Sat. March 12, 2022—in a parallel universe.
The last time I sat down with perennial celebrity author Jonathan Perlock and his iconoclast ex-protégé Grahame Cassidy was in Jon’s St. Louis apartment in summer 2021. That interview (about Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Composition) ended when Grahame threw and broke Jon’s antique chair. I hadn’t known about their tenuous relationship prior to the interview and I never wanted to be in the middle of it again. However, I reconsidered two weeks ago when Jon published his review of Neo Schubert’s Faust in Space, calling it “a work of post-apocalyptic fiction using the device of nuclear holocaust never to be surpassed.” Jon’s literary criticism is among the widest read and most authoritative in the world, and normally would warrant no contention. But ten hours after its publication, Grahame Cassidy published a rebuttal in an uncharacteristically farcical tone, asserting that Faust in Space lacked esthetic value and originality, and that it had been surpassed on every count decades ago by Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, from which (he claimed) Schubert had borrowed too heavily. Contention between two literary titans has not been seen since Hemingway and Faulkner, so I set out to organize another interview hoping to orchestrate an authentic discussion between the two about their past relationship, their current achievements, and how there came to be such incessant antagonism between them. Grahame was surprisingly amiable and repeatedly assured me he had paid Perlock for the broken chair. He agreed to sit down with Jon to discuss his view of A Canticle for Leibowitz as obligatory reading in the 21st century. His one condition was that we meet somewhere other than Jon’s apartment. I heartily agreed with no intention to discuss A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I had not read.
So it was that I met with Grahame Cassidy and Jon Perlock in Rabbit Run Park in east-central Missouri, a park harboring the ruins of an early 1900s-era castle overlooking Ozark woods and cavernous, carbonate hills. We sat at a picnic table not a hundred feet away from the ruined castle. Along the wide pavements that weave around the castle and its outbuildings, the occasional hiker or visiting family passed by. Grahame and Jon sat across from each other. I sat near the end of the bench. Grahame wore a moss-colored fleece and his blond hair swept sidewise and his eyes were cast like iron on Jon, who wore slacks and loafers in spite of the dampness and rugged surroundings. Jon leaned forward, stared back at Grahame with a barely-discernible-but-definitely-there smile. I expected Grahame to say something cross but he didn’t. He returned something like a smile and tilted his head. I decided to set a friendly tone and direct the conversation where I wanted it to go—their relationship—but as I started to speak, Jon interrupted me and I never recovered. Instead of an analysis of how our two most treasured fiction writers became so divided from one another, they pit me between their squabbling and Grahame prematurely exited again with the fury his fans have come to love him for. I was left with a book review—call it a defense—of Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I transcribed for you here.
Me: Gentlemen—
Jon, speaking to Grahame through his smile: You don’t naturally disagree with my assessment of Faust in Space. You wanted to disagree, but you had to fight every impulse to do so. You’ve always chosen to disagree. Remember the first feature you ever got, the one I lined up? That woman called you literature’s first-rate contrarian. We laughed about it. Don’t think I don’t see you trying to live up to it ever since. Your response to my review was rubbish.
Grahame: You wrote a bad review, Jon. That’s why I put out the counterpoint.
Jon: Counterpoint. Looking at me: Would you call it a counterpoint? I’d call it dissent for the sake of dissent. Or a love letter to Walter Miller.
Grahame, raising his voice slightly: You claimed Schubert used nuclear holocaust in a way never to be surpassed yet he handled it the way every writer resentful of art has handled it for the past fifty years. Miller deserves a love letter for writing something authentic and actually visionary.
Me, quickly: How so?
Grahame: A Canticle for Leibowitz throws stones at the nerves of civilization and it never missed then and it doesn’t miss now. Neither essay nor other non-fiction exposition nor Faust in Space can match the wit and precision with which it touches mankind’s worst and irreversible folly—its refusal to learn from mistakes. It’s a profound achievement in science fiction. And fiction in general. And perhaps one of the most relevant novels today.
Jon: Settle down Cassidy. Canticle made me laugh a little I’ll admit. But Faust made me cry.
