I had some radical agenda, or some alternate theory I was trying to peddle. I took it on because I’m a storyteller, because all the various parts of John’s story struck me as being achingly beautiful, and because I recognized that for whatever reason no one had yet tried to assemble them into a single account. If I wrote the book “in faith,” as they say, it was in faith that the narrative existed, even despite the dispersal of sources, and that it revolved around a single (at least somewhat) comprehensible character.

That this character should turn out to be different than we might have expected is hardly surprising – the closer we look at anyone or anything, the more our estimation is liable to change – but to the extent that what I’ve presented here is a attempted distillation of our collected memories and meditations, it’s hard to see how the result could be called iconoclastic.

Q: What about your view of Jewish history – is that a conventional one? Did you take liberties?

BH: Not so much more than Josephus himself, whose trustworthiness is far from absolute. If there was any other guide I had in mind, or precedent, it would have been the Shakespearean histories, just in terms of the balance they strike between the needs of good drama, and the conscience of history. I’m certainly not saying I’m as good a writer as Shakespeare, but as historians I’d say we’re in the same ballpark. I might even give me the nod, in terms of trustworthiness.

Q: Is Manean an historical character? If so how did you find him?

BH: Absolutely. I found him in Bartlett’s book of unused-but-basically-reliable narrators. The Acts of the Apostles makes mention of Manean as having been a friend of Antipas’ from his childhood. A schoolmate. He is also placed in Antioch as an early teacher of the gospel of Jesus. As such, he is quite likely to have been there at Herod Antipas’s banquet, and as likely as anyone to have been the source of the be-heading story as it was later reflected in the synoptic gospels.

That he was also the son of Menahem the Essene, advisor to Herod the Great (and also a bonafide historical character), is a pretty wild conjecture based, if I’m not mistaken, upon the similarity of the names -- ‘Manean’ being and alternate spelling of ‘Menahem’. But this conjecture did not originate with me. Among those peddling this theory would be the co-historians Comay and Brownrigg. I just took it and ran.

Q: Has anyone else ever taken your view of what Salome’s infamous Dance of the Seven Veils was really about, or how it led to John’s beheading?

BH: Well, first things first: that it was a Dance of Seven Veils is itself a grafting from later history. The Greek word for the dance that Salome performed for her father – this as reflected in Mark’s pericope (or capsule) of the incident – can be translated as romp, as in childish “romp,” as in the sort of thing grandparents happily endure at Thanksgiving.

But to your question, I’m hesitant to say no one has ever taken my view, just because it seems rather obvious once you stare at the pericope of four or five years on end. The gospels themselves differ as to whether Salome asked for the head on her own or at the suggestion of her mother. I went with the latter. To be clear, my contribution, if it is a contribution, is that out of clear recognition that Antipas deep-down feared and revered John, Salome (very much at her mother’s recommendation), asked for the prophet’s head to punish Antipas for having statutorily raped for the last several months.

Again, looking at the Bible passage, I can’t imagine any other plausible explanation.

It should be noted that I avoided like the plague the Rita Hayworth movie, so I have no idea what their explanation was, and that the other most famous interpretation would be the one offered by Oscar Wilde in his play Salome, which is a work that that I deeply love and admire – likewise the Ken Russell movie, Salome’s Last Dance, which is based on the Wilde. (I’m not so keen on the Strauss opera, but that has more to do with the music and casting requirements.) In the Wilde account, Salome demands John’s head as a way of getting back at John for having spurned her sexual advances, which (granted) could have been motivated by the desire to get back at her lascivious step-father. It’s very good and funny and disturbing account. I just don’t think it sheds much light on John. He and his head, are an excellent, excellent prop.

While I’m at it, I should perhaps mention that Flaubert wrote a fairly long short story about the same incident. I don’t at the moment recall what Salome’s motive is there, maybe because the story as a whole is a bit of a mess. The set design is great, though, and I copped it liberally and shamelessly.

Q: Is there a character in the book with whom you most identify?

