"In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Expatriate novelists are often interrogated about their hometowns. Everyone seems to doubt that it's possible, in exile, to retain that "sense of place" which is supposed to be so essential for writing "anchored" fiction, whatever that is. It sounds like fish stories to me.
I can never respond to this sort of question without sounding off-puttingly morbid, because my particular Bethlehem and its accompanying "sense of place" are bound up with my own premature death, and with the destruction of the human race at large. I was born downwind in Utah in the heat of the aboveground hydrogen bomb test era. There's a projected mass die-off of Utahns my exact age, of thyroid cancer, due to commence any day now. It's not just the poor Uighurs in East Turkestan who get whining rights.
I remember in kindergarten peeking out the lunchroom window and seeing the sky blacker than midnight. It was a flat and unwholesome shade of black that I've never seen since. Nobody talked about it, including the other kids, which seems pretty odd in retrospect. Large portions of Nevada real estate were passing overhead, and it didn't even make the six o'clock news.
Edward Teller, the famed father of that blackness, showed up several years later with a suspicious lack of fanfare. He gave a couple perfunctory speeches in obscure high school auditoria - discreetly checking the subject population for mongoloids and harelips, no doubt. He wasn't disappointed.
Answering a question about arms limitation, he said, with a straight face (or at least as straight as that face could ever get), "We had arms limitation from the beginning. It commenced already with the second detonation."
Apparently the first detonation was so huge that it blew a hole right through the stratosphere, and the destructive payload was dissipated in space, quite uneconomically. Teller is famous for betting that "device" would ignite the atmosphere and turn the planet to cinders.
It's not just a simple question of resenting Eddy and Oppy and the boys at the Los Alamos labs, and feeling the victim's comfy sense of moral superiority. I'm not about to hijack the term "Holocaust" for the six-million-and-first time. Those scientists were pursuing a vocation qualitatively identical to the novelist's. And once you've received a vocation, you pursue it or die. If you're not the suicidal type, you don't even have that choice - which makes it as much a part of your metabolic activity as eating or excreting or growing tumors in your neck.
Any serious creative work will reach a certain critical mass, after which it takes off on its own, and you're just hanging on, serving as the proverbial amanuensis, your conscious will playing no part at all. It's the most delightful experience imaginable. The word "delight" hardly begins to encompass it. You need to shift upward to the metaphysical lexicon. Anyone who has felt it, or has read an adequate description of the experience, knows that nothing else matters at that particular moment. The world can go up in flames all around your desk, and probably will, if you do the work right, and you don't give a damn.
I'm sure that's what those Poindexters were feeling in the desert outside my hometown fifty years ago. Only in their case the big conflagration wasn't metaphorical. "I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds," said Oppy on TV (pretending to try, with a more or less recondite reference, to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the liberal intelligentsia, when he knew very well that his perfect face had already done the job for him the moment he went on camera).
It's not just Department of Defense flunkies like him who have access to universally lethal knowledge. In the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Jesus takes his doubting disciple aside and whispers three esoteric words. When the other apostles crowd around and demand to know what the Master said, Thomas replies, "If I were to reveal even one of those words, you would take up stones to kill me, and those stones would turn to fire and burn you up."
Every writer has just such moments. He looks up from his manuscript, his head reels, and, like Melville, he gasps, "I have written a wicked work." With Coleridge, he says of himself -
"...Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of paradise."
In other words, "Publish this book, big fella, and the world comes to an end." And there's not even a momentary quibble. To Hell with the world, and with me!
So, indignation is not one of my reactions to those thermonuclear poems of the fifties. Smug victimology isn't part of my "sense of place." But, then again, my thyroid is still intact. Maybe I should hold off publishing this book for a few months, till I've grown twin goiters that can be used as flashlights when the power's out.
Meanwhile, take another look at those gorgeous films of the H-bomb explosions in my back yard. See how the whole sky peels back like a popped blister, and this column rises up into the dilated firmament like a refulgent hard-on. If I could be the first guy to cause that to happen, I doubt I'd be Christly enough to demur. Anybody who's seen or been an adolescent boy with a bag of Wyoming cherry bombs knows the feeling.
Fortunately, almost nobody is approached in the desert by such a great Satan. So it's difficult to get moralistic about those who are buttonholed by the really large temptations, and succumb. It's like feeling holier than a certain president of the previous century because you never ordered up dry fellatio from an underling in your private office - when you have neither underlings nor office, nor indeed that very power which is, as Kissinger reminded Mao (as if Mao needed reminding), the "ultimate aphrodisiac."
Hear Tom Bradley read this piece at The Blue Moon Review
Tom says, "I am a bleeding victim/hero in the never-ending war to make the world safe for Freedom of the Press. My battles have lately been fought in the Pacific Theater, against the mean Shinto fascist pricks. My courageous actions have been featured in Arts and Letters Daily, and are psychoanalyzed in the legendary Exquisite Corpse, where I am diagnosed as suffering from an 'unwholesome Christ complex and a desire for public self-annihilation. I bless you and keep you. I make my face to shine upon you, and give you respite. Amen."