Grahame: I’d say melancholy tone with nuclear holocaust is the easy achievement for any competent writer and therefore questionable as such. Besides, Canticle is as melancholy as the subject demands. It’s just more deftly done and it’s funny.
Jon, looking at me: Which is the bigger achievement, funny or sad?
I’m caught off guard and relieved when Grahame fires back before I open my mouth.
Grahame: No Jon, this is me and you. Are you going to defend that Schubert pursued a more difficult road than Miller in writing melodrama for nuclear holocaust? Your biggest fans won’t buy that.
Jon: Easily. I read about real murder all the time and don’t cry. It’s not easy to evoke authentic sadness from a reader. It’s not easy. I’d put forth you’ve not effectively done it. I’d put forth you’ve struggled with it in your own novels, what with all your open endings and narrative departures. In fact, it’s easier to make light of something horrific than touch firmly on its terror.
Grahame: You know damn well Miller doesn’t make light of it. Being funny and making light are not the same thing.
Jon: We disagree. That is why I was trying to bring our friend into it.
I expect Grahame to rise and throw leaves in Jon’s face. (There are a good bit around our feet.) By Jon’s countenance, he is expecting something too. Surprisingly, Grahame is not baited. He is intent on making his point. He turns to me.
Grahame: Well? How do they compare, Canticle and Faust in Space. Did Schubert rip off Miller or what?
Jon: Ho, whoa. That wasn’t the question.
Me: I’ve read Faust in Space. I thought it was well done. I’ve never read A Canticle for Leibowitz. I honestly don’t even know what it’s about. Nuclear war, obviously.
They both look at me with a sort of gaping incredulity. For the first time, I see a tether between old friends.
Jon, looking at Grahame: Tell him then. But quickly.
Grahame, sighing the way one sighs when receiving a gift having previously said not to get them anything: It’s a fix-up of three novellas. It starts in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust and ends in the heat of another one over the span of a few thousand years. Fall, rise, fall—death, life, death—that’s the cycle put forth as inevitable in Canticle and it runs across all three novellas. The point is that mankind doesn’t learn from its mistakes and that that issue is unavoidable. And the result is destruction. It juxtaposes—
Me: Schubert asserts the same thing in Faust. I’m sorry to interrupt. I noticed that—he acts as if what happens in the book is inevitable but doesn’t really say why. He treats it as an inside secret we are all supposed to know and agree with by virtue of the events in the book, but I don’t buy it. It’s my one gripe with the book, which is why I had to interrupt. I’m sorry, go on.
Grahame: The reason he doesn’t give a reason is because he took the inevitable cycle motif from Miller but couldn’t also rip off the why without being obvious. Miller does explain. Or rather, one of his characters does. Let me see.
Grahame, straight-faced and entirely serious, pulls from somewhere beneath the table a ragged paperback copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz. The book is rampant with colorful tabs sticking from the pages as page markers. He fans through them.
Jon: Oh God. Just tell it, Cassidy. You carried that with you and hid it so you could pull it out like that? Laughing gently:Christ, man. Just tell him.
Grahame: I want to get it right. Here:
“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they—this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.”
Me, nodding: Mm. Destruction for the sake of hope. Interesting.
Grahame: The cycle is an endless story, one that continues after the last page on and on in pages that don’t exist, dragging its feet through ages, in your head, and off the last page into our own world, into 2022, where veiled threats of nuclear war from across oceans give the novel first relevance and a freshness that must be as ripe as it was in 1959 when the novel was first published.
It’s cynical and some of the themes are bleak—suicide, death, Megawar (a term the author favored for nuclear war)—but don’t let that dissuade you. It beams with humor that will never stale. You will laugh—above all you will laugh—all the way through nuclear annihilation.
Me: Like Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, kind of.
Grahame looks at me and I might swear he was confused. I feel about the size of the ant traversing my end of the picnic table.
Jon, at me: Grahame lacks a sense of humor for someone so taken by how funny Canticle apparently is.
Grahame: It is funny. Let me just read a little from the very beginning so you see how it starts. He flips to the start of the book and reads:
“Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.”
