Backland

Oops

I wrote this about 25 years ago. Forgive me if it has, like its author, aged.

*

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And God saw what he had done, and said, “Oops. Sorry.”

And God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

And the man said, “God, do you really expect me not to eat of that forbidden tree? Then why the Hell did you put it there? What, do you think I’m stupid?”

And God saw what he had done, and said, “Oops. Sorry.”

And God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And the woman called to God, and said, “You idiot! Do you realize what you’ve gone and done? You’ve just initiated the inequality of the sexes, the subjugation of women! Do you realize that because you were too short-sighted to create us both at the same time, I’m going to have to suffer the consequences for ten thousand years?”

And God saw what he had done, and said, “Oops. Sorry.”

And Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. One killer, one killed. And God saw what he had done, and said, “Oops. Sorry.” And history marched inexorably on, and each step was another mistake (the flood, the Tower of Babel, the golden calf, the broken tablets). And at each step, God saw what he had done, and said, “Oops. Sorry.” And truly, God was sorry, for he never made the same mistake twice. But what about all the other mistakes out there, just begging to be made?

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And thus our histories are like the history of the universe: an eternal series of mistakes from birth until death. At every step we take, we look back and say, “Oops. Sorry.” And at the end, we ask ourselves, “Where did I go wrong?” We answer, “Everywhere.”

And then we ask ourselves, “Have I ever done the right thing?”

Sometimes God, too, asks himself that question. And then he remembers creating the trees, the birds, the flowers, the rocks. And he looks back on what he has done, and exclaims, “What joy I brought to the world!”

And sometimes we do the right thing too, and then we look back on what we have done, and we also exclaim, “What joy I brought to the world!”

But then we think about what we have just said, and we say, “Oops. Sorry.” And we rest our heads on our pillows and sleep fitfully until dawn.

Four letters about writing

. . . which I wrote in the days before e-mail. Two names have been changed.

Dear Billy,
    Have you ever lost your voice? I have an infection of the throat that has caused me to cancel social engagements to avoid hurting my voice. No phone calls, no talking to the cat, no casual conversations on the street . . . But isn’t voicelessness a natural condition among educated people? In writing workshops students are taught to find and then cultivate an “authentic” voice. What could be less authentic than such a practice? Over the course of our education, we are taught to write five-paragraph themes, personal letters, fairy tales, detailed descriptions of events, things, and places, reminiscences of our summer vacations, lists of things to buy, persuasive arguments, book reviews, and class notes, each of which requires a different voice. And then they expect us to come up with an “authentic” voice after all this? There is no such thing. We are all voiceless.
    I imagine you have some thoughts on all this, being a professional ventriloquist yourself. (I hope my metaphor for as-told-to autobiography doesn’t offend you.) Is it easier finding an authentic voice as an as-told-to oral historian than as a writer? Has it ever occurred to you to write someone’s autobiography in the order of the telling rather than in the order of his life? Ask somebody to start telling you stories and write them down; chronology will be thrown to the winds. On a blind date one normally talks about the recent past first, then gradually delves into the distant past. The events one relates first are the superficial ones; as acquaintance deepens, the more apocalyptic events surface. Why shouldn’t this be the way books are written too, rather than beginning with the event that changes one’s life, or worse, beginning with one’s birth, an event that one cannot remember?
    As usual, my life reads like a very contrived first novel that will never be published. I read somewhere that there are about fourteen million aspiring novelists in the U.S. Maybe the internet is a good thing because it’ll suck up some of the energy that would otherwise go into writing bad novels. Do you think the fact that fewer people are reading books is a good or bad thing? It might be good: fewer people might then write books. Even better, writing workshops might shrivel up for lack of applicants. Maybe only the books that people really care about will start to sell, since only serious readers will be left. Because the readership will be less fickle, book prices will quadruple, thereby insuring that publishers will be more willing to take chances on unknown writers. Therefore I say to the electronic media, More power to you!
    Your prompt reply will be most appreciated (said Yuval in an authentic voice).

