The Hair of Harold Roux

  THE HAIR OF

  HAROLD ROUX

  A Novel

  THOMAS WILLIAMS

  Koi sureba abata mo ekubo.

  (If there is love, smallpox scars seem as pretty as dimples.)

  —Old Japanese saying

  Men do not sham convulsion,

  Nor simulate a throe.

  —Emily Dickinson

  When a man tries himself the verdict is in his favor.

  As easy as lying.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Afterword

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  INTRODUCTION

  I HAD NOT YET begun to write fiction, or to even think of it, when I first met Thomas Williams. It was the fall of 1981, and I was twenty-two years old. A few months earlier I had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and I was living in a two-r oom apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, working as a carpenter’s helper by day and reading social theory by night. I was taking a year off before heading to graduate school where I’d been accepted into a Ph.D. program in Marxist social science. I hated cruelty and injustice of all kinds, and I thought then that only Karl Marx had figured out how to weed these evils out of us.

  On weekends, I would drive northeast to Haverhill, Massachusetts, the mill town on the Merrimack River where I’d grown up. Sometimes I’d sleep at my father’s house on the Bradford College campus where he’d been teaching since 1966. One Saturday morning, he asked me if I wanted to go with him and his wife Peggy to spend the night with his friends Thomas and Elizabeth Williams. They’d all be staying in a cabin the Williamses had built themselves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire two hours north.

  Over the years, I’d heard my father speak of Thomas Williams. I knew he was a fiction writer and that he wrote more novels than short stories, which were my father’s chosen art form. I learned that Thomas Williams had won a National Book Award for his novel, The Hair of Harold Roux, a hardcover title I remembered seeing on our bookshelves in the rented house across the river where my mother had raised us. There were other novels of his there, too: Whipple’s Castle, Town Burning, The Night of Trees. Like most of the books on those shelves, I hadn’t read them and knew little of this man and his work. But I heard again the reverence and affection in my father’s voice when he spoke his name, so I went.

  At the end of a rutted dirt road was the Williamses’ place, a shaved-timber cabin with a steeply pitched gable roofed with cedar shingles. Beyond it was a sloping field of wild grass, then the deep woods that rose into a mountain ridge. In the last light of the afternoon, Tom and Elizabeth Williams stepped off their porch to greet us, and they were warm and welcoming and I liked them both. Tom Williams wore a faded work shirt and jeans and work boots. His face was clean-shaven, deeply lined, and handsome, and when he shook my hand it was like shaking the hand of a carpenter, the thick pad of calluses just beneath the base of the fingers, the kind you get from swinging a hammer.

  Elizabeth and Peggy went inside, and Tom Williams, my father, and I stayed out near a worn picnic table and took turns shooting a .380 semi-automatic at a playing card clipped to a branch. When he wasn’t shooting, Thomas Williams sat on the picnic table, his feet on the bench, smoking his pipe and chatting with my father. They were talking about the shed down the hill from their cabin, one he’d built as a place to write.

  “You wrote Town Burning there, didn’t you?” My father was reloading the .380, again his voice reverent. Williams was ten years older than he was, and it was clear my father saw him as a mentor of some sort. This was strange to see, for whenever I visited the campus where my father wrote and taught and lived, I could see how students and even fellow professors looked at him in that way. In the presence of these two men, I felt like a puppy among veteran hunting dogs.

  That night, after a grilled steak dinner on their porch overlooking the darkening mountains, I hiked up a trail and slept in my sleeping bag between two boulders. For weeks now, I’d no longer felt pulled toward Marxism or the study of people as subjects of social science. Lying there in the dark, the smell of moss and pine in the air, I did not know that in months I would begin to write fiction for the first time, that I would feel more like myself than I ever had before, that I would be tentatively stepping into the same river my father and Thomas Williams swam in so gracefully, so truly.

  I saw Thomas Williams only one more time. It was the winter of 1989, and my father was throwing a publication party for me for my first book, a collection of stories I’d been working on in the eight years since I’d first met Mr. Williams. This was at my father’s small house in the rural section of Haver-hill, and it was full of people I barely knew, writer friends of my father’s from over the years. Ella Fitzgerald was singing on the stereo, and there was laughter and cigarette smoke in the air, the clink of bottles and glasses, men and women talking in the joyous tones like-minded people fall into when in each other’s company.

  Over all this, there came a knocking on the sliding glass door out to the porch. In the light from the exterior lamp, I could see Thomas and Elizabeth Williams in winter coats, their breaths visible in the air. Behind them were the novelist John Yount and a woman I did not know, and I walked over and invited them in. Tom Williams grasped my hand and squeezed: “Congratulations on your triumph.” The lines were a bit deeper in his face, but he was still handsome and looked to me not like a man who wrote books but like one who built houses, a leather carpenter’s apron around his waist as he balanced himself on the ridge of some roof he’d framed. I thanked him and the others for coming, and they walked in and greeted people they seemed to know.