That’s the first line of the first novella entitled Fiat Homo or “Let there be Man.” Closing the book but holding the spot with his finger: At the start, the setting is a desert and we meet this monk named Brother Francis and he is fasting in the desert and the desert is strewn with the remnants of past high-civilization brought to wasteland by nuclear holocaust 600 years prior. The response to the nuclear war by its survivors was immense backlash against science and those who wielded it to create weapons capable of such destruction. The backlash was swift, immensely violent, and all-encompassing. These survivors, self-professed simpletons, went about dismantling all aspects of modern society and murdering first the scientifically literate and then just the generally literate—the Simplification they called it. The Simplification is how the book got to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that it opens with. And it’s from these violent illiterates and the desert itself that the monks of the abbey of St. Leibowitz protect the scientific knowledge of the past. The knowledge is mostly in the form of rediscovered fragments and documents from the time before the war. They call all the stuff Memorabilia. During his fast in the desert, this Brother Francis discovers ruins that turn out to be a fallout shelter. Remember this is 600 years after the nuclear war. The monk reads the sign that says, “Fallout Shelter,” and this is what he thinks. Grahame reads from the book:
“He had never seen a “Fallout,” and he hoped he’d never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends. He crossed himself and backed away from the hole. Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a Fallout, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his Baptism drove the fiend away. Brother Francis visualized a Fallout as half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge, and as half-incubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep, for, were not the monsters of the world still called “children of the Fallout”? That the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which descended upon Job was recorded fact, if not an article of creed. The novice stared at the sign in dismay. Its meaning was plain enough. He had unwittingly broken into the abode (deserted, he prayed) of not just one, but fifteen of the dreadful beings! He groped for his phial of holy water.”
Grahame pauses and looks at me expectantly. I’m a bit puzzled, and it must show some on my face. Jon has been suspiciously quiet.
Me: Wait, monsters?
Grahame: So in the monk’s time, there are people with deformities caused by the radiation that still persists. So he’s got the idea that a Fallout is a monster that despoiled virgins in their sleep—because today (in his time) those people with deformities are called children of the Fallout. See? Among the trove of treasures Francis finds in the fallout shelter is a grocery list and a reminder to do taxes and, most prized, a blueprint of an electrical circuit signed by E. I. Leibowitz himself, the patron saint of the abbey where this monk serves. But what’s funny is that as it happens, Edward Isaac Leibowitz was just a regular guy murdered by simpletons trying to save some scientific knowledge during the Simplification. But because of the monks’ ignorance, the grocery list, the tax note, the blueprint—these are precious artifacts whose meanings are unknown. The result is a trip by this monk Francis far away to New Rome to deliver the blueprint to the Pope himself—an ill-fated trip that punches home the savagery of this world Miller created. Which, by the way, is thought by many people to have heavily influenced the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Me, honestly, though partly drawn by Grahame’s exuberance: It does sound interesting. And that bit about fallout being a monster is clever.
Grahame: That’s honestly light for this book, and just a bit from the first novella. But as my claim of relevance, there are parallels between the Simplification and various mob crusades we suffer today. I’m not going to read to you every line of narration, but the idea of the populace at large rebelling against science and murdering its adherents and destroying its legacy because of the destruction “it” has caused is very relevant today, don’t you think?
Jon: Cassidy, make a point.
Grahame: Look at the skepticism surrounding scientists and vaccine manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry altogether. I mean, I’m arguing Canticle’s relevance today sixty years after its publication. You can imagine, hyperbolically maybe, but with perhaps too close a tangent to reality, a similar response as the Simplification to pharmaceutical companies and vaccines, and 600 years from now there are cloisters of “monks” in the backrooms of stripclubs illuminating medical white papers about polio and protecting and hiding antique syringes and textbooks trying to make sense of it all. And the irony! That monks be the safeguards for scientific knowledge…
Jon: Come back Cassidy, Christ. You’re all over the place. Can we avoid politics? Just tell him what it’s about in two or three sentences so we can get on with civil debate.