*

Dear Billy,
    I received your affirmation of conventional views of writing with mingled joy and disappointment. The joy came from the receipt, and from your finely-crafted prose; the disappointment from my feeling that you simply affirm established “truths” about writing without questioning them.
    You claim that each of us has an authentic writing voice, which can vary like a spoken voice. I think the proper comparison here is to handwriting, which is as physical as the vocal cords; each of us has an authentic handwriting, which can vary a great deal, but yet which can still be identified. But once one takes away the physical manifestation of our writing and encases it in type, all writing becomes anonymous. By imposing our “authentic voice” on this anonymous writing, we label it as ours, we claim possession of it, we become authors. Authorship is constructed, not intrinsic. Many writers—Keats comes to mind—have viewed authorship as a quasi-mystical channeling of a divine force; others—e.g. whoever writes the back of cereal boxes—view writing as a task motivated only by capital. In many pre-modern and non-Western societies, the quality of art and writing was judged by how faithfully it resembled certain models; originality was considered a fault, not a virtue. In fact, with enough study, almost anyone of intelligence could produce passable imitations of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, and Melville (provided one limited oneself to a specific work). Children are taught the five-paragraph theme form, and for many of them, that is the only writing they have ever done. Is this their authentic voice, then? Do they subsequently discover their authentic voice, or do they invent it? Is there really any difference? And once it is discovered/invented, what is to stop them from changing it radically? If one did not know that Melville was the author of Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, and Battle-Pieces, is there anything in the works themselves to conclusively point to one author for all four of them? Each is written in an entirely different voice. An author is defined by his voice; the voice is defined by the work; therefore the author is defined by the work. Without knowing biographical details, and without attribution, each of those Melville works would define substantially different authors, about whose lives conjectures would vary widely.
    Your notes on finding George’s voice simply reaffirm these thoughts: you are constructing a voice particular to this book. Doubtless George’s previous autobiographical work, written with a different coauthor, is in a different voice; and doubtless were he to actually set pen to paper and compose a memoir himself, it would differ substantially from yours. Then consider the possibility that he might want to write fiction, rather than a memoir; or poetry; or pop song lyrics, or legal treatises. You define George’s voice in your joint text as consisting of words which he could have possibly said. But there is nothing that he could not have possibly said. Had he learned French and subsequently gone mad, he could have possibly said, “Je ne suis pas mort; je monterai un cheval blanc; et à la fin, vous me trouverez trés loin d’ici.” Aren’t you, in fact, constructing a written voice for George, one which cannot claim authenticity? Isn’t your construction entirely dependent on how you want George to sound to your readers? Why not admit that, instead of calling it “finding George’s voice”? Is he incapable of finding his own voice?
    I’m sorry if this letter is too earnest, testy, and argumentative. You know me. My next letter will be nothing but bad jokes . . .