BH: Probably Manean. He is in the classic narrator seat, and has all the characteristics of a good novelist: aware of all the arguments to be a made, and to that extent sympathetic to every side; willing to play advisor and confidante, but extremely circumspect about revealing his own leanings; possessed of an appalling willingness to watch other people, even friends, make horrible mistakes without intervening. He’s extremely passive aggressive, in other words, like all good writers.

I also have a soft spot for Azharan, John’s brother and most devoted disciple. In a lot of ways, I don’t think anyone in the book suffers quite as much as he does, and all because he’s loyal.

Q: I find your prose style in this book – styles, since there are two distinct strands or narrative voices – unique. Breathtaking, actually. What are your influences and how did you manage to keep both voices so pure, without one approach bleeding into the other? Was there any temptation to unify them more?

BH: Immersion, I’d say, and an adherence to sources. One of the advantages to working so slowly is that over time you actually begin to forget which parts of the story you’ve borrowed and which you’ve made up. Another is that voices just start to grow into you.

That two voices finally emerged in this instance is, as I say, a function of my high regard for the sources I was using. I think this is something all writers struggle with, especially when they’re telling stories derived from outside sources (sources other than their imagination, that is.) On the one hand you have at some point to take control of your story, wherever you found it, to make it your own, to take responsibility for it, if only to discover why you were so drawn to it in the first place.

By that same token, there is a strong impulse to want to honor the source, and to serve it, to find a way to allow the reader to see it and be inspired it by it the same way you were.

This is an issue I’ve dealt with in my last two novels, the former one being about the first eight weeks of Napoleon’s stay on St. Helena. In that book, as with John, I really loved all the material I was drawing from – the diaries and memoirs – and was dogged throughout by the fear that there was something profoundly presumptuous in my thinking that I could do better, or shed more light, than my sources had. Both in the case of that book and John, I had half a mind simply to present the reader with my bibliography and let them follow the same path I did, and make of it what they will.

Obviously I did not do that, but I suspect that any reader who did a running check of text-to-source-material would be surprised at the extent to which the story presented here really is a thinly-veiled collage.

That said, I assume the two voices to which you refer would be the one that recounts the ‘secular’ story – the one about the Herods – and the one that recounts the ‘sacred’ one, about John. In each case, there are characters within the accounts that I regard as being the likely sources. The secular witness is Manean. The sacred witness is Kharsand. Each acquired its voice primarily from the source material. In the case of the Herodian saga, that would be Josephus, who would have been a heckuva novelist had he so chosen. In the case of the John material, the primary sources would be the gospels and the Mandean stories, which in particular possess a kind of music I hadn’t really heard before, but which comes through even in translation because of the essentially oral tradition from which they emerge. The Mandaean accounts are clearly cants, poems, songs, presented in such a way that they can be heard and remembered. Capturing their rhythm and syntax was far less difficult than actually breaking them down, recognizing which parts could serve as incidents, which were allegories, when should first-person passages be switched to third. That sort of thing.

And in the course of doing that work – the “make-it, break it, make it again” nature of all creative activity -- you learn things about the different styles, and you begin apply them. You recognize, for instance, that one characteristic that almost all sacred or scriptural writing shares in common is the fact that it never tries to sell itself – an idea, or an event. In most fiction writing, or literary writing, so much effort is expended on trying to persuade the reader -- of time and place, of the power of a moment, of the significance of an idea or an action. A “literary” writer, faced with the prospect of recounting an angelic visitation, would naturally want to express to the reader just what it felt and looked like, to set the reader there and make her believe that what happened here really happened. A scriptural writer knows better than to try, and usually winds up being more convincing. It’s quite liberating one you get the hang of it, and it extends to all incidents and descriptions. Even dialogue. “Andrew went to him and said, ‘…'” is an unthinkable sentence in a short story. It’s the bread and butter of scriptural writing.

Q: When I first met you, you were writing not about a sacred figure, but a profane one – the 60s comedian Lenny Bruce.

BH: Eton Boone, but I take your point.

Q: Do he and John the Baptizer have more in common than meets the eye? In general, your novels seem to be dominated by a single male character who stands apart from the crowd. Do you see any progression?

BH: I suspect that this is the sort of question that I am incapable of talking about it with any authority or dignity, and that I am better off just following my nose and letting you figure out what I think smells good.

