The Chrysanthemum Palace

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WE DROPPED THEM AT THE Chateau and drove back to Venice.

Miriam and I had plans that night. She went to Shutters to bathe¹ while I headed for the beach. After an hour and a half in the car, I felt like stretching my legs. I took along The Soft Sea Horse, intending to finish it on a boardwalk bench.

I was surprised at the unguardedness of the book’s narrative. (I knew the title had been cribbed from the yacht that launched Jeremy to his watery death but subsequently learned it was a line from a poem of Jack’s.) Sea Horse is the story of twin brothers, one of whom, an autistic “angel” favored by their glamorous film star father, drowns in the Aegean Sea during a visit to a film set. When the child vanishes and is presumed dead, the long-embittered wife flies in from Amagansett with the surviving twin. The “angel” reappears after the wounded family reunites, in the form of a seaweed-swaddled wraith. When the book was published, Miriam said Jack called it a “cruddy Creepshow of a novella, worthy of a trepanned Stephen King.” He did everything he could to humiliate Thad in print. I’m no critic but I disagreed. To me, the novel was a fantasia that attested to a courageous, tender nobility. The reviews, though, were unkind and it sunk like a stone — or a boy — providing trivia for future unauthorized bios of the patriarch.

Thad was forty when he wrote Sea Horse. While the book showed promise, it was still very much a first novel — there are far greater sins. At the exact same age, his father had produced Radiant Light, Come to Morning, Death of a Translator, Jonas and the Whale, The Man at the End of the Booth, and so on, already winning a clutch of Guggenheims, Pulitzers, and National this-and-that’s. (Dual citizenship would eventually allow him a Booker.) Michelet saw the runt’s efforts as blasphemous exposure of family business, a tabloidal assault dressed up in the pathetic gown of magical realism which was then in American vogue, lazily diluted by its long, northern migration. His rage knew no bounds or boundaries.

I did some Netsurfing and found an interview Black Jack gave in the New York Review of Books, at the time of Chrysanthemum’s publication:

NYRB: Your son has written about Jeremy in his book, The Soft Sea Horse.

MICHELET: It’s god-awful! So clearly an attempt to stab at me. What’s galling is, his publishers know it. That’s how cynical the game’s become. I doubt they even read the manuscript, such as it is. The thing has no value whatsoever, except as literary curiosity. Please to put quotes around literary. It’s obscene. All the needy stuff one prayed to have gotten off one’s chest a lifetime ago while battling acne. Or on the frigging couch. You write it, yes — of course you do, but then you burn the pages. If you’ve got any sense! Look, we’ve all done it, I’ve burned reams of juvenilia. But to enshrine, as a man? The towering stupidity of it — that kind of unforgivable hubris. If it were any good, I’d be the first to — hell, I’d haul it out like a piss-proud grandpa and do the book fair circuit with him, kit and caboodle. But see, I cain’t, cause it’s so much shite.

It was piercing to read.

The devilish thing was, I found myself suddenly blackjacked. With the collegiate nonchalance of an armchair freelancer I dismantled Thad’s inferior prose, tropes and longueurs, stylistic shibboleths and high-minded canards. There on the boardwalk, hard by clusters of sinister halfway-house junkies and hardbodied skatergirls, I smugly took him to task for daring to attempt a dissection of family tragedy through the refracted lens of a borrowed genre that in order to transcend parody would have required genius. I excoriated the man for the grandiloquent gall of embarking on such a voyage, knowing full well his ship would founder on remaindered shoals—he had to have known. On that Saturday afternoon, dusk approaching, my blood and eyes grew cold, and I seemed not to care a whit about the fortitude, the sheer, steely gumption required for Thad to have taken up his own dare. Then I wondered: Had I ever done anything equally ambitious or recklessly poetic? Had the pathetic, unrealized, revenue-driven scribblings of Bertram Valentine Krohn even faintly approached the boldness of this monumentally disruptive, violent, seminal act? My remorse compounded as I recalled Michelet’s single-minded determination to devour his remaining son. How could anyone have survived such a father? Or such a reader as I was turning out to be…

Yet the legacy of Jack Michelet’s genius will outlive our days — the ironic curse promised and delivered, it seems, by all monstres sacrés. I stopped at the bookstore tucked behind the Sidewalk Café and found a thin volume of poetry that put the old man in good graces again; I hated myself but what can be done? I wandered to the fiction shelf. The absence of Thad’s novels alongside his dad’s seemed a grievous wrong — an unmarked, looted grave, a desecration and ugliness perpetrated by that child killer, cannibal, madman. Thus I seesawed back and forth, pro-Thad, pro-Jack, pro-Thad, finally leaving the paper cemetery to take in the ambient exultation of seaside tourists, natives and buskers.² I was at odds with the carefree crowd, wading against their currents while stewing over the House of Michelet, surprised at how far off the deep end I could go when it came to other peoples’ bad juju. Maybe it was the writer in me. But that sounds so—

Let me leave it at that.

¹ On Sunday, the four of us were supposed to have lunch at my folks’ in the Colony. It was a busy weekend.

² A moment oddly reminiscent of hours spent listening to NPR during the Iraqi invasion: the commentators’ ceaselessly articulate, impotent point-counterpoints and my own irrelevant internal tug-of-war, syncopated to the jazz riffs bridging ads and pledge pleas.