Dear Henry, Thank you for agreeing to make my payments "under the table," as well as, I suspect, out of your own pocket. As "William Monahan" (that fucker) I will remain at my present location until further notice. Your inaugural FedEx (of which I am, sir, in grateful receipt) caused some initial confusion in the mind of the supreme being of this hotel, a mangle-haired drunkie & cretin named Ed. He had never received a FedEx before (this says a lot about my present place of residence, which essentially selected me in that I fell on my face in the downstairs bar after chasing the last of Mei-Mei’s lorazepam with 16 or 17 cocktails). In his illiteracy Ed mangled the admonition not to send "blood products" in the envelope into the idea that the envelope contained blood products, to a certainty. "Here is your blood," he said, after knocking like the entire fucking police department on my door. For two days, Henry, I thought that Ed understood that the envelope contained money—which he was threatening to steal—unless I gave him some. The La Badarian mind sorted out the situation after two days of extremely heavy drinking, as well as attacks of hyperconsciousness which I would not wish upon the Archfiend.
In Guatemala, as you helpfully suggest, your money would go a great deal further than it does in this bijou college town in Massachusetts, but if I desired to live among incomprehensible savages, constantly on the lookout for a knife in the back, I would return to Manhattan, or my marriage. As destroyed as I am I do have "lifestyle considerations." I know that our "agreement" will continue until one or the other of us is dead, but I do not delude myself into thinking that $500 a week, though it is very serious money in the Genius Trade, will satisfy me forever. At any rate, Claude La Badarian is not going to fuck off to Morocco so he can squirt diarrhea all over the place while you eat caviar tartlets at Apocalypse with Candace Bushnell giving you handjobs. Neither am I the sort of man to remain content smoking Best Buys and pounding a nightly "doll house" of sub-premium beer in a welfare hotel. (Faced with that sort of lifestyle, I would be in danger of giving up drinking and smoking entirely, leaving Art bereft of Claude La Badarian, and thus all interest of any kind.) I may have to supplement my remittance and I certainly cannot do it while dying of dysentery among cannibals. Then the world would be as naked of Improvements as you are of that divine spark called Talent—unless we can consider your capacity to knife and toady your way to the middle without ever saying an original thing—a quality conferred by a respectable deity. This thesis would render your most sympathetic friends omnino taciturnos.
Today at the bar conveniently located beneath my residence (I live among mumbling "veterans"—and of a lot more than the fucking Army, I can tell you that), moodily converting your "blood products" into mammoth brandies, I realized that my essential problem now is what to do with my freedom. I am not the first man to have had this problem (Frenchmen have it pretty considerable). There are many who would say it’s no problem at all—yet it’s more of a problem than you think. The La Badarian Condition has always been: say you wake up in the morning and have every talent in the world (you cannot imagine this, Henry—but bear with me): what the fuck do you do with yourself? Create Art, you say, obviously, or "make" it, as the potters say, doing the opposite—yet La Badarian has to retool as an Artist, and, again, is wondering if it’s worth it. If God gives you something you can do, asks Stephen King, in his extra-popular On Writing, why wouldn’t you do it? Answer, you fucking hammerhead, Because Genius is different from, and possibly more problematic than, getting millions of dollars to rewrite old monster movies—you cunt.
Claude La Badarian, from earliest youth (photograph exists of the young Claude in a badged blazer, emerging from a basilica with his palms pressed together and his eyes turned skyward), has been besieged by gratuitous integrity. Anti-success training is the specialty of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Sell out! people used to say to Claude La Badarian. Did Claude sell out? No. And then later, when he asked to sell out, he didn’t then, either, and not in every case because no one would let him. For a while there, with Mei, I nearly acceded to the view that writing is merely the way you make your living, so perhaps you should view it as a business—you asshole. And bang went the teapot off the La Badarian head. Fuck that, Henry. That’s why the world is excrement. Claude La Badarian is like Lancelot: the greatest knight, chucking his arms into a stream because to employ them for Vanity is hubris, and to employ them except in right cause (do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Are you reading this in Sagaponack with your buttplug in?) is unworthy of a human being. Is writing, these days, a right cause? You fucking tell me. I don’t think it is.
At any rate, I have abandoned Hyper-Consciousness:AMemoir. While lying in a foetal position in my barricaded room after Ed’s assault on my reason I realized that I could not go on with the book. True the MSS has some immortal scenes (the young Claude trying to smash a mailbox after posting a letter asking an Author for help, the young, scarved Claude standing on a crag in an Atlantic gale, vowing like Scarlett O’Hara to be Famous, etc.). But as fascinating as the story of my life may be, I—even I—find myself constantly tempted to change defeats into victories, victories into triumphs, reinterpreting and readvantaging everything that ever happened to me. The autobiographical form musters lies like a medium generates ectoplasm. Not five men in human history—neither the Apostles, Augustine, Dick Cavett nor Casanova—has ever written a memoir any more reliable than the crap he tells women when he’s drunk, and the women if anything are worse.