*

Dear Billy,
    I’ve come to the conclusion (if one can really come to a conclusion—it sounds so utterly final) that the only true written literature consists not in novels, not in poems, not in short stories, but in letters. Give me enough letters and I will have no need of anything more. All other literature suffers from a peculiar lack—that of an addressee. Have you ever read a book written specifically for you? Who are books written for? Are they letters to oneself? If so, they would read, “Dear Me, dear me”—and many of them do. Are they letters to the world? If we subtract books addressed to oneself and books addressed to the world, we are still left with the large majority of books, whose addressees are unknown—or perhaps consist of certain groups of amateurs, such as sci-fi buffs, Civil War buffs, mystery buffs, future professors of English. None of this is specific enough for me. I want my reading to address myself, impinge upon me on purpose rather than by accident. Reading a book that someone has published for anyone to pick up is like getting junk mail. Who does this author think he is, writing me in such a fashion? one thinks. How did literature arise? Does it make sense to write a book? Pre-literary communication, I assume, must have all been directed. Who came up with the idea of writing an unaddressed communiqué? I suppose first there were chronicles—the idea of saving some heroic remembrance for posterity must be ingrained in all humans—followed shortly by the words of gods. Such documentation strikes me as quite legitimate. But a novel? How did the documentation of oral history get transmuted into such a peculiar thing? Stories are social acts, and impart a peculiar kind of knowledge we have long ago lost sight of. This is narrative knowledge, and is not information; it cannot be boiled down to a short statement. This kind of knowledge is best imparted orally, to a small group sitting around a campfire, or in a friend’s living room, perhaps, around a fireplace. I leave that to the storytellers. The novel departs from all that—it is a non-social communication, a shot in the dark. I can’t read the damn things anymore. What has this country come to, Billy? I would estimate that 20% of the populace consider themselves writers. All this writing—where does it go? Perhaps it’s useful to compare novels to birdsongs—they establish a certain territory—they are fenceposts for the property of the mind. Thankfully, letters sail over those fenceposts indiscriminately. You and I both partake in this free-floating disease, this aspiration to write, which is really an aspiration to publish (even if that publication succeed our demise), and I’m certain that if either of us ever does publish anything, it will be of much more literary worth than the stuff that’s in our letters. So what? Those published pieces will be barren in comparison. All the emotion, all the urgency, will have been drained from them. Literature departs from us like a package placed at an anonymous doorstep. We think we know what that package contains—a bomb, perhaps, or a baby—but we have no idea when and whether it will be opened—and if it is opened, whether the bomb will explode, whether the baby will live. And if it explodes, will the bomb harm the right people? And if it lives, will the baby bring joy to idiots or savants, misers or paupers? Letters reach those who deserve them. You deserve mine, Billy. Take that as retribution or reward according to your estimation of your desserts—and of my letters.

