The Active Dead

You should read Mark Helprin’s Elegy in Blue because it is witty, wise, and funny. That is the impression made by the whole, and that is the point to hold on to. It would be facile and stupid to cavil at particulars of characterization and plotting because they are unrealistic. They are. Or to complain that the book isn’t an elegy—that, in fact, it doesn’t obey the laws of a particular genre but operates on its own terms. Such is the case. When we approach books of considerable originality, comparisons should at least whet the palate. For dazzling literary showmanship, the example of James Joyce’s Ulysses comes to mind, though Elegy in Blue is not epic in scale, and it is very New York in flavor. Like Joyce, Helprin fuels an encyclopedic mind with vast supplies of language. He is also indebted to the elegiac depths of Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” If asked to construct a literary genealogy for Elegy in Blue, I would point back to Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote. If asked to list more contemporary influences and congeners, I would name F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isaac Bashevis Singer, P. G. Wodehouse, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Auster. The first-person storyline follows an octogenarian’s life from his earliest memories to moments before a violent death. There is plenty of action and plenty of history, as the tragic and the comic intertwine in a Jewish-American narration that is, when all is said and done, one man’s dialogue with God.   

Helprin tempers his gift for lyricism with the artistic restraint to keep the lyrical passages from spreading like loosestrife. Early in the book, the reader encounters a memory that elicits this high lyrical power. The reminiscence belongs to Helprin’s nameless narrator, a man of multitudinous qualities and experiences, a protean and archetypal hero in modern dress:   

Once, when I was not yet in middle school, I opened a trap door into the attic. It was late summer, perhaps early September. The attic was like an oven and the sun blinding as it flooded in through the old-glass window in the gable. The stirring of air as I lifted the trap door and threw it aside lofted a thousand, desiccated, silvery yet nearly transparent wings that had separated from long-dead insects. For a moment, catching the light, they floated above me, so delicate as to be nearly insubstantial. Then they floated down, settling across the floor as slowly as the most silent snow, no more in the light. I was very young, but I thought these were the souls of the departed, unimaginably delicate and forever forgotten, and that someday I would join them.  

To appreciate Helprin’s art, one might start with the role of the verbs: the stirring of air lofted a thousand, desiccated, silvery yet nearly transparent wings, but these wings, not exactly bereft of agency, had separated from long-dead insects. Catching the light, they floated overhead and floated down—notice the inaudible, winglike comma—settling across the floor. The surprisingly active dead are not done with us, and the passage enacts its uncanny sense at the level of syntax, rhythm, and word choice.  

Helprin is a master of playing off presences and absences, the psychological shell game of summoning absent persons into the light and studiously observing their departure into the shadows. He can play this game in an elegiac key (as he does in the above passage) or leverage it for comic effects. When the hero’s viciously grotesque enemies—an anti-Semitic couple known as the “Weenises”—pay an unexpected visit to his nineteenth-floor apartment, he compares an elevator to “a magician’s box”: “He opens it and out come the Weenises. The Weenises go back in. The next time it opens, no Weenises.” This is very funny as it unfolds, in a style that has shifted from lyrical to the unvarnished simplicity of Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.” 

I do not praise Helprin because he excludes sex of the descriptive kind found in Roth, Houellebecq, Sally Rooney, and even the Roman Catholic author J. F. Powers: these authors are generally fine by me—I despise Puritanism almost as much as Shakespeare did. But style is a matter of choices and exclusions, and Helprin’s choices work well for him. Like Fitzgerald, he has the power to dwell on beauty in passages of sensuous reflection. For instance, when the narrator summons an early memory of his mother during the Second World War, while her husband is away fighting in Europe, he relives the emotion of watching and not quite understanding her attraction to a chivalric figure on horseback, who is guarding the coast out on Long Island: 

I wondered who was so grown-up and so strong that he or she could disallow the will of a horseman, with a rifle, free and alive in the night, riding next to the waves. And as I was wondering, the horse took a step or two closer and lowered his head as if searching for grass. The Coast Guardsman asked if I would like to pet his horse. My mother got to her feet and didn’t need to get me to mine. Then she took my right wrist and brought my hand to the horse’s nose…I sensed delight between my mother and the Coast Guardsman. His presence seemed to make her younger, and I had noticed that when he arrived she had smoothed the white cotton of her dress.   

Given our daily blitzkrieg of political and sexual hysteria, we may find this description intensely healthy and refreshing. It is noble, romantic, innocent, and real: an unexpected and salubrious tonic. It is a well-earned payoff for Helprin’s style and sensibility, however, “old-fashioned”—an epithet his narrator embraces.    

Another representative passage concerns the state of Manhattan architecture. If the reader will indulge me, I was struck by the geographical overlap of my New York with the narrator’s, the main reference points being Ossining, Manhattan, and the south fork of Suffolk County, though where Helprin’s nameless hero settles in Brooklyn, my Irish and Jewish families settled in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. I hope this last sentence qualifies me to appreciate and endorse the following judgment about certain new skyscrapers:  

There are a lot of these pencil-thin erections in New York nowadays, a fitting definition of hubris as they beg to fall over. Their immense ambition rising from an almost negligible base is very much a symbol of the times, and a target that the wind must view the way a bowling ball, if it had eyes, would view ten-pins.

If Nick Carraway, crossing the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, were to appear in a contemporary novel, he would experience much the same insight. 

A Jewish friend of mine, a philosophy professor whose father was a Freudian shrink, has a habit of punning on the word id by replacing it with “Yid.” The pun applies to Helprin’s narrator, whose ego seems pinched between his Yiddish id and his godlike superego. He exhibits a serious messiah complex, as he empties himself of all belongings, volunteers in his old age to rescue his Brooklyn neighborhood from the tentacles of an international cartel (aptly compared to the Aztecs), and mystically experiences a resurrection. When things turn violent, it’s as if Captain America has wandered into Paul Auster’s City of Glass. But then the Yid gets loose and rampages hilariously through whole sections, violating the propriety of names—Lobster Shapiro, Irving Feinbutt, Barrington DeWooster Cabot Clemson the Sixteenth—and, in the book’s funniest section, a masterpiece of comic genius that almost killed me, mocking the symbolic law. The hero, impersonating pharmacist Irving Feinbutt so as to avenge himself on Feinbutt’s patient, who is none other than Professor Weenis, informs his victim of a mistaken prescription with terrible physiological consequences. He is unable to enlighten the horrified Weenis any further due to “Pharmacy law.” When Weenis demands an explanation for an outrageous surcharge, the impersonator explains, “Pharmaceutical tax, according to pharmacy law.” Unfortunately, the pharmacy will be closed the next day: 

“What holiday?” 

“Pharmacy Day.” 

One is reminded of a Mel Brooks slapstick routine, like Moses dropping the third tablet in History of the World, Part I. But Helprin’s comical sacrilege is more intellectually absurd, closer in spirit to Waiting for Godot.  

Is Elegy in Blue a “conservative novel”? It indulges, for instance, in a shuttlecocking of literary allusions à la Wodehouse—that great conservator of class differences. In an artistic sense, though, the phrase does not do Helprin justice. One recalls that Jonathan Swift attacked the progressives of his day. Swift’s work survives not because it is conservative, however, but because, with consummate artistry, it lashes perennial human folly. And yet, a work of art cannot wholly escape its author’s political disposition, and Helprin’s refusal to flatter the tastes of our prize-encrusted literary establishment merits three cheers from thinking people on the right. 

Lee Oser’s band, The Riflebirds of Portland, are recording their third album this month in Los Angeles. His most recent books are Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature (2022) and Old Enemies: A Satire (2022).