Childish Loves

With Childish Loves, Benjamin Markovits completes his Byron trilogy (the first two volumes of which I discussed here and here).  Like Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment, Childish Loves maintains the fiction that the novels are "written" by Peter Pattieson, itself a Walter Scott-derived pseudonym for deceased private school teacher Peter Sullivan, and "edited" by Benjamin Markovits, whom we may or may not wish to identify with the Benjamin Markovits whose name is on the title page.  (This time around, one character ups the irony by accusing Markovits-the-character of writing the novels himself [43].)    Given the carnival of author-figures, it comes as no surprise that the series has been extremely interested in both the actual practice of writing and the relation between biographical facts and narrative fictions.  Childish Loves pushes these two themes to the breaking point.  The text consists of a double fictional memoir: one, Pattieson's/Sullivan's fragmentary journal in Byron's voice; the other, "Markovits'" account of trying to figure out Sullivan's motivations for writing about Byron, which also leads him to reflect on his own professional career and his rather vexed relationship with his English wife, Caroline.  Besides being a fictional memoir about a fictional memoir, then, this is also what Suzanne Keen calls a romance of the archive (here, complete with visits to real archives, like the Harry Ransom Center).  But while the novel leaves the genre of historical fiction intact, it tears the practice of reading for biography to shreds.

As most Romanticists will be aware, Lord Byron's memoirs were torched after his death.  In the previous novel, his wife Annabella colludes in their destruction so that she can finally achieve complete control over Byron's "story."   Here, Benjamin Markovits (the character), who was bequeathed Sullivan's manuscripts for reasons he doesn't understand, seeks to retrace both Sullivan's work as a writer (what sources did he use? how did he transform them?) and to uncover the secret of his life.   In part, this quest is about explaining the very nature of authorship itself; contemplating A Quiet Adjustment, Markovits admits that "I missed him [...] Not the man I knew, who could never have written this book, but the man I didn't know, who had" (9).   Life experience proves inadequate to explaining the mystery of artistic creation.  There must have been a real Peter, elsewhere, hidden, whose nature would be somehow in keeping with the evidence of his imagination.  Because Childish Loves is nothing but "a strange uncomfortable collection of chapters" (10)--a fiction of the Romantic fragment genre, in effect--Markovits determines that it needs "context," and that context would be "Peter's life" (10).   Researching Peter's biography not only promises to supplement Markovits' apparently inadequate consciousness of Peter's potential, but also to domesticate the "uncomfortable" quality of the final, incomplete fiction.  "Real" biography and biographical fiction would form a complete circle, each illuminating the other, nothing left worrisomely unsaid.  And yet, as Markovits admits to himself while reading a dead teenager's terrible, guilty story about love and death, "my training had taught me to distinguish between good and bad writing, but not between what was true and what wasn't" (17); some of the most melodramatic stories turn out to be true, yet in terms of artistic craft terrible.   (It's the age-old problem of probability, in which real life makes for lousy literature.)  The most manifest biographical content may strike the reader as pure fiction, which implies its corollary: that, as Markovits later argues of Byron's own work, he "'treated fiction as a kind of code, which allowed him to refer more or less openly to the facts of his life'" (260).  This "'real history,'" as far as Markovits is concerned, is the truly "'moving'" thing about a poem like Don Juan--in other words, subordinating the fictional world to the purported real world that both grounds it and gives it actual oomph.  But, as one critic and editor calmly observes about Markovits' quest to find out the deep, dark secret of Sullivan's life, "'I'm also not sure why you care'" (260).

