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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey H. Bowman

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Lethem

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick; cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-56022-1

  E3-20181220-DA-PC-ORI

  E3-20181206-DA-PC-ORI

  E3-20181203-DA-PC-ORI

  E3-20181109-DA-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Furry Girl School of American Fiction: An Introduction by Jonathan Lethem

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Book One: 1950–1959 Chapter 1: The American Embassy, Mexico City, 1950

  Chapter 2: The Watergate, District of Columbia, 1951

  Chapter 3: Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, 1951

  Chapter 4: Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, 1951–1952

  Chapter 5: Whittier, California, 1952

  Chapter 6: Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, 1952

  Chapter 7: The Cargo of Truth, an American Ship Floating in the Aegean Sea, 1952

  Chapter 8: Puget Sound, Washington, 1953

  Chapter 9: Opa-Locka Airport, Florida, 1953–1954

  Chapter 10: Suddenly, California, 1954

  Chapter 11: The American Embassy in Tokyo, Japan, 1954

  Chapter 12: Detroit, Michigan, 1955

  Chapter 13: Cody, Wyoming, 1955–1956

  Chapter 14: Bloomingdale’s (Asylum), Westchester County, New York, 1956

  Chapter 15: Long Island, New York, 1956

  Chapter 16: Memphis, Tennessee, 1956

  Chapter 17: The American Embassy, Montevideo, Uruguay, 1956–1957

  Chapter 18: Black Mountain, North Carolina, 1957–1958

  Chapter 19: Aboard the Chola Srivijaya Bound for San Francisco, 1959

  Chapter 20: Alaska, 1959

  Book Two: 1960–1963 Chapter 1: Reno, Nevada, 1960

  Chapter 2: Hilldale, Somewhere in the U.S.A., 1960

  Chapter 3: Watergate Towne, District of Columbia, 1960

  Chapter 4: The Great Lakes, 1960–1961

  Chapter 5: The Island of Dr. Moreau, Somewhere off the Southern Coast of the United States, 1961–1962

  Chapter 6: Chinatown, Los Angeles, California, 1962

  Chapter 7: Teapot Dome, Wyoming, 1962–1963

  Chapter 8: The American Embassy, Saigon, South Viet-Nam, 1963

  Revolution 9: Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963

  Epilogue: Reciting Poetry with Aristotle Onassis

  About the Author

  Also by David Bowman

  Newsletters

  The Furry Girl School of American Fiction

  An Introduction by Jonathan Lethem

  1. They Also Wrote

  For years I thought I’d begin an essay with the title “They Also Wrote.” This wasn’t a plan, exactly, but a notion, barely more than a title. The idea was to write a kind of general manifesto on behalf of forgotten authors. I’d likely never have done it. By a certain point I’d made my eccentric preference for out-of-print and neglected fiction, for the noncanonical dark horses—Flann O’Brien over James Joyce, say—abundantly clear (probably irritatingly so, for any reader who was paying attention). With the help of the New York Review of Books imprint, and a few other heroic publishing programs, I’d been involved, a few times, in dragging a few of my pets back into view—Bernard Wolfe, Anna Kavan, Don Carpenter. Other times I’d simply been delighted to see it done, as if according to my whims, but without lifting a finger.

  We may be living, in fact, in the great age of “rediscovered” authors. Younger readers want to talk to me, all the time, about Shirley Jackson and John Williams and, of course, Philip K. Dick, who’s become so renowned that very few people remember that at the time of his death he was largely forgotten, and out of print. Perhaps at a time when canons have fragmented and been assaulted, and working authors seem compromised by social-media overfamiliarity and three-and-a-half-star verdicts, these honorably silent dark horses are the best repository for our old sacred feeling, the one cultivated in the semiprivacy between a reader and a favorite book. Living writers, now that we’ve gotten such a close look at them, are pretty embarrassing. Famous authors of the past? Mostly blowhards. Posthumously celebrated writers, on the other hand, all seem to walk under the grace of Kafka’s umbrella, with Melville and Emily Dickinson.

  Plenty of remarkable books still slip through the rediscovery net. I wouldn’t have put money on David Bowman’s chances. Certainly, I’d never have imagined that my largely forgotten old friend, author of two slim out-of-print novels and one out-of-print book of music journalism, would be reincarnated in the form of an epic novel about celebrity and power in the postwar twentieth century, one he didn’t finish soon enough to submit to publishers before he died. Sure, I’d known Big Bang—which Bowman also sometimes liked to call Tall Cool One—existed. He’d shown me portions of it over the years. I’m probably not the only person who saw pages. But the notion that he’d reached a satisfying conclusion to what seemed his most quixotic writing journey, let alone that anyone would ever usher it into print—this never seemed remotely likely.

