Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Cannonia and America had a special and preferential historical relationship, he insisted, beyond their shared distaste for oracles and pundits, as the only two nations in History of whom it could be truly said that all their wounds were self-inflicted. And what could Cannonia offer America? The wincing knowledge that there are historical periods in which you have to live without hope.

After all, you must recall, things were different then. All the configurations had flipped. It was the ancient American, toughened by his encounter with modernity, who was about to lead the innocent European out of the theater of megalomania; the American who would offer his hand to the blasted cosmopolite with the stained shirtfront, and maneuver him, without much grace, but without thinking to ask for anything particular, into the post-war half-life of tatty triumphalism, up-to-date torments, and unintended consequences. And once here, at the fag end of the fin de millénaire , after rearranging certain creature comforts, the American host turns to his classy ward with a mildly sardonic grin to shrug, “Dry hole?”

The natural fit between the Cannonian sharp temperament and the soft tissues of America strikes one as astounding, and one can only speculate on the consequences if more Cannonians had chosen to emigrate. Of Pzalmanazar’s comrades who made the choice to escape, we see a similar adaptive energy, fired perhaps by the natural bond between those nations who ignore history and those who can only export it. Of Iulus’s generation, I know of only three who came and survived. One, a high school physics teacher from the CharmNetz region, a woman matronly and mustachioed even in her twenties, became the only female admitted to the Manhattan Project, and this only a few months after her arrival. Another tortured soul, a supervisor in the Phamaphy factory, which made papier-mâché airplanes and tanks to be placed on runways and roads to confuse bombers, claimed to be a professor of Greek and director of the opera, and arriving with only a pack of Tarok cards with photos of murderers, sex offenders, and arsonists in the place of the medieval figures, soon became an associate at the New York Psychoanalytical Institute. And a third, perhaps the best known to the general public, a portly former doorman at the Auberge L’Espérance near Sare, known for his unbreakable cheerfulness in the face of menacing inclement weather, was moved with alacrity to the seniormost levels of the Department of State, and often wore his old uniform to diplomatic receptions at the Eastern embassies. A talented race, the Cannonians, though not one, as we used to say, with whom you’d care to share a foxhole.

Iulus was the only man I ever knew who really understood America to the bone, partly because he was well-paid for it, partly because he had a number of perfectly attentive audiences, but primarily because of his unique education. He knew that lacking an interior discipline, democracies depended in large part upon a worthy opposition for momentum, and the worse thing you could do to a people who thought of themselves as a church and believed their truths to be “self-evident” was to take their enemy away from them. He also knew that the Dark Hero of the Secret Name was essentially about an inferiority complex, an obsession with predictability, an attempt to catch up to modernity. What the Soviets were too parochial to realize was that modernity had already destroyed traditional society in the West, and so their special path of maximalism was doomed to irrelevance, the freezing of petit bourgeois attitudes on a mountain of corpses. “They never had a chance,” was how Iulus put it, as early as 1968. “They bored themselves to death.”

It is hardly surprising that recent scholars have concluded that our “secret” operations in Cannonia had no effect whatsoever — and if anything prolonged the war, as well as the so-called Cold War, which in this writer’s opinion was the most destructive and pernicious of all wars, the largest non-event in history — a bizarre sideshow of poetic illusions, a full life’s lie that saw two great nations, each on the verge of fluorescence, abandon their inner struggles to export their kindergarten philosophies, inflicting millions of casualties upon noncombatants while erecting a great frozen glacis behind which all values decomposed. It will seem as obscure and incomprehensible to future generations as the Thirty Years’ War does to us.

What an astounding thing, eh, that a little piece of the Enlightenment, that aberration during which the great religious movements were thrown off stride for a moment, should be set down so fortuitously in our trackless swamps and pimpled plains? For we have just barely survived the most religious century of all time — religious in the sense of the absolute triumph of synthetic explanation and doctrine.

Now Iulus was hardly your typical secret agent, not a mole or turncoat, not a cipher, palimpsest, cryptographer, or operator; not an undercover man, dissembler, or counterfeit; not a hawkshew, sleuthhound, scout, tout, or reconnoiterer; certainly not what he was often called, nigger in the woodpile, bug under the chip, snake in the grass, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Not a flybull or derationator, not an informant, mouthpiece, snitch, or masquerader, not a sealed book, misprision, or huggermugger. He did not operate in camera, sotto voce , or sub rosa , or between you me and the bedpost, and most certainly he was no flatfoot, gumshoe, plainclothes horse, or house dick. In short, he owed nothing to those contrapostos who figure so prominently in our police entertainments, those marvelous sedatives that present every mystery as a legally punishable exception. “It’s easy enough to catch the murderer,” he often said. “The true detective is the one who prevents the murder.”

Iulus’s charge, as he patiently explained to me, was to create the perfect cover, to meld into the population, becoming simultaneously infinitely forgettable and unforgivably acute, retaining no allegiance to a foreign power, even one as inchoate as Cannonia, but expanding his sympathies totally with his adopted culture so he might better identify its breaking point. His “mission,” if one could call it that, was when reality finally stepped forward, when the erratic mucoid snore of America’s sleep apnea was particularly deafening, that he would be the only one awake. “Living the other’s death; dead in the other’s life.” This is Heraclitus, of course, the only Western thinker who makes any sense at all to the Cannonians and their Astingi comrades, with their love of puzzles and the darkest riddling, for thinking in their view is not real thinking unless it simultaneously arouses and misleads one’s expectations of symmetry. But their love of riddles has a moral dimension which is easily missed; games for them are also always ethical tests.

In the Cannonian cosmos, the Sleeper, as the bright twin of Death, does not experience a private phantom world, but while unconscious remains responsible for the conscious universe. This reaching through and across history is the distinctive Astingi blasphemy, destroying all our conventional notions of identity and the psyche. “ Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper.”

How I would miss his profound but smiling pessimism, his nacreous intelligence, this fideist to the school of gliding. He was one of those strange people who, having rectitude, didn’t need freedom. Even now, rereading his scattered cantos, it is as if he is sitting in the room talking personally with me, the secret of all great writing.

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aluminum. 1945, sunk in North Sea by explosion of petrol vapors. 1946, raised and reclassified as a battery charging barge, NAP 111. February 1946, failed to return from patrol. June 1946, located off Cape Tarkhankutsky, raised and reclassified as stationary training platform, redesignated Communist .