This, as they say, is the rub.  To nobody's very great surprise, Sullivan's secret is sexual: did he or did he not molest one of his male teenage students, about two decades before his suicide?  The critic's cool disinterest in Markovits' project, which strikes him as purely irrelevant, gets at the heart of the matter: would such a revelation make the final novel signify in any meaningful way? In fact, Markovits' reader (by which I mean real-Markovits [Markovits Prime?], not fictional-Markovits) will probably be asking herself the same question as the novel goes on, as neither Markovits Beta nor Sullivan/Pattieson enjoys a particularly interesting existence.  Boredom is, to say the least, a rather dangerous narrative strategy, and yet the sheer dullness of both men's lives keeps seeping through.  Peter Sullivan does nothing except teach and write about Byron; Markovits does nothing except teach (creative writing), deal with the drudgery of being a professional author, and have strikingly unemotional relationships with both Caroline and a high school acquaintance, Kelly.  When Kelly declares her romantic interest in Markovits, he can only respond, "'I'm sorry [...] I don't feel much about anything at the moment'" (394).  (Markovits' near-total lack of affect is reminiscent of the narrator of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, who spends the entire series deeply uncomfortable with anything that requires actual emotional expression.)   For, after all, isn't one of the great paradoxes of a writer's life that the most interesting thing about it--the writing--is that which most resists narration? This is most certainly the case with the Byron fragment, which is mostly about Byron's various romantic entanglements and farcical involvement with the cause of Greek liberation; the fragment relegates his poetic work to matter-of-fact references ("...I sat down at the table and for the first time almost a month began to write" [389]) and after-the-fact accounts of his poems' reception.  The process, however, remains stubbornly absent.

Markovits' Quest for Sex (something he is having a hard time with himself) thus looks more and more like a substitute for the unrecorded act of writing.  In fact, when he analyzes the text to see how Sullivan appropriated other texts by and about Byron--letters, memoirs, academic biographies--it is because "[w]hat I wanted was to find the parts of his story that didn't stand up to the history, which he might have invented himself or drawn on his own experience for" (114).   Markovits thus downgrades the historical novelist's creative engagement with his sources in order to find the holy grail of the perfectly unsourced, where imagination (and autobiography) must reside.  Far from admiring Sullivan's skill (and, ironically, his own), Markovits glumly concludes that "I began to see how shallow the waters of his imagination were" (118).  (In fact, Markovits repeatedly criticizes the two earlier works, in a frank--or is it?--self-assessment that echoes Walter Scott's famous self-review.)  Believing that he has found a potentially revelatory moment in Sullivan's account of the adolescent Byron's possible (here, actual) rape/seduction/something by his somewhat older friend, Lord Grey, Markovits announces that "I don't want to say a writer can't write a scene like that without drawing on personal experience. But if there has been some personal experience, I also don't see how he can leave it out entirely" (120-21)--a reasonable observation, no doubt, that is promptly complicated by real-Markovits' authorship of the novel that fictional-Markovits is studying (and also living in).  So this can't be right, says the reader.  Or can it?

The reader who approaches this novel seeking, understandably, the revelatory moment of truth that will ground the ambiguities of the earlier novels will be deeply disappointed--which appears to be Markovits' point.  When fictional-Markovits finally runs down Lee Feldman, the now middle-aged man who accused Sullivan of molestation--a Korean adopted by a Jewish family who has now converted to Christianity, yet another play on the instability of identity--the denouement is spectacularly anti-climactic.  (I hope that's not a stealth pun.)  On the one hand, Feldman's account of his experience in Sullivan's office turns out to supply the dialogue in the final paragraph of Sullivan's Byron fragment, thereby linking artistic inspiration to erotic desire; on the other, Sullivan's Byron begins writing poetry in the moment of his rejection, whereas Sullivan (who seems to have got what he wanted) writes the fragment only after meeting with Sullivan again two decades later.  Thus, even the fictional moment for which a biographical explanation seems most useful turns out to significantly transform its original (and Sullivan's own subjective experience remains lost).  After this, both Markovitses simply...give up; the fragments and Sullivan remain fragmentary, irreducible to this one moment in time.  By the same token, fictional-Markovits' wife, initially appalled by the memoir sections of the book, first prohibits him from bringing the book out, then concedes, because "the marriage described in this memoir seemed to her as fictional as anything else that's out of date" (396-97).  Estranged by the passage of the time, biographical fact does not so much become fiction as it reads like fiction--the very difficulty that Markovits had admitted much earlier on.  How, then, can the earnest reader hope to stabilize the fiction by questing for nuggets of biographical fact in the story?