Grahame, nodding quickly: The second novella, Fiat Lux (“Let there be light”) jumps centuries later when the world has progressed to something resembling an era of Greek city-states and—
Jon, interrupting: There are three novellas, correct?
Grahame: Yes, right. The first was “Let there be Man” with the monk taking the circuitry blueprint he found in the fallout shelter to the pope. The second is “Let there be light.” What’s great about the second novella is—
Jon: The second is the most boring, skip it.
Grahame: It’s not boring.
Jon: The middle portion of any book is at best more mundane than the rest. Let’s skip. Skip. Skip.
Grahame: That’s convenient, Jon, because Schubert stole from the second part. In the second book a genius scholar-scientist is making large discoveries in math and science and he goes to the Leibowitz abbey—which is still around these centuries later—he goes to study all their Memorabilia which until then he has not taken seriously. He goes there to the abbey and it’s a long, dangerous trip because at this point the country is on the brink of war. He gets out in the desert and studies what the monks have, all these old books and things, and he sees that all his own discoveries are simply rediscoveries. He’s humbled and taken in by the stuff, the artifacts, and there’s a whole thing. But anyway, before he goes there, he is unconvinced that the relics are even real at all. To him they are a sort of legend. So in a discussion with… with… with someone I can’t remember, in a discussion with someone he is asked something like, “If you doubt it, why bother studying the Leibowitzian documents?” To which this genius responds,
“Because doubt is not denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.”
It's a good line. But doesn’t it sound dangerously close to the famous message in the bit of code discovered aboard the starship Banefull Byrd in Faust? Grahame pauses, looking satisfied.
Jon: A little. It’s probably homage. You know how writers are. Or it’s chance. It’s not a particularly crafty line.
Grahame: Your poker face has soured Jon.
Jon: We’ve never played poker. Do you even know how to play poker?
Grahame: He stole it and a lot more and you know it. Turning to me, seemingly eager to keep on: Understand that in the first novella, the setting was essentially wasteland with pockets of tribes and these monasteries and roaming gangs and the like. Think The Road. By the time this scholar is visiting the Leibowitz monastery, there are city-states like the Empire of Denver, Texarkana, Laredo, the State of Chihuahua. And Plains people in the spaces between. Holdovers of the tribes, I suppose. And as I said, everyone is on the brink of war, with the ruler of one plotting to fold the rest into his kingdom. I’m not going to bring up the relevance of this ruler and his ambitions and tactics to modern analogs—you get it, and novels with that kind of relevance fill shelves everywhere. I will skip that. But a more nuanced and astute stonethrow—
His voice trails off and he frantically searches the book using the neon tabs. I’m thinking that this is not at all how I wanted this interview to go.
Jon: Grahame, no.
Grahame: Here. Reading:
“Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey’s books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knights-friars would have burned many of them as “heretical” according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope.”
Now, we can talk about the rise of nihilism all around us and the supposed heresy of everything depending on your political color. But better are the whole sections that pit reason against faith and progress against tradition. It is deftly done. Deftly done. They’re not, you know, Miller doesn’t use vague, boring, lofty soliloquizing; nor does he preach. It’s sharp, natural dialogue that asks questions concerning metaphysics and epistemology that are clearly informed by knowledge of the philosophies of real originality. You know, Plato and Aristotle and Heraclitus and Parmenides and the Pythagoreans and yada. The best part is that Miller seems to have recognized that a culture’s prevailing philosophy controls the fate of the whole civilization despite the individual. He seems to recognize that philosophy underpins the ideas and values of individuals, and individuals pursuing their ideas and values steer the direction of the world—and that most individuals are influenced by what they soak up by default, that is, prevailing philosophy. But it’s delivered as brilliant, fictional narrative without the matter-of-factness of a textbook or original source. Consider—
Jon: Grahame.
Grahame: Real quickly, I promise. Consider this interaction in the first novella between Brother Francis and another monk. It’s Francis and Brother Jeris, who likes to antagonize him. Hold on.
Grahame begins searching his colored tabs again.
Jon: Grahame.
