Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. People might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things
In late 2019, my family temporarily moved to a small apartment on the tenth floor of a building overlooking Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. The windows faced east, and the light was good. There was a gym on the top floor. At night I hit the treadmill. I could see the buildings beyond the glass, and my reflection floated against the dark so that I appeared to be running through the sky.
This was ostensibly a brief stop between more permanent housing, but our relocation hit a snag, and the world of course had other plans. In March, New York went into lockdown. The gym closed. We wore our masks, avoided sharing elevators. By the second week, the days lost definition; by the third, the weeks. The city streets bloomed with quiet.
My wife’s work and kids’ schooling went remote. During the day, everyone had a room but me. I converted a big closet into an office, angled my huge desk inside, a ship in a bottle. The ceiling bulb was adequate, but there were no vents or outlets. This would become an issue by summer, but at first the snugness suited me. I made headway on my novel, which I’d been tending for six years. A new narrative thread emerged, made of historical episodes that mingled with fiction. Each one was short, a page at most. I stacked them up, kept things lively.
In our holding area, time lost meaning. What was school, work, home? I tried to Marie Kondo the clutter. One unmarked box held my old reporter’s notebooks, Girl With Curious Hair, assorted cassettes, and a manila envelope with a familiar heft. I thought it might contain a sequence of a hundred poems I wrote and then lost, back in 1997.
I hadn’t written poetry for the better part of a decade, but for a few months that year I cranked out a few ten-to-twenty-liners daily. I didn’t type them up, let alone submit them. This was pure writing, free of ambition. As I approached the fifty-poem mark, I made it my goal to reach one hundred. I did—then stopped. The handwritten poems, rife with non sequiturs and wordplay, went into an envelope that I tucked in my office desk. Over the years, if I happened on the stash in the drawer, amid the rising jumble of clippings and doodads, I’d peruse its contents with pleasure and proceed to forget about them for a few more seasons. Then one day in 2006, I was laid off. Had I thought to rescue them before being shown the door?
In that strange apartment ten floors above Columbus, in the mortal spring of 2020, I practically drooled at the imminent recovery of my long-lost verse. Instead, I pulled from the envelope another manuscript I hadn’t seen in years: Three Tenses, my unpublished memoir.
The printout was 214 pages long. Unlike my cavalier treatment of the poems, I had dutifully entered my handwritten and typewritten text into my old desktop Mac, back when I lived alone in a small studio thirteen blocks south. However, these pages were the only legible version of the book. There was no digital trace. I had surely copied it onto a floppy disk twenty-two years ago, but even if the disk were to appear, I no longer had the hardware to view it. (My habit of emailing myself drafts was untenable in 1998, due to file size.)
In the heat of my improvised workspace, I thought of the apocryphal Confucian aphorism “Pale ink lasts longer than the strongest memory.” Pandemic isolation brought a degree of introspection to everyone but not, I wagered, like this. In a few months I would be fifty, and Three Tenses was all I could read, a prismatic self-portrait at twenty-eight. I diligently typed the whole book into my laptop, saving it to the cloud as I went.
In the Tiles
A dead author’s unseen work can cast a spell, sometimes strong enough to propel the invisible books into the marketplace. But they rarely affect the late writer’s reputation. Hemingway fans and Nabokovians skip The Garden of Eden and The Original of Laura; understood as single-novel authors, Ralph Ellison and Harper Lee aren’t judged by Juneteenth or Go Set a Watchman. The immortality of Gabriel García Márquez rests on One Hundred Years of Solitude, while the recently published Until August—which he ordered destroyed before his death in 2014—is already a footnote (despite having read at least five pieces about it, I had to look up the title just now).
In those days, perhaps, having found no earthly readers, I was writing mainly for the aliens.
Unpublished work by living authors has a simpler status, removed from the din of literary executors and divided acolytes. After all, they’re still around. They can either keep trying to place their belletristic debris, insisting it’s of a piece with their visible work, or let it tip into oblivion. I have sufficient experience with the latter, having spent much of my twenties working on two madly ambitious novels, the first of which (1996) failed to land with a publisher, while the second (1999) couldn’t even find an agent. When the gatekeepers said no, I shrugged and started anew. Over the intervening years, the thought of either manuscript made me wince. Now I see how these longer but lesser works taught me how novels were made, or at least how I might be able to make them.