  No, if Bowman were heard from again, I’d assumed it would be because some dedicated publisher had chosen to reprint his first novel, from 1992, Let the Dog Drive. It was his only success, really, among the three books published during his lifetime, despite being published by NYU Press, and therefore receiving barely anything in the way of a publicity campaign. (The early ’90s were an unmatched era in the history of publicity campaigns for novels; it was Bowman who joked to me that when he witnessed Donna Tartt’s rollout in Vanity Fair he thought, “Wow, I wish I had a novel out,” and then, “Wait a minute, I do have a novel out!”) Let the Dog Drive, an antic noir comedy about a dysfunctional family, interspersed literary and pop-cultural references with arresting sex and violence. It gained rave reviews in both the Times Book Review and The New Yorker, despite featuring nothing more in the way of jacket blurbs than an excerpt from a letter to Bowman from Joan Didion, thanking him for mentioning her in the novel. (That he’d written to Didion was, I’d learn, typical of Bowman’s ingenuous approach to celebrities, literary and otherwise, who fascinated him; more on this soon.)

  During Bowman’s 1995 book tour for the Penguin paperback of Let the Dog Drive he visited Diesel Books, in Oakland, California. I was one of a h
andful who attended. I asked him to autograph my copy of the NYU hardcover and gave him a copy of my then-fresh first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. Bowman inscribed my copy, “to Jonathan—six figures in your future!” Bowman candidly dreamed of glory for both of us, from the inception of our friendship. Yet it was our dual marginality that created the bond. From this point I’m implicated in every story I have to tell you about David Bowman. I’m incapable of introducing him without committing memoir.

  2. The Bowman Tapes

  Bowman returned to New York, and I stayed, for the moment, in my garret in Berkeley. Almost immediately, we’d talk on the phone nearly every day. Bowman was my first conduit to the contemporary literary New York City of the late ’90s, which I was now working my courage up to enter, and which was almost wholly mysterious to me; growing up in Brooklyn hadn’t constituted any form of preliminary encounter. Bowman was marvelously charismatic on the phone. His tone amused and conspiratorial, he began every call in medias res, with the word “—so…” Then he’d leap in midstream, resuming some trailing thought from an earlier conversation, even if it was only one he’d been having with himself.

  Yet the phone wasn’t enough. Bowman besieged me with charmingly nutty handwritten letters, many of them containing scissor-and-glue-pot collages, usually incorporating elements from the New York tabloids—Page Six squibs concerning the kinds of writers who generated Page Six squibs: Mailer, McInerney, his beloved Didion, or downtown figures who’d risen to stardom, like Patti Smith, Jim Jarmusch, David Byrne—combined with Bowman’s own cartoonish Sharpie scribbles, or his personal erotic photography. He’d call these cut-ups “charms”—they were meant to convey writerly luck. One I still have tacked up over my desk was called the “Dancing DeLillos Charm”: a row of Rockettes with Don DeLillo’s head atop each dancer.

  Yet there’s more: the Bowman tapes. He and his wife regularly rented a cabin in Montauk, and while there he’d pace the beach, drinking beer, and monologuing to me into a tape recorder. The cassettes arrived in the mail, incoherently labeled. I’d pop them into my car or home tape player and listen. They were hypnotic, outlandish, and boring at once. Bowman’s monologues were elaborately themed—usually some variation on his obsession with writerly ambition, and how it was cursed for him, for me, and nearly anybody, by the afflictions of personal fate. He’d inaugurate each rant with certain key phrases to which he’d return, as if in song. Bowman was a master at a kind of verbal plate-spinning routine, but he was also a helpless digressionist, and sometimes a plate on the far side of the stage would be forgotten for twenty minutes or more. Sometimes you’d have to flip the tape over to find out if he’d forgotten his theme.

  This is improbable, but much about Bowman is improbable. He sent more tapes than I found time to listen to. I recall my girlfriend complaining about how they’d begun filling up the floor space in the passenger side of my Toyota Corolla. I did my best to keep up, but it was hopeless. On the tapes, Bowman’s dreams and schemes were interspersed with the crunch of his feet on the wet Montauk beach at night, and though I haven’t listened to one of the Bowman tapes in nearly two decades, I can still hear that gravel crunch and the heavy breathing of his pauses for thought, as if it recurs in my nightly dreams.

  3. The Lot 49 Method

  Bowman’s loyalty and generosity were simply immense, in those first years, while I remained stranded in Berkeley, far from the action, and our friendship was conducted by phone, tape, and charm. After three books, I’d been orphaned at Harcourt Brace and needed a new publisher, but I was a pretty small fish. My agent had an offer from Doubleday, but Bowman, working behind the scenes, turned it into a small auction with his own publisher, Little, Brown. (I landed at Doubleday.) The book in question needed a new title, the first task I needed to perform for my shiny new publisher, and I was flailing. Bowman walked me through it: use the Lot 49 Method, he told me. I had to ask what he meant. “‘The Crying of Lot 49’ is the last line of The Crying of Lot 49,” he explained. “What’s the last line of your book?” I looked: my last line included the phrase “as she climbed across the table.” That same book was blurbless. Bowman, acting on his own, forced it on, of all people, Jim Harrison. Likely bewildered but charmed, as people tended to be on early encounter with Bowman’s manic style, Jim Harrison improbably gave forth with a blurb. I doubt my new publisher had any idea how that happened—I barely understood it myself—but they probably assumed Harrison had been my teacher somewhere, or had been a friend of my dad’s.

