The Abyss of Human Illusion Read online

  THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION

  Other Books by Gilbert Sorrentino

  POETRY

  The Darkness Surrounds Us

  Black and White

  The Perfect Fiction

  Corrosive Sublimate

  A Dozen Oranges

  Sulpiciae Elegidia: Elegiacs of Sulpicia

  White Sail

  The Orangery

  Selected Poems 1958-1980

  New and Selected Poems 1958-1998

  FICTION

  The Sky Changes

  Steelwork Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

  Splendide-Hôtel

  Flawless Play Restored: The Masque of Fungo

  Mulligan Stew

  Aberration of Starlight

  Crystal Vision

  Blue Pastoral

  Odd Number

  A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles

  Rose Theatre

  Misterioso

  Under the Shadow

  Red the Fiend

  Pack of Lies

  Gold Fools

  Little Casino

  The Moon in Its Flight

  Lunar Follies

  A Strange Commonplace

  ESSAYS

  Something Said

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography by William McPheron

  COPYRIGHT © 2009 by the Estate of Gilbert Sorrentino

  COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Strand Koutsky

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Vivian Ortiz

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

  Sorrentino, Gilbert.

  The abyss of human illusion/Gilbert Sorrentino.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56689-233-9 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-56689-286-5 (ebook)

  1. City and town life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  2. Neighborhood—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 1. Title.

  ps3569.07a74 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2009028064

  Sections of this book previously appeared in

  Golden Handcuffs Review and The Brooklyn Rail.

  THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION

  Contents

  Preface

  The Abyss of Human Illusion

  Commentaries

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  The Abyss of Human Illusion was begun by my father in October 2003, and a first draft was mostly complete when he was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2005. Both the disease and its treatment rapidly incapacitated him, and he had little physical or intellectual energy available to sit at his desk and work. Despite this, he did work throughout his final months to complete what he referred to matter-of-factly as “my last book,” finishing it a few weeks before his death in May 2006. At the time, he provided me with a typescript, heavily corrected and with marginal notations, consisting of the main sections of the novel, as well as a composition notebook in which he’d drafted in longhand the brief glosses on these sections, which together comprise the book in its entirety.

  In preparing the manuscript for publication, I encountered one immediate problem. As his strength faded, my father’s handwriting (somewhat difficult to read under the best of circumstances) deteriorated to the point of near illegibility. Determining his intentions was made more difficult by his habitually precise, but not necessarily consistent or orthodox, approach to punctuation, typography, and so forth—the minutiae most commonly in question. Less frequently, although more problematically, I came across indecipherable words and phrases. Often these became clear in context, or were repeated elsewhere more legibly, and thus were easily transcribed. In some instances, though, I have taken an educated guess, drawing on my familiarity with my father’s work and verbal mannerisms. I found these to be relatively simple decisions, although doubtless there are some presumptuous flaws in my leaps of conjecture.

  My father never made the switch to word processing, and habitually made handwritten revisions and alterations to his work only periodically and at discrete stages in the process—the now-common practice, familiar to writers of my generation, of intermittent, even fitful, revision and the subsequently frequent creation of wholly updated “documents” was unknown to him. In other words, I was working with what amounted to a corrected first draft, and in places the absence of the author from several stages of composition could be felt. While some sections called for only minor modifications—the correction of obvious errors and unintentional inconsistencies, for example—others raised the issue of their suitability for inclusion. In the end, I decided to ready the manuscript in its entirety for publication, for reasons that readers, and certainly writers, may find interesting.

  For much of his career, my father delighted in writing within formal constraints (a practice that gave rise to what may be his defining remark, “Form not only determines content, but form invents content.”). Some of the forms he devised allowed tremendous opportunity for play, in other cases the approach demanded a rigorous observance of prescribed rules and procedures. Correspondingly, while sometimes the formal conceits in his novels are obvious or easily grasped (the algorithmic mechanism of Aberration of Starlight; the use of the Tarot deck in Crystal Vision), many of his later books offer a less apparent and/or more indeterminate structure, and it is among this latter group that The Abyss of Human Illusion belongs. Though one aspect of its structure is evident even from a cursory look at the book (Its fifty sections grow incrementally longer; while the first is around 130 words, the last is around 1,300), its other formal ambitions remain unclear (to me).

