The devoted reader

I have left my book

I have left my room

Because I heard you singing

Through the gloom.

-- James Joyce

This is the story of one book, one writer, one reader. It is improbably a love story between artists and their audiences. Like many love stories, it begins with dazzling infatuation. The infatuation here is a first novel, “The Stones of Summer: A Yeoman’s Notes 1942-1969,” by Dow Mossman, a young 30-year-old writer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The 552-page novel made its maiden critical appearance in the Sunday New York Times Book Review on Page 4 in 1972. The review was done by John Seelye, who was also a writer on the rise at the time. Seelye’s review lifted the novel off its launch pad with a full-bore blast of testimony, proclaiming it was “a whole river of words fed by torrential imagination ... crossing the Rubicon, discovering a different sensibility, a brave new world of semi-consciousness ... a holy book, burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon fire, stone fire.” Infatuated words, but Seelye was just warming up. “This is the Faulknerian swarm miasmic, given order not by baroque turbulence of Jacobean Gothic, but by the whining rise and fall of a ceaseless sitar ... this novel has a quality of greatness, that mad Dionysian stream that D.H. Lawrence perceived flowing through certain classics of American literature.”

The love bug of infatuation bites, and the bug also bit a bookish young college student, Mark Moskowitz, who had heard Seelye’s toot from the mountain but couldn’t afford the novel’s hardback price. Later, he eagerly snatched a cheap paperback edition. With novel finally in hand, would infatuation bloom into love?

No. Moskowitz quit on Page 29. Maybe, if he had been aware of another “Stones” review that appeared in the Baltimore Sun, he would have soldiered on. The Sun review had laid its cards face up on the table: “If you wade through the first 100 pages of pretentious, overwritten, humorless claptrap, ‘Stones’ will relax into a charming, poignantly funny and often brilliant autobiographical novel that trumpets the arrival of a major talent.”

Not only had Moskowitz given up on “Stones,” so had virtually everyone else. With only four reviews in all of America, “Stones” sank of its own weight, out of sight forever. Or so it seemed. A quarter of a century later, Moskowitz had become a successful TV producer of political campaign commercials, a married man with kids, a married man with books. Books surrounded him; it was as if his home was built of books, not boards and bricks. Moskowitz decided, after years of packing and unpacking the tattered paperback of “Stones,” barely held together with string and rubber bands, that he must read the thing damned to oblivion. It took him six weeks to blast his way through the solid granite of “Stones,” and he emerged on the far side a changed man: He had crossed the Rubicon, believing he had read something great. With the messianic fervor of the newly converted, Moskowitz set out to gather all of the copies of “Stones” in the world so that he could spread the word -- “Here, read this book. It will change your life!”

But there were no “Stones” to gather, not in libraries, not on the Internet. And what about the author, Mossman, whose image had appeared on the inside cover of the hardback edition, looking like a cross between James Joyce and Art Garfunkel? What about that pensive young man in the leather jacket who had received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Was he alive or dead? Mossman too had sunk like a stone into oblivion.

What happens to writers when their bright, brief moment burns out? What injustices befall them? Are they better off dead rather than to live on after history has marched inexorably forward without them? Do they go mad with the loss of public recognition that once danced fleetingly with them across life’s stage? Or are they happy to have done with it, the whole messy enterprise, the laying down of a life for words, the anti-narcissistic reality of being locked alone in a room, digging metaphors of meaning out of their veins? Whoever said writing is a craft? For some it is a mean art, and over it all has been thrown a cloak of deceptive nonchalance, the lie that creation comes easy, falls into place with effortless grace.

Moskowitz, an unwitting Ishmael, decides to find out what happened to one lost writer. He makes a film, “The Stone Reader,” about the odyssey to find Mossman, the yeoman who went overboard, went crazy with literature’s siren song of immortality, hurled to oblivion by the thrust of his own harpoon aimed at the whale heart of the matter, that vulnerable spot where the written word counts, can penetrate and change the currents of the human ocean forever.

The search for Mossman becomes mythic, shaped by all of those writers who shipped out for the big one, the Great American Novel, and ended up drowning, singing all the way to the bottom of the sea, where creatures horrific and benign, grand and petty, dwell. In the film, many of these creatures are encountered.

The sea of literature is vast. Moskowitz needed a helmsman who knew the winds and currents of fickle fate: “If I could talk to anyone about books I love and why they faded away, who would I ask?” The answer was Leslie Fiedler, who led a revolution with his “Love and Death in the American Novel.”

