He wasn’t comfortable, but he guessed he was happy enough where he was.
Die Trying, 1998
Lee knew what happiness sounded like: Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ – the aural equivalent of reading Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ (New York Times). ‘It’s the deftest illustration I know of what it is to be human, to be happy, to have loved, to have been loved, to have known ecstasy. If you listen to it and get it, you know that the whole long strange trip has been worth it.’
Lee got it. He had a lovely daughter and a great (if often long-distance) relationship with his wife. The job had gone well and he had enough money for everything they needed, or wanted. It was all just about as good as it could be, or at least very hard to imagine how any of it could possibly be better.
He knew what it was to be human.
But, he said in January 2019, he would never describe himself as happy.
Much less contented. He hated ‘contented’. Contented was too complacent. Too smug. Too satisfied. He would never be satisfied. He was ‘a completely normal person in every possible way’, ‘a completely normal middlebrow person’, but he could not, would not settle for satisfied. Satisfied had about it the whiff of mediocrity. ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘if there’s one thing I hate it’s mediocrity.’
It was never a charge that would be levelled at Reacher. He wasn’t ‘normal’, either. ‘You’re a hard man,’ Alice says in Echo Burning.
‘I think I’m a realistic man,’ he said. ‘And a decent enough guy, all told.’
‘You may find normal people don’t agree.’
He nodded.
‘A lot of you don’t,’ he said.
Reacher was willing to respect ‘normal’. ‘Open up the encyclopaedia to N for normal American family and you’re going to see a picture of the Hobies, all three of them, staring right out at you,’ he says of (the real, missing-in-action) Victor Hobie and his distraught parents. But not axiomatically or unthinkingly. Within the conventions of the genre it was always liable to be sinister:
Chester Stone’s day started out in the normal way. He drove to work at the usual time. The Benz was as soothing as ever. The sun was shining, like it should be in June. The drive into the city was normal. Normal traffic, no more, no less. The usual rose vendors and paper sellers in the toll plazas. The slackening congestion down the length of Manhattan, proving he’d timed it just right, like he usually did. He parked in his normal leased slot under his building and rode the elevator up to his offices. Then his day stopped being normal. (Tripwire)
Normal was the perfect camouflage for evil.
Reacher was wary of ‘satisfaction’ too. It was reasonable to feel satisfied after a trip to the diner, or after sex. After sex he might even feel briefly ‘contented’. But these are not feelings he indulges for long.
Nine times out of ten satisfaction is expressed by the wrong people over the wrong things. Which makes it dangerous. Borken and Hook Hobie and Lamarr are all satisfied. But not for long. Not once Reacher shows up.
When were you happiest? the New Statesman asked in 2017. And because Lee had an answer to everything, because by then his job consisted mostly in answering questions, he said:
Manjack Cay in the Bahamas, February 1993. We were broke, but my wife assembled offers and we had a holiday. The hotel had boats you could borrow to visit uninhabited islands. I remember standing on one and thinking how absurd it would have been to predict ever being there.
This Swallows and Amazons moment dates from a year and a half before he started writing Killing Floor. He was Jim Grant, not Lee Child; television technician, not multimillion-selling global superstar. Like the Beatles said, money can’t buy you love.
Happy is OK, so long as you don’t feel entitled to it or make a big deal of it.
‘I’m always happy,’ Reacher tells Jodie. ‘Always was, always will be.’
It was the same with Lee. I’m always well. I’m never ill. I’m always hungry. He could deflect a cold just by facing it down; he was hungry however much he did or didn’t eat. Conditions that were temporary, things that were supposed to go up and down on the graph, for him were steady states: he wasn’t subject to them, he’d chosen them. This was who and what he was. Maybe he could add that to his business card: Lee Child: Smoker and Hungry Man.
Happy doing what? Jodie asks. Nothing much, Reacher says.
I don’t go round looking for involvement. […] I was happy, living quiet down there.
‘There’ was Key West, ‘way farther south than most of the Bahamas’. Jim and Jane and Ruth had holidayed there in October 1996, so Ruth could visit Universal Studios in nearby Orlando, just before Lee put the finishing touches to Die Trying and started on Tripwire.
It isn’t the jumping-up-and-down happiness Jodie experiences when she makes partner in the law firm. It’s a toned-down stripped-back muted happiness, in the style of his prose or his manner of dress, the kind of sober not-unhappiness that is all a sane man might rationally accept.
The only time Reacher’s happiness was seriously threatened was when Jodie’s father left him a house and car and garden.
Now his nose was pressed right up against the border fence. He could see normality waiting for him on the other side. Suddenly it seemed insane to turn back and hike the impossible distance in the other direction. That would turn drifting into a conscious choice, and conscious choice would turn drifting into something else completely. The whole point of drifting was happy passive acceptance of no alternatives. Having alternatives ruined it.
Reacher is an absurdist hero. There is no B to get to, and therefore dwell in, and to pretend otherwise would be to live a lie. Dambuster Mickey Martin was his boyhood hero; Richard Dawkins – ‘waging a bitter battle of a different sort’ (New Statesman) – was the intellectual equivalent.
Lee said to me: ‘I don’t see how a thinking person can look out at the world and be happy.’
