It Happened in Boston?

First published by Random House in 1968, Russell H. Greenan'sIt Happened in Boston?is the story of a brilliantly talented, unbalanced artist who strives to meet God face-to-face in order to destroy Him. It is "a magic spell of a bookphantasmagoric, lushly written, full of unforgettable characters and brilliant twists of plot," writes Jonathan Lethem in his Introduction. With a vivid depiction of the art world and a breathtaking narrative that incorporates forgery, time travel, and murder, Greenan's hilarious and disturbing debut novelnow an underground cult classicis ripe for rediscovery.

<b>Russell H. Greenan</b>, on his way to becoming a novelist, grew up in the Bronx, served in the navy, sold industrial engines, and ran several curio shops in the Boston area. His thirteen novels include <i>The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton</i> and <i>The Bric-a-Brac Man</i>.<br><br><b>Jonathan Lethem</b> is the author of six novels, including <i>Motherless Brooklyn</i>, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and <i>The Fortress of Solitude</i>.

From the Afterword, by Russell H. Greenan

1
It’s been thirty-five years since I completed It Happened in Boston? and in that time many people have asked me how I came to write it–a question not easily answered. Since novels have their beginnings early in the author’s life, long meandering roads are usually traveled before the finished product shows up on a bookshelf.

After the Second World War, at Long Island University in Brooklyn, I took my only course in creative writing–a lightweight subject in academia back then. Our astute teacher for that one semester, Mr. Nathan Resnick, kept his instructions simple and did not burden us with grand dicta or clever formulae. A four-hundred-word composition “about what you know” had to be turned in at every session. It would then be evaluated by the teacher privately and discussed in class at the next session.

Because what most college youth “know” is not too exciting, the result was page after page of uninspired realism. After two or three weeks of this, I broke the rules and wrote a four-
hundred-word, obviously fabricated, story–and Mr. Resnick liked it enough to have another student read it aloud to the class. Predictably, someone leaped from his chair and wailed, “That’s fiction, and you told us to write what we know.” But I defended myself by explaining that the story came from my mind, and therefore I must have known all the elements that comprised it. And how could anyone write about things he did not know? Soon thereafter the homework and the discussions became more interesting.

Of course, if a novelist writes an eight-hundred-page story about chasing a bad-tempered whale across the wide Pacific without ever having left his hometown of Lodgepole, South Dakota, the novel probably won’t turn out as true-to-life as Moby-Dick, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be devoid of merit. What authors put down on paper springs from their own personal experiences, from all the memories that have gathered over the years in the recesses of their minds, not to mention all the books they have read. Naipaul says that if you want to know who a writer is you don’t read his autobiography, you read his fiction. Autobiographies are full of lies, but storytelling strips you bare. A wise author will never explain his novel. He will tell you the novel explains him.
My desire to write flared up at age six or seven in the Bronx, when my older sister, Bernadette, brought novels about dogs and horses home from the Alexander Avenue branch of the New
York Public Library. Thomas Hinkle was a particular favorite of ours. They were sad stories, but with happy endings–an old plot structure still hard to improve on. To me each was an absorbing trip into an exciting world very different from my own, and I wondered how such vivid marvels could be created by mere human beings. Since then I have been consuming books at a great rate, and have never lost that sense of wonderment.

This revelation occurred in 1931. We lived in a cold-water railroad flat, 354 East 144th Street, between Willis and Third Avenue. There was no bathroom or shower–I performed my weekly ablutions in a portable washtub that held about three gallons of water–and our toilet, set in a separate alcove, had to be shared with whoever occupied the apartment next door. A cast-iron coal- or wood-burning stove heated the kitchen in the wintertime, but the other three rooms were Novaya Zemlya frigid.

Children in a family–I had three older siblings–handle poverty amazingly well, as long as they have a roof over their heads and aren’t starving. If our old oaken icebox was usually empty, my mother nevertheless always managed to put a meal on the table. Those meals improved quantitatively when the Home Relief program was established.

To a twenty-first-century American all this may sound like Gorky’s The Lower Depths, but it was actually a stimulating time and place for a kid to grow up. Next to the house next to ours there was a four-story stable, complete with a blacksmith you could watch noisily hammering red-hot horseshoes on his anvil, or nailing the shoes to the hooves of the weary old nags who were his clients. These beasts pulled the peddlers’ wagons that roamed the streets of New York, providing people with fresh fruits and vegetables–a custom that vanished during the Second World War. The wagons were stored in a big livery yard across the road. I liked that stable very much, but in the summer months horseflies were a nuisance. And the occasional dead equine, left on the street for several days before the sanitation department got around to hauling it off using a sling and a winch, could have a deleterious effect on the neighborhood air quality.