Fiedler, in the film, is the Ancient Mariner, inches away from death, gray bearded with wispy hair haloed around his head, his breathing labored, his words slow, though his mind bright, darting with Jamesian alacrity. The subject of “one-book writers” fascinates Fiedler: “It is more typical for a writer to write one book and stop than to continue on. Sometimes writers stop writing because of failure, others because of success. These are the one-and-done writers.”

One and done, like Harper Lee, Emily Bronte, Ralph Ellison, those who have written everything they had to say and did it beautifully. Everyone can make up a lengthy list of the one-and-dones. There is a cold current of fear that runs under this, for each writer must ask, after the first book or the eighth, “Should I stop?” But the problem is that the inexorable wind of words can warp a person, bending them in a certain direction, and that direction often lies in the conceit, the dream, the belief and the lie that the next book will do it, capture all of life, for all time, in a bottle. Not all writers are bent in such a grandiose fashion; some are content just to create, busy hands and minds, delighted as a night-school pottery class student, eager to display their end product. But for others, the writing occupation is hazardous.

Fiedler had never heard of Mossman, and he confides off camera to the filmmaker, “I can’t read this kind of book anymore, but I believe it is something worthwhile.” What is it that can’t be read but is worthwhile for a major gatekeeper of the literary canon?

“The Stones of Summer” is a book coming from the literal heart of America that proclaims in its pages, “Build your house on Mid-western rock and it will collapse with large thunder.” The house of this novel is built from a reinvented American dream, deconstructing the three-act story into a three-ring circus, from grace to madness, from childhood to adulthood, from a family at war to a country losing its peace. The writer is not self-absorbed in a 1960s pastiche of self-realizing therapeutical righteousness tipping over into a cosmic psychobabble designed to pull through the dark days when the active seismic fault of the Vietnam War was splitting through the American cultural landscape, tumbling down all assumptions of normalcy, from nationhood to sanity. This house becomes a madhouse distortion where pain’s cry represents an entire portion of the generation that came of age in the ‘60s. There is brazen, unlimited landscape surrounding this house, limitless possibility for construction or destruction. There is the ghost of Huck Finn but no Holden Caulfield, no circumscribed urban limits. The antihero Huck who lives in this house knows where the ducks go in winter: They jet-stream across the Midwestern flyway and are shot down in a cold blue sky. Some ducks have other destinies than to float feckless as feathered pets in the ponds of Manhattan’s Central Park.

If the house that Mossman built had a critical champion, certainly it was John Seelye. Moskowitz tracks Seelye down in a Maine seaport town and presents him with a box of books he’s lugged on his journey, extracting each tome and announcing its title with importance before he smacks it roughly down on the table, like a farmer throwing sacks of seeds off the back of a truck, knowing those seeds are durable, holding the mystery of regeneration. Moskowitz hasn’t journeyed this far just to talk about one book, he’s come to talk about all books, the seeds of a million ideas. Moskowitz talks up the seeds of book ideas into towering oaks, but the first oak to be cut down is “Stones,” when Seelye informs him: “It’s a great book, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it. I can tell you it wouldn’t be published today.”

It wouldn’t be published today. One hears the buzz saws in the oak grove of books, corporate-publishing bottom-liners clear-cutting the big ones to make way for the multitude of little ones, a fate that befell “The Stones of Summer” and was soon to befall so many other books. The publisher of “Stones” had been Bobbs-Merrill, a scrappy second-line independent outfit reduced to trying to pull off at best a modest bestseller. By the time “Stones” appeared, Bobbs-Merrill had been taken over by the corporate alpha octopus of the time, International Telephone and Telegraph. The octopus wasn’t about to roll the dice on literature; it demanded hard nonfiction darlings that would rake in the dough -- no more moon dancers and shamans, no more boys on a raft shooting the rapids of the Ol’ Miss. The octopus would eventually cut all fiction from Bobbs-Merrill and provide the corporate takeover model for American publishing. The quaint days of great reviews for literature didn’t mean a thing in the bolder scheme.

“Something happened,” as Joseph Heller would say, and something sure happened to publishing in the late 1960s and early 1970s to change the rules forever. And it was Heller that Moskowitz had most wanted to talk to about this and other phenomena: “ ‘Catch-22,’ that was the book, subversive ... first book I read where the author’s voice meant as much as the story or the characters. The first writer I wanted to know more about -- because the voice behind the pages was a friend that I could never find in life.”

