In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman

between Saxony and Bohemia, in his trilogy of novels—The Prisoner of Zenda, The Heart of Princess Osra, and Rupert of Hentzau—characterizing it as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic absolute monarchy. Despite it being perpetually in the midst of dissolution, that dissolution would mean only, paradoxically, more ground. Even as class, ethnic, and religious tensions threatened conflict, territory was taken at every compass point. War could not destroy it, peace could not bore it—every dark passage, be it to throneroom or dungeon, met intrigue along the way. Ruritania’s annexations only acquired for it more names, as if noble honorifics: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire expanded it northeast toward Russia and called it Zembla; George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark hexalogy expanded it southeast to the Carpathians; in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Mad King, it’s located east toward the Baltics, as Lutha; in John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds, it’s a Scandinavian/Italian/Balkan mélange called Evallonia; Dashiell Hammett, in one of only two stories he ever set outside the States, had his nameless detective, the Continental Op, meddle in the royal succession of Muravia; Frances Hodgson Burnett further clarified the cardinalities by positioning her Samavia “north of Beltrazo and east of Jiardasia,” names that should be familiar to every good mercenary as demarcating the borders of “Carnolitz.” Newman called his Ruritania “Cannonia”—a toponym echoing the martial ring of “cannon,” with the authority of “canon.”

       Cannonia

      Still, to map Cannonia 1:1 onto Pannonian Hungary might be to misunderstand how Newman regarded place: to him, books could be just as physical as cities. The trashed palace of pages he left behind recalls the setting of another unfinished project: Kakanien, the wry appellation of Austro-Hungary in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Though Kaka is German juvie slang for “shit,” derived from the Greek prefix meaning “shitty”—if “calligraphy” is beautiful, “cacography” is ugly—Kakanien is also a pun on K und K, the Empire’s abbreviation for itself: kaiserlich und königlich, “Imperial and Royal,” indicating Austro-Hungary’s dual, dueling, crowns. Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers, with the death of its author, or The Death of the Author (Musil was stopped by a stroke at age sixty-one, having completed only two of the projected three volumes).

      Newman had always known his only option was what he called “postmodernism”—a knowledge that assuaged his yearning for “modernism,” which was itself a balm for earlier aches. Though he’d always idealized the man in full, he was fated, was aware he was fated, to montage, sumlessness, pastiche. Ruritania will forever be trapped in the clockwork gears of the turn-of-the-century, but by the time another century was about to turn, the drive to synecdochize all of Europe in Vienna, or in a Swiss sanatorium (as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), or even in the sci-fi province of Castalia (in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game), had forsaken history for dystopia. If utopia was “no-place,” dystopia—cacotopia—was Anglo-America: Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange. Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard. By the 1980s—when Newman was first surveying Cannonia—the genre goons were at publishing’s gates, and they proceeded to divide and conquer: “literary novelists” would take care of the totum pro parte—“the whole for the parts”—in an effort to maintain the ideal of an artwork that could still mirror all of reality; while the pop hacks who hadn’t yet traded the page for TV and film would concern themselves with the pars pro toto—“the parts for the whole”—in an attempt to acknowledge that reality had sprawled beyond any consensus, exceeding the capabilities of any single novelist, and the capacities of any single reader. (Throughout the Cold War, espionage and thriller novelists made effective use of this limitation: in presenting Western spycraft as important to, though inconsistent with, Western democracy, they revealed even their right to publish fiction as the privilege of a fiction—a delusion.)

      Newman’s ambition was to write this change itself. He would show, and tell, the evolution of literature, would narrate the revolutions of the wheel. His cycle would begin with a volume of three books in Musil/Mann/Hesse mode—landmarks, monuments, all set in Cannonia, from the fin de siècle to 1924—follow with three books surrendering Cannonia’s metonymy to Russian hegemony, through 1938 (comprising a second volume Newman claimed to have begun, since lost), and conclude with three books triangulating with realpolitik—with Cannonia, Russia, and America negotiating between 1939 and 1989 (comprising a third volume Newman never began but described in correspondence—though he never mentioned whether the novel’s ’89 would’ve marked the end of communism).

      In Partial Disgrace is the one-volume version of the first volume—the one-book version of the first three books that Newman worked on for the last three decades of his life. Its initial hero was, and still is, Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar, “Hauptzuchtwart Supreme,” which is to say a dogbreeder, trainer, and vet nonpareil, whose clients include Freud—himself an analysand in the first volume—and Pavlov—the presumed bellwether of the second. His son, Coriolan Iulus Pzalmanazar, “Ambassador Without Portfolio for Cannonia, and inadvertently the last casualty of the last war of the twentieth century, and the first great writer of the twenty-first,” would become a “triple-agent”—Cannonian, Russian, American. Their stories, along with tales of the Professor (Freud), and the Academician (Pavlov), were all to be told as the memoirs of Iulus, “translated, with alterations, additions, and occasional corrections by Frank Rufus Hewitt, Adjutant General, U.S. Army (Ret.),” who remains a presence in this composite—indeed, he’s the parachutist who lands on the very first page, in 1945—and who was to emerge as the hero of the final volume, where he’d betray Iulus, or be betrayed by him, or—it’s anyone’s guess, anyone’s but Newman’s. The overarching theme of the cycle was to be the rebalancing of power, the shift from military brinksmanship to informational détente: if every side has the same intel, and so much of the same, it’s only the purpose, or the intention of disclosure, that matters, that means. Determining what one nation knows about another is to write their histories in advance—“prolepsis”—just as determining what readers should know about a book before they read it might be to split the difference between Freudian displacement and Pavlovian conditioning.

      Cannonia is a breeding ground, literally—not just for ideologies—for canines. The eugenic pursuit of the perfection of diverse breeds of Canis lupus familiaris takes on a far more sinister, defamiliarizing set of associations when applied to Homo sapiens. The Nazis compelled the Reich’s blondes and blues to mate their ways to an Aryan super-race, whereas the Soviets preferred to inculcate exemplary comradeship through “art”—a literature that would mold its own public, indistinguishable from its characters. Newman’s consideration of species—of speciation—is of a piece with his investigation into the properties of metaphor: the question of whether it’s irresponsible to try and perfect a breed is also the question of whether it’s irresponsible to try and perfect a novel—what happens to breeds that don’t please their masters? are misbehaving novels—or novelists—to meet the same fate as untrainable mutts? Nature v. nurture is the case, which Newman insists is as much a referendum on the master as on the mastered: is culture innate or cultivated? or both? Finally, if a new breed can only be the combination of old breeds, just as a new literature must come from a miscegenation of the old—what are we to make of ourselves? of humans? Are we just helixed bundles of parental genes, raised, hopefully, to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses? or could we find a way back to understanding ourselves as we did in Genesis—before mind-body dichotomies, before mind-body-soul trichotomies—as unities, perfect merely by dint of our existence?

      To Newman, Freud’s psychology compartmentalizes our being—as if life were just a train of alternating appetites and suppressions—whereas Pavlov’s physiology coheres us as singularities, but as beasts. Newman alternately accepts and rejects these two conceptions, even while slyly offering a third: men are no better than dogs, and no better than locomotive engines—though they can become the worst of both, especially in the company of women. (Felix’s “three golden rules”: “1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500