*

Dear Billy,
    I’d rather not hear that your letters were “too ordinary to send.” First, that seems improbable, even from your point of view; second, letters are by nature quite extraordinary, especially the ones I receive, since they arrive so seldom. Reading a letter is never an ordinary event; the event imparts something out of the ordinary to the letter itself.
    I must defend my position on correspondence. You wrote, “All flirtation imparts counsel.” How can a novel be flirtatious? Doesn’t flirtation imply a person with whom one flirts? One can’t very well flirt with a thousand people at once. That would be entertainment, not flirtation. Let’s put it another way. In telling a story, the teller can observe the reactions of the audience; the same is true for an actor on stage. Letters are always written with the expectation of reciprocation. But novels are written in a vacuum. One is advised when writing fiction to ignore any possible audience, to write for oneself alone. Indeed, John Stuart Mill once stated that true poetry is comparable to monologue. This has been an essential part of literary discourse since the late eighteenth century. I ask you, does it make any sense to publish something that is written for oneself alone? Is there any reason why a reader should be put in the position of an eavesdropper on an internal monologue? Perhaps, as you put it, “I’ve driven off the road into the bushes.” The road, in this case, is modernism (broadly defined to include the last two hundred years); the premodern bushes I now inhabit are quite accommodating.
    You hesitate to follow me when I head somewhere strange. That’s OK—I hardly need followers. As Neil Young put it in an interview with Greil Marcus, “I know that the sacrifice of success breeds longevity. That’s an axiom. Being willing to give up success in the short run ensures a long run.” Some ideas of mine work, some don’t. Whether they work or not, I’d rather test out new ones than stick with the old. Right now I’m interested in how writing is directed, how it functions as writing. I’m trying to understand how fiction works, how it can exist, how it can be defended. I’ve come to the point at which I have a very hard time getting past page two or three of any fictional work I pick up (unless it’s an epistolary novel). Too many problems present themselves to me. For convenience, let’s use Moby Dick, frequently called the greatest novel in the English language, as an example. “Call me Ishmael.” This presents the problem up-front: I have been issued an imperative, one that the author knows I will never obey, not only because I have no reason to call the narrator of the novel “Ishmael,” but because the author’s name is not Ishmael. All right, let’s forget about the latter, and pretend that an actor is on stage, directing us to call him Ishmael. Does the audience then respond, “Hi, Ishmael!”? Or does it sit in silence, as we do when confronted with these words? What kind of language is this, where a clear imperative is utterly ignored, with the implicit consent of he who issued it? If I wrote you a letter that told you to “Call me Ishmael,” you would either respond, “Dear Ishmael,” or, Bartleby-like, “I’d prefer not to.” But here we somehow take it for granted. Now I realize that this imperative says more than that—it says, in essence, “My name may not be Ishmael, but for the purposes of this narrative, I’d prefer you to know me as Ishmael.” Melville cleverly begins his fiction with an admission by the narrator that he is not entirely trustworthy. The second sentence reads, “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” That “never mind how long precisely” again admits the untrustworthiness of the narrator. So we are facing a fiction within a fiction, a tall tale told by a narrator who does not exist. The key thing is that this distancing strategy is necessary if we are to swallow this whale of a tale whole. It is a variant of “This is a story my father told me, and it was told to him by his father.” The novel no longer claims to be representative of reality—it becomes simply a story.
    But something peculiar happens halfway through (and not only there, but in the prefatory material as well): this story, which has been presented to us as pure fiction, begins to require reams of documentation. Melville gives us hundreds of pages of facts—interpreted facts, but still facts. Why? What has happened here? When a traditional storyteller tells his tales which he has heard from his father who has in turn heard it from his father, no facts are necessary, we have left behind the factual world and exist in the realm of pure story. But the novel, at least after Balzac, requires the influx of information, requires provability. What is the point of the profusion of detail in the novel? To enhance the illusion of reality. But what is the point of that illusion? Why should we be deceived? And how do we allow ourselves to be deceived by realistic descriptions when we have not allowed ourselves to be deceived by “Call me Ishmael”? In my last letter, I argued that the very existence of novels made no sense; now I support that argument by saying that the way novels are written and presented makes no sense. There is nothing more futile than the imitation of the real, as Plato pointed out in The Republic. Pure fiction (as in the folk tale), pure communication (as in letters), pure documentation—all these things I can understand. But the novel—this unholy mixture—baffles me.

I no longer write letters. I write novels.

Read, read on

To celebrate having finished writing the second draft of my novel The Birdwatchers I here post a song about a bird and reading:

The Books - An Owl with Knees (2005)

Here are the lyrics:

Eat rye straw
Leave, withdraw
Drink ink tea
Stay with me 

Fame stay shy
By way of why
Wait, lie low
Old ones' odd odes 

Read. Read on
Read, read on
Breathe, be calm
You're gone, gone on 

It's strange to see how time agrees to slow down for owls with knees.

The dark side of Netherland

Few recent novels appear to have been praised as highly as Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It won the PEN/Faulkner award; the New York Times called it “stunning” and one of the best books of the year; James Wood, in The New Yorker, called it “exquisitely written” and said it showed “deep human wisdom” (as opposed to animal wisdom? I wonder); the Times Book Review said it “had more life inside it than ten very good novels”; and, hell, even Barack Obama liked it, calling it “a wonderful book.” It has probably sold some 300,000 copies so far.

So I read it. The writing is indeed exquisite. The protagonist, Hans van den Broek, is a drip, but at least he is preoccupied with a compelling antagonist, a Trinidadian con man named Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans occupies the Nick Carroway position, while Chuck is rather transparently a Great Gatsby of sorts. And I thought it rather clever of O’Neill to switch Gatsby’s meditation on class to a meditation on race and origin.