Though I kept hard copies of both misbegotten books readily accessible over the years, my rare peeks saddened me, forcing me to recall the gap between ambition and execution, completion and reception. Conversely, I found I could enter Three Tenses on any page and get hooked. Written in a few months in 1998, this memoir—I’ll staple some asterisks to that word later—did not resemble those two monstrosities. The Tenses were built, mosaically, out of 1,478 discrete fragments, each just a few lines long, polished to what I deemed a brilliant gleam. In fact, let’s call them tiles.
It’s a method of assemblage not unlike the one I was using for part of my “real” book, the novel-in-progress with the historical tiles in the closet with the ship-in-a-bottle desk that would become Same Bed Different Dreams. Except in Three Tenses the incidents were personal, trivial, at times so gnomic that even I could no longer decode them. Ancient childhood memories, whittled down to slivers (“In my youth there was a pond, and around that pond were these things: pussy willow, Queen Anne’s lace, redwing blackbird, leopard frog”) alternating with fleeting observations (“In the bookstore a man presses a point on the talking globe. The globe says, The Mediterranean, The Mediterranean, The Mediterranean”). The book teemed with outright inventions, musings on movies and Korean history, and scenes from the lives of outsider artists like Henry Darger and A.G. Rizzoli. For famous people and friends alike, I subbed initials for names, playing with notions of acquaintance and importance. Time and again, I blurred the truth at the moment of writing for fear of invading someone’s privacy, or if I thought that a small spin would make a sentence land with more beauty, mystery, or both.
The tiled style possibly stemmed from an immersion in David Markson’s anti-novel par excellence, Reader’s Block (1996), in which an elusive narrator mirrors the author as he darts between clumps of quotes and undigested facts. As much as the fragmentation itself, I thrilled to the Publisher’s Weekly blurb on the cover: “A book often dreamed about by the avant-garde but never seen.” A John Updike review on the cover of Peter Handke’s 1977 diary The Weight of the World had also stayed with me since undergraduate days: “He writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebbles.” Both Block and Weight were presented as barely plausible texts, unreadable books that could paradoxically now be read.
This kind of fata morgana was aesthetically attractive, but there was a more practical reason for me to write this way. I hadn’t gone far with my maximalist postmodern efforts; why not calm down, get sparse, keep it to two hundred pages? I don’t know the exact date composition began, nor when I realized the scope of the project; unlike the aforementioned novels—the mainstays of my creative life to date—with Three Tenses, I didn’t know that I was writing a book until I was writing it. The tiles piled up; they were easy, even fun, to assemble. Everything had equal weight, like Handke’s (or Updike’s) pebbles. Once you have a voice you like, it’s hard to stop; or rather, you keep at it till the voice goes away, as mysterious as the silence of a vanquished god.
Eventually, I grouped the tiles into three sections—“Exiles,” “Munhaddon Dogsbody,” “The Paper Kingdom”—roughly corresponding to scenes in foreign countries (I was not particularly well-traveled but did spend nine months in Korea after college), workplace observations (a seedbed of sorts for my first published novel, an office comedy), and writing about writing (from orthography to the sublimity of pale ink). But there was plenty of overlap and echo; any given tile could appear anywhere else without major structural damage:
In my aunt’s letter is a scattering of English, asides and translation sealed in their parentheses: Lesson, Dr. Park, last year, Hot Spring, Oct. 14–15, sorry, writer, works, beautiful plan of your future, someday.
In the office all morning I hear a whir, a mechanized softness almost past the border of hearing. Later I see a dark shape atop a low wall of file cabinets—actually the head of someone in a wheelchair, passing behind the barrier.
In the car, driving up the West Side Highway, I see a building by the water, belonging to UNITED STATES LINES. Except some of the letters have burned out and it’s UNITED STA INES.
