The Black Brook

  THE

  BLACK

  BROOK

  Also by Tom Drury

  Pacific

  The Driftless Area

  Hunts in Dreams

  The End of Vandalism

  THE

  BLACK

  BROOK

  TOM DRURY

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1998 by Tom Drury

  Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

  Cover photograph © Henry Lopez

  Henrylopezphotography.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2306-0

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9234-9

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 100113

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  FOR

  VERONICA GENG

  1941–1997

  My poor Captain! He’s going where we are all going, and the only extraordinary thing is that he hasn’t gone there sooner.

  Jacques the Fatalist

  A Conversation between Tom Drury and Daniel Handler

  Daniel Handler: The Black Brook is basically my favorite novel. What’s yours?

  Tom Drury: That’s a tough question. I have a number of books that I try to keep nearby. Some are not novels, such as Mythologies by Yeats (though the Red Hanrahan stories make a sort of novella) or the Liaozhai stories of Pu Songling or The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena. The novels include Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata and Oh! by Mary Robison. So I’ll go with Oh!

  DH: I’m a Robison fan too, although I’d probably go with Why Did I Ever as my favorite of hers.

  TD: I usually find that whatever I’m reading by Mary Robison is my favorite. Oh! is her first novel, and it’s been on my essential list the longest. I can reread it entirely or let it fall open anywhere and I think, “Yes, I know this part, it’s great,” and I’m happy to see it again, or to find new things that I didn’t remember.

  DH: Episodic is often a pejorative when people talk about novels . . .

  TD: I’m a fan of the episodic. Plot in my experience tends to lumber into a story and drive everything else out. You do want to create a sense of progression, of increasing stakes, but not in a way that feels mechanical or untrue to life or dull to write. I mean, what is the plot of life? Is life not episodic?

  DH: It’s funny, isn’t it, when people talk about whether or not books resemble life, because a novel that was actually realistic would be incomprehensible and dull. The Black Brook feels like life to me, but then stop and remember that it has, for instance, a version of organized crime that probably isn’t very realistic.

  TD: That’s true. It’s kind of a screwball syndicate.

  DH: Is The Black Brook a crime novel? Is that how you think of it?

  TD: Not really. There is a lot of crime, but it tends to be fairly unusual. Absurd, even. I think I was playing off the ways that crime is portrayed in movies and fiction. And Nash’s problems are really more basic than the laws he breaks or witnesses being broken. You could say his transition into the criminal world is a symptom of what’s really going on.

  DH: Sometimes when I write about crime I think it’s a cop-out, that it’s such an easy thing to put a story in motion—theft! murder! betrayal!—that I ought to think of something else. I like how The Black Brook turns a convention upside down, that the slow closing in of a threat is of almost no consequence to our hero. It’s like No Country for Old Men, if nobody cared about the money.

  TD: Yeah! If Javier Bardem was so busy acquiring hair care products he forgot his pneumatic cattle-gun thing at CVS. I liked weaving everyday elements into conversations among criminals and improvising on the popular notion of gangsters trying to branch into legitimate business or applying unexpected shadings of morality to what they do. That’s what the Haunted Mortar and Pestle Conference is about—the underlings and associates are worried that the syndicate is getting too refined and losing its commitment to crime. And while the gangsters may be funny, they can also be dangerous, which is important. Nash should be afraid of them (as his relatives keep telling him) but either is too heedless by nature or feels so guilty for other reasons that he doesn’t care what happens.

  DH: Seems like that ties into the whole shape of the book. People keep getting distracted.

  TD: Is that what you like—the distractions? What was going on when you first read it? I’ve often wanted to ask why this book is a favorite of yours.

  DH: I picked up The Black Brook—if that’s what you mean by “what was going on when you read it”—because I read a review of it in the Times by Luc Sante. I’d just met Sante at a conference—I admire his work, and he was very friendly towards a new whippersnapper like myself. But when he talked about writing I disagreed with just about everything he said. This was unusual for me, someone who I thought was a good writer saying things I thought were thoroughly wrong. It got me to thinking, me a new writer with just one book under my belt, about the paths different writers take, and the whole enterprise of literature, the real enormity and diversity of it, opened up for me. It sounds maybe ridiculous to say, but I realized then that there wasn’t a “right” way to do it.

  TD: That reminds me of something Flannery O’Connor said—that it’s always wrong to say you can’t do this or that in fiction. That you can do anything you can get away with, but the thing is, no one ever gets away with much.

  DH: One influence I’ve picked up in this book and in your work in general is that of literature that’s very old—epic poems and whatnot. How does that work for you?