In addition, one of the things that has made this novel so compelling to readers is its pitch-perfect evocation of post-9/11 New York. The book ranges all over the five boroughs, from a cricket field in Staten Island to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, from Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel to the haunts of taxi drivers in Queens. One of the most delightful things about Netherland is wondering where in New York you’ll end up next--and whom you’ll meet there.

But when it comes to the larger picture, unfortunately, O’Neill has nothing fresh to say. Ramkissoon is a man of constant action, big dreams, brilliant talk--everything Hans clearly wishes he was himself but has long ago given up hope of ever being. Hans is a millionaire stock trader cursed with a pathological passiveness, acquiescing to every suggestion, hopelessly in love with his cold-hearted wife and, when she spurns him for no good reason that he can find (though the reader can easily supply one: Hans is--though he never realizes it, not even at his most self-critical--a terrible bore), he becomes suddenly taken with anyone with darker skin than himself. (Spoiler alert: stop reading this post if you plan to read the book.) And it’s not just the oh-so-mysterious Chuck--in the only sex scene in the entire book Hans hooks up with a black woman who asks him to whip her. And he does! (Like I said, he pathologically acquiesces to every suggestion.) Chuck, of course, turns out to be a bad guy, a gangster, though the reader realizes this far before Hans does, and also realizes that he’s not really any worse than Hans himself, though Hans will never come to that conclusion--millionaires who whip black women and gangsters who beat up small-time businessmen are apparently not equivalents in his world. Hans’s cluelessness about all this made me want to throw the book across the room--in one scene he comes across concrete evidence of Chuck’s thuggish ways and it takes him two pages to comprehend what he has seen (I comprehended it immediately and was appalled by Hans’s--and O’Neill’s--need to explicate it).

But this is nothing compared to the author’s grotesque insistence on Chuck’s inner jungle-like nature. After Hans discovers what Chuck is capable of, he breaks off all contact, but Chuck reappears only to deliver a monologue that goes on for pages about his youth in Trinidad’s jungles, replete with dangerous snakes and Shango-Baptist feasts. The apparently charming, ambitious, clever black man turns out to be, well, a jungle bunny, if you don’t mind my not mincing words. This allows Hans the blessed opportunity to renounce his black envy (though, of course, never explicitly), leave New York, reunite with his wife and child, and return to the far more comfortable and less mysterious land of London, at last happy and comfortable in his lily-white skin.

I should add here that part of my distaste is probably due to my occupying a similar position to Hans’s once upon a time. When I lived in Brooklyn I, as a volunteer for an AIDS organization, befriended a blind and dying Trinidadian Yoruba-Baptist preacher named Lionel, who, over the course of eighteen months or so, took me to a half-dozen of his wild feasts, in which colorfully dressed Trinidadian Brooklynites became possessed by African orishas, poured strange libations in the corners of rooms, walked into the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean so that trays of brightly colored cakes could float out to the horizon, and so on. Joseph O’Neill has, apparently, never been to one of these feasts himself, since he has Chuck say, “The Baptist Church is this Trinidad brew of Christian and African traditions--you’ll see them in Brooklyn on a Sunday, wearing white and ringing bells and trumpeting the spirit.” Wearing white? Ringing bells? Trumpeting the spirit? How about men dancing with a bottle of rum in one hand and a machete in the other, possessed by malevolent spirits, and having to be wrestled to the ground so that they don’t hurt anyone? How about half-naked girls dancing on all fours to the beat of polyrhythmic drumming at three in the morning in a hot candle-lit Brooklyn basement? Of course, all this fascinated me, but I knew better than to pretend that Lionel--or any of his bizarre male lovers or gossippy female friends--symbolized my dark side. O’Neill may count himself in good company--after all, he’s following in the footsteps of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville--but one would hope that black people symbolizing the dark side of white people would be, by the twenty-first century, a thing of the past.