My memoir was built of gaps, juxtaposition, weird little nothings. It had no chronology, which may have been the point. Maybe this was a way to live forever—an appealing idea, during the months when Covid seemed to tear through the city, the disquieting urban silence broken by sirens. At one point, the manuscript quoted Slaughterhouse-Five, about the unusual books enjoyed by the beings on the planet Tralfamadore: “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” In those days, perhaps, having found no earthly readers, I was writing mainly for the aliens.
In the Fever Room
Three Tenses was a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again. The fantasy of pounding out a fast, almost effortless book came true here, as did the reality of such an unclassifiable creature not having any readers. Even as I wrote it, I appreciated its unpublishability; shortly after finishing, I shared the memoir with two friends, whose polite befuddlement was enough for me to salt it away.
About that designation, memoir: much of Three Tenses worked like a glorified notebook, a hoard of quotations gleaned from newspapers and the radio, novels and esoterica, such as An Inglorious Columbus, a tome from 1885 that maintained America was “discovered” by Buddhist monks in the fifth century. I remember the quiet joy of giving order to my years of accumulated absurdities—a clearing of the commonplace book.
At times, the arrangement of tiles was aleatory; every so often, I’d hit on a sequence that generated its own unstoppable logic. On page 180, reflecting on my cramped Eighty-Third Street lodgings at the time, I cited Sado Seja, the doomed, insane crown prince of eighteenth-century Korea, who was ordered to climb into a rice chest by his father, where he died. The next tile came from The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyng, in which the prince’s widow recalled her lonesome childhood in the palace apart from her family, and how due to royal probity her parents “gathered all my letters and, at regular intervals, washed away what was written.”
This triggered a memory of a box of postage stamps my mother saved, which became the germ of my beloved childhood stamp collection: “My categories seem somewhat arbitrary: Korea, sports, Queen Elizabeth against different colored fields, Christmas, triangular.” Then came the following.
In Borges there’s a passage I can’t locate, an ironically arbitrary division of the types of animals.
In Hulbert’s History of Korea, vol. 2: “It was customary to expose infants born of incest, and they were allowed to die in the streets. The king ordered that the government pay the expenses of such unfortunates. He gave decent burial to those who died in the mat sheds outside the wall, where contagious cases were carried and left to die. He named nine kinds of men who would make good prefects. (1) Men of good life and conduct. (2) Good scholars. (3) Skillful men and those who fostered trade. (4) Natural leaders. (5) Fearless men. (6) Students of human nature. (7) Men without an itching palm. (8) Men renowned for filial piety. (9) Good authors.”
“In assisting at a fire in a boarding house, the true gentleman will always save the young ladies first. . . . Partiality, in the manner of rescue, to be shown to:
1. Fiancées
2. Persons toward whom the
operator feels a tender sentiment,
but has not yet declared himself.
3. Sisters
[etc.]
24. Landlord
25. Firemen
26. Furniture
27. Mothers-in-law”
—Mark Twain, “From an Unfinished Burlesque of Books on Etiquette”
“In my life the furniture eats me.”
—William Carlos Williams
In Beckett: “Such density of furniture defeats imagination.”
In a letter from Nabokov (after having some teeth removed) to Edmund Wilson: “My tongue feels like somebody coming home and finding his furniture gone.”
In his book The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, Ian Buruma describes the German obsession for “memory” as being “like a massive tongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth.”
To the uncharitable reader, this might scan as an info dump. But there in my closet, it was easier to defend than disown such concatenations. I saw a writer searching for connections, an American tethered to the idea of Korea, and above all the shape of a life lived in books.
A casual reader might notice that each tile starts with the word “In.” Indeed, that is how the entire book looks: two-hundred-plus pages of In, In, In. Though I was much taken, in the 1990s, with Oulipian concepts of artistic constraint, there’s no concrete reason why in became the equivalent of sourdough starter in Three Tenses. No conscious decision, other than I liked how it looked, that I felt secure in this in-sanity.
