Dressing Down the Primitives

Shortly after November’s routing of the Democrats, best-selling novelist Jane Smiley launched a bare-knuckled counterpunch on Slate--saying, essentially, that the “unteachable” red states wallowed in their own ignorance. It was a piece that had right-leaning websites sparking and sputtering.

These hot spots included the Internet home of the conservative Claremont Institute. “I presented Smiley with a book award once,” says Mark Helprin, author, editorialist and a senior fellow at the institute. “See: You try to be nice to liberals and then they turn around and spit in your face.”

Helprin virtually twinkles when he says this. He seems to twinkle a lot for a guy pegged as a hard-swinging right-winger. But this smile, emanating from within the luxe Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, might just mean he doesn’t think his fellow novelist is that far off. Helprin is certainly a darling of the right--a foreign policy consultant to and speechwriter for presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and a longtime contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal, where he has espoused a tougher, faster, stronger U.S. posture on strategic defense and attempted to define the American conservative agenda as something other than knee-jerk.

Just because he hasn’t voted Democratic since Hubert Humphrey doesn’t imply a blind allegiance to what are commonly cataloged as Republican politics. He doesn’t like George W. Bush very much (“Pleistocene” was a word he once used in describing the president). He thinks the Iraq war has been grossly mishandled. And he drives a Volvo.

What Helprin claims to be about is truth--although, unlike many on either side of the U.S. political schism, he doesn’t claim to have a monopoly on it, or an entitlement to it. He resents what he sees as hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle, especially the kind of character assassination that has become common currency in the political arena. “Now, conservatives can do that, they have,” he says. “But boy, is it done, and I know from personal experiences, in the opposite direction, all the time. Because I am for low taxes, I supposedly want to kill babies . . . to starve babies.”

Republicans are “supposed to hate the poor,” he says. “We’re supposed to be racists. We’re fanatical militarists, etcetera, etcetera. It’s absurd. And people believe that when they make you into the Other, anything they do to you is legitimate. And it’s OK if you’re not accurate, if you lie and cheat and steal to defeat the evildoers. The evildoers!”

But while some of the more left-leaning elements might claim humanity as their defining quality, they have little edge on Helprin, a writer of symphonic talents and a seemingly effortless ability to spin humor, pathos, myth and encyclopedic detail into prose. It’s writing that advocates charity, generosity and objective morality, and posits that avarice is not a virtue--nor is the philosophy of self-interest that some say has become synonymous with the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan. So whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, his journey demands respect.

The cost of his politics--though he may not care--has been the degree of celebrity his writing might otherwise have earned, the devotion of critics, camaraderie of authors, movie deals or anything else that relies on a liberal establishment. In short, it has created precisely the kind of career exile and general isolation that a writer like Helprin could draw on, for precisely the kind of empathetic work one finds between the covers of his books.

Helprin’s best-loved work probably remains “Winter’s Tale,” a fantastical, epic 1983 novel set in an imaginary belle epoque New York, which spanned 100 years and synchronized several centuries of the city’s infamy, architecture and folklore. It is a decidedly Jewish novel: Peter Lake, the hero, is a messianic figure who doesn’t realize who he is--in agreement with the Jewish belief that the Messiah would not initially know who He was. Peter’s fate, tied as it is to mankind’s, positioned the novel--like so much of Helprin’s work--between defiant hope and existential irony. “Winter’s Tale” was followed by “A Soldier of the Great War” (1991) and “Memoir from Antproof Case” (1995), respected if less hysterically received novels. But it may be the short story form that is Helprin’s natural metier: “A Dove of the East,” his first collection, published in 1975, remains a prodigious beginning, a fully formed embrace of the genre. The celebrated, longer form “Ellis Island”--actually a novella--was run in its entirety by the New Yorker magazine, and anchored his second collection, published in 1981.

With “The Pacific and Other Stories,” released late last year, Helprin returns with virtuosic fluency, displaying an ability to harvest and process an uncanny number of different worlds: ranching, masonry, baseball and business. The tension that has always existed in a Helprin story--between an idealized vision of what the world could be, and a melancholic view of what it is--is greater here. It reflects, perhaps, the writer’s age, and the journey he has made between the time of wishes and the time of reflection. It doesn’t make his stories more or less great, just as ripe with resignation as the writer himself.

Nick Owchar, The Times’ deputy book editor, said about “The Pacific” in his review: “Perfection exists in our world, Helprin suggests in this splendid collection, but it takes a quick eye to spot the momentary gleams. And for those who might not be quick enough, his writing preserves them, in a prose that is as glassy and smooth as amber.”