He recalled a boy from King Edward’s: a prodigy, but restless and angst-ridden with it. Around the time he left school he was involved in a traffic accident in which a number of passengers were killed, and had sustained severe brain trauma. When Jim saw him at a party some months later he was fully functioning, which was a miracle, but had been transformed from ‘twitchy genius’ into ‘happy fool’. Sometimes – he knew it was a terrible thing to say but said it anyway because it was true – Lee had fantasised about being that guy.
For a guy whose brain was firing on all cylinders, happiness was not an appropriate response to being alive. This was not merely an existential problem, but a social one too. Happiness was not a personal good. It depended not simply on things being right for me; they had to be right for others too. Not just my family and friends, my tribe, my race or my species, but dogs and horses and roosters, trees and forests and oceans too, for every living thing. The prospects weren’t great.
Lee had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring back in the sixties and ever since had seen climate catastrophe as the elephant in the room.
He couldn’t solve the world’s problems. Nor could Reacher. The happiness he offered was only going to last the length of the World Series at best, then the reader was on her own again, like Roscoe or Turner or Chang. If he was lucky – wasn’t he always? – then reading one of his books might be like watching a football match or a play in the theatre: ninety minutes on the clock, maybe even one hundred and twenty and penalties, but timeless in intensity. Eventually the lights would come up and the crowd would stream out of the stadium and the millions of readers close up their Reacher books, but for the duration all our fears would fall away. If he could work that magic, liberate each of us from the burden of our biographies, then yes, he would die lonely, but happy, too.
Lee didn’t entirely like being a big man. There wasn’t much he could do about his height, and he recognised it as one of his immense ‘structural’ advantages, but he didn’t want to big himself up any further. Being big was a lie, an illusion. It might trick you into believing you were important, the centre of your own universe. He had always been thin and was getting thinner (‘old age and loss of muscle mass, mainly’) but he didn’t mind that. Losing weight was OK. What he hated was putting it on. ‘A normal person puts on a pound and they don’t even notice, but I feel uncomfortably bulky around the middle.’ It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. ‘I feel it here,’ he’d said the year before, pinching his hip like a nineties supermodel or prima ballerina.
His big brother Richard had always had ‘what now would be called an eating disorder. He looks like a famine victim.’ If you said let’s get food it was like ‘asking him to stick needles in his eyes’. Whereas James had eaten everything. He wasn’t fussy. Like his father said, in this respect at least, he’d been a success from the word go. But the older he got the less he ate. Thanks to Audrey and the poverty of post-war British cuisine (in 1957 spaghetti was considered an exotic delicacy) his ‘gratification pathways’ had been set in a different direction (caffeine, nicotine, weed) before he ever discovered that food could be a form of pleasure.
He conscientiously sought out cakes and muffins with real butter, causing bemusement when he strayed into Whole Foods. Whenever we met at a diner he would order big and enthusiastically: silver-dollar pancakes with smoked bacon and two eggs over easy on the side. But he only ever ate half of it. Once when he pushed his plate aside I nudged it back towards him saying (like the mother I was): You should eat more. He nudged it away again, with a slight shake of the head.
He never left any strawberry milkshake though. ‘I’m thinking of investigating those meal-replacement drinks,’ he said once. It would take the work out of having to feed himself, like streamlining his wardrobe took the worry out of choosing which outfit to wear. But they would have to be pink.
‘I hate eating,’ he said at Bristol CrimeFest in 2018. ‘I actively like the sensation of feeling hungry.’
‘Consume’ was a verb he used mostly of books.
He weighed himself every day. ‘Not because I’m worried, just because I like numbers.’ But it was the opposite of book sales. These were numbers he didn’t like to go up. Six foot four and sixty-four, he was shocked one morning to weigh in at 138 pounds, rather than 135. (Reacher was six foot five and 250.) If he wasn’t careful he’d be back up to 10 stone (140 pounds), which was what he weighed when he first met Jane.
One way he kept the weight down was by writing lean and hungry. It was like he was transferring all that muscle mass to his alter ego, enacting Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray in reverse.
There were three main reasons Lee would never see a doctor. (Reacher won’t either, just kneads his broken nose into shape and pinches it together with duct tape.) First, they would tell him to give up smoking (and put on weight, probably). Second, he would never do anything they told him to do, because it would be ‘too boring’. And third: ‘I don’t share this obsession with longevity, with staying alive at all costs.’
There was no afterlife. We were all condemned by the cosmos. The physical deterioration of cells and neurones would get us all in the end. It was a case of when, not if. And frankly, in the great scheme of things, if you zoomed out and took the long view – as any thinking person must – ‘when’ didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Each of us was no more than a speck, always already on the point of melting into thin air. ‘Who in their right minds could think the presence of one single human being makes any difference either way?’ This was true on both the macro and the micro scale, and he counted on those who loved him to grasp this nettle with both hands when his own infinitesimal spark of light snuffed out or a stiff wind blew him away.
He wasn’t a cynic, just a realist. By keeping his weight to the minimum, by whittling himself down to the bone, he was simply facing facts. He was looking destiny straight in the eye. We are such stuff / as dreams are made on; and our little life / is rounded with a sleep.
Are we all doomed, the New Statesman asked?
Of course we are. Evolutionary history shows we’re a vicious bunch, clever but not clever enough. We’ll be done soon, and the planet will recover. Call it fifty thousand years, from the invention of language to extinction. A tiny blip.
Perhaps there would be a tree on the cloverleaf, where he could shelter from the sun or the rain. But either way there was nothing to be done. So long as he had a good book to read, Lee Child was happy to wait for a lift out of town.