  TD: When I was a kid I had to go to church every week, and the most interesting thing there was usually the reading from the King James Bible. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed”—lines like that, that have lasted so long. Later, much later, I read the Greek classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Aeneid, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Celtic sagas, etc. I love how those stories were told. The language is clean and direct (as it was, in most cases, written by one poet and translated by another), things happen quickly, the supernatural is accepted as a part of life.

  DH: Do you steal from those old stories consciously, then? Look at their structures? Or are they just part of the brain loam?

  TD: Mostly I just experience the story I’m reading as fully as I can and let whatever lessons there may be sink in on their own. And epics tend to be relentlessly engaging. Otherwise the ancient storytellers would have lost their audience. When my daughter was eight or nine, I read her the Robert Fagles translation of the Odyssey. She loved it. Then we tried the Iliad, but there were too many ship names and too much violence
.

  DH: Steady, preferably breathless engagement is often overlooked, I think. With children’s literature it’s sink-or-swim—there aren’t too many children who will give a book the benefit of a fifty-page doubt if things get a little boring—and I’ve always been grateful to have that drilled into me, while other writers are too often taught, one way or another, that the engagement of the reader is secondary to some other goal.

  TD: I have this idea that books should be of compelling interest on every page, and I’ve probably pursued that goal at the expense of following rules about how a plot is made. Well, I know I have. But for me that’s okay.

  DH: Are all great books funny? This is a question I furrow over.

  TD: What conclusion does your furrowing lead to?

  DH: Well, when I reviewed another book of yours I took some of my soapbox time to say that all great books are strange.

  TD: I agree. What I look for as a writer and reader is something that holds my attention, feels true to itself, and hasn’t been done before, or hasn’t been done in the way it’s being done on this page.

  DH: Sometimes I want to add “sad” and/or “funny.” It does seem that a good book needs, if not quite humor, a way of looking askance at things.

  TD: If you say all great books are anything you’re begging for somebody to raise their hand with an exception, but I can’t think of any that aren’t funny sometimes. If you represent the full array of human activities you’re bound to create moments of humor as well as sadness.

  DH: The opening of The Black Brook, with the suffocating dog in the car, has something of the feel of a set piece, even if it doesn’t quite turn into a skit. (And thank goodness for that.)

  TD: He’s not really suffocating, he’s just got a defective sense of balance that makes him alarming to watch. I usually start with something like that, a situation that seems to call for action, however misinformed that action may turn out to be.

  DH: Being misinformed seems key. I like that Nash has to keep telling people that the forged-painting angle is not relevant, and then it turns out to be the crux of the matter. Was the painting central for you right away? Sante compared The Black Brook to a primitivist painting, and I wondered if that made any sense to you?

  TD: Some sense, though I don’t know very much about primitivist painting. I was going by instinct rather than theory. There are a number of people and things in the book, and what you might call plot elements are mixed in with everything else. While writing The Black Brook I had a grid of portraits by Sargent taped to the wall of my office. Each one was supposed to represent a character in the book. I don’t know that it helped organize the book, but it did make the wall more interesting. Anyway at some point I ran across The Black Brook, which seemed very different from the portraits. The paint is rough and impressionistic especially for Sargent and the subject is a young woman sitting by a stream and looking to the side with her face in shadow and her hands in bright sunlight. It’s really more of a landscape-with-person than a portrait. She looks as if her thoughts are far away—she can hardly be bothered with being painted or she’s not aware of it. It was not hard to imagine a dying crime boss becoming fascinated with the painting because I was fascinated with the painting. And it reminded me of the ghost in the novel, who is also kind of elusive.

  DH: Did you consider making up a painting?

  TD: I don’t think so. I wanted a painting that readers would be able to see. The hardback had a reproduction on the cover, made to look like it had been torn from an art book and taped to the wall of a prison cell. I also liked the idea of gangsters casing the Tate Gallery to see if the painting could be stolen, which I suppose you could do with an imagined painting, but it’s better if it’s there in reality. And a Sargent painting figures into an earlier scene, when Nash sees the mural he did for the Widener Library at Harvard, so it made sense that it would be one of his.

  DH: It’s one of the few books I can think of that utilizes a real cultural artifact without being annoying. With so many books the album, the movie star, the reclusive author, feels like cheap cheating.

  TD: Uh-oh. I had a reference to the song “The Sporting Life” by the Decemberists in The Driftless Area.

  DH: I know Colin Meloy was tickled by that song’s mention.