Heller died before Moskowitz could ask him what had happened, but in a scene in the film there is a moment of odd domestic aplomb, in which Moskowitz lies supine in a hammock, reading and dreaming without a whiff of cynical self-consciousness. In the background is his wife, constructing a stone wall. Suddenly, a voice-over is heard reading from “Catch-22.” It is the voice of Robert Gottlieb, editor of “Catch,” a man who probably witnessed the birth of more novels than any other in the last century in his roles as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred Knopf. Later, as Gottlieb is being interviewed, Moskowitz aggressively tosses a heavy hardcover copy of “Stones” at him, demanding to know whether he’s ever heard of it. Gottlieb never has, and quickly sighs with a tone of dismissive despair: “There are no rules in publishing -- it’s a crapshoot.”

Publishing is a crapshoot, and one of the professional gambling houses where they turn youngsters into professional players is at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. So Moskowitz goes on the prowl for former workshop students who were around at the time Mossman was there writing “Stones.” None of them remember Mossman. Like nearly everyone else, none had heard of the novel. Moskowitz was beginning to wonder if Mossman existed. Maybe “Stones” was written pseudonymously by a mafia of precocious students, all piling on with brilliant verbal riffs, writing books within books, even throwing in actual letters from Vietnam combatants, just the way “Stones” is constructed.

An interesting theory, but one quickly laid to rest when Moskowitz makes it to Iowa City on the one last chance that he can capture the truth. He finds William Cotter Murray, a retired writing workshop guru who was a teacher of Mossman’s. Murray, handed a copy of “Stones,” utters, “Isn’t that amazing. When you guide someone through a novel you have to play so many roles, and you are hated and loved.” Murray is shocked to discover the book is dedicated to him: “I didn’t know that.” He recalls that the novel reminded him of “Under the Volcano” -- “the madness, the surrealism.” And what about Mossman? Murray shakes his head sadly: “A major book and it went nowhere. The worst thing about a novel is finishing. Like the stretch run of a horse race -- you battle down the stretch, you don’t want to run anymore, you’re tired of the damn thing, you hate it -- you lose confidence. I thought the book was going to destroy Dow.”

If Mossman wasn’t dead, maybe he had gone crazy, had quit a loser, cashiered out of the Great Crapshoot. Maybe his fate had been foretold with, “Build your house on Mid-western rock and it will collapse with large thunder.” And after the thunder destroyed the house of the book, silence. This destructive silence still haunts Mossman’s agent of those many years ago, Carl Brandt. Fighting back tears, Brandt recalls, “It’s the kind of thing that breaks your heart.... One blames one’s self to some degree.” And then he pulls himself together, knowing that a moment of vulnerability can be the death of an agent: “But you can’t write it for them.”

During his obsessive search to find Mossman, Moskowitz’s father dies, seasons come and go, money and time are spent in pursuit of the ghostly contrails left in the sky from a long-ago forgotten book and the disappearance of a writer. Yet Moskowitz never loses hope, never loses faith in the word, in the power of the book. To demonstrate his faith, he shows his own young son receiving a bulky package in the mail. The boy unwraps the package with anticipation and pulls out a thick new novel from Amazon and cracks it open. It’s as if a bolt of lightning has suddenly flashed -- “It’s not about the great novel anymore,” as Norman Mailer once said. “What’s important is that we keep writing novels. My real fear is not who’s going to be the best writer of us all, but whether novel writing is going to continue.”

Some novelists want to move the world; sometimes they do. But whether they do or not, they inevitably realize the world moves on without them. The act of writing creates a profound vulnerability. It’s not about the Great Novel, for how is “great” defined -- through effort, intention, execution, through language and character, theme and cultural context? What is great today has less chance of being great tomorrow, for it may be too emblematic of its time, too sharp a temporal symbol to transcend to the universal. This could explain in one stroke “Moby-Dick,” forgotten in its time, implacable in the future.

This story began with infatuation over a novel, about a devoted reader in search of his perfect writer. The film, about the reader’s attempts to rescue the writer from obscurity and his novel from oblivion, resonates with startling revelations about personal sacrifices for art and commercial vicissitudes that conspire against creativity. In the end this tale serves not as a cautionary act of contrition for innocence lost but as an act of defiance, a love story that proclaims irreverently, first the heaven, then the hell. Welcome to the arts in America.