A Meaningful Life Read online

  L.J. DAVIS is an author and prize-winning journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Harper's, among other publications. A former Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of a National Magazine Award, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of seven novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. He lives in Brooklyn and in Maine.

  A MEANINGFUL LIFE

  L.J. DAVIS

  Introduction by

  Jonathan Lethem

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  A Meaningful Life

  Dedication/Epigraph

  Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  This can only be entirely personal for me, I have no way around it. Not least because in considering the matter of “the Brownstoners”—those straggling individuals and families, nearly all of them white, who, by laying claim in the 1960s to a few of the aging and tattered row houses in the neighborhoods on the periphery of downtown Brooklyn, set the groundwork for the disaster and triumph of Brooklyn’s slow-motion gentrification, so full of social implications and ethical paradoxes, and trailing any number of morbid and comic life situations not unlike those depicted in L.J. Davis’s three novels of Brooklyn—I am considering the matters of my own life. My parents were Brownstoners, and the complexly uncomfortable facts in the case, discernible behind Davis’s Brooklyn novels and also behind Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Thomas Glynn’s The Building, are the facts of my childhood. These were the facts I eventually excavated in a long novel called The Fortress of Solitude, yet which no matter how deeply I dig, I will never completely demystify.

  Not least, but not only. Writing about Davis’s book is personal for me because L.J. Davis was my first writer, and by that I mean not in the sense of Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum, who were among the first writers I read, but that he was my first captive specimen. L.J. and his family lived on the next block (he still lives in the neighborhood, and so do I), and I was best friends with his son Jeremy. When I first conceived the wish to be a writer, the thought was pretty easily completed by the phrase: “like Jeremy’s dad.” I liked what I saw. L.J. sat at the back end of an open, high-ceilinged parlor floor devoted to bookshelves. (That I alphabetize my books now is probably attributable to the fact that his were alphabetized.) His desk was massive—I think it had to be, to support the weight of his manual typewriter, which I recall as a piece of epic ironwork wreckage, something you’d seen driven around on the back of a flatbed truck in search of a vacant lot where it might be safely abandoned. In that office, when Jeremy and I weren’t shooed away, I was introduced to the existence of the books of Thomas Berger, Charles Webb, Leonard Michaels, and Kingsley Amis (“I was happy to be called Brooklyn’s Kingsley Amis,” L.J. once told me, “until I had the misfortune of being introduced to Kingsley Amis”), and to Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony LP. These are all tastes I’ve retained, and the flavor of which seem relevant now to the pleasure I take in L.J.’s novels—rightly relevant, it seems to me, though I could never defy the associative force of childhood memory.

  So, Davis’s A Meaningful Life, along with the true literary thrill it offers on rereading, provides for me a shudder of recognition, or a whole series of shudders. In three of L.J. Davis’s four novels, young men who can only be described as sick, chronically ill with self-knowledge of their prejudices and reservations, find their ambivalent fates manifest in scenes of brownstone renovation in downtown Brooklyn, where the joists and pillars of the grand and tempting old houses are too often rotten to the core. More than that of Fox’s great novel, close to the bone though it cuts, is the world I dawned into when my parents moved to Dean Street. The dystopian reality of late 60s and early 70s outerborough New York City can be difficult to grant at this distance; these streets, though rich with human lives, were collectively damned by the city as subhuman, crossed off the list. Firehouses and police stations refused to answer calls, whether out of fear, or indifference, or both. As L.J. told me once, most simply: “Anyone who chose to move to the neighborhood was in some way crazy. I know I was.” How precarious this existence was—morally, sociologically, financially—was never exactly permissible to name outside of L.J.’s books, or at least not with such nihilistic glee.

  L.J., by refusing to blur the paradoxes of racial and class misunderstanding in idealist sentiment, was “un-PC” before there was such a thing. By being so, he turned some of his neighbors against him, exemplifying a loneliness he, from evidence of his books, already felt as a innate life condition. That he also chose with his wife to adopt two black daughters to raise in his brownstone alongside their two white sons is a fact that still stirs me in its strangeness and beauty. I remember thinking even as a teenager that L.J. had made his home a kind of allegory of the neighborhood as a whole, perhaps partly in order that he might refuse to stand above or apart from it. Then again, with characteristic dryness (unforgivable in the eyes of some local parents), L.J. once awarded a friend of mine and Jeremy’s the Dickensian nickname “Muggable Tim,” and recommended we avoid walking the streets with him. When after thirty-odd years of personal shame at such stuff I finally managed to open my mouth in The Fortress of Solitude, I had L.J. to thank.

  L.J.’s novels, like those of Berger and Webb—as well as those of Bruce Jay Friedman and a few other contemporaries—could be fitted into the uncomfortable category of the Black Humorists, an unaffiliated clan of writers who strained European existentialist angst through residual American optimism, arriving at a mordant hilarity just shy of doom. I call the category uncomfortable because nearly any writer ever associated with the label disavowed it, and while most were critical darlings (Davis was), too many bumped to the lower rungs of the mid-list (certainly Davis did). If a concocted literary “movement” doesn’t sell books, what good is it? In any event, most of these writers could be called sons of Nathanael West, but unlike West, giddily free of the formal pressure of modernist aesthetics. In L.J.’s case, he appears to have tempered his West with a jigger of West’s brother-in-law, S.J. Perelman, or even of P.G. Wodehouse. “I like slapstick,” L.J. recently told me, as if guiltlessly confessing a murder.

