`Eerie Rhymes'

One of the reasons I became so fervent a reader of Vladimir Nabokov was the casual way he injected little hiccups of wonder into his narratives. Any competent writer can build self-forgetting momentum, especially in fiction, and Nabokov, despite his mandarin pose and meta-fictional credentials, knew how to move the reader along with the conventional engines of suspense and empathetic curiosity: What happens next? But Nabokov also enjoyed abruptly throwing a switch that shifted the narrative into another dimension, inducing a momentary sense of vertigo in the reader, as in the final sentences of Bend Sinister:

“I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.”

In Pale Fire, Nabokov created an entire novel that flickered between alternate dimensions. As a result, he spoiled some writers for me forever – Dostoevsky, Freud, Mann, among them – but he also alerted me to a more exalted class of writers who are fond enough of their readers to share with them the gift of delight. John Cheever does this for me. So do Steven Millhauser , Italo Calvino, Borges and early Updike.

This quality is rare in nonfiction. I see it occasionally in Ian Frazier, though I find it most consistently in the work of Lawrence Weschler. In fact, wonder is among his recurrent themes. He devoted an entire volume to it in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. Don’t confuse Weschler’s wonder with whimsy or infantile New Age ga-ga. He explains it best in the “Introduction” to his latest volume, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, citing the impact John Berger’s essay on the famous photo of Che Guevara’s corpse, surrounded by Bolivian brass, had on him. Berger glosses the picture, its set up and framing, as a re-creation of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson.

“Only, in the years since, and admittedly perhaps still in thrall to Berger’s way of seeing, I myself have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections – sometimes in the weirdest places…The range in tone of these convergences was considerable: some were fanciful, others polemical; some merely silly, others almost transcendental. Some tended to burrow toward some deep-hidden, long submerged causal relation; other veritably reveled in their manifest unlikelihood.”

As a reporter and columnist, I have often followed such “eerie rhymes,” using Weschler, among others, self-consciously as my model. Weschler wrote a pioneering, admiring profile of the cartoonist Art Spiegelman for The New Yorker in 1986. Four years later, Spiegelman was giving a lecture at a library in suburban Albany, N.Y. I interviewed him in advance by telephone for my story, then spent several hours with him at the library setting up a display of items related to his extraordinary Holocaust comic, Maus. I told him in advance that much of what I knew about him and his work came from Weschler, whom Spiegelman praised profusely. He also praised my story, but was incensed by the mindless headline some editor had put on it. Clearly, Spiegelman was an artist in anger. He relished it. He settled down when I asked him to sign my first edition of Maus. Across from the copyright page is another page blank but for a quotation from Adolf Hitler: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.”

Spiegelman sketched himself as he appears in Maus – as a mouse, with a shirt and vest, smoking a cigarette. Smoke rises up the page, bisecting the quote and inevitably recalling the smoke of the crematoria. He wrote: “For Pat, Thanks for a swell write-up. All the best to your headline editor…best, Art Spigelman.”

I treasure that drawing and inscription, probably more than any writer's autograph I have. When I see it, I think of Spiegelman. I also think of Weschler, who hovers like a tutelary spirit in Spiegelman’s neighborhood. In broad terms, Weschler’s books can be divided into those devoted to politics (Solidarity in Poland, torture in South America) and those concerning art and artists (Robert Irwin, Boggs: A Comedy of Value), though others (Vermeer in Bosnia) blur the distinction. For a taste of Weschler in conversation, read his interview with Robert Birnbaum in the latest issue of The Morning News.