Grahame: Here! It’s short. Brother Francis is illuminating the blueprint of the circuit design that he found in the fallout shelter and Brother Jeris approaches him. Reading quickly:
“Brother Jeris, who had joined the apprentice copyroom at the same time as Brother Francis, seemed to enjoy teasing him about the project. ‘What, pray,’ he asked, squinting over Francis’ shoulder, ‘is the meaning of Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B, learned Brother?’”
“‘Clearly it is the title of the document,’ said Francis, feeling slightly cross.”
“‘Clearly, but what does it mean?’”
“‘It is the name of the diagram which lies before your eyes, Brother Simpleton. What does Jeris mean?’”
“‘Very little, I’m sure,’ said Brother Jeris with mock humility. ‘Forgive my density, please. You have successfully defined the name by pointing to the creature named, which is truly the meaning of the name. But now the creature-diagram itself represents something, does it not? What does the diagram represent?’”
“‘The transistorized control system for unit six-B, obviously.’”
“Jeris laughed. ‘Quite clear! Eloquent! If the creature is the name, then the name is the creature. Equals may be substituted for equals, or the order of an equality is reversible, but may we proceed to the next axiom? If quantities equal to the same quantity may substitute for each other is true, then is there not some same quantity which both name and diagram represent? Or is it a closed system?’”
“Francis reddened. ‘I would imagine,’ he said slowly, after pausing to stifle his annoyance, ‘that the diagram represents an abstract concept, rather than a concrete thing. Perhaps the ancients had a systematic method for depicting pure thought. It’s clearly not a recognizable picture of an object.’”
“‘Yes, yes, it’s clearly unrecognizable!’ Brother Jeris agreed with a chuckle.”
“‘On the other hand, perhaps it does depict an object, but only in a very formal or stylistic way—so that one would need special training or—’”
“‘Special eyesight?’”
“‘In my opinion, it’s a high abstraction of perhaps transcendental value expressing a thought of the Beatus Leibowitz.’”
“‘Bravo! Now what was he thinking about?’”
“‘Why—Circuit Design,’ said Francis, picking the term out of the block lettering at the lower right.’”
“‘Hmmm, what discipline does that art pertain to, Brother? What is its genus, species, property, and difference? Or is it only an accident?’”
“Jeris was becoming pretentious in his sarcasm, Francis thought, and decided to meet it with a soft answer. ‘Well, observe this column of figures, and its heading: Electronics Parts Numbers. There was once, an art or science, called Electronics, which might belong to both Art and Science.’”
“‘Uh-huh! Thus settling genus and species. Now as to the difference, if I may pursue the line. What was the subject matter of Electronics?’”
“‘That too is written,’ said Francis, who had searched the Memorabilia from high to low in an attempt to find clues which might make the blueprint slightly more comprehensible—but to very small avail. ‘The subject matter of Electronics was the electron,’ he explained.”
“‘So it is written, indeed. I am impressed. I know so little of these things. What, pray, was the electron?’”
“‘Well, there is one fragmentary source which alludes to it as a Negative Twist of Nothingness.’”
“‘What! How did they negate nothingness? Wouldn’t that make it a somethingness?’”
“‘Perhaps the negation applies to twist.’”
“‘Ah! Then we could have an Untwisted Nothing, eh? Have you discovered how to untwist a nothingness?’”
“‘Not yet,’ Francis admitted.”
“‘Well, keep at it, Brother! How clever they must have been, those ancients—to know how to untwist nothing. Keep at it, and you may learn how. Then we’d have the electron in our midst, wouldn’t we? Whatever would we do with it? Put it on the altar in the chapel?’”
Grahame, taking a deep breath and putting the book aside: Now. We might as well call Jeris a Parmenidian warrior attacking an unwitting Heraclitian. But then, you could know nothing about the history of philosophy and laugh here, and get some natural inkling about the hidden questions, and your brainstuff will start sliding and firing, and you’ll be thinking—
Jon, who has started vigorously bouncing his knee: Grahame. That’s enough, man. We’ve got funny Brother Francis and a stable of monks preserving grocery lists and science textbooks as sacred relics until Francis dies, and then comes the second novella with a genius scholar bringing civilization back with his rediscoveries amid the backdrop of war. What’s last?