(And perhaps it’s better not to dwell on Joseph O’Neill’s treatment of Jews. The only Jewish character, Abelsky, is easily the most loathsome creature in the book, a caricature of the sweaty, swarthy, money-grubbing, fat, ignorant Jew; O’Neill also takes pleasure in poking fun at kosher certification, and the word Jew appears to signify “money-loving” in the few places it appears.)

My skin crawled when I read this book. Why didn’t Michiko Kakutani’s or Barack Obama’s or James Wood’s? At least Zadie Smith condemned the book for its shilly-shallying ways. Her review, written for the New York Review of Books, is here.

Rise

In moments of bliss I would rise. Suspended three feet off the ground, I would hang happy in the air for up to a quarter hour. This happened repeatedly: walking in a rose garden, bicycling over a bridge, smoking a joint at a party.

I took to carrying images in my wallet of Jews in concentration camps, lynched black youth, starving Ethiopians; of the crucifixion, Hiroshima, Jonestown. When I felt bliss coming on but did not want to be an object of attention, I would take out the images and gaze at them until I was in a more natural condition.

While making love to my wife, limbs entwined, we would both rise off the sheets shortly before climax, and remain suspended afterwards; we would slowly fall back to the bed as I drifted off to sleep.

But one day I could no longer rise. No matter how happy I felt, I stayed on the ground.

In the summertime, I went to a park several hours before dawn and when the first bird sang I slit my wrists. I began to rise as the blood flowed. As I lost consciousness, I soared over the rooftops. Even the vultures, although excited by the smell, were too astonished at their rapidly rising quarry to inflict any damage. Large drops of blood fell on the street in front of the library. Long after dawn I kept rising, past the gates of heaven, into the colorless beyond.

Narrative art

The true role of narrative art is this: to relate dreams as if they were reality, and reality as if it were a dream.

—Massimo Bontempelli, Minnie la candida (1929)

The birth of an American monarchy: a brief history of Backland in the eighteenth century

No one knows exactly why one of the original fourteen colonies was called Backland. I’ve done some research into the use of the word prior to the colony’s founding in 1716, but the closest thing I’ve found is William Penn’s description of parts of Pennsylvania: “The back lands being richer than those that lie by navigable rivers.” Perhaps that’s how Backland’s founder, Lord Simon Boon, thought of the place. He planned to settle the colony with “chroniclers, historians, portrait artists, poets, playwrights, actors, singers, and so forth.” Unfortunately, Lord Boon couldn’t find many folks like that willing to follow him to this God-forsaken land, so the colony was populated mainly by scoundrels, religious fanatics, and adventurers. It attracted more than just Brits—Welsh, Scots Highlanders, Germans, Italians, French, you name it—with one exception: settlers from other American colonies were barred.

During the Revolution, chaos reigned. Contemporary historians estimate that the American population was split in thirds between Patriots, Loyalists, and folks who didn’t know which way to turn. When the War began, most Americans had been in favor of some kind of reconciliation with Britain: they were willing to remain in the British Empire but tied only to the king, with Parliament having no authority over them at all. As late as 1776 most Americans were monarchists. But after the War began in earnest, America split apart. The Patriots elected representatives to the Continental Congress and sent soldiers to Washington’s army; the Loyalists were tarred and feathered, had their property confiscated, and often emigrated to England; and those on the fence had to choose between one and the other. For six years the Colonies were without any truly legitimate government: anarchy, mob rule, and terror reigned.

