The glass motel: personal reflections on the fortieth anniversary of 'Lolita'

Literary Review, Fall, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

A decade ago, living in Denmark without writer friends, I learned that there was an American novelist who made his home in the little north Zealand town where I sometimes summered. My mother-in-law had discovered him one morning on the beach as she hunted for amber amidst the tidal rubble at the foot of the sand cliffs there. He had just published a novel with a small radical press in the American Midwest.

Only recently having begun to publish fiction, I was eager for contact. Before approaching him, however, I ordered a copy of his novel. From the jacket, I learned it was his second; the first, published twenty years before in New York, had enjoyed some success. The new novel was splendidly written, eerie and violent somewhat in the manner of Crews, Selby, Burroughs, clearly a serious work of disturbing power.

He was my senior by a dozen years, but I found solace in the twenty-year lapse between his two novels, for I had just turned forty and had published only a few stories after many years of effort. One of the methods I was using to educate myself in the art of fiction was to contact writers I admired to propose an interview, for which I would prepare myself by reading several of the subject's books and taking notes on whatever I didn't understand about what they were doing. It was an agreeable and, I thought, effective way to learn. In this manner, I have had the privilege of sitting for hours with a number of fine writers who generously shared their knowledge and wisdom with me: Andre Dubus, Robert Coover, Robie Macauley, J.P. Donleavy, Gordon Weaver, Gladys Swan, James Carroll, W.D. Wetherell, William Stafford, and others.

Full of enthusiasm, I phoned my newfound expatriate colleague to introduce myself and he told me his story on the phone. In his twenties, he had lived in Paris at the famous beatnik hotel on Rue Git le Coeur where he had shared stairwells and hallways with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso . . . He told me about his life, his career, his brush with fame in the sixties and his current obscurity. His new novel had been almost totally ignored by reviewers. He also shared with me a piece of his personal sorrow; his teenaged son had committed suicide. As a father of two small children, I felt I understood the agony this must have caused him and perhaps had a clue as to why so much time had elapsed since his first book.

Another novel, his third, was almost finished now; the first chapters had been published in an American literary journal of some repute. Meanwhile, he supported himself as a country mailman and literary translator from Danish to English -- in fact, we were members of the same translator's union, a tiny group of expatriates translating from Danish into other languages amidst the greater sea flowing in the opposite direction into Danish. This was in the years before Peter Hoeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow, Borderliners, The Woman and the Ape) and film-makers Gabriel Axel (Babette's Feast, the Oscar-winning movie version of the story by the Baronness Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), Bille August (Pelle, the Conqueror, House of the Spirits, and the film version of Smilla's Sense of Snow) and Lars Van Trier (Breaking the Waves, Europa, The Element of Crime) had alerted the world at large to the potential of contemporary Danish culture -- the good old days where just publishing a handful of translations of Danish poems in an American literary journal made news in the general Danish press, which treats literary matters with considerable seriousness.

My new friend, as I had begun to think of him, agreed with me on the phone about a number of things: That the publishing world was not always quality-conscious. That just those people one might most expect to be open to the world of ideas seemed not infrequently to fear less conventional attempts in literature to explore human reality and existence.

One phone chat and our friendship was in bloom. He promised to send me the first chapters of his third novel as well as other material, including the last letter of rejection the book had received from a small publisher whose reaction against the work was, he said, typical of what he was up against. We agreed to meet soon in Copenhagen over a beer to talk more, start the interview. I would call him as soon as I was ready.

The package arrived two days later, a good sign. He was as committed as I felt. Eagerly, I returned from the office that evening and manned my favorite work station of those days -- on the sofa in the living room amidst my family, my wife on the opposite side of the coffee table reading, the kids playing on the floor with toy cars and winged ponies, each of us glancing up from time to time for a glimpse of the irresistible nonsense flickering on the TV screen. It was there I felt happiest, safest, most -- well -- blessed.

I opened the package, read first the letter of rejection my new friend had complained about and was sharing with me. The rejection letter was, in fact, written in a sad, warm tone of concern. It said something like, "I don't know if you are a Christian or if you hold to any religion at all, but I hope you will consider what Jesus expressed about the little ones. To hurt one of them willfully is the most terrible of things a person can do in this life, to betray their trust and their need, to use them in such a way."