  L.J.’s family home also gave evidence of a fanatical interest in world history, which had been Davis’s major at Stanford. He and Jeremy shared a fondness for antique lead toy soldiers, John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, scrupulously realistic board-game re-creations of European wars, and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser. Born in Seattle but raised in Idaho, L.J. explained in a typically caustic autobiographical statement (written for the jacket of his first novel, Whence All But He Had Fled):

  There is something about Boise, its isolation and its inbreeding and its density, that fosters a specialized kind of hatred of parent for child and child for parent. I think the West, the concept of the heroic West, has a great deal to do with it. The pioneers are closer than they are in other places...It has something to do with the great good place found. The second generation agrees almost by default with the first, and the third can think of nothing but going away. Going away is not easy. Its goal out there is specific: San Francisco, and San Francisco is 642 miles away.

  The context of American history, its grand themes of Manifest Destiny and Manifest Disappointment, are terrifically relevant to A Meaningful Life, the most pointed and severe of L.J.’s novels of Brooklyn. It is precisely this undertow of pioneer failure that gives the book its oxygen and reach, and which make it undismissable,
more than just a brilliant complaint or comic-existentialist howl in the night. By the description of his hero Lowell Lake’s failing attempt to pen a novel of—surprise!—“the founding and settlement of Boise, Idaho,” and by various other nearly subliminal keynotes (Lake suffers his premarital jitters at Donner Pass), we come to see Lake’s disastrous reverse-pilgrimage into Brooklyn, the easy destruction of his tissue-paper WASP idealizations upon immersion in the racial boiling pot of the inner city, in terms of an American incapacity or unwillingness to meet the true implications of its founding promises, made to itself and to the future. Every arrival aimed at some golden San Francisco of the mind falls leadenly short, landing in a Boise of regret and loathing. In this, Davis’s America opens unexpectedly into Kafka’s unattainable Castle, and the Zeno’s paradox hopes of breaching its doors.

  “Do you realize that I’m the first member of my family to cross this thing in a hundred years?” said Lowell as they bridged the Mississippi at Saint Louis. His emotions were strange and sinking, but not precise enough to put a name to.

  “Big deal,” said his wife.

  They came to New York at night, hurtling through a hellish New Jersey landscape the likes of which Lowell had never dreamed existed, a chaos of roadways and exits, none of which made any sense, surrounded by smoke and flashes and dark hulking masses and pillars of real fire a thousand feet high, enveloped in a stench like dog’s breath and dead goldfish.

  In Davis’s helpless vision, West collapses into East, the American future into the bloodstained European colonial past. Plus the contractor you hired just wrenched out and demolished the irreplaceable Carrara marble mantelpiece, without asking.

  —JONATHAN LETHEM

  A Meaningful Life

  FOR JUDITH

  “This is the place. Drive on.”

  —BRIGHAM YOUNG

  “Brigham, Brigham Young,

  It's a miracle he survived,

  With his roaring rams,

  And pretty little lambs

  And his five and forty wives.”

  —OLD IDAHO FOLK SONG

  1

  Lowell Lake was a tall man, rather thin, with thin sandy hair and a distant, preoccupied though amiable disposition, as though the world did not reach him as it reaches other men and all the voices around him were pleasant but very faint. His attention was liable to wander off at any time and he was always asking people to repeat things. He gave the impression that people bored him, although not in a bad way: actually, they seemed to lull him. He was frequently discovered half-asleep at his desk, gazing vacantly out the nearest window.

  One morning not long after his thirtieth birthday, Lowell woke up with the sudden realization that his job was not temporary. It was as though a fiery angel had visited him in his sleep with a message of doom, and he leaped from bed in a state bordering on panic, staring wildly about him. His job wasn’t temporary and things weren’t going to get any better—not that they were going to get any worse, barring some unforeseen catastrophe like atomic warfare or mental illness, but they weren’t going to get any better. That was the whole point. He’d found his level, and here he was, on it. He was the managing editor of a second-rate plumbing-trade weekly, a job he did adequately if not with much snap. It was, he realized with a dull kind of shock, just the sort of job for a man like him. Someday he might rise to the editorship, either of the plumbing-trade monthly or of something exactly like it. Big deal. But it was all he was good for, and he was stuck with it.

  “What did you say?” asked his wife sleepily, rolling over in bed and peering at him from under her hand.

  Lowell wasn’t aware that he’d said anything.

  “I thought you said something,” she muttered. She yawned. “Maybe you were dreaming or something. It sounded like a groan.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Lowell. “I was just, um, stretching.” He stretched and groaned elaborately, demonstrating. “Like that,” he said. “That must have been what you heard.”