In the middle of all this, Robert Jones published his infamous pamphlet, Against Liberty, in Vickery, Backland’s largest city. Jones, who had come here in 1724 at the age of four, had lost everything: his property had been confiscated, his crops had been burned, he’d been tarred and feathered and paraded through the streets, and finally he’d left for London. Subtitled A Prophetic Warning, and drawing on the writings of such defenders of monarchy as Plato, Dante, and de Maistre, Against Liberty described Jones’s vision of America under the Patriots’ rule. It would be “a life of slavery and subjection to the iron-fisted tyranny of the majority, a life more like death than liberty.” Jones theorized that the more people in power, the more oppressive the power would be, so that a democracy, in which power was vested in the majority (“the mob”), would be inherently more oppressive than a monarchy, where all power was vested in one person. In Patriotland, Jones’s imaginary democracy, all preferment was granted according to how well a citizen fit in with the tastes of the majority, not according to his ability. These tastes—which were of the decidedly lower-class variety—ruled not only over the realm of politics, but over all culture, from what food was grown to what music was played. Under a monarchy, however, or so Jones argued, the tastes of the king and his aristocracy allowed natural excellence to flourish. Similarly, under a democracy exceptional men would be punished for being different, and in Patriotland the prisons were filled with men of genius; in monarchies, however, the prisons held precisely those rabble-rousers who would rule Patriotland. In a hundred years, Jones prophesied, Patriotland would become a nation in which every citizen would imitate his fellows, and, nobility having vanished, nothing would be left but a mass of mediocrity.

This pamphlet was immensely influential in Backland, where it was circulated widely. The colony, like Georgia, was already a hotbed of Loyalist sentiment, but Jones’s pamphlet actually made it possible to openly voice Loyalist creeds. Jones himself returned triumphantly in 1779 and organized a pro-British militia. He damned the Continental Congress, characterizing them as pawns of the French—a view which, by the way, was shared by John Adams, John Jay, and Ben Franklin—and, in a famous speech, proclaimed, “Give me monarchy or give me death!”

Meanwhile, his cause was being defeated by Washington’s army. By 1781, after Washington’s victory at Yorktown, Britain’s only remaining holdings were New York, Charleston, Vickery, and Savannah. Lord North, the British prime minister, resigned, King George III drafted a letter of abdication, and Cornwallis’s army returned to England. The Patriots had won. And by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed, Britain had ceded the entire fourteen colonies to the newly established United States of America.

While the rest of America’s Loyalists had fled, Jones’s army remained, entrenched at Fort Vickery, supported by a large majority of Backlanders. Washington didn’t take them very seriously, especially since they were entirely without British support. Backland Patriots drafted a state constitution and had it ratified by ignoring Jones’s supporters; Backland became the seventh state to join the Union. Everyone figured that sooner or later Jones and his followers would just go away.

But that never really occurred to the men in Fort Vickery. As soon as the peace treaty had been signed—ceding Vickery to the USA, to the great surprise of Backlanders—Jones—who considered himself a prophet, not a leader—sent his right-hand man, Caleb Turner, on a special mission to King George III: he was to plead that Backland remain a British colony.

Turner, however, had other ideas. He was 35, tall, with a full head of dark hair hidden under his wig. After a backwoods upbringing and years of military service, he had a ruggedness, a manly bearing, entirely foreign to the Court at London. He was easily the most handsome man there. And, having had few if any contacts with women during the years of the Revolution, he quickly formed a huge appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. It was rumored that during his first week in London he bedded nine different ladies, including several who were married to Lords, though that appears to me extremely unlikely. Needless to say, these rumors did not endear him to the Court.

Turner reasoned, quite correctly, that if he followed Jones’s instructions and asked King George to reacquire Backland, and if the king accepted, this would put Backland at war with the other colonies, who wanted no British on their soil. On the other hand, if Backland were to become an independent nation, they could remain at peace with the United States, and he could then ask King George to make him Backland’s first king. Turner met with the king in private; there are no records of their conversation. But we gather that Turner’s first proposition met with George’s approval, while his second was refused—or at least postponed. At any rate, Turner wrote to Jones that England had rejected the proposal that Backland remain a Crown Colony, and that King George would appoint a king for Backland.

Turner lobbied hard for the position. He got himself engaged to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Duke of Windsor; she flatly refused to consider any other suitors, no matter what their station. The duke therefore was most desirous to have a king rather than a colonial commoner as his future son-in-law. But King George wasted little time before deciding to appoint his second cousin, Francis Colchester, as Backland’s King Francis. Turner broke off the engagement and returned to Vickery empty-handed.

