On love, death and togetherness
When one of my favourite writers was nine years old, his sister drowned in a pond while he was supposed to be watching her. According to interviews he’s given over the years, this – as you’d expect – affected him for the rest of his life. It’s apparently a relatively common thing to happen, and a huge parental error. What a thing to land a child with.
Perhaps it explains some of William T Vollmann’s character. I was first turned on to him, as with a lot of other great books, writers, and music, by Will Ashon, who founded Big Dada Recordings, Ninja Tune’s hip-hop imprint. Meeting Will was an electric moment in my life – here was a man who lived and breathed hip-hop, had a fiery intellect, and was equally knowledgeable about great novels. When I was about 22, he sent me a list of books he thought I’d like. On it was You Bright and Risen Angels by William T Vollmann.
As it turned out, I couldn’t find this book anywhere, so I ended up with The Royal Family instead. Vollmann might be a great writer, but he’s also considered ‘difficult,’ so some of his books aren’t as widely available as they should be. In his case, difficult really just means that the books are long, uncompromising and complex – but they’re also highly original and very exciting.
For the uninitiated, Vollmann has something in common with Thomas Pynchon, and is loosely a postmodernist. This theory – and approach to making art – used to be largely the territory of the intelligentsia and academe, but has more lately found its way into the online, clickbait-addled world of the culture wars – but let’s not get into that. For my money, postmodernism in the arts yielded the best results in fiction, as opposed to visual art or music. From roughly the ’60s to the ’90s, it regularly produced big, thrilling books in which there was no central truth, and thus a giddying freedom.
The theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard summed up postmodernism as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives,’ i.e. a rejection of big, overarching theories that seek to explain the world – religions, ideologies and economic models, for example. In Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, this is applied to gender, treating it, too, as simply a construct, with the central character being reborn as a woman. The novel ends in the desert, which might be a reference to Baudrillard’s ‘the desert of the real.’ (I’m doing this from memory, so if you just happen to be a critical theorist and I’m getting this wrong, go easy on me.)
In Don DeLillo’s Libra, a novel about the JFK assassination, the central postmodern image is of a researching agent drowning in evidence around the event. The real truth can never be known, the novel seems to tell us. Therefore, there is no truth.
In Pynchon… Well, better people than me have tried to explain Pynchon’s genius, and really the thing with him is just to strap in and enjoy the ride. Let’s just say that he, more than any other postmodern writer, exemplifies the idea that if a modernist mourns the fragmentation of the old metanarratives, a postmodernist gleefully plays around with the pieces. (This doesn’t explain the often quite dark tone of postmodern fiction, but you get the idea.)
But if Vollmann can be compared to Pynchon, he differs from him in two very important ways: he uses a lot more autobiography in his work, and there’s also more nihilism. I sometimes think that Pynchon’s central message is love. Vollmann’s might be, too, but he wants to conjure it by showing the suffering we inflict on each other. His social consciousness is evident – he’s written a seven-volume treatise on violence, a mega-novel about the plight of the Nez Perce Indians, and lived among the homeless and prostitutes to write The Royal Family. Again from memory, I believe he’s been clear that this included smoking crack and sleeping with them. He’s a very moral writer, in his own way, but part of this is in rejecting the flawed moralism of wider social mores.
Vollmann’s postmodernism is exemplified by his blurring of the autobiographical and the historical – now very common, but I’m not sure anyone has done it so boldly and to such effect. In my favourite of his novels, The Rifles, he blends the story of the doomed Franklin expeditions to find a northwest passage with his own time spent in the arctic circle, living among alcoholic Inuit and hiking alone. For these purposes, he invents an alter ego, Captain Subzero, and writes about him in the third person. In one striking section, he decides to visit an uninhabited arctic island in winter. The organisation responsible for managing it refuse to help him travel there.
‘Polar Shelf strongly urged him not to go. Oh, Polar Shelf could tell him horror stories…
Go ahead.
Well, just last year a Swedish gentleman went alone by dog-sled across the Great Slave Lake. He capsized, and got hypothermia. His dogs ate him.
Well, said Subzero, life is a terminal disease.’
His Inuit friends tell him to take animal fur and seal skin, but he declines their advice and takes top of the range North Face stuff instead. On arrival, he decides to camp out in an abandoned weather station:
‘His steps rang and groaned terrifyingly in that dry and pitch black coldness. The rec. room was particularly dark and horrible like a vault full of corpses. Armchairs, piled with snow, seemed to stretch and torment the darkness.’
It’s too cold to light a match, and the zippers and rubber seals on his expensive gear all perish, wither and break apart immediately. He makes the terrible error of getting water into his sleeping bag. When this happens, the moisture can never be dried out. It simply freezes, then melts into icy liquid when its occupant sleeps in it, creating a potentially fatal loop.
Subzero is reduced to walking endlessly to stay warm, carrying the shotgun he’s brought for protection against polar bears, the barrel of which freezes to exposed skin on his neck. Sure enough, he only narrowly survives.
Can you imagine actually doing this, as Vollmann did?
In the ’80s, he walked across Afghanistan – then as now one of the most dangerous and brutal places on earth – in order to write a book called An Afghanistan Picture Show. The novel that Will Ashon recommended – You Bright and Risen Angels – was written when Vollmann was a young man, working as a computer programmer. During its creation, he secretly lived in the company’s office and wrote at night, sleeping in a cupboard and eating from a vending machine. In perhaps his most daring act, he once rescued / kidnapped a Thai child prostitute, drove her to Bangkok and set her up in a vocational school there.