Another neat attraction loomed just beyond the stable: the Third Avenue el, which cut through the middle of the block in order to meet the Harlem River bridge to Manhattan. Because of their proximity, these trains were difficult to ignore. Aside from the loud rumble and the screech of the brakes as the cars entered the 143rd Street station–particularly harrowing at night when you were trying to sleep–the constant vibrations seemed to threaten our wood-framed house with imminent collapse.

An empty tenement around the corner gave the local kids a nice venue in which to play hide-and-seek, until one day two classmates of mine found an unfortunate man hanging from a gaslight fixture over a flight of stairs. Afterward the house was considered haunted and we never entered the place again. Littleboy’s suicide had its origin in the memory of that incident.
My father’s work picked up in 1935–he tuned pianos at the Hardman & Peck factory on West 57th Street in Manhattan–so we moved from 144th Street to 155th between Elton and Melrose, a classier neighborhood where all the apartments had steam heat, hot water, a private toilet, and real bathtubs. And the el was a block and a half away, so we barely heard it.

2
I passed blithely through the New York Public School system–PS 31, PS 38, PS 51, and Morris High–served in the Navy during the war, received a B.A. from LIU thanks to the G.I. Bill, and got a job as a parts man at a machinery distributor. When someone in their Boston office returned to the Navy for the Korean War, I eagerly accepted the company’s offer to replace him.
In 1950 Boston had the beguiling look of a European city. Its one tall building, the original John Hancock, had been constructed only a few years earlier and was something less than a skyscraper. I soon became very fond of the old Yankee town–of its Back Bay mansions, its Charles River, Public Garden, the Common, the libraries, the museums, the winding streets. Outsiders often possess an objectivity that allows them to see a place clearer than the locals do.
For a few years I was a traveling salesman in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, but, ever restless, I quit the machinery company and opened an antique shop in Harvard Square, hoping to set up a business that someone else could eventually run for me. On the imagined profits from this operation I could then go to Europe and write a novel. The imagined profits remained that way, however, and my Cambridge venture failed. I opened another store called Back Bay Bric-a-Brac on Newbury Street, Boston’s art gallery district. Much of the material and atmosphere in It Happened in Boston? derives from those days, from the time I spent dealing with pickers, auctioneers, artists, restorers, and other members of the antique fraternity. But Back Bay Bric-a-Brac, despite its catchy name, did not succeed, either, and by then I was thirty-three, in debt, and married with three children. I went back to the machinery business.

Then, one bleak winter morning in 1962, while working as a branch manager of a ball-bearing company, I decided that the only way I would ever make that trip to Europe and write that novel was for my wife and me to save every penny we could out of my meager salary until we amassed ten thousand dollars. On that I calculated we could live abroad for a year. Simple as the idea was, it came as an epiphany to me. To repay our debts we had already been living a hand-to-mouth existence. All we needed to do was continue this nickel-nursing for another couple of years, et voila–off to the Continent we would hie. Believe it or not, my wife, Flora–a rare blossom indeed–assented to the plan.

In fact it took us closer to four years and involved a lot of pretty desperate asceticism, but in the spring of 1966 I quit my job, sold our furniture, pulled our children out of school, and sailed away with the whole family on the Italian Line’s Cristoforo Colombo. It was an exciting fourteen-day journey, and the ship called at many charming ports. Though we could have disembarked at Genoa, the city closest to our ultimate destination, Nice, we stayed aboard till the very last stop, Trieste, and crossed northern Italy to France by train, visiting Venice and Milan on the way.
I knew Nice. I had spent three months there during the winter of 1950—51, after having saved up a thousand dollars and taken a leave of absence from my Boston job. Then, as later, the object of my trip was to write a novel–or a good part of one, anyway. But for a twenty-five-year-old single person the French Riviera was not the best place in the world to do serious literary work. There were all kinds of distractions.

In early March of 1951 I returned to the States on the Vulcania with relatively little accomplished, though for a couple of years afterwards I continued to struggle with this never-to-be-finished first novel. When I finally put it out of its misery, the manuscript was 175 chapters long and the story had progressed only a third of the way to its denouement. Nevertheless, I learned things about writing from the experience, the most important of which, perhaps, was that a novelist should not allow himself to get bogged down, that he should persevere on to the end of his narrative even though this may mean leaving undeveloped characters and plotlines in his wake. Authors get a psychological boost from completing that last page, and they can always go back and strengthen the weaknesses left behind. Recently I read the letters of Kingsley Amis and was pleased to see that the one bit of advice he gave an aspiring novelist concurred exactly with this long-held opinion of mine.

Despite my lack of literary success during that first visit to Nice, I liked the city too much not to return there when I had the chance. I was sixteen years older in 1966 and had a family–and an entire year in which to work. With a few rudimentary chapters packed in my suitcase, along with many pages of researched material dealing with art, forgery, strychnine, and so forth, I was confident that I would get the job done this time.

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Excerpted from It Happened in Boston? by Russell Greenan
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