There is a reason that the confession-box has a screen between you and your "public": Holy Church knows that no one is to be trusted where "personal narrative" "intersects" with an audience. After all, Jesus himself claimed that he had no money intentionally and that his father was God. He’s neither the first nor last to try that one on, either. Even I, Claude La Badarian, a permanent resident of the Castle of Knowledge, cannot always defeat the impulse to start lying like a wizard the minute I draw a crowd. Truth? Well, you have to go to literary fabrication for that, like Shakespeare did. No author has ever made a reliable self-portrait until he has managed to vaporize the self and, instead, created a vast number of characters who are nothing like each other and are all, precisely, him—and not him at all. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? No. You are not a Genius.
After one realises that one’s Memoir is a stack of prevarications, it is possible to convert the mass of text into a perfectly serviceable coming-of-age novel, but alas, Henry, what you’re left with then is the ordinary First Novel (a pitfall Claude La Badarian tried to avoid by calling his first novel Second Novel), in which a person resembling yourself in every detail ends up doing roughly the same shit you did but doing it (precisely as in Memoir) better than in the original. At this point in literature this obscenity (which is to say all of American Literature) must be avoided at all costs. The first things to avoid in novel-writing are the usual, primitive, mistakes in protagonist-creation. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a kicked-at little man, incapable of doing one chin-up, necessarily reinvents himself as Tarzan, and then sends himself to Mars, where he is able to leap phenomenal distances into the air, lay princesses, and kill six-armed giants with a sword. Tom Clancy, powerless realtor, creates, of all people, "Jack Ryan," who gets to hang around with sailors before becoming president. I realized yesterday, my jaw dropping open, that there is no difference whatsoever in essence between Stephen Dedalus and Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan never missed a branch specifically because his creator missed them all the time, crashing cocklessly through the socioeconomic canopy of what the French, so aptly, call le jungle. That is, until he became Edgar, primate of Tarzana, signing himself simply "Tarzana" at the bar. Perhaps I am projecting.
A thief and liar named Paco, at the local "Mac" store, has sold me an ancient PowerBook 520, and though he lied and told me that it could "recognize" its modem (it certainly can fucking not: and a rather good thing, too: La Badarian, pill-crazed late-night epistolarian—omnia transformans sese in miracula rerum—operating on the Rimbaudian principle that the "I" is someone else, enhanced by insomnia, financial peril, and extensive media connections, is definitely not something we need to resurrect), I have set myself up a small office here in my SRO, which is actually quite a nice place—I have lived in worse—I have longed for worse—though the whiff of colostomy in the hall would knock down a grenadier, and the man next door talks to himself continually, as I might as well have been doing for twenty years. At any rate I have a machine on which to work. I do not know what it might be honorable to write with it. A long narrative poem in Italian? What does the world need? Certainly not a memoir, not little Claude running around as Mighty Mouse, nor yet the Claude who was jumped and wedgied at his own book party trying to tell you that it was arranged by Claude himself, in one of those involitional volitionisms which are the portals of discovery.
Yet though the lamp of genius flickers low amidst the fumes of incipient melancholia (However wisely one writes, one will be judged by fools), I am still here. Still here. Can the problems of Literature be solved? Oh yes. They are solved continually, and usually by me. To be sure, the idea that the "I" is someone else is not original to Claude La Badarian, but it was the La Badarian mind which converted the principle into the grand fact of the Universe. No one’s "I" has been more someone else’s than Claude La Badarian’s—especially when he has an active e-mail account, and has realized that his friends will one day be making themselves all-too available to biographers. Proteus hath not more shape than your friend. I leave you with wisdom. As anyone au courant in Literature knows—which is to say that I know it—contradictory statements are the new Silence, whereas Ambiguous Presence is the new Exile, like brown used to be the new black. Cunning is what it always was, if you have any. Your thought for today is: There’s nothing true which also isn’t. That belongs in Bartlett’s. Will it get there? I fear not. Genius is a bittersweet business, Henry. It is bitter, bitter, sweet.
I must close. A graduate student from sunnier climes, here at the café where I "scrible," as Voltaire wrote an English correspondent, has discovered that I am that Claude La Badarian. I am going to sign her book, chat about the meaning of life until 4 am, and then fail sexually.
Claude La
Badarian
Restaurant Critic
The Aristocrat Magazine
Next Week: The Time Candace Bushnell Seemed to Be Asking Claude if He Had Any Coke & Other Missed Opportunities