  Later, a little drunk, I walked up to Thomas Williams and asked him what he was working on. He said he was writing some short stories set in Leah, New Hampshire. I did not know this was his fictional landscape, a place he’d invented in the same way Faulkner had invented Yoknapatawpha County. I asked him about his most recent novel. I had read something good about it but forgot where. “What’s the title of that novel?”

  “The Moon Pinnace.”

  The room was louder with talk and laughter. I had to lean closer to him as he spelled the word pinnace. He must have seen the incomprehension in my face. He said, patiently, “It’s a kind of sail boat.”

  “Oh.”

  He nodded at me and sought out less ignorant company. He did not do this rudely, but he was probably beginning to sense the depths of my ignorance about many things, his work included. I still had not read any of his fiction. He was one of those writers whose body of work, for some reason, I was saving for later. I did not know that The Moon Pinnace had been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, an honor of which I was also ignorant. I knew Thomas Williams was respected and highly accomplished, but because I had not yet read him I did not know I was standing in the presence of a true master novelist. It was like being a young boxer and chatting with Sugar Ray Leonard without even once having seen him dance around the ring throwing those miraculous flurries of punches with such passion, and with such grace.

  Twenty-one years later, I read The Hair of Harold Roux. If I’ve read a finer novel, I don’t remember when or where; it is, quite simply, a masterpiece, and like all great works of art, captures and illuminates a myriad of things all at once. Set in 1970 New Hampshire, the Vietnam War still five years from its end, the blood from the shootings at Kent State still fresh, this novel ostensibl
y explores two days in the life of Aaron Benham, a novelist and professor, husband and father, a man who has devoted his life to making art and in the opening pages is struggling with the nascent novel that awaits its birth on his desk. “He has always thought of a novel, before it has taken on its first, tentative structure, as a scene on this dark plain, the characters standing around a small fire which warmly etches the edges of their faces. Distant mountains are turning moon-cold and blue as the last light fades as if forever. It is that small fire he must constantly re-create or these last warm lives will cease to live, will never have lived even to fear the immensities of coldness and indifference around them. Absolute Zero is waiting, always.”

  We feel, through Williams’s precise and evocative sentences, that Aaron Benham is capable of tending that small daily fire and bringing these people to life, but in addition to his own procrastination, there are distractions from the world: the mother of a missing student calling Aaron Ben-ham’s house; a depressed friend’s wife (who Benham clearly desires) calling and asking for help, and so he goes and we worry about those “last warm lives who will never have lived.”

  But very soon Aaron Benham begins to imagine the novel he must write, and it is this vision that gives us the novel within the novel that is the story of Harold Roux and his friend’s, the lovers Allard Benson and Mary Tolliver and the gleaming post-World War II years they inhabit, though there is no nostalgia here, only a clear-eyed realist’s view. Allard Benson is modeled on the young Aaron Benham, and because he is not romanticized by Benham—his nearly predatory lust, his youthful sense of immortality, his physical and emotional recklessness—we come quickly to trust Benham the novelist, and we find ourselves falling into the novel he can’t quite bring himself to sit down and write. On the way back to this unfolding story, Thomas Williams serves us other stories, which both feed us yet also make us hungry for the one Aaron Benham is avoiding: There is the ongoing story of Aaron’s distractions from the desk, all of which capture the texture of 1970 America—its dumbfounded marriages, its cultural and class divisions over our involvement in Vietnam, so many of its college students radicalized and stoned; there is the mythical story Aaron recalls telling regularly to his young daughter and son a story they insist be told the same way again and again; there is the novel within the novel within the novel, Glitter and Gold by Harold Roux, a weak romance built on the hopes and delusions of Allard Benson’s tender and solitary friend; and there is the short story Aaron Ben-ham reads to his depressed friend’s class, a first-person, thinly veiled literary manifesto by Benham’s alter ego, Allard Benson, that ends with this: “I will use G. and all the rest for my own purposes, use them coldly and without mercy, more coldly than their own needful selves could ever understand.”

  This line comes fairly early, and we are already so taken by Williams’s ear for voice, for his stunning balance between the sensual and the ethereal, for his naturalistic insistence on painting things as they truly are but also his impressionistic sensibility as well (“the hips’ heartbreaking generosity”), that we want Benson’s and Benham’s, and ultimately Thomas Williams’s, cold and merciless purposes to be realized. For at the heart of The Hair of Harold Roux is this: the speeding train of one’s own mortality against the slow apprenticeship and blossoming of art, in this case, story itself and our universal human need for it.

  “Aaron Benham, it seems, is also running as fast as he can … running as time runs, no matter what you do, toward the bad news. His problem is always doubled, however, because there is his life and there is also that thing that is of his life, the thing he is making, whatever it happens to be at the moment, and he never knows what it happens to be … What future there is is the work he will do, the chaos of the past he will somehow make into form, all the fragments swirling just out of reach, the excitement inside him somewhere he can’t scratch, a pain he can’t locate.”