I would say this, however, that every book is a reaction to the last. Every book tends to beak the rules of the last, and that as far as protagonists go, the same holds true. Gus Uyterhoeven, the protagonist of The Chess Garden was a direct response to Eton Boon: the former cultivated the ability to see spirit; the latter, ego. Dr. Perlman (of Perlman’s Ordeal) was a skeptic, a rationalist and a humanist tested by faith, taunted by the unseen. Toby, who was kind of the moral center and conscience of The Monsters of St. Helena represented another swing of the pendulum back in the direction of spiritual sight, or openness.

John the Baptizer, as you’ve noted, is really comprised of two stories: a sacred story about John; a profane story about the Herods. But even within John’s character, there is a contrast between the enlightened vision he possesses, and the anger that overtakes him when he looks back down at the world around him. I think that anger charged him, in a way, and it was derived from a sense of separateness, of strangeness to the world, that likely exceeded that of any character I’ve ever dealt with, and probably ever will. I hope.

Regarding the more general question of my protagonists and the crowds they play to, or the situation they find themselves in, I would last (and inadvisably) say this. Right or wrong, it struck me a while back that the operative idea behind most popular fiction was to put an “ordinary character in an extraordinary situation,” while the directive of literary fiction was to put an “extraordinary character in ordinary situation,” and that my career, such as it is, could be seen as an experiment in doubling down and seeing what happened if you put an extraordinary character in an extraordinary situation. Why not?

Jury’s still out, I guess.

Q: Has writing this book changed your own faith or view of Christianity in any way?

BH: I would suspect. I think for anyone who identifies him- or herself as a Christian, the question comes, does your faith consist in what you do, or in what you believe. John’s life reminds us that a lot of Jesus’ “message” – having to do with the primacy of good acts, of charity, of purity, and of divorcing yourself from the trappings of the world – don’t really belong to Jesus at all. These ideas existed before him, and would likely have existed after him whether or not he had come to give them voice. What the figure of Jesus brings to all these ideas is his own sacrifice, the mystery of faith, if you will, that simple but inscrutable mechanism by which his death and resurrection saves us all provided that we believe in it, and him.

The question all Christians are bound to ask themselves along the way is whether they really need that – to give over to the belief in a savior, a belief in Jesus’sacrifice and resurrection, and a conviction that their own their salvation depends precisely upon this belief -- or whether their salvation could just as well consist in all the sorts of things taught and demonstrated by John: charity, self-sacrifice, independence from the world and so forth. It is a tempting proposition. We can’t pretend that vesting one’s faith in a mere belief – that "God so loved mankind" and so forth… -- isn’t fraught with risk and potential misunderstanding. It clearly is. It breeds false righteousness. Arrogance. Wars, dare I say? Would it not suffice to be a follower of John – to seek purity and light through a simple life of good acts and devotion -- or do we need to go that extra step and marry our actions to a belief in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection.

I certainly don’t think John’s story answers that question, but I do think it asks that question rather forcefully, by exploring the loyalty and the practice of those who did not go on to follow Jesus, by looking at John as a seer and teacher in his own right, and not just a functionary within a Judeo-Christian story of sin and redemption. And by ending where it ends. That was always one of my favorite things about John’s story, in fact, is that it concludes before we come to the crucial “Christian” moment of Jesus’ death and resurrection. By ending where it does, John's life poses questions about the necessity of Jesus' sacrifice. Aside from the fact that John does refer to Jesus as “lamb” – which is definitely fascinating – his story offers no opinion about the truth or the significance of what was to happen on Golgotha or in the tomb. John’s life doesn’t foresee that. I think a great part of the doubt he experienced in prison is attributable to the fact that he did not understand how “Christian” salvation would manifest. He was inheriting thousands of years of conjecture and catastrophic expectation. In absence of that knowledge , he had no choice but to doubt, to wonder. How is the Nazarene going to pull this off? And do I trust him?