  4. The Furry Girl School

  At some point early on Bowman coined a name for us: the Furry Girl School of American Fiction. He’d named it after a character in my second novel, Amnesia Moon—a girl, specifically, who was furry. I don’t mean “furry” in the modern polymorphously perverse sense of a fetish for dressing up in costumes and having sex—I mean that her body was covered in light fur. To Bowman, the character was an emblem of what he and I loved most in the books we loved: not “heart,” exactly, but some eccentric character or motif, a tic or inside joke, almost, one that made the book personal to the author, and in turn to the reader who loved it. A book could be impressive without containing this quality, which was quickly shortened to “Furry.” In Bowman’s reasoning—always comprised of instantaneous certainties—almighty DeLillo, for instance, had written books both Furry (End Zone, White Noise) and not (Players, Underworld). Mailer had never been Furry in his life. Chandler was Furry, Ellroy not. And so on. Swept up, anointed, I consented even when it made no sense, and we indexed the whole world on the Furry Scale.

  The Furry Girl School needed a female member—this was my suggestion, and I nominated a writer named Cathryn Alpert, who’d written a funny, Furry, and in some ways Bowmanesque novel called Rocket City. From the clues (small-press publication in hardcover, for one thing) Alpert was as much outsider, as much dark horse, as Bowman and I felt ourselves to be. We called or emailed, out of the blue; or possibly I turned up at a reading and announced us to her. Bowman’s charms worked at a distance (perhaps they worked best at a distance), and Cathryn Alpert, who’d heard of neither of us before this, quickly consented. The Furry Girl School had three members now.

  5. Chloe and Snoot

  David Bowman would turn out to be one of the most isolated people I’ve ever known—isolated on the profoundest levels by a certain traumatic displacement from ordinary human consolation. Yet on a day-to-day basis he wasn’t strictly alone. Bowman had a wife. Chloe Wing was older than Bowman, and seemed almost infinitely kind and patient with him, if sometimes also rather distant, impassive (later, I’d view this as a survival trait on Chloe’s part). He also had a dog, the beloved Snoot, a tall black-and-white hound with sensitive paws. Snoot suffered: he endured treatments to his paws, and for digestive troubles, and other ailments. Bowman, helpless in his devotion, suffered with the dog.

  When I moved back to New York City and first visited Bowman and Chloe and Snoot in their beautiful Manhattan apartment, his life seemed enviable. From the distance of California my new friend had appeared to know so many editors and writers. I was now ready to be swept up in his world, to begin our friendship in person, rather than long-distance. In fact, up close, my great friend was quickly exposed to me as a person whose stark limitations, whose damage, were the equal of his charisma and brilliance. Almost overnight, I began at some level to take care of Bowman, instead of the reverse.

  6. Dogboy and Sarge

  If David Bowman was such a dear friend, why do I keep calling him Bowman? Well, I never called him David. To others, I called him Bowman, as he’d called me Lethem, to others. It was Bowman’s habit always and only to last-name writers (Didion, Lish, Moody, et al.). Then he’d adopt hard-and-fast nicknames for interpersonal address. At his suggestion, I called him Dogboy, and he called me, at first, Amnesia Boy, after my second novel, Amnesia Moon. Pretty soon he switched me to Sarge, which was how he addressed me for the rest of his life. Bowman called me Sarge because, he explained, he always
followed my commands, as if in a war movie, as if we were going over a hill.

  The “commands” in question? I’d tell Bowman not to do things. After I’d moved to New York I’d begun to realize how he was serially alienating the magazine editors upon whom he depended, as well as his book publicists and other editorial subordinates. He freaked people out with his bizarre pitches, his strange, insinuating late-night calls and emails, his impetuous rages over poorly specified minor betrayals. He knew many writers and editors, yes, but now I saw that nearly all of them had learned, or were learning, or would soon learn, to treat him with kid gloves. There came a point when I understood I’d never met anyone who devoted as large a share of his (vast) creative energy to impulses that were sheerly disastrous, that he had to be talked out of.

  I failed, at the time, to concern myself with the recipients of Bowman’s tirades. Some of the villains who incensed him might have earned it—like the businessman who’d once kicked at Snoot on Second Avenue—but this can’t be true of all the publishing operatives at whom he uncorked. To my shame, my interventions weren’t so much with his victims in mind as they were intended to save Bowman from himself.

  7. Loves

  Bowman loved beer and traveled to a special warehouse in Brooklyn to purchase the exotic imported bottles he craved. This was nearly the only thing that could get him onto the subway—he otherwise preferred to walk Snoot on the Lower East Side, or to stay at home.

  Bowman loved Bob Dylan, inordinately, and collected Dylan bootlegs, but to my astonishment had never been to see Dylan play live. Bowman loved Patti Smith, inordinately. He loved her earliest music, raging and foul-mouthed, and he seemed always to be searching for an equivalent in his curiosity about PJ Harvey, Thea Gilmore, and so forth. He loved Marianne Faithfull, too; fair to say he was electrified by foul-mouthed women in general. He loved Lou Reed, Gillian Welch, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Dr. Seuss, and dogs.