Conversely, in the New York Times--which ran two dismissive reviews, by D.T. Max and Michiko Kakutani--Helprin’s politics seemed to be a distraction. Max’s review mentioned them in his lead paragraph. Kakutani--with whom Helprin did an interview early in his career, famously embellishing details and apparently poisoning his relationship with the critic and her newspaper--seemed premeditatively critical, while also being preoccupied by Helprin’s politics.

“This book is 16 stories and they treat it, the hostiles, as if it were some kind of crime,” Helprin says of the reviews. “As if I were a criminal. They are, I think, beautiful, moving stories and like anything like that they have a certain vulnerability. They’re short stories. They’re not the 82nd Airborne Division.”

Helprin adjusts his shorter-than-average self in the armchair of his hotel room. He is wearing, to judge from interviews past, a standard-issue uniform of blue polo shirt, khakis and cordovan desert boots. At 57, his sandy hair--although he would never describe it as such--is Kennedy-esque. His forearms are thick, his waistline not. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t ingest caffeine (“not even chocolate”). He doesn’t attend social gatherings if he can help it (“You know how people have parties at their house? I’ve never been to one.”)

T.S. Eliot once stupefied his would-be admirers by declaring himself “an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” Helprin is a Jew in culture, if not necessarily religious devotion, a neo-fantasist in literature and a conservative in politics. (Having avoided Vietnam, the conscience-stricken, ethnically resuscitated Helprin served in the Israeli army). And he lives outside the literary mainstream, in rural Virginia, where he resides with his wife of nearly 25 years, lawyer Lisa Kennedy, and two daughters. A long marriage, college-age children and a nearly 40-year literary career can put a lot of things in perspective and make the past opaque. Other moments remain gin clear. Helprin recalls, as a young divorce in 1977, riding in a car with a female friend of a friend. “She was very attractive,” Helprin remembers, “and I was quite interested. We were talking and it turned to politics, and she said, ‘What about this?’ and ‘What about this?’ and after a while she said, ‘Wait a minute, you sound like a conservative.’ And I said, ‘I am.’ And she said, ‘How CAN you be?’ ”

“Those are primitives,” he says calmly, with the delivery of Jerry Seinfeld. “And they live largely on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Berkeley and they are as primitive as the people somewhere out in ‘Branchlands,’ Texas, who cannot conceive of anyone not being a Christian. The two primitives are very much the same and that’s where a lot of the bitterness comes and the polarization, because neither will recognize that the other has some points. And neither of them, nor I, nor anyone, has an exclusive path to the truth or the right positions.

“I’m often wrong in my positions. I know that and I like to discuss them. But I like to discuss them civilly, because everything that I believe in I believe because I think it’s truth, or the best policy, and I consider it very carefully.”

In his prose, Mark Helprin seems to collect and arrange words as if they were polished stones on a beach, one buffeted by nostalgic winds and a sea of regret. “The short story form is dying,” Helprin says, with the fatalistic tone of someone who will continue to explore it. “People are not interested in it as a genre anymore. I think it’s probably because you can’t really do a trashy short story. And people like trashy books. It’s not like a Grisham novel. What they like is beach books. The short story form lends itself to art, and that is not something the mass market is interested in.”

In “The Pacific,” his main characters--usually men, but of varying ages, histories and eras--strive for a moral idealism and hunger to reorchestrate the past.

“Monday,” among the more moving stories in the collection, is Helprin’s oblique take on 9/11: A contractor, heart-stung by a young widow whose husband was in the World Trade Center, rallies his men to construct for her an urban palace within a Brooklyn duplex. In “Il Colore Ritrovato,” a music impresario, faced with repeating the past, reflects on a singer he discovered as a “typical starving Italian girl” and turned into a diva of monstrous appetites. (“Now she cracks marble floors as she passes over them, and stalls elevators as she gets into them.”)

In “Perfection,” a young Hasidic refugee named Roger, whose parents were lost in the Holocaust, travels from Brooklyn to “the House of Ruth” to help the “Yenkiss” of Berra, Stengel and “Mickey Mental” roll over the competition, including--with a score of 147-0--the White Sox (“a repulsive bunch of taciturn midgets whose throwing arms seemed attached to stolid blocks of steel. Whereas most pitchers were like supple human fly rods, the White Sox were like trench mortars or doughnut machines.”)

“Perfection,” with its ultimately poignant lessons, seems like a movie waiting to happen. “That’s what I thought,” Helprin says. “I thought that I’d get movie offers right off the bat.” (Is he twinkling again?)

