All the Sad Young Literary Men Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I

  The Vice President’s Daughter

  Right of Return

  Isaac Babel

  II

  His Google

  Sometimes Like Liebknecht

  Uncle Misha

  III

  Jenin

  Phenomenology of the Spirit

  2008

  Permission Credits

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Keith Gessen, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Page 243 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Gessen, Keith.

  All the sad young literary men / Keith Gessen.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-670-01855-0

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  For Anya, Alison, and Anne

  Prologue

  In New York, they saved.

  They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived that year on the 7 train and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the two Korean grocers, and cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes.

  It was 1998 and they were in love. They were done with college, with the Moscow of Sasha’s childhood, with the American suburbs of Mark’s—and yet they’d somehow escaped these things with their youth intact. To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little, but to be young—to be young was divine. If you’d had more money than they had that year, you’d simply have grown old faster. And so, with smiles on their faces, they saved.

  It was 1998 and they were angry. The U.S. had bombed a medicine factory in Sudan. The U.S. was inert on Kosovo—and then we started raining bombs. The Israelis continued to build settlements on the West Bank, endangering Oslo, and the Palestinians continued to arm. “Contingency and irony, sure,” said Tom, in their kitchen. “But have we forgotten solidarity?” They hadn’t. Mark and Sasha went to teach-ins, lectures, protests in Union Square. They attended free readings, second-run movies, eight-dollar plays. The readings were miserable, the plays were horrible, the lectures were nearly empty. Some of the movies were good.

  Their friends came to visit, from Manhattan, from Brooklyn, from farther away. Val’s real name was Vassily and he lived in Inwood; Nick wanted to be an art critic but worked for the moment at a bank, with expensive art on its walls. Tom was a fiery radical of the far left: in college he’d read Hegel’s Phenomenology; in New York he mostly read the political writings of Lomaski. Toby came to visit from Milwaukee and wandered around the city, his head craned up to see the faraway tops of the buildings; he was gifted with computers but wanted to write. Sam came from Boston and couldn’t stop talking about Israel; he even had an Israeli girlfriend now.

  It was 1998. Mark and Sasha and their friends held down the following jobs: translator, gallery assistant, New York Times copy clerk, Web temp, investment banker, temp, temp, temp.

  Mark had always been cheap, but in college he’d become radically cheap. He went to Russia to research a project and met a girl. She had enormous green eyes and held her back straight and walked like a ballerina, the heel just in front of the toe, and she spoke English with such a proper, Old World reserve that Mark wanted to help, to put his arms around her, to tell her it was OK. One day after classes they’d gone for coffee, sort of—there was no place to sit in all of Moscow, unless you sat outside, which is what they did, and then as it was dark he’d offered to ride the subway home with her.

  “I don’t believe this is something you would like to do, really,” she replied, properly.

  Oh, but he did! She was tiny, with her big green eyes, and they rode the train for over an hour—she lived at the very tip, the very southern tip, of the entire sprawling metropolis—and when they got out of the subway, Mark had to catch his breath. The rows of buildings, graying socialist high-rises, nine stories, thirteen stories, seventeen stories, each with its crumbling balconies, each grayer than the next, stretched into the horizon like a massed column. Mark was terrified.

  “You live here?” he said to the girl, to Sasha, immediately regretting it.

  “Yes,” she said.

  It was just a matter of time, after that, before he declared himself. Three years later, they were in New York.

  So they saved! Mark cheated, a little. They had a 4Runner, a present from his father, and Mark would drive it to the big Path-mark on Northern Boulevard. Once there, he achieved the serenity of a Zen master. The people of Queens ran around this way and that, their shopping carts like externalized stomachs. Others had coupons and carefully they held them, like counterfeiting experts, up to the items they hoped to save on, to make sure they were the ones. Mark never did. He had emptied himself of any attachment to specific foods. The only items he saw were the items already on sale. In this way he kept his calm, he tried new foods, and he saved.

  They kept a budget. At the beginning of the week they gave themselves seventy dollars for food and transport. Impossible? Basically impossible, yes, but not if you never go for “drinks” at a bar, never walk into a restaurant, and never ever buy an item of clothing not at the Salvation Army on Spring Street and Lafayette. Sa
sha herself was perpetually amazed. “I see girls in there,” she reported, “they have three-hundred-dollar shoes, but they are looking for a jacket, a blouse, they would like to look like me.”

  “Whereas you already do,” said Mark.