King George had required that Backland’s borders be secured before Francis’s arrival, so Jones’s militia, armed with additional ammunition supplied by the British, spread throughout Backland, handing out muskets to anyone willing to fight for king and country. After heated debate, the Continental Congress decided to expel Backland from the confederation, although Washington preferred to take the state by force. The expulsion, however, was more acceptable to most congressmen, who generally considered Backland an embarrassment, and not worth the expenditure of arms; in addition, Francis had taken the precaution of sending certain powerful congressmen emissaries bearing expensive gifts. So on August 3, 1783, Francis Colchester, who had arrived from England the night before, was crowned King Francis I of Backland. Years later some wag calculated that August 3 could also be called “The 34th of July,” so the date was dubbed Dependence Day.

Francis was sane, 46 years old, had been married for eight years, and was expecting his first child (who turned out to be stillborn). He had never before been to America, but he was capable and wise, and he knew that the first thing he had to do was consolidate his power. Immediately after the coronation he decreed a new tax, which he called an establishment tax, a one-time fee collected from all property holders, which he promised to prudently invest, allowing Backland to gain economic independence from the rest of the former colonies.

All economic and diplomatic ties with Backland were soon severed by the U.S. Congress. King Francis now felt he had a free hand. Backland’s leading Patriots were tried for treason and executed; other Patriots either fled or were deported. Hundreds of slaves labored for eleven years to build an immense twenty-five-foot-high wall along the U.S. border, with barbed iron spikes hammered into the mortar and sticking out from between the stones. Francis knew that he had ready customers for all Backland’s exports—rice, indigo, deerskin, lumber, beef, pork—in England. He invested wisely, spent wisely, taxed heavily. And Backland thrived.

As for Caleb Turner, he continued womanizing; he started drinking too. Subject to manic bursts of energy, he accomplished some significant things, such as establishing Backland’s first hospital, organizing a land-clearing crew for agriculture and lumber-production, and opening four racetracks. However, between these efforts, he led a life of complete dissipation. Although he never married, it is said that his progeny numbered in the dozens.

And as for Robert Jones, he was named the first Duke of Vickery and became very wealthy. Under Francis, he was almost twice as rich as he’d been under George III. And he wrote a now largely forgotten sequel to Against Liberty, a pamphlet called Republic of Infamy, in which he engaged in an imaginary dialogue with a U.S. republican rogue. During most of the dialogue, Jones enumerated the injustices he’d endured at the hands of the Patriots—a pretty tedious account; this was followed by a what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this series of questions. The only surprising thing about the pamphlet was what Jones’s imaginary Patriot answered: with unconcealed anger, he simply retold the history of the Revolutionary War, illustrating the triumph of democracy over monarchy by force—a might-makes-right argument that, considering U.S. history, actually makes perfect sense. As Jones might say, what is majority rule but the command of the strong over the weak?

The door

You may open or close the door, but you may not enter.

If you close it, you will conduct your affairs as usual and not give it another thought. If you leave it closed long enough, you will forget it is there.

But if you open it, a sweet fragrance will drift into your room, a sweet light will play on your walls, the sweet sounds of music and laughter will waft around you; you will become distracted from your affairs, enveloped by an unquenchable longing to pass through the door; your life will be sweeter from the sweetness in your eyes, ears, and nostrils, yet more bitter from the knowledge that you cannot cross the threshold, you can do no more than close the door again.

The merit of lies

These days, when the merit of fiction tends to be measured by the currency of its subjects, a confessional element in the work helps establish credibility. Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it's easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets. Confession doesn't leave much room for imagination except to demand its allegiance to the personal, which may leave readers less inclined to find value in the extravagant lies of fiction.

—Joanna Scott, from her article on Isak Dinesen in this week's Nation