I WAS LOST. FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS I HAD DREAMED A LONG and private dream about Pittsburgh and the mysteries of summertime, but now, as if by means of some pulp-madman ray gun, the solitary dream had escaped my head. Recently, by the strange alchemy of a judge’s words acting upon our own stubborn refusal to swerve at the last minute (how poignant and sweet, already, was the memory of the night on which we briefly decided to call the thing off!), my new wife and I had avowed our poor judgment under the gaze of our loved ones and the state of Washington, in a ceremony that itself unfolded with the mistaken inexorableness of a dream. Now, a few days later, our honeymoon bed in a hotel in Venice was a place of operatic vastation and woe. I was twenty-four, rootless, feckless, homeless, and mapless; a child of divorce; raised in the broken Utopias of the 1970s and Columbia, Maryland. I stood in a narrow ruga somewhere in the Cannaregio, solo, abbandonato, perduto, briefly and prefiguratively separated from my bride (we would separate in earnest, for the first time, later that fall), baffled, literally not knowing which way to turn.
That was when I saw the mirage. It hovered, small, golden, rectangular, in a shop window, adorned, in modest serif type, with a question that felt inexplicably pertinent at that moment: What Is Post-Modernism?
I went into the bookshop and asked to have a look at the book. I flipped through its pages as if searching for a clue, a way home, a cool drink for a thirsty soul. The first thing that caught my eye seemed, in the way of all mirages, to promise all that. It was a reproduction of a watercolor painting by Leon Krier, an architect famed for his unrealized visions of ideal cities, depicting a place that might have been Washington, D.C., or Washington as it might have been, if the original baroque urban plan, as devised by Pierre L’Enfant, had been realized. It offered a bird’s or rather aeronaut’s view of that imaginary city, placing the spectator above and slightly to the right of an old-fashioned propeller plane whose wing was dipped in playful farewell, implying that this more perfect capital was receding beneath one as one left it behind. The colors—green boulevards, blue tidal basin, white monuments—were at once intense and wistful, as if the picture were not even a view at all but a recollection: the memory of a place that never was.
I was born in Washington, and raised in the “planned community” of Columbia, Maryland, a city that, like my birthplace, had first existed as a prediction, a grandiose diagram of itself when at last perfected. Washington’s plan and Columbia’s were always linked in my mind, not only by their primal nature as idealized, impossible map-selves but also by the mythic presence throughout my childhood of the enigmatic black astronomer, inventor, and surveyor Benjamin Banneker, who lived somewhere in the vicinity of Columbia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who, according to legend, had reconstructed L’Enfant’s drawings from memory after the intemperate Frenchman stormed off the job in a Frenchman-like huff. As with Washington, D.C., however—and like the doomed novel that now, in that Venetian bookstore, began to kindle in my mind—Columbia was never to know completion, at least in the form its original planners so fervently imagined. Columbia was a dream, too; a Great Society, “Kumbaya” dream of racial equality and ecumenical coexistence, open space and open classrooms, and I dreamed it for eleven years. But Columbia had fallen short of its projections, my parents had divorced, and we all abandoned Columbia, for California or the decidedly non-Kumbaya city of Pittsburgh. Yet it was not until I saw that little painting by Leon Krier on page 20 of What Is Post-Modernism?, and caught a half-remembered glimpse of a never-was city, that I understood, truly felt, the loss of home: that endless, ongoing sense of longing for a place that never quite came into being, which is the answer, finally, to the question posed by the title of Charles Jencks’s book.