  “Tak,” said Sasha. “Imenno tak.” Exactly.

  And, slowly, Mark’s Russian was improving. He made his meager living now by translating industrial manuals into English. Sasha helped. The rest of the time he studied Soviet history and wondered if he should apply to graduate school. Sasha worked at a gallery and painted watercolors. She thought they should have children. It was 1998 and the rest of the world was rich.

  Their friends came over and Sasha fed them. All together they argued and argued—there was so much to argue about! Val looked through their art books and gave talks about the painters—about Goya, about Rembrandt. Sasha told him about the Russian icon-painters, about the profound influence of religious anti-representationalism on Russian art. Tom explained the latest political developments. Sam talked about Israel and the writing world: who was publishing in the New American, who was publishing in Debate. Mark listened always and observed. It was clear what some of them would do with their lives; it was less clear about the others. In the case of Mark, for example, it was unclear.

  Occasionally he and Sasha had terrible fights. She was so quiet; she was so small. One time they met up in the city to watch a free movie in Bryant Park. Mark was already at the library on 42nd Street, and Sasha was at home, so she was to bring some food. But she was in a hurry and forgot. Trying to hide his annoyance, Mark led them around midtown looking for a place to eat. Finally they walked into a deli. The salad bar was closed. The sandwiches cost six-fifty, seven dollars. Mark concluded to himself that he would have a Snickers bar, but Sasha should eat.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I don’t need anything.”

  “You need to eat something,” he insisted. “It’s a long movie.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “ORDER A SANDWICH!”

  “Bozhe moi,” she said, my God, and without another word walked out the door. He followed her quietly and Snickers-less. They did not go to the movie.

  Things like that. And sometimes Sasha would lie in bed for days and refuse to get up. But this passed, it usually passed, and anyway they were in this together. In an emergency, it was understood, Mark would be able to find a real job. So they were pledged to avoid emergency. Or maybe only Mark was pledged to avoid it. There were other issues, of course. There are always other issues.

  But most of all Mark and Sasha and their friends worried about history and themselves. They read and listened and wrote and argued. What would happen to them? Were they good enough, strong enough, smart enough? Were they hard enough, mean enough, did they believe in themselves enough, and would they stick together when push came to shove, would they tell the truth despite all consequences? They were right about Al-Shifa; they were right about the settlements. About Kosovo they were right and wrong. But what if they were missing it? What if it was happening, in New York, not a few blocks from them, what if they knew someone to whom it was happening, or who was making it happen—what if they were blind to it? What if it wasn’t them?

  In their apartment, in their beautiful Queens apartment, Mark and Sasha knew only that they had each other. And they also knew—even in 1998, they knew—that this would not be enough.

  I

  The Vice President’s Daughter

  It was just at the point when things were finally cracking up for me that I ran into Lauren and her father on Madison Avenue. Jillian, my fiancée, was visiting her family in California and I, I had raced up to New York in our car. I didn’t know what I was going to do there, in fact the people I contacted to announce my trip were people I barely knew—but the main thing was to get out of our apartment. The life I had then was slipping away, I could feel it, and I had developed the notion that some nudge, some shift or alternately some miracle, might help me fit everything back into place. I would hold on to Jillian, I hoped, and last until the next election, and then we’d see.

  I had just been to the Met and was now looking for a place to get a coffee and check my e-mail when I first recognized Lauren and then, without bodyguards and without ceremony, her father. I had seen him at campaign stops, I had written and thought about him almost without interruption for an entire year of my life, but I’d never been this close, and he’d never been so alone. I was carrying a book under my arm, and some papers, I think, with phone numbers and e-mails, and finally my cell phone was in my hand like a compass because I guess I was hoping some of the people I’d called would call me back. I stopped on the street and stood for a second before Lauren saw me. On Madison Avenue she looked happy, flushed, a walking advertisement for our civilization, while her father wore his beard, his infamous beard, and I was surprised by how substantial he looked, how physically powerful. I wanted to say to Lauren “I’m sorry,” though she didn’t look like she needed it, and “I wish you were President” to her father, who looked like he did. I saw him flinch from me a little—from the way I froze on the sidewalk he might have thought I was another illwisher, another nut—but soon it was all over: Lauren looked at me, shabby and scattered with my phone in my hand, and I looked at the former Vice President, and we all paused for a moment while I kissed the Vice President’s daughter on the cheek, she assured me they were in a terrible hurry though it was nice to see me, and they crossed northward while I waited for the light.

