Looking at the big stack of manuscript pages, I'm reminded of the tagline from the most recent movie about the San Francisco Zodiac murderer: "There's more than one way to lose your life to a killer." In the movie, that line applies most of all to the Jake Gyllenhall character, Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle whose love of puzzles leads him to attempt to solve the murders. (That's a funny phrase -- "solve a murder." Of course, no such thing can be done.) The movie suggests that Graysmith probably did figure out who the killer was, and yet there was never any resolution. Graysmith got two books out of the deal, but he lost his job and his family. The most depressing scene was that of Graysmith surrounded by boxes of papers, the apartment he'd once shared with his family wholly devoted to the attempt to reconstruct a murderer through documents. I'm familiar with the scene. I saw Zodiac a couple of months ago, two days before I wrote the last words of Jesus Plus Nothing. I caught the late show, then I went back to work at the industrial studio I rented for the project. It's a big space -- maybe 400 square feet -- but I'd covered most of the floor and a good part of the walls with documents. At the height of the writing, I could wander these snow drifts and pluck out whatever I needed from among thousands of pages. Now, a couple of months on, the paper tide slowly receding, it all seems blank to me. The other night, Julie was looking at some index cards I had pinned to the wall and laughed out loud at a quote attributed to a late industrialist, a brute who so hated anyone left of J. Edgar Hoover that he went insane, convinced that everyone around him was a communist out to get him; even the mail, he concluded, was a socialist plot on his life. Just desserts. The quote was from a speech he gave in 1960: "We are victims of our own decencies." What a lovely, ironic line. I have no idea what I intended to use it for.
A bleaker example: By my desk, there's a stack of documents from the Reagan archives half a foot high. I read them all and tabulated and underlined them; and used none of them, a fact that caused me great distress at one point. Now, it's only the recollection of how much they cost me to obtain that stops me from throwing them away.
There is, in fact, evidence of murder in those pages, but I don't think I'll ever put the pieces together properly. Unlike the cartoonist who almost solved the Zodiac murders, I'm not much interested in puzzles. It would take a mind given to intricate imagination, indeed, to read the cipher of murder that runs through those pages. The victims, in this case, were South African; the killers were the usual suspects in that country. The accomplices were in the White House. And they got away with it.
It'd take me five more years to figure out how exactly it all went down, whether and where and to whom shipments of American guns were made, and what they were used for, and the scriptural justifications by which true believers justified their actions. But I'm done with the fundamentalists. Five years of archives and angry churches and numbingly righteous books and "purity" manuals and deliberate omissions and sanctimonious snark and -- oh, but there were people, too, people with ideas. Dangerous and cruel ideas, I think, but passionate ones, at least. It wasn't so bad to listen to them for awhile.
But I'm done. If I went on any longer with the fundamentalists, I'd end up like Robert Graysmith -- with two overlong books instead of one and an apartment full of documents and empty of life.
So I'm getting back on the Brooklyn yuppie path I veered off of five years ago. Going to some parties. Sitting on my stoop on a mellow evening. And exercising -- what I lost in sanity during the five years of making this book I gained in girth. So I'm going to the gym, and to get myself through the first painful and boring days, I decided to buy an audio book to listen to on my IPod. I went for Wuthering Heights. I've always wanted to read it, if for no other reason than that my wife loves it, as do a lot of women whose literary tastes I follow. I thought it would be like a Jane Austen book -- a little dull, to my mind, but full of finely observed details.
But what a treat Wuthering Heights is! I'm only five chapters in, but I'm much skinnier for my choice -- I ran an extra mile on the treadmill, unwilling to stop listening and shower.
And already there are nightmares and devil dogs and witches and dark glances and dangerous weather and the mysterious gypsy boy who'll become Heathcliff. That is to say, Wuthering Heights contains all the melodrama I love in comic books, only more artfully rendered. Bronte's attention to landscape and architecture and furnishings easily surpasses that of the best comic book artists (I think comic books are home to some of the best landscape and cityscape writing going these days), and the narrator, Lockwood, is a figure of comic complexity, frequently declaring himself a mirror of Heathcliff's apparent misanthropy and yet hungering all the while for gossip and company. He is the writer as she wants to be and is. Yes, he is a she, very clearly I think. Wuthering Heights is from that literary school that disdained omniscient narrators. Stories had to come from some place, and so an observer had to be positioned accordingly, and granted an almost supernatural curiousity. Thus, the vanity of Lockwood, expressed through fascination with Heathcliff in his older years. One needn't resort to queer theory to determine that the gravity between the two -- or, at least, that attraction exerted by Heathcliff upon Lockwood -- is homoerotic in the most literal sense. That is, Lockwood has no sexual desire for Heathcliff, but his obsession with the man transcends ordinary interest, and the details he is drawn to and, often as not, infuriated by, are those that might compel a woman in love with Heathcliff.
So Bronte must have been with her creation. Her love for Heathcliff is not what makes Lockwood a woman writer in drag, however, but rather the way it's expressed. I think it's brilliant -- I wish I could learn to love my subjects like Bronte loves hers.
That's why male writers not naturally gifted enough to rise above cultural conditioning on their own must make sure to read lots of women writers (and vice versa, I suppose, though that's hardly a challenge given the testosterone-drenched canon). Years ago, many of my favorite writers were women -- Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion, Marilyn Robinson, Kate Chopin. But my half decade of fundamentalist research drew me into a masculine universe -- dry historians of religion, angry fundamentalist texts, and thousands, hundreds of thousands of documents by and about industrialists and political hacks and military hustlers. The form my obsession with my subjects took therefore adapted. I lost the nimbleness of Bronte's Lockwood alter-ego and probably became some kind of monstrous cross between Heathcliff himself, absent the romance and good looks, and his ridiculous servant, fearful sputtering Joseph. Such a persona may have served a purpose -- with no romantic heroes to be found in my story, I had to develop a determination to push some ultimately very bad men along through the historical narrative -- but I wonder how the story would have changed had I come to Wuthering Heights sooner, had I been reminded of the way some writers love their characters.
Maybe not at all -- Wuthering Heights is, in a sense, about people who've lost their lives to obsession. Heathcliff is Robert Graysmith, only he had the good sense to brood in the moors instead of producing true crime books without resolution.