But digging deeper, the dogged critic of Three Tenses could only conclude that the author of these pages was in a situation he didn’t know how to get out of, circa 1998: a depleting job in a non-career; a long-distance relationship; an alarming inability to publish anything, not just gigantic postmodern novels but short stories, articles, reviews. That guy couldn’t get arrested, there in his lodgings on Eighty-Third Street, which he sometimes referred to in those fugitive pages as the fever room. The phrase could also signify his previous abode on Ninety-Eighth Street, or the shared apartment of his post-graduate Korean wanderjahr (“In my room in Itaewon, the seediest section of Seoul, my head touched one wall, my feet the other”), or the infernal rice chest of the crown prince; and it was reaching forward in time to me in 2020, there in my makeshift office, my closet away from central air, in the building on Columbus Avenue.
In Conclusion
The months mounted. How long would we be like this? I worked on my novel, typed up my memoir, watched more television than ever before in my life. In the closet, in the fever room, I found a piece of cardboard on which, years ago, I’d scrawled a John Cheever quote to inspire me: “A page of good prose remains invincible.” I propped it on a toolbox; I still believed it. I ordered books online, lost interest before they arrived. All I could read was Three Tenses. I scanned my shelves for slimmer fare, took down the seventy-eight-page Roberto Bolaño curiosity Antwerp. “I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of,” he writes in the 2002 introduction. He’d composed Antwerp in 1980, twenty-two years earlier. “I never brought this novel to any publishing house, of course. They would have slammed the door in my face and I’d have lost the copy.”
By coincidence, twenty-two years matched the span separating 2020 me and the 1998 construction of Three Tenses. I got the chills. I kept typing the old liquid syllables, laying down tile after tile. Barring the obvious typo, I never changed a word. The patterns grew more recognizable.
The title Three Tenses came from a fictitious book mentioned in Nabokov’s slim, penultimate novel—the crazed, elegant, and little-loved Transparent Things (1972). In Three Tenses, I wrote about events in the past using the present tense. The third tense—the future—had to wait until now to unfold: in a life I could scarcely imagine, in a time when the normal order was falling apart, in a place where the narrowness of my circumstances unearthed a book that had been waiting for me to find it, and to remember.
In the middle of the day there’s a symphony on the radio and in the middle of the symphony rings a phone in real life.
In the margins of the book on Buddhism there are exclamation points, question marks, small but emphatic Nos.
In the used bookstore are volumes with inscriptions like this: “Jane—I know you’re not the kind of person who reads fiction, but I thought you’d get a kick out of this. Love, Peter.”
In the final stages I delete every reference to you, and change the others, and call in sick for one full week.
In my room I listen to the radio. Someone’s being interviewed. I turn it on, and turn it off—the phone rings—before the end, and as a result I don’t know who is being featured. The subject seems slightly cranky at times, or stoned; sometimes he’s enthusiastic, laughing, and other times not. My sense is that he’s a record producer or archivist. I mean what do we mean by music? he’s saying. It’s a socially contextualizable product. Recorded music is limited to the length of the tape or record or disc. Performances are limited to the endurance of the musicians, the willingness of the audience, the length of availability of the venue. The money above all. He’s saying, But that’s so limiting. A piece of music, a performance, can be two minutes long, or it can take a year. A year? asks his interlocutor. Five years! The limits are artificial, they’re market determined. So you’re basically changing the definition of music? That’s a tall order. People think too small, says the producer. It strikes me, as I turn off the radio to talk on the phone, that there’s no way I can know whether I tuned in at the middle of the interview, or quit shortly before the end, even though the hour was about to turn. Who knows where the edges are? The interview could still be going on, right now, as I write, two years later.
In the writing of a book a single word seems to draw in the world. This is what I’ve learned. Any human sound or concept is information and information is its own best magnet. You can funnel an encyclopedia through a window five, three, two letters wide. You can bury your book in a thicket of your own devising.
In my notes, this open letter: “Dear everybody: Shut up!”
In New York the pages accumulate. I need more boxes, cabinets, money.
In Neruda somewhere: “Give me silence, water, hope.” In Moby Dick, more to the point: “Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”
In the stairwell of the M79 bus between Park and Madison avenues, a lady says she has forgotten her transfer. The driver scolds her. She says, “I know. But people are human and they forget.”