  “Mum,” she said. “Come back to bed and wait for the alarm.”

  Normally Lowell stayed in bed for as long as he could, fighting wakefulness and never totally giving up. Sometimes on weekends he stayed in bed until noon and then dragged himself heavily around the apartment until it was time to go to sleep again. This morning he looked at his bed with fear and loathing.

  “I’m too awake for that,” he said. His wife rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Lowell dressed furiously. He wanted to be out of the room before the alarm rang and he had to watch his wife hoist on her girdle and buckle on her bra. Usually he was half-asleep when this happened, and he didn’t think he could stand it, somehow, awake. Tucking in his shirt with desperate haste, he raced down the hall to the bathroom, first making an inaccurate feint in the direction of the kitchen. The apartment was constructed around a narrow, wormlike central hall, and although he’d lived there for three years, Lowell had never gotten the hang of it.

  Peeing, then shaving with considerable speed and indifferent accuracy, he trotted down the hall to the kitchen (having first taken a step toward the living room) just as the alarm clock went off. It was a hateful sound. In a moment it stopped, and he heard his wife beating the pillow where his head should have been.

  “Lowell?” she called, not too confidently. “Dear?”

  “In the kitchen,” Lowell said. “Making coffee.”

  “Oh,” she said. There was a pause. “Oh, yes, I remember. You got up.”

  “That’s right,” said Lowell. “I got up.” He held his hand in front of his face and watched the fingers tremble. He giggled nervously, then stopped himself.

  “Something’s the matter with you this morning,” said his wife as they sat down to their instant coffee and frozen coffee cake. They were not great breakfast people. “You look kind of funny. Was it something in the news?”

  “Thirty,” said Lowell before he thought. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “no, there’s nothing the matter. What makes you think something’s the matter? I just woke up early, that’s all. Is there something wrong with waking up early?”

  “Forget I said anything,” said his wife. They put on their coats and went down to the subway together. At 42nd Street his wife got off the train and transferred to the shuttle, which took her to the place where she punched computer keys, or whatever she did over there. Lowell continued downtown, wearing a tweed cap. He stared bleakly at his dim, jostled reflection in the window. It was a silly tweed cap.

  “What in God’s name is the matter with you this morning?” demanded his boss, a man named Crawford. As a youth, Crawford had developed a fixation about Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet, which had molded his character and determined the course his life was to take. He looked back on those days with nostalgia and regret, but he would have cut out his tongue before admitting that his life had been shaped by a minor character in a child’s radio serial, the comic-book counterpart not having affected him in the least, but there was no getting around it. Most of the time he managed not to think about it, but every once in a while awareness would suddenly strike him and he would feel like a supreme ass. “Pay attention, Lake!” he barked. “I said, what’s the matter with you?”

  “I heard you,” said Lowell, who had been doing random violence to the papers on his desk, picking up one and throwing it away, scribbling a note on the margin of another, driven by a fierce but aimless need. “Keep your shirt on,” he snapped.

  Crawford gave a startled little hop and looked at Lowell with a face on which fear was close to the surface. A modest man, not much older than Lowell, Crawford lived in constant terror that one day his job would be snatched from him by a smart subordinate. He firmly believed that an office boy with pluck and stamina could rise to be editor, and he was accordingly careful to select his office personnel for cowardice and lethargy. In fact, he’d never had a spot of trouble with office boys, but he’d once been forced to make life so miserable for a junior copy editor that the man h
ad finally quit, a little hysterically. The somnolent Lowell Lake was just his sort of man, and Crawford had seen to it that he rose swiftly through the ranks to a position where he served as a buffer against any threat from below. The road to the editorship lay through the managing editorship, and even if they got Lowell, it would still be possible for Crawford to pick them off before they were able to gather for another spring. Under these circumstances, Lowell’s sudden display of unprecedented energy was alarming indeed, and Crawford scarcely knew how to deal with it. It contradicted nature and defied experience and confirmed his darkest and most secret fears that someday they would contrive to get him no matter what he did to stop them.

  “Any idiot could do this kind of work,” Lowell snarled, regarding a piece of paper as though some outrageous insult were written upon it. He initialed it viciously, put it in his Out basket, and picked up another. “Any idiot,” he repeated.

  “Now, see here, Lake,” began Crawford hesitantly.

  “Do you realize that I’ve never fixed a pipe in my life?” Lowell raged. “What do I know about plumbing? I’ll tell you what I know about plumbing. I don’t know shit about plumbing.”

  “Has everybody around here gone stark staring mad?” bellowed Crawford in desperate mimicry of his hero. He stuck the cold stump of a cigar in his mouth and stormed into his office, braying the name of the senior copy editor, who promptly appeared, only to be told to go soak his head.

  “I’ve got it figured out,” Lowell told his wife that night as they prepared supper together. Lowell was cutting up the vegetables and his wife was cutting up the meat. “I know what my problem is. I’m not having a meaningful life. There you have it in a nutshell.”

  “I knew there was something the matter with you this morning,” said his wife.