As for myself, I suppose that the number of years I've spent with John and his story is in itself an indication of my own desire to do without that particular mystery of faith. To see if I miss it. To see if I feel liberated without it. I don’t really know the answer yet. If I’ve learned anything in this process, it’s that these things take time.

bout of pedantry #2, "begs the question"

Truly, you cannot surf the political blogosphere for ten minutes without running into the misuse of this venerable old phrase, so much so that I’m almost ready to hoist the white flag and let it be, let it mean what everyone seems to want it to mean, which is “prompts the question” or “makes one want to ask the question” (As in, “the sudden reaction of conservative pundits against the prospect of a government bail-out of the nation’s financial system, on the grounds that it vests too much control in the hands of one unchecked entity, begs the question ‘where were you guys for the last eight friggin’ years?’”)

After all, the sheer extent of abuse (of the phrase, that is) speaks to the apparently urgent need for some expression to do the work for which this one has been drafted, so why not surrender the old meaning and give over to the new. Is the original meaning of “begs the question” really all that important?

Well, the truth is, it was pretty good. Back in the day, to "beg the question" meant to give an answer that really only sounded like an answer, but which was, in fact, really just a clever restatement of the premise upon which the question was asked in the first place.

To give an example, you might ask: "How has Jose Reyes managed to raise his average from .250 to .333 in just two short years?" (Just play with me here.)

I might answer, "Well, that's simple. Whereas two years ago he was only getting one hit every four times up, now he's getting one hit every three times up."

THAT is "begging the question." Clearly in asking, you wanted to gain some insight into Jose's swing or new command of the strike zone. My answer, while seeming quite knowledgeable and responsive, was really nothing of the kind, just a more crafty restatement of the premise of your question. No new information was provided.

The technique has many more significant real word applications, of course. When the Bush Administration, asked whether it has sanctioned the use of torture, replies that American Law forbids torture and we follow the Law, that’s a version of begging the question. When your four-year-old son, in the course of one of his why-jags wants to know why grandma’s cat died, and you find yourself, after the eleventh straight “why?” saying, “Because God decided?” and he says, “ Why did God decide?” and you say, “Because God makes the decisions,” that is certainly another form begging the question, and it isn’t pretty, but sometimes it’s the only thing that will allow you to get back to your newspaper. Begging the question is the only thing that will silence him, not so much because you’ve satisfied his curiosity -- you haven’t – but because your son now realizes you’re not really as smart as he thought you were.

But that is neither here nor there. The point is, “begging the question” is a very real, very common, very deceitful little maneuver, and one worries that if we give up the phrase – or the meaning of the phrase -- we may in some way give up our capacity to recognize and to identify what is among the most important weapons in the arsenal of all cheats, liars, crooks, politicians, schoolchildren, ne’er-do-wells, and parents. And that would be a loss. We really can’t let that happen, and so I ask, if we do let “begs the question” mean “prompts the question,” it prompts the question, what should we then call begging the question?

Soon to return to more pressing matters. There seem to be several.

Empathy vs Sympathy in the race for the Wild Card

If a blog is good for anything other than chiseling down our predictions for all the world to see, it has to be the occasional bout of pedantry. So here’s one.

The other day, the Milwaukee Brewers, with whom my Mets are currently battling for a playoff spot, looked as if they might be righting themselves from a late season nose dive. They were leading their division rival Cubs by four runs in the ninth, in Chicago, only to blow the lead, and then lose the game in the bottom of the 12th, having put runners on second and third with none out in the top of the 12th and failing to plate them.

A brutal, brutal loss. As I wrote to a couple fellow Met fans that same evening, in advising them to check out the boxscore: “Now THAT’S empathy.”

My point, in saying so, was this:

Back when I was a kid, and into my early teens (I was born in ’65), it was enough to say that you sympathized with someone. If they were going through a difficult time, broke their leg during the summer vacation, for instance, it sufficed to say, “Hey, I sympathize” or even “I can sympathize.”

Then roundabout 1984, a whole new word was discovered. It had been there all along of course, but for some reason, the word “empathize” got unearthed. (I’m now wondering how much this had to do with the emergence of the concept of “empaths” in comic books and on Star Trek: The next Generation, which featured, as ship-counselor, an attractive young “empath” of a stubborn Greek/Turkish lineage, Deanna Troi.)