Grahame: I didn’t say Francis dies.
Jon, looking at me: He dies.
Grahame: You’re an ass.
Jon: Are you going to finish?
Grahame: The third novella is Fiat Voluntas Tua.
Jon: English.
Grahame: May thy will be done.
Me: Ah.
Grahame, after considering Jon for a moment as if expecting him to interject: Society in the third book has progressed from city-states to being as advanced as it ever was—as we are now you could say. Space travel, computers (of a sort). It’s on the brink of war again, this time with nuclear weapons. So we’ve come from nuclear devastation to the brink of nuclear war, not least of which because of the work of the Leibowitzian monks, who are still around in the same abbey, which has been somewhat modernized. The suggestion from the author seems to be that Christianity, or mysticism in general, is indestructible. The year is three-thousand something or other, I think almost four-thousand AD. You’ve got the Atlantic Confederacy and the Asian Coalition at each other’s neck with threats of mutual destruction. The fate of the world is uncertain, so the abbot of the monastery at this time, Dom Zerchi, plans to ship some monks to offworld colonies to keep their Memorabilia safe and perhaps extend their work into the future should the worst-case scenario come to pass. And of course it does come to pass. And you see this happen through his eyes, Dom Zerchi. That’s all I’ll really say about it.
You start to see my point about the novel’s endlessness. The monks protected the scientific knowledge that brought the world to darkness so that the world could be brought again to light, and it was brought to light—here they are—but then the threat of darkness is there again because of their very effort. And now, off they might go to carry that knowledge to another colony, and on and on it goes, you imagine. It’s cynical, the idea that man can’t help but destroy himself. You heard the justification I quoted earlier. It’s fleshed out in masterful form. The book won the Hugo in 1961.
But let me say one more thing. At one point near the end of the novel, refugees from an area affected by a nuclear bomb are aided at the abbey by a humanitarian group led by doctors, whom the monks have allowed to operate there. When the abbot Dom Zerchi learns that the humanitarians are assisting with (and recommending) suicide to the hopeless cases, he argues from his faith with one of the doctors that he can no longer allow it. Therein follows forcible dialogue about suicide between the two characters. What is compelling is that the author himself, Walter M. Miller Jr, converted to Catholicism after WWII (during which he took part in the aerial bombing of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino). He also committed suicide by self-inflicted gun wound. In the context of his life, his religion, and his suicide, one can’t help but see that the book’s real center of mass might be a tragic dialogue between author and self. Here you have a man converted to Catholicism who writes a book wherein a monk and a doctor argue about the morality of suicide from the point of view of the monk, who later kills himself. In the final scenes is a visceral, deathbed self-examination by Zerchi, and you wonder whether he stands in for the author. Of course he does. You’ll just have to read it. That’s it. That’s the gist.
Jon, almost immediately: About that refugee camp.
Grahame’s jaw goes from slightly slack and pleased to closed, slowly, as if trying to hide from us some apprehension about what is about to come from Jon’s mouth.
Jon: Zerchi paints a sign for protesting the suicides after he learns about them, I remember. It’s powerful.
“Abandon every hope ye who enter here.”
Me: That’s Dante.
Jon: Ah, it is. Well. You don’t have to convince me. I agree the book is good. The prose is barefaced and immaculate. In my copy, there are peeks of low style, for example, the use of all caps when someone shouts. I have to believe the author called for it, not the editor. I love it, though, because it matches the humor. The low moments are always humorous, until they’re not, and the story carries you bouncing to its bitter end. It’s a shame he ripped off Dante there, though.
Grahame, tensely: Ripped off Dante? No one rips off Dante. It’s not possible. It’s obvious allusion.
Jon: Oh. Obviously. But it is ripping off when Schubert uses Miller’s line about doubt being applied to history for his line of code.
Grahame, after looking caught and pausing for too long: We haven’t even talked about what Schubert did. Let’s talk about what Schubert did.