  Add to this the fact that, as is often the case with my father’s work, there is a dense measure of intertextuality present in the book—sections of the book refer, or seem to refer, to one another, to my father’s other books, to episodes depicted in those other books, and to stories and poems by others (Section XVI, for instance, is a loose reinterpretation of Rimbaud’s early poem, “Winter Dream.”). Perhaps not-so-paradoxically, the technical goals my father set only rarely trumped his belief—his faith, even—in serendipity, accident, in the aesthetically justified deviation from constraint that the OuLiPo named the clinamen; in standing back and seeing for himself whether a thing was finished to his satisfaction. Ultimately, the correct artistic balance was something my father determined not by having fully executed a schematic requirement, but, for better or worse, in the scale of his hand.

  Accordingly, while I have made surgical excisions and interpolative changes as described above, and while I have, on occasion, cut sentences, phrases, and even paragraphs where it seemed to me that my father abruptly galloped off on one of the well-lathered hobbyhorses he rode over the years, or bore down on something more heavily than I believed his finely calibrated sense of irony and sarcasm would have allowed to stand, I have gone no further in “editing” this book. The scale of my own hand, though competent and discerning, is not that of his, and that alone is enough to stop me. Perhaps in time, wh
en Sorrentino scholarship is not the exclusive pursuit of devoted sons and other deviants, a definitive edition of The Abyss of Human Illusion will appear, and I can only hope that the patient soul who labors over it will find my judgments essentially sound.

  None of this is intended to suggest that this is an unfinished volume, intended only for scholars and completists. My father, who never had a problem burying work that dissatisfied him, made quite clear his intention and desire that this book be published. And it should be noted that, despite his absence from his customary role in its preparation, it is, in the end, a book to which he literally brought the fullest measure of his energy and ability.

  —Christopher Sorrentino

  He sat and stared at the sea, which appeared all surface and twinkle, far shallower than the spirit of man. It was the abyss of human illusion that

  was the real, the tideless deep.

  —HENRY JAMES

  — I —

  Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its paper wrapper still on. All are in repose, in their absolute thingness, under the overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen. They may or they should, they must, really, reveal the meaning of this silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t. There is no meaning. These things will evoke nothing.

  In years to come, almost three-quarters of a century, they still evoke nothing. Orange, green, incandescent glare. Silence and loss. Nothing. There might be a boy of four at the table. He is sitting very straight and is possibly waiting for someone.

  — II —

  “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?,” the Shadow asks, and answers himself, “The Shadow knows.” The Shadow knows everything. “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay.” The soft and eerie voice states these opinions as fact. As truth. As the law. Then the Shadow begins to laugh, a terrible, monstrous, haunting laugh, and then steps softly out of the Philco floor-model radio, amazingly and terrifyingly out of the little orangeglowing arc of the dial.

  He stands in his black cloak and black slouch hat, his face covered save for his vengeful, burning, hellish-black eyes. The boy turns pale and his heart stops beating for a moment. “The Shadow knows,” the phantom says, and begins, again, mercilessly, his unearthly laughter, laughter that his dead grandmother would laugh, were she able.

  — III —

  He had blundered through his life. He often thought of all the people he had known: those he had touched briefly, those he had loved or hated, those whose names or faces he clearly remembered, their voices. He considered how these people had not managed to ease or simplify his life, his way through life, perhaps, was the more accurate phrase, save for a moment here or there. But what had he expected, what had he wanted? It was, he knew, certain, that had he not known, in any way, all the people he had known, but had, instead, known as many wholly different people, his life, such as it was, would have been the same in its vast panoply of error and carelessness. He had indeed blundered through his life, as he would have blundered through any life given him. Had he been born anywhere at all—he knows this—he’d still be standing at a dark window, alone, wondering who, through the years, precisely he was. “Or who I am.” It was going to snow again.

  — IV —

  Three windows look out on a cold, sunless street. A toy metal zeppelin, silvery in color, with a rigid vertical fin, rests on the floor on two bright red wheels. There are people in the room, there is laughter and conversation, a Christmas tree in the corner, situated so as to be seen from the street, projects its insistent multicolored lights into the room. A two-year-old boy sits on the zeppelin so as to ride it, to push it with his feet across the floor to where his mother sits with a highball, talking to another woman. The boy slides backwards on the zeppelin and feels a sharp pain as his buttocks strike the sharp fin. Blood seeps through his short pants and he begins to cry, holding his hands against the hurt. The blood runs down the boy’s legs and into his socks.

  His father jumps up from his place on the couch where he has been talking, quarreling, really, with his father-in-law, his highball spilling on his trousers. He steps toward the boy, his arms thrust out. His face is white.