  I think I could have screamed. I walked down 80th Street, down the long hard residential blocks before Lexington, and I felt myself outside myself, and saw us all for what we were. Sorrow touched me; I was touched, on East 80th Street, by sorrow. My phone rang finally in my hand and it was Jillian, my Jillian, and I did not pick up.

  I was hurt, of course, that I had not been introduced to the former Vice President, but I had no cause to be offended. Lauren’s friendship with me was contingent on her friendship with Ferdinand, my old roommate, and Ferdinand was a complicated person. In his particular line, I always said, he was a genius. “You’re an astute observer of history” is how I explained it to him once. According to Hegel, I said, for I had read fifty pages of Hegel, the world-historical hero is necessarily something of a philosopher, and sort of extrapolates—

  “It’s always like that,” Ferdinand interrupted. It was our sophomore year, and we were gathered around a big circular table in the Leverett House dining hall, where day in and day out I tried to apply the lessons from my classes to the great sociorelational problems of our time—Ferdinand’s sex life, usually. On this day I had a huge bowl of green peas in front of me, and a chicken parm sandwich, and I was sipping from a cranberry-grapefruit mixture, which I’d patented—swirling and sipping and discoursing on the higher thoughts. “It’s always like that,” said Ferdinand. “You tell a goat to draw God, he’ll draw a goat. Philosophers are goats.”

  “Yeah, OK,” I conceded. “But this is about you, the philosopher-stud. You’ve sensed something in the air, a shift in the historical mood of the female class, and you’ve acted. What is it?”

  Ferdinand considered this, slowly, wondering whether I was making fun of him, and then began to laugh his deliberate, nobody’s-fool laugh. It opened with a lengthy enunciated “ennhh,” asking, waiting for you to come along, and then it burst forth like applause.

  So he laughed now, he didn’t answer, and that was OK. I knew I wouldn’t learn the secrets of the world-spirit from Ferdinand, nor would I learn how to pick up women. I wouldn’t even learn how to dress from him, because he was tall and narrow, he could order clothes directly from the catalogs, which with my build (I was a high school fullback) I couldn’t do. About the only thing I learned from Ferdinand was that women were perspicacious, prophetic, for they saw in him what I at first did not. He struck me as vain, deluded, skinny. I didn’t get it. “Boy, am I glad they gave me you,” he said on the first day of college, after we’d moved ourse
lves into Matthews, sent our awkward parents home, and opened my bottle of peppermint schnapps (the best I could do) and his dime bag of mediocre weed (the best he could do). “I was afraid they’d stick me with some total nerd,” he said. I was flattered. “Or an Asian.”

  “What?”

  “Much bigger chance of their being a nerd. Don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” I said. And, in short, when washed and J.Crewed Ferdinand suggested we hit the bars, I did not refuse—it seemed like just the thing to do before getting down, finally, to the books. And Ferdinand was a good companion, at first, though he was loud and obnoxious and I couldn’t tell what sort of person he’d been in high school. His family had money but did not seem to come, so to speak, from education—whereas my forefathers had been huddled over Talmuds, then Soviet literary journals, for many generations. But I have always been attracted to cruel, acerbic people, and Ferdinand was fantastically acerbic. He knew right away that our classmates were a bunch of jerks. “Total douchebag” was about the extent of his commentary on most of the people we met over the next few days. “Major league DB.” He referred to girls he didn’t like as “assholes,” and somehow this cracked me up. Intent on showing that my high school drinking had been significant, that first night I got absurdly drunk and threw up on the bushes next to Boylston Hall. “Dude,” said a relatively sober Ferdinand as I rejoined him, “you’ve christened the Yard. In nomine Patris. And we only just got here.” The next day he was relating the story to everyone we met. “Who’s got the best roommate?” he’d demand. I was embarrassed and proud.

  But there were also calculations going on in Ferdinand’s mind. The bars were his business, the girls were his destiny, and on the fourth night of college we had our first conflict. That day we’d gone to the Salvation Army near Central Square and bought a monstrous yellow paisley couch for fifty dollars, and saved money by carrying it the mile back to our dorm. We took little rest stops in the heat and traffic of Mass Ave and sat down on our new couch, lounging. When we got back to Matthews we showered and then sat on the couch again, newly home, as Ferdinand smoked an illegal cigarette (“What’s the point of college,” he said, coughing, “if you can’t smoke?”) and I began to choose my classes. When he finished his smoke, Ferdinand announced it was time to go out.