Child of Light by Madison Smartt Bell

Author:Madison Smartt Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

OUTERBRIDGE REACH

1

CHILDREN OF LIGHT, RECEPTION AND PROMOTION

Bob’s delivery of the Children of Light manuscript came out more or less even with Knopf’s advance on the book. He committed to teaching another semester at Princeton in the fall of 1985. The Stones took an apartment in the Hibben-Magie complex where they had briefly lived in 1971—the place seemed seedier to them now, perhaps because of poor maintenance, perhaps because they had grown used to living at least a little higher on the hog. Bob’s teaching schedule was light enough that they could spend part of each week in Westport and sometimes even Block Island.

On Valentine’s Day in 1986, Bob was off to Australia on another cultural junket, sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency. This trip lasted nearly six weeks, taking him to various cities in Australia and New Zealand. Traveling without Janice, Bob got in a scrape or two. While in Sydney, he scored prescriptions for oxycodone and Indocin—for gout, ostensibly, though he was not above putting a prescription narcotic to recreational use. He burned his hand on a tea towel he’d set on fire on his hotel-room stove, and while diving in Perth cut himself on coral. These wounds were infected by the time Bob passed through Sydney again, the infection serious enough to make him ill for a few days; he was still feeling a little sick from it when he did a phone interview from Adelaide with Barth Healey of The New York Times.

The general drugginess of Children of Light prompted certain questions. “I come out of the generation of drugs when we were all experimenting with LSD—a bunch of artists experimenting,” Bob told Healey. “Drugs marked my generation very strongly. But I lost a number of friends, by which I mean they are dead.” Asked if he took drugs now, Bob gave a lawyerly response. “ ‘I don’t use illegal drugs,’ he said. ‘I am a social drinker, and even that I regard as a waste of my creative energy. I write good prose. I wouldn’t be able to do that if I were dependent on drugs and alcohol, which I use progressively less and which I anticipate using not at all.’ ”

The lines from Healey’s interview were appended to an insightful review of the novel by the biographer Jean Strouse, which ran on the cover of The New York Times Book Review on March 16. Strouse took Stone’s career and the novel seriously: “Critics have compared Mr. Stone to Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Nathanael West; all apt enough, but there’s a James T. Farrell, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett strain as well—a hard-edged, lonely intelligence that sets bright promise off against stark failure and deals its mordant hand lightly.” (She also dubbed him “the apostle of strung out.”)

Bob was still Down Under then, and also well away from the flap over his U.K. publisher André Deutsch having “jumped the gun and published a few days before Knopf, infuriating the Knopf people.” Janice was deputized to smooth that situation out as best she could, until Bob’s return on March 25.

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