Jon: I don’t want to talk about Schubert. I want to talk about A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Grahame, waving the book: One thing I’m surer of than the quality of this novel is that you came here to hear yourself talk. Go ahead.
Jon: You’ve been doing the talking. Looking at me: Have I spoken a fraction as much as he has? Back at Grahame: I wrote what I wrote about Faust in Space in my review and you took issue. Now we’re here to talk about Canticle. There are some things you haven’t talked about. Like Miller’s scattered but acute examination of nature and its relationship to man. For example, the circling buzzards, which recur in every novella. And the wolves that stalk Brother Francis in the desert in the first one. It’s as if Miller is not just attacking a Man-centric notion of Earth but asserting disdainfully that, evidenced by our outcomes, perhaps we have been placed here specifically to be carrion for the beasts, to prepare ourselves in a pot of war, salted with lead, to be eaten. Somewhere in the book is the joke that the buzzards are sentient and that they believe the world has been created especially for them—with all its human wartime corpses. Isn’t that in there?
Grahame, suspiciously: I hadn’t brought that up yet. Nodding at me: I was giving him a general idea about the book and—
Jon: And what about the powerful foreshadowing on the very first page. I didn’t notice it till the second time I read it because you have to know where the story is headed to catch it. When Brother Francis sees the pilgrim approaching during his fast—that’s another symbol you didn’t elaborate on but never mind—when Francis sees the pilgrim approaching, he doesn’t know who it is and he’s worried. He describes the pilgrim as an iota. Can you read that part?
Grahame, having already flipped to the first page at Jon’s mention of foreshadow, reads immediately:
“The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun.”
Jon: Keep going.
Grahame:
“Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way.”
Jon: There. See. The monk is talking about the pilgrim. But the author is talking about mankind and its march toward nuclear holocaust. Toward Megawar, as you said the term was that the author preferred.
Grahame sits silently, his eyes tracing the words back and forth on the page. His face is alight with revelation.
Jon: But you know the book better than me. Go on, expound some more. I’ve bought the film adaptation rights, so I want to make the book relevant again. You seem bent on that. So keep going.
Grahame looks up from the page with a flick of his chin, as if a fly bit his nose.
Grahame: You own adaptation rights to A Canticle for Leibowitz?
Jon, smiling as big as I’ve ever seen: Yep. Bought them, mmm, I guess not long before I wrote my review of Faust.
Grahame, looking at me: Did you know this?
Me, shaking my head quickly: No, huh-uh. No.
Grahame raises slowly from the picnic table and looks as if he is going to bring his fist down on it with his whole might, then stops short and points at Jon.
Grahame: I’m done with you. I’ve been done with you. You’re a manipulative ass. I’ve said it before.
Jon, still smiling: You must have forgotten.
Grahame can’t resist and slams his fist on the table, turns, and begins walking back to his car. Before he gets there, he lets out a brief howl that pulls to him the face of every patron in the vicinity of the castle ruins. Jon calls after him in mocking fun with a quote (I learned later) from Canticle:
“Heathen! Pagan! Desecrator!”
Me: This is not how this was supposed to go. Do you insist on digging at him? We didn’t get into anything I wanted to get into.
Jon, watching Grahame leave: That’s it. Yep. There he goes. Oh, you knew it would go this way. I told you he can’t converse very long without blowing up. Do you want to know a secret?
Me, resigned: What?
Jon: He’s right about A Canticle for Leibowitz. Funnily enough Time magazine called it intellectually lightweight when it came out. The irony is that it could only come off that way to an intellectual lightweight. It’s as strong as the genre gets. Don’t tell Grahame though. Near the end, when Zerchi is examining himself before he dies, there is a line something like,
“The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others.”
I like the line. It sticks with me for some reason. Given the context, I guess.
Me: Wait, that monk dies too?
Jon: Grahame said that already.
Me: No, he said something about being on his deathbed.
Jon: Same thing.
Me: Not the same thing.
Jon: It’s all right. It doesn’t spoil anything. It’s just as he said—death and destruction isn’t the point.
Me: Do you really have adaptation rights?
Jon winks and I drop my head to the table.