In any case, the difference between empathy and sympathy is a subtle one, and like most all English words, subjective. Generally, though, sympathy is understood to represent an expression of shared feeling with the subject (usually a sufferer), while empathy expresses an actual identification with the subject, usually based upon the shared experience – again, usually of suffering.

That’s all a little fudge-y, granted, fudge-y enough that the popular understanding of this difference, at least to judge by the steady creep of the word “empathy” between the early 80s and now, was that empathy, insofar as it expressed a kind of One-ness with the Other, was basically like sympathy times two. The early, pioneering usages of the term were a little more furtive. They’d have gone something like “Broke your leg? Hey, I sympathize – no, actually I totally empathize – with you.” Empathizing was a way of ratcheting up your expression of sympathy – going from a peck to a French kiss -- while at the same time permitting a not-unsubtle note of egoism. As in, that’s how much I care. Screw sympathy. I have empathy, because of what I know and where I’ve been. I AM you, my friend.

And slowly but surely, as this widely accepted view gained purchase, that empathy was just a larger, greater, more potent version of sympathy, sympathy got kicked to the curb, it got treated like a rented mule; like the notion of “giving 100%” (having suffered so in the face of athletes giving 110%, then 115%, and now 300%), to the point now where now, in 2008, you almost never hear it mentioned anymore. You would never hear a TV newsman say, “I think we can all sympathize with the victims of Katrina.” At this point, one would have to say, “I think we can all empathize with the victims of Katrina,” as if we all know, we’ve all had our houses swept away, we are all Louisianans, and Georgians, AND Berliners, we are all Christ and Buddha, and Deanna Troi. To express anything less than complete unity and oneness withal – that is, to be merely “sympathetic” with what someone else is going through -- would sound like an insult.

See, but needless to say, I’ve always felt this gets the whole dynamic wrong. My take on empathy was always that it was a (potentially) compassion-free expression of identification with someone else’s plight, insofar as it was based (assuming one is not either Christ or Deanna Troi) upon a perceived common experience. So an easy example from my life would be, if I heard about another married couple who were having trouble conceiving a child, I could very quickly say, “Oh, I empathize,” meaning simply, “hey, I’ve been there,” Which is true, I have, so I know, I can feel, and to that extent, I can identify with much of what they’re going through, the same as I can identify with much of what the Milwaukee Brewers fans have been going through this past week. As a Mets fan, I empathize.

Does it mean I care? Does it mean I sympathize? Hell, no. As I say, I'm a Mets fan. To my way of thinking, there’s nothing remotely disconsonant in saying, “I am giddy with empathy for Milwaukee Brewers fans right now.” I know exactly what they’re going through, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

And this is my point. Not only do I not understand empathy to be a more powerful or potent expression of sympathy, I believe it to be a far less powerful expression – of compassion, at least. All empathy ever really meant (in my book) was that I identify, or I can identify with the plight of the person at question, having been there. It says nothing about whether that identification moves me to have actual compassion for the Other. What moves me to feel compassion for them is…well, sympathy, which is based either upon the inherent magnanimity of my spirit, or the fact that I am for whatever reason fond of whomever we’re talking about. Perhaps this is all an explanation of what makes me a class-A prick, because maybe I should sympathize with everyone I empathize with, but I don’t think I do. That couple heading in for their fifth unsuccessful IVF? They could be horrible people for all I know. Maybe they hunt baby seals on vacation. Maybe they voted for Bush twice. I don’t know. So they can have my empathy, sure, when they find out the “bad” news. My sympathy, I keep; I keep for when I feel it, and let me point out in defense for what may sound like a pretty heartless position a) that I’m not advocating the judgmental portioning of one’s compassion so much as trying to define the use of a term, and that b) I don’t even sympathize with myself most of the time. I empathize with myself – all the time – but as for the sympathy I extend my own lament, my own personal tales of woe? Eh.

By the same token, when the shoe is on the other foot, when I am on the receiving end of these same two expressions, my feelings are commensurately distinct. If someone says to me, “I empathize with you,” I take it for what it’s worth. I appreciate what they’re saying – that they must feel they have been through something similar and to that extent can “feel” me – but I also can’t help but detect a taint of pretentiousness and self-aggrandizement in their saying so, in the first place because I don’t really believe they know what they’re saying – for me, the word always sounds like someone using “whom” when they shouldn’t – but also because I feel like, to the extent they actually do know what they’re saying, all they’re really doing is using my plight to call attention to themselves and what they’ve been through, which suggests a very high likelihood that they have no idea what I’m going through, they’re so trapped in their solipsistic little universe.

