From there, I moved on to other longish books – the two I mentioned above, along with L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, King’s The Stand, The Lord of the Rings (which was really intended to be just one big book before the publishers chopped it up and named the pieces themselves)... and I still have copies of Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Joyce’s Ulysses sitting on my shelf at home, ready for the next time I’m in this frame of mind. In all cases, the main reason I got into these books was because they were BIG, not because I heard good things about them or they had anything else in particular to offer. The fact that some of them are considered “classics” just legitimized my wanting to read them.
Another part of it, though, is that I marvel at people who really have that much to say, that they would sit down day after day and just keep weaving the same tale. I’m not the kind of person who is able to just talk and talk without having some sort of real content to it, and I’ve never had that kind of stamina in terms of writing either… Even in my writing projects that have made it past short story length, I’ve had to drape my story across an already-existing frame to give it the sense of structure I need. For “28 IF” it was the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, for “Tints of Dread” (which I still haven’t finished) it’s Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, and for my still-unfinished novel “Nadir”, it’s Dante’s Inferno.
Even stories about such mammoth tomes really intrigue me … Spalding Gray did a monologue in the early ‘90’s called “Monster in a Box”, which concerned his process of writing an incredibly long novel that he eventually scrapped. But the way he would talk about the “monster” was fascinating, the myriad story lines and how it started to take over its life because of its sheer size and psychological weight.
Then a few years ago I heard about Henry Darger. He had a troubled childhood – if I remember right, he had some mild form of mental illness -- who ended up working as a reclusive janitor in the very sanitarium he had spent a lot of time in as a child. He seemed like a quiet, unassuming loner until he passed away in the 1970’s… and when his apartment was unlocked, his employers found a secret project he had been working on for over 30 years. It was a novel called “The Story of the Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal”, a 15,000-page fantasy novel about a fictionalized Civil-War-type conflict between armies of children and child slavers, that takes place in a world he had completely devised on his own. Not only that, but there were also hundreds of panoramic watercolor paintings that he had done, illustrating the many fantastical battles. The estimated length of this work is over 9 million words (for comparison, all seven Harry Potter books added together are just over 1 million). There’s a great documentary film about Darger and his work called “In the Realms of the Unreal”. That just blows my mind, the sheer power of imagination that must have involved.
And then there’s Charles Crumb, brother of famous underground comic artist Robert Crumb (the guy who came up with the “Keep on Truckin’” logo in the ‘60s). It was actually Charles who became obsessively fascinated with comics as a kid, and got his younger brother to take it up. Charles drew many comics of his own, but eventually gave it up. Well, not exactly gave it up… in the documentary film “Crumb” (directed by Terry Zwigoff) you can see Robert thumbing through some of his brother’s later work, and it’s bizarrely fascinating. Charles’ obsession seemed to center on the story of Treasure Island, more specifically on the Disney film version that the Crumb kids all saw when they were young. Charles would write volumes and volumes of comics about Long John Silver and his young apprentice, but after a while his focus seemed to change… there’s a scene in “Crumb” when Robert flips through a particular comic, and as the pages go by, you can actually see Charles’ obsession running away from him… the figures in the comic panels get smaller and smaller, the text starting to take up more and more of the pages. After a while, the words take over entirely, small, crabbed writing filling the whole page, and even further along Charles stops using words altogether, with page after page full of squiggles that look like words until you examine them closely.
Crumb and Darger seem like flip sides of the strange obsession that writing can cause… where Darger, over the course of decades, was able to construct something huge and weird and impressive, Crumb’s own writing devolved until it wasn’t writing at all, just barely-organized scrawls across a page. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, he committed suicide in the mid-90’s.
I’m also really intrigued by the film Se7en… in the scene where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt find the apartment belonging to Kevin Spacey’s serial killer character, they find bookshelves filled with those standard black-and-white composition books, each one of them filled with tiny writing, the meticulously set-down thoughts of a madman raging at a world he only imagines that he understands. This movie really got under my skin the first time I watched it, but that scene in particular… I think it’s because insanity that focused, that precise and clear in its own self-analysis, is more frightening that any random act of violence. At least, it is to me.
(That scene, in fact, inspired a story of my own, called “Outside My Window”, in which a man on death row writes obsessively, and it’s not until it’s too late that you realize he has somehow become capable of bending the physical world to his will through the process of telling his own story.)
When you think about it, there’s nothing particularly challenging about a long book… it just takes longer, that’s all. But I can’t help but feel a big sense of accomplishment when I finish one. Maybe it’s the knowledge that not many people have attempted to read such a long book, and even less have finished it. I think it’s just a way of taking my bookish leanings and making them seem like more of an achievement than they really are. It the same reason why have a list of every book I’ve ever read, every movie I’ve ever seen… it takes something that I do for fun and would do anyway, and turns it into some sort of accomplishment.
It’s a good thing I’m not more of a loner than I already am, or I get the feeling I’d be chasing this ideal to its end, trying to find the subject(s) that would allow me to write, and write, and write… still, I love hearing about these writers who, for better or worse, have dedicated themselves so single-mindedly to their art. But I’m also glad I have family and friends to keep me grounded, to prevent me from running off too far into my own fantasy lands…
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