  TD: Really? That’s a cool thing to know. Have you read Enrique Vila-Matas? Bartleby & Co. and Dublinesque are wonderful novels in which the characters obsess on the work and lives of real authors. You can guess some of them from the titles. My books can seem to come from an older time, so I don’t mind putting in one or two contemporary things as a change-up.

  DH: Oh, OK, so sometimes it works. I’m easily swayable when I like a book. I read David Markson, I think everybody should write like David Markson, until I read Pete Dexter or Muriel Spark or Toni Morrison or old Spanish ballads and then everybody should write like that. I mean, A Series of Unfortunate Events is little more than shout-outs and references to other books.

  TD: This goes back to what Flannery O’Connor said—some things never work, until they do. What I don’t like is when a novel tells you the brand of watch the character is wearing but I don’t know, maybe that could be done successfully too.

  DH: I think I’ve told you this before, but sometimes in a bookstore when I’m trying to convince a friend to buy The Black Brook, I find a passage which begins “The campus had its problems, and there was in fact a monthly newsletter called Campus Problems.” I find that passage—even just that line—hilarious and sad. But I understand that other people might think something else about it. So I find that line and say, “If you think that’s good, you’ll like this book.”

  TD: I’m happy that you like that sentence. Just by looking at it you can see how it evolved.

  DH: Did you steal that from ordinary life? Is your dialog overheard?

  TD: “Campus problems” was made up. I might use overheard dialogue on occasion, but only if it’s really memorable and I can take it out of its context and put it in a new one. Memory is a good filter. That which sounds interesting today you may forget by next week, but if you remember something for years then you have to assume it has meaning, though you may not know what that meaning is, which is all the better.

  DH: I feel like 60 percent of what people say is accidental poetry, with its squiggy grammar, wait-I-changed-my-mind midsentence, slightly-off clichés, the whole bit. I recently met a tech guy who started talking to me and I thought if I transcribed it, it would be the best John Ashbery poem in the history of the world.

  TD: I would read that. When I was a journalist I would tape and transcribe whenever possible, even on deadline sometimes, which I don’t recommend if you want to remain on good terms with editors. I liked the old cassette recorders because you could see the reels turning so you knew the thing was working. Now we have digital recorders and there is a light but how many of us really know what the light means?

  DH: I had some journalism gigs early on—nowhere near as extensive as yours—and I always thought that transcription was a great crash course in dialog, learning the patterns of it, figuring out how to edit.

  TD: I used to love transcribing. I’m not sure why because it’s tedious in many ways and takes forever. But capturing the way that people actually talk—the important things left out, the obscure things added, the direct questions that don’t get answered—seemed really necessary.

  DH: Speaking of careers, career-wise this seems like maybe it was your difficult second album.

  TD: I was aware of writing something different than The End of Vandalism, which was a novel set in the Midwest and originating from childhood memories though not about children. The Black Brook drew more on my experiences as a reporter in New England in my twenties and early thirties, and it is more troubled and less subject to resolution. There is no strange but self-repairing community for Nash to fall back on. He is out in th
e world, and some of this feeling of isolation mirrored my own while writing it. It was a hard book to finish. They all are, but this one especially. I did not want to let Nash go without saving him somehow. So I put in some encouraging words from an oxyacetylene torch welder working away happily in the middle of the night. Some people who liked The End of Vandalism did not like The Black Brook, and probably vice versa—though I did think Sante, whom we keep mentioning, was onto something when he likened the book to “whistling past the graveyard.”

  DH: Can you look at it now? I just had to reread a book of mine, published about the same time, and it was like eating ground glass.

  TD: I read it last week to prepare for this. First time I’ve ever read it again. I read it as a memoir carried on by other means and it felt all right to remember all the enthusiasms and Deep Questions that inspired the various elements. Where I would do things differently (and one would always do some things differently), I was able to accept the fact that I’m fallible. “Hindsight’s killing me/Too much memory”—do you know this song? Built to Spill, a very fine song.

  DH: Speaking of hindsight, I read The Black Brook for the first time on my honeymoon, a long, five-week jaunt in various European locales, and I saw a path there, in The Black Brook. What I sensed most of all is that it was something made by an individual with an individual point of view. I think it was the first time I understood that that kind of individuality is actually the essence of literature, and every time I reread The Black Brook, it doesn’t just bring me the comfort and joy of reading a novel I really like. It keeps me on the path—my own path, the way the book stays on its path.

  TD: And you’re still married.

  DH: There you go.

  I

  RASPORAS

  1

  It was a hot dry dusty summer day in New Hampshire. Mary and Paul Emmons had just taken a booth in a diner called Happy’s when Mary noticed a dog in a car in the parking lot with its head turned upside down.