As you’ll be realising, Vollmann is a writer who does stuff. This led one of his contemporaries, David Foster Wallace, to write this memorable passage in his essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It tells of Wallace’s assignment to cover a voyage on a massive cruise ship – which he hates. When the vessel briefly pulls alongside another, he writes:
‘I calculate by eye the breadth of the gap I’d have to jump or rappel to switch to the Dreamward, and I mentally sketch out the paragraphs that would detail such a bold and William T. Vollmannish bit of journalistic derring-do as literally jumping from one 7NC Megaship to another.’
My mind turned to Vollmann last week because of the American election. The great writer, now in his early 60s, turned up in The Spectator with a piece called My Friends Who Vote Trump.
In it, with bitter-edged comedy, he rails against climate change deniers – making clear that’s his single issue for elections (we all have one, don’t we?)
‘One of my homeless Republican friends (who stopped speaking to me once he realised that I thought differently) used to explain that if we simply listened to the president (meaning Donald Trump, who by then was out of office), we would log our forests and solve that fire problem for good. Climate change was a Chinese hoax, he instructed; and so was the Covid 19 virus, of which (according to those lying socialist doctors) his ladyfriend died in his presence – preposterous!’
And I really enjoyed this bit, too:
‘A blue-collar right-wing neighbour of mine complained about feeling hot, and I reminded him that he could not be hot at all, because that was a Chinese hoax.’
But more than sarcasm, the piece made clear the love and respect he feels for his Trump voting friends – including a Jewish man who is ‘one of the kindest, most intelligent and civic-minded people I know,’ and found that vocational school for the ‘kidnapped’ child prostitute.
But something in the piece shocked me. Vollmann says, early in the article and with brutal directness, that his daughter has died. I found myself unexpectedly upset. I knew about Vollmann’s sister, which made the idea of his losing his only child seem incomprehensibly awful. A quick web search revealed that Lisa, his daughter, had drunk herself to death.
For some reason (my own bias?) I imagined a white woman, perhaps in her thirties, with a long, gruelling history of alcoholism. More, increasingly upsetting web searching revealed this to be quite wrong. Lisa Vollmann was apparently a mixed-race twenty-something who’d recently graduated Cornell (which happens to be Pynchon’s alma mater.) There were pictures of Lisa online. She was half-Asian, slim and pretty and smiling at the camera, sometimes goofing off a little in front of tourist attractions.
I mention her race and appearance only because she appeared so shockingly similar to the millions of other mixed-race, happy seeming, industrious graduates who populate California.
I came across her X feed. It might seem offbeat and funny, unless you knew what had happened to her, in which case it seemed erratic and a little unstable. It stopped being updated – of course – in January 2022.
All of this brought me to the edge of tears, and I had to stand up and take some breaths and pace around the room a bit.
Later, I read a longer piece that Vollmann had recently written, ostensibly about speaking to homeless men on the night of an oncoming winter storm in Reno, Nevada. He referred to money problems and to having been dropped by his long-term publisher. The pain and sadness were palpable, pulsing from his inimitable, mesmerising style. In the piece, he gave further details about Lisa:
‘When Lisa’s protracted dying grew undeniable I bought a burner phone so that I could check in on her… So I would call my daughter when I could and get her voicemail, or else she would answer listlessly and groggily, lying in her bed of drunkenness.
On the day before my return I called, and again she did not answer. So I told her that I would see her in a day, and that I loved her. Wasn’t that enough? But as drunks will, she mixed up the dates and thought that I was at my studio. On the previous night the paramedics had taken her to the emergency room just as they found her, that is without shoes. They intubated her and let her sleep it off, because as a policeman had long since told me, she was a known drunk. In the morning, when she was hydrated and somewhat sober, she refused counseling for alcoholism, so out she went, in her stocking feet… It was only two or three miles to my studio, but it happened to be raining. She waited for me in the parking lot for hours. (I torture myself over and over with this.) Then a kind homeless man gave her water and led her to the women’s shelter, where a crazy lady threatened her all night and tried to attack her.
Had I been where she imagined or hoped I was, I would have rushed to hide the alcohol, as usual, then fed her, wrapped her in blankets on my sofa (being also bulimic she was thin and got cold easily), and stayed beside her, postponing for another day my brilliant monetizations of the miseries of others. (Oh, I was plenty compassionate, all right; I had written books to prove it.)’
It's too much to bear, isn’t it?
I write this now because Vollmann’s Spectator piece was the most beautiful thing I came across in the week of the American election. What struck me about it was his generosity. It’s risky to boil such a great piece of writing down to a single message – let alone a trite one – but if there’s a theme, it’s togetherness in all its ugly glory, not just with the people we agree with and like.
It seems safe to say that without an attitude like Vollmann’s, more elections might go the same way. Writing off our fellow citizens to entrench with our own tribe gives the illusion of shelter, but I think most of us would admit, if pushed, that it just makes things worse. To my friends who hoped for Kamala – I don’t think that raging and blame are going to solve the problem next time. It’s going to take empathy and acceptance to do that.
It seems to me that Vollmann’s piece offers a blueprint for this. Perhaps it’s easier to get there when you’ve experienced tragedies on the scale he has, and spent a lifetime grappling with them.
But if Vollmann’s wisdom is hard won, hopefully most of us are luckier. We can simply adopt it.
Love this piece man, thanks for putting me onto Vollmann!