On the other hand, if someone comes out and says I “sympathize”, well, there I hear an authentic expression of support and compassion, borne of nothing other than the mysterious generosity of the human spirit, a desire to share my suffering not because this person has been through it, too, but because they are a friend, and because they WANT to bear my burden with me.

When someone says to me, “I empathize,” I feel like I’m supposed to reply, “Oh, really what happened to you?”

When they say, “I sympathize,” I just want to say, “Thank you, brother, that’s very kind.”

In the coming days, look for similiar installments on the expressions "buck naked," and "begs the question."

...and Mother Theresa, as herself

For the record, this post is really more about writing than politics.

Andrew Sullivan, among others, has been tracing the evolution of John and Cindy McCain’s adoption story, noting that, as with other stories the McCains like to tell, this one has undergone some noteworthy revision over the years. Specifically, it is only the later versions that make mention of the fact that Mother Theresa herself helped convince the McCains to rescue two girls from the Bangladeshi orphanage, one of whom they ended up adopting – their daughter Bridget.

Again, who knows? They did what they did. It’s a wonderful thing. Assuming the girl is happy and that the estate tax can be abolished, I wish them all the best.

What’s curious to me is the idea that Mother Theresa’s role in the McCain’s decision somehow makes it a better story. And I’m not denying that most people would agree it does. Juicier, anyway. But really it just goes to show what a bunch of hopeless suckers we all are for celebrity, even sainted celebrity.

Because from a pure storytelling perspective, the McCain’s revision is a mistake. It’s actually fairly common, in the course of conceiving a story (and I’m not suggesting that the McCain’s made this one up, I’m just speaking from the perspective of someone who does make stories up) that quite often you want for your protagonist to do something – say, get off the bus. The plot requires it. The question is, how do you get them to do it? Well, the easiest and least imaginative way is to have another character - a friend or a sidekick - urge them to: say, “buddy, get off the bus.” (The entire Academy Award winning screenplay of GOOD WILL HUNTING is nothing but this, so far as I can tell: one scene after another of girlfriend, friend, and therapist imploring Will to stop diddling and do something with his brain, which finally in the end he does).

So you create the sidekick and write the scene, and oftentimes the scene helps you figure out why the protagonist should do this thing (as in “get off the bus or you’re going to be late for school” or, alternately, “adopt the child, you’ll make her life much happier and you’ll feel better about yourself.”) And then the protagonist goes ahead and does it.

Something you come to learn as writer, however, is that more often than not, now that you’ve gone and written in that character, you’re actually better off without it. Now that you know the motive, all the sidekick is doing is taking power and initiative away from your protagonist, making him or her seem like a passive follower of advice. Far better to just go ahead allow your protagonist to do the thing you wanted him or her to do in the first place – get off the bus, or adopt the child. He or she will instantly become a much more dynamic, potent, and powerful character; one worthy of telling a story about.

Obviously, this is not hard and fast rule. Sometimes advice plays a role in our lives. Not all protagonists need to be dynamic and decisive. I’m just saying, it’s a natural part of the creative process, making up characters or situations that help you understand what your protagonist should do and why he or she should do it, and then cutting them in order to allow your protagonist to proceed thusly and heroically and compellingly. (Why did she get off the bus just then? How intriguing. I must find out!)

So the weird thing with the McCain story is that they added the sidekick in the revision. Now, obviously we know why. Mother Theresa is an excellent character. It testifies to the McCain’s own celebrity and importance that they actually got to meet her, and frankly there isn’t a producer in the world who wouldn’t go with the “Mother Theresa” version, provided her agent doesn't “bust my balls.” The downside, however, is that McCains actually come off as less powerful, less interesting in the Mother Theresa version than if the story had simply been, “we went to Bangladesh, we saw the child needed us and that we needed the child, and we knew what we had to do.”