  — V —

  The party was in a very dark apartment. It wasn’t much of a party. There might have been twenty people there, or many more. There was a drone of what seemed to be conversation. There seemed too a drone of music coming from the walls. Sam was looking for his wife. She had gone into a little room off the living room with some people whom she apparently knew. Sam didn’t know them. He knew one of them. He left the apartment and went down the stairs to the ground floor. His wife was at that party, he remembered. In the kitchen. He knew her friends. Or one of them. The door to the apartment was open. The apartment was just as dark as the other one. He went upstairs and got his coat. The cab was waiting right in front of the building. Somebody called down the stairs to say that it was only Saturday. His wife was sitting in a leather armchair. She was smoking a cigarette. Her coat was across her lap. He knew she wanted to leave. This woman was not his wife. She didn’t look like his wife. She was wearing his wife’s clothes. There were six people sitting on the floor in front of the woman. Their backs were to her. They looked at him with amusement. His wife began to emit a low drone. She wasn’t his wife but he knew she was.

  — VI —

  Most of his friends were dead or far away, staggering into the apathy and complaint of old age. He was, that is, virtually alone, his wife dead for many years, his children distantly attentive, formally so, but no more than that. When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that his old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of—what?—life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.

  He didn’t know, or knew but refused to believe, that the celebrations and joys, the razzmatazz, so to speak, of his youth and young manhood, were perhaps perversely, yet precisely, what had brought him to this disquiet, this discomfort, this hidden and unacknowledged longing for oblivion. Had his youth been another sort of youth…. But it had not been, it had been his and his alone, and its clichés and blunders had led, almost sweetly, to the clichés and blunders of his senescence. Time to go and leave the world to the young, happily wallowing in the mess he’d left as a small part of their general inheritance.

  — VII —

  The girls are on the beach at about three o’clock on a sunny but cool July afternoon. Carol and Marsha and Sheila. Berta and Minna, Nina and Ellie, Bea and Diana and Natalie, Sydelle, Gloria, Margie, Marianne, and Lona. They are all, this summer, in love, first love. They look wonderful, they look pretty; they’re beautiful. Young and bronze and almost perfect in their absolute lack of experience, their innocence that they think of as secret, unique knowledge. They think that they have lived, but life is waiting for them just beyond the beach, just past this particular summer, life with its loss and disillusion and tears, its disease and pain and death. They are beautiful and fading into oblivion.

  He stands in the shade of a birch tree on the little island separated from the beach by a shallow and fast-moving rill of water, and he looks at the girls in their varied glamour: he sees them. He sees, too, the girl with whom he is in love in this disappearing summer, and who is in love with him. He will not say her name; he has his reasons, demented though they may be: he has his reasons. She, of course, is the most beautiful of all the girls and will always be so, he mistakenly thinks.

  — VIII —

  He gets up at 6:00 every morning and turns on the radio, so that he can listen to the news, concerning which, he cares nothing. He makes ins
tant coffee and toasts a store-brand English muffin, which he slathers with peanut butter, eats and then lights a cigarette, one of the five or six he smokes every day, despite his doctor’s warnings about the early signs of emphysema. After he clears the table and washes his few dishes, he goes into the living room, sits in his easy chair, and waits. He waits for news that the world will be ending by noon, that the president has fallen off a horse and broken his neck, that the mighty of the earth have all been vaporized. He waits to hear that Jesus has returned and has been married in Las Vegas. He waits, the radio blathering and droning, on and on.

  His wife is dead, his children estranged, all his friends dead, too, or dying, or living in grim sunny places without sidewalks far away. Far away from what? he sometimes laughs, remembering the old story of the death camp survivor. He waits for everything to what? To get tired, to disappear, waits for all the filth to disappear, every mean fucking cold-eyed bastard to disappear, to be obliterated along with their victims, along with the dogs and cats and whales and showgirls, along with all the mothers and sisters and priests, along with all the money, the computers, the radios and the television sets, the news, the news, the news. BOOM.

  — IX —

  Each day, he’d sit at the kitchen table looking out the sliding glass door at the little patio that he had slowly grown to hate, he had no idea why. He’d sit and drink coffee and smoke and wait for the phone to ring with someone, anyone on the line to give him some news, good or bad or meaningless, it didn’t matter. But the phone rarely rang, and when it did, it presented a message so empty, so anonymous, that it was merely a form of quiet noise.