Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

Afterword

Evan Michael Tanner was conceived in the summer of 1956, in New York ’s Washington Square Park. But his gestation period ran to a decade.

That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.

What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)

But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.

Where’s Tanner in all this?

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred and fifty years after the death of Queen Anne, the last reigning monarch of the House of Stuart, there was still (in the unlikely person of a German princeling) a Stuart pretender to the English throne.

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Britannica. They seemed to go together, and I found myself thinking of a character whose sleep center had been destroyed, and who consequently had an extra eight hours in the day to contend with. What would he do with the extra time? Well, he could learn languages. And what passion would drive him? Why, he’d be plotting and scheming to oust Betty Battenberg, the Hanoverian usurper, and restore the Stuarts to their rightful place on the throne of England.

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Tanner was ready to be born. By then a Stuart restoration was just one of his disparate passions. He was to be a champion of lost causes and irredentist movements, and I was to write eight books about him.

I don’t know if there was a Latvian Army-in-Exile back in the Sixties. What I do know (or thought I knew) is that there was a Lithuanian Army-in-Exile. It came to my attention sometime in the late fifties, when I was sitting around with a group of people that included Dave Van Ronk and Tom Condit, and someone (Dave? Tom? Someone else?) mentioned a friend or acquaintance who’d found a particularly efficacious way to avoid getting drafted. (We were all preoccupied with avoiding the draft, as if it would cause the flu. It’s hard to remember why. I don’t know that the Army would have had me, and if it had, serving would very likely have done me no harm, and might even have done me some good. That’s hindsight talking, of course; at the time, I dreaded the prospect.)

And how had this worthy escaped military service? Had he (like another legendary genius) smeared himself with filth and reported for his pre-induction physical reeking, only to be summarily dismissed and written off as an ambulatory psychotic? Had he (like other mythical beings) made a strong physical pass at the consulting psychiatrist? Had he cultivated a psychopathic stare and demanded to be given a gun so he could kill the filthy Russians? (And would that really work, or would they just give him a big hug and send him to Officer Candidate School?)

No, he had accepted a commission as an officer in the Lithuanian Army-in-Exile.

“That’ll do it,” someone pointed out. “If you enter into the service of a foreign power, they can’t take you into the U.S. armed forces. Of course, you get stripped of your citizenship.”

That seemed extreme. Suppose one wanted to run for president one day? Which seemed a stretch, admittedly, but still, one did want to keep one’s options open. Still, the idea of marching and saluting and drilling in the Catskills with a batch of Lithuanian patriots had a certain appeal.

And it evidently lingered, because it came to mind when it was time to write a third book about Evan Michael Tanner; if there truly was a Lithuanian Army-in-Exile, Tanner would have to be a part of it. I’m not sure what prompted me to change the Lithuanians to Latvians. In time I would meet a Latvian painter in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Valdi Maris by name, and some years after that I would have a Latvian girlfriend, Zane Berzins by name, and now, years later, I am still able to say Happy New Year in Latvian, though I’ll admit I don’t get much call for it. But back then all I knew about Latvia was that it was sandwiched in between Lithuania and Estonia.

What I liked about the story was the notion of Tanner embarking on a harebrained mission to bring one person out from behind the Iron Curtain and accumulating an increasing menagerie along the way. It was, as you might imagine, fun to write – but what you might not imagine is the way my whole world changed while I was writing it.

Because I started out writing it in New Jersey, where I was living. And then I got involved in a mad affair, overflowing with drink and drama, and I wound up running away from everybody. I got on a plane at Idlewild and got off it in Dublin, and I entered the Republic of Ireland with an extra pair of underwear, an extra pair of socks, and the partial manuscript of Tanner #3. I had, as Oscar Wilde put it, nothing to declare but my genius, and I wasn’t so sure about that, either.

I took a room in a tatty bed-and-breakfast on the north side of Dublin, in Amiens Street, and I rented a typewriter in a shop around the corner in Talbot Street, and I bought some typing paper that was about an inch longer and a half-inch narrower than what I was used to, and within the month I’d finished the book.

I think I had about a third of it written when I was interrupted by life, but I can’t be sure, because when I go back and re-read it, I can’t find the break. My life before and after could hardly have changed more, but the book’s life was somehow uninterrupted. Tanner, it seemed, really didn’t care what I was going through. He had problems of his own.

I should add that there was a stationer in O’Connell Street called Eaton’s, and that it was there that I came upon a book called Teach Yourself Latvian. That sounded more like an inventive schoolboy’s curse than a book anyone would want to buy, but I bought it, by George, and that accounts for the Latvian phrases you’ll find in these pages. I can’t swear they’re accurate, but really, what do you care?

About the title: after the general enthusiasm for The Canceled Czech, I wanted a comparable title for the third book. I came up with a few, including The Lettish Tomatoes, which I rather liked, but the publisher chose Tanner’s Twelve Swingers. Which I flat hated. I’ve restored other titles, but I think I’ll leave this one alone. For the time being, anyway.

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village