Helprin insists that “real writers” don’t overly deliberate. “Roger Rosenblatt was one of my teachers at Harvard, and he said something, he may have been quoting, I don’t know, but he said, ‘Good writers have good accidents,’ and it’s because it’s the subconscious that really does it.”

But if one thing does seem deliberate, it is how Helprin avoids a contrary voice, the inhabiting of a negative or evil character. “I don’t have negative characters,” he says. “I don’t have evil characters; in all of this book, there isn’t a single evil person. There’s no one who is as evil as Michiko Kakutani.”

He twinkles. “Seriously. There aren’t evil people in it. Certainly, as a conservative, I don’t make excuses for crime or hurtful things, and I think people should be held accountable, but the people here in the book are all trying to do their best. Most people do that.”

The question of evil reminds him of a former editor, an “arbiter of taste” who decorated his office with kitschy, tasteless collectibles meant for visitors to laugh at. “To me,” he says, “the analogy was to an Olympic track coach who had pictures in his office of people with no legs. I used to say to myself, ‘This is ugly, this is horrible, because what he’s saying is, ‘Look at those idiots’ and ‘I’m so terrific I can mock them.’

“It all comes from invidious comparisons and wanting to feel superior to other people, and getting a charge out of that, which is sick--and at the same time cowardice, being afraid to be on that side of that divide. Because there are two sides of that divide, the We and the They, and you always want to stay on the side of sophisticated people and away from the ones who will be mocked and rejected.”

Helprin’s point of view seems perverse given his upbringing, which took place in Ossining, N.Y., the home of both Sing Sing prison and some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in Westchester County. Helprin and his parents, film executive Morris Helprin and onetime actress Eleanor Lynn, moved there from New York City when Mark was 7. Their circle of friends, especially for a would-be writer, was regal: John Cheever, for instance, swam in their pool.

Is that the key to the man as artist? Is Helprin, a conservative who grew up in a milieu that breeds liberals, who practices a craft dominated by liberals, who pours humanity onto the page while cutting off a large chunk of it out of his life and refusing on principle to do what the perceived establishment expects--simply waging his own small war of class? Is he resisting what he sees as a form of tyranny, of the intelligentsia over the rest of America?

He is clearly agitated by discussing--and demolishing--the forces of supposed cultural superiority. He barks at the valet as he waits for his interviewer’s rental car to arrive; he needs a ride to downtown Pasadena. “Three things I don’t like about conservatives,” he says, as the ride draws to a close near a Pasadena restaurant. “One is making fun of people who drive Volvos. Another thing is smoking cigars; I give a lot of talks and eventually the cigars come out and it turns into the ‘I Hate Girls Club.’ ”

The third? The posturing and crowing of post-election Republicans. “I don’t feel good about it and I would like to have a refined, intellectual conservatism. But on the other hand, that’s not how politics is,” he says. “And also it’s defensive and a reaction, although I don’t know how defensive it is if you’re in a place. . . . You see, I grew up always among liberals and Democrats and everything like that. And I’ve always felt beleaguered.”

It’s hard to feel beleaguered when you have company, but that’s something Helprin lacks. Thomas Mallon, a conservative novelist, says the fact he doesn’t know Helprin “is in a way a little funny to me, because I’ve been linked with him once or twice for this very reason . . . supposedly highbrow novelists who are politically conservative.”

Asked whether his politics have hampered his career, Mallon says, “The short, simple and happy answer, at least from my point of view, is no.” But he mentions an Internet poll before the presidential election, in which American novelists were asked whom they were voting for.

“I submitted a paragraph,” Mallon says. “They got about 30 responses. I think they got four Bush voters. . . . You sort of see what a conservative literary person appears to be up against. Passions were running very high with the election, and I felt distinctly odd being part of that. I got a lot of e-mails from friends with the subject line ‘I love you anyway.’ ”

In July, Helprin will publish “Freddy and Fredericka,” his first novel since “Memoir from Antproof Case” and a foray into what is said to be all-new terrain for him: comedy. The story is of a married pair of British royals who will ascend the throne only if they re-colonize America. It will no doubt give vent to Helprin’s multiple talents as satirist, fantasist and critic. As well as put to rest the complaint that he’s been sitting on his hands.

“If you go back for a period of 10 years you will find that I have written and published two novels, a short story collection and two children’s books,” he says. “That’s five books in 10 years. Five books, 10 years: That’s one book every two years.

“That’s almost prolific,” Helprin says. “Right?”