  In this gorgeously written and absolutely compelling novel, Thomas Williams does reach those swirling fragments, he does locate the pain, and the result is a shimmering work of truth and beauty.

  Thomas Williams died a year and a half after that publication party at my father’s house. I never saw or spoke to him again. My father died nine years later. Both men, fortunately for us, left behind their life’s work. But not all of it is still in print, and that is why this new publication of The Hair of Harold Roux is such cause for celebration. William Faulkner wrote: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”

  Thomas Williams has achieved that here, his aim as true as ever, and I still see him and my father in the sun’s last light over the mountains, taking turns squinting down the barrel as precisely as possible, talking quietly about their daily discipline, this constant tending of that small fire which today, for both of them, burns so brightly, these flesh and blood stories that give us such rich and enduring life.

  —Andre Dubus III

  Aaron Benham sits at his desk hearing the wrong voices. The human race he has been doomed to celebrate seems to be trying to prove to him that nothing is worthwhile, nothing at all. He sits in his small study surrounded by the interesting, haphazard fragments of the business of his life—books, stacks of old galley proofs, knives, pencils, pens, typewriter, dictionaries, shelves of old and new quarterly magazines, catalogs, incunabula. A wooden filing cabinet is filled to its drawer tops with stacks of papers, letters and manuscript pages as if each drawer were a bushelbasket. His one firm label in this area seems to be “miscellaneous.” And yet it is his work to seek meaning and order. On the shelf just above his desk are his five books in their various editions and translations, each full of words he has painfully arranged in order.

  But right now it seems to him that his world, with perhaps a temporary remission now and then, is departing upon a long slide away from any sort of rational middle, like a psychotic plunging toward his bleak end. Nobody is listening to anybody else. He wonders where he stands between chaos and that other order, the order of death—wonders if there is still a place to stand. Throughout the world he cannot leave, all of those in power seem corrupt, dimwitted or insanely committed to false assumptions. Children are being starved to death by the millions, yet twice as many more are being born into starvation and despair. The Prince of Peace has revealed himself to be in thrall to a legalistic code suited to the ages of plague. The tide of fascism he once observed from the shore now seems to have risen to the foundations of his house.

  He leans over his notebook, feeling the ghosts of words in his fingers, but instead of words he draws a human torso. It is the body of a woman, slim-waisted, and now he draws, below the weakness, the vulnerability of the slim center, the hips’ heartbreaking generosity, then the delicate bulge of belly implying all the inner complexities of life, passion, creation. He feels that this drawing has been called up by a certain episode in his past that has now turned dreamlike, bittersweet. In the sudden, sinking aura of memory he scribbles over the drawing, tears out the page and crumples it. Perhaps there is no longer enough time in his life to go back and illuminate to himself that dark episode; one never knows until the search is under way. He can think about it, try to explain it, but mere words of definition bore him because they are too simple, too full of lies. They can never be responsible for the exact quality of light that slants across his desk now, or through the pines of years ago; for the deep complexities of those undiscovered metaphors. But why go on, why describe, why search for the metaphor that would touch the scene with life? Because exercise begets energy, life begets life, rest is illness, paradox is all.

  “Paradox,” he says out loud, surely startling all his mute possessions. Against the pain of memory he holds the word. Para, parasol, parachute, parabellum. Dox, doxy, doxology—paradoxology. Remember that actual events are seductively plausible and contain meaningless emotion, like dreams; false importance, like dr
eams. If he can only begin, perhaps the realities of this unborn fiction will compel him forward out of the rigid past, away from a present that seems to deserve either tears or hysterical laughter, into the world of meaning.

  But that world is, as always, contingent upon this real one, this small globe with its thin skin of air the gods of money and pride are so busily destroying, this world hermetically sealed by blackness of absolute zero.

  So celebrate the race, celebrant. He hears cold cheers, ancient voices full of cracked glee, the voices of the dead.

  It is 11:30 A.M., the sun just coming out again, now just missing the edge of his desk. Fire along the carpet. His wife should be home soon from the supermarket, the trunk of the car full of bags of groceries, bags within bags within life-proof plastic—at least fifty or sixty dollars’ worth. The children are at school. He is supposed to call the septic tank man. He is supposed to make an appointment to have the car headlights adjusted because they point too high now that the snow tires have been changed. There are several other things he is afraid he has forgotten.

  It is spring, and many of the birds are back. Across the road in the dying elms grackles and starlings jabber and creak, a strange descending tonality in their voices, like distant arguments in Italian.

  Now the telephone in the front hall begins to ring, its smug, brainless imperative repeating, seeming to listen, repeating with impatience, even anger. He has to go to it.

  “Hello?” he says into its network of infinite possibilities.

  “Professor Benham?” A woman’s ragged voice.

  “Yes?” he says, fear waiting.

  “Professor Benham? This is Louise Rasmussen, Mark Rasmussen’s mother?”

  Whenever he is confronted by emotional disintegration his spirit immediately capitulates, his heart beats erratically, his palms grow damp.