When I returned home from that honeymoon trip I did some research into the work of Leon Krier, and began to imagine writing a novel about a grieving or at least poetically sad young man who apprenticed himself to a visionary, postmodern architect out of a longing for some vanished home or notion of home. That was all I began with. Over the course of the next half decade I wrote fifteen hundred pages and incorporated into the plot and fabric of the novel everything from messianic Zionism to French cuisine to radical environmental activism. And baseball. Oh, and Japanese monster movies. But when at last I abandoned work on the damn thing, stepping out on it to begin what became Wonder Boys, that was still, in some way, all that I had: the lost kid and the illusory vision of home. If only, I have since often thought, I could have found some way of being truer, of hewing closer, to that kid and that longing—in fewer than, say, four hundred pages. If only I possessed whatever was required to finish that book, to redeem that lost promise, to finish what I had begun. If only I could have found, to paraphrase Beckett, a better way to fail.
Because I believe in failure; only failure rings true. Success is an aberration, a random instance devoid of meaning. The extraction from my head of the summertime Pittsburgh novel by the dream-thieving ray of the New York Publishing Entity, and its subsequent “successful” publication, taught me nothing useful about the world, nothing (apart from some fresh lessons in my own vanity) that felt remotely useful to understanding myself, that floundering, temporizing, procrastinating, rationalizing, frequently inert waster of time.
Furthermore, as with the scientist, the chef, the parent, as with anyone caught up in the practice of art—that distillation of the human enterprise, which is, at its simplest, a business of paying attention—failure instructs the writer. Every novel, in the moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written; but in the long dying fall after we have finished it (if we finish it), every novel affords us, with the generosity of a buffalo carcass affording meat, hide, bone, horn, and fat, the opportunity to measure precisely, at our leisure, the distance between it and that L’Enfant-esque dream. Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes.
And so for a long time after that novel failed I tried, as nature fitted me to do, to extract some valuable lesson, some use, from the failure of Fountain City:
This lesson was ignored in favor, and failed to stand up to the example, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and so I subsequently discarded it for:
But I had taken a sizable advance for Fountain City from the publisher of my first novel. If I abandoned the book, I worried, I might have to repay that money. I might fall prey to the black arts of lawyers. On the other hand, I used to worry, sitting down to try to render less vague my protagonist or less germane my ignorance of the practice of architecture, what if the only reason that I daily persevered, in spite of my regular massage sessions under the Hand of Dread, was fear, mere financial panic? How could such a motive possibly be the healthy basis for artistic creation? Clearly, therefore, when Fountain City failed, the lesson of that failure was:
Just before I finally gave up the effort to find the lesson in the disaster of Fountain City, to see in it what Richard Sennett, in his lovely study The Craftsman, calls a “salutary failure,” I produced the annotations that follow this preface. After an absence of several years, I dove back down to the wrecked book I had abandoned at the sea-bottom of my hard drive, to see what treasure, if any, I might hoist up. What I found, more than any salutary wisdom, was a strangely intact record of my life during the time I was writing the book, a bubble of ancient air trapped in the caulked hull of the sunken novel. Neighbors, arguments with my ex-wife, meals eaten, hostels haunted, shoes I used to have, all had made their way into the book, invisibly and unknown as such to anyone but me. I also found all kinds of bits and pieces of my childhood and life before my work on the novel began, stories and anecdotes and people and settings that, having served nobly and without complaint to feed the needs of the failed novel, receded or vanished completely from my own lived memory, until I rediscovered them, touched by the reunion, in the pages of Fountain City.
As I began to adumbrate, by means of numbered notes, this idea of a “life in the margins,” I also found myself following and uncovering traces of the mysterious life of a book, any book, the history of its birth, growth, evolution, and—in this instance—its untimely death. Believing fervently as I do that nothing succeeds like failure, I hoped to dig up, and to share, like a special commission appointed by Congress to investigate some disaster, the lessons of the wreck of Fountain City, in the hope that others might learn from, and thus receive the salutary benefit of, my mistakes. But then other, more pressing obligations intruded before I could produce annotations for more than the first four chapters, and the great brined and barnacled hulk sank back to the silence and dark, and so in that effort, too, as in so many others before and since an afternoon in Venice twenty-three years ago, when I foolishly thought I knew everything there was to know about being lost, I failed. (2010)