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When Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles and Queen Camilla would visit the United States to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, I knew I had to call Mark Helprin.
The bestselling author’s fifth novel, 2005’s “Freddy and Fredericka,” is a thinly veiled sendup of Charles and Princess Diana — who, in this case, must travel to America and recapture “the colonies” in order to be blessed by an immortal, magical falcon who selects the true kings of England.
If you’ve never read one of Helprin’s novels, that summary is a pretty good glimpse into the experience: discursive and funny with a healthy shake of magical realism.
“Freddy and Fredericka” is a darkly comic romp across the United States that finds our heroes falling in love with the country they were sent to recapture, urging Americans to “let everything in the nation flow through you” and to return to “your original principles … immaterial and bright, ever enduring.”
It’s been more than a decade since I first read “Freddy and Fredericka,” and I’ve returned again and again to this book, essentially “Democracy In America” in novel form. So I was excited to ask Helprin how much Tocqueville was on his mind while he wrote the novel.
“He wasn’t,” Helprin said, for one simple reason: He had never read Tocqueville.
He was, however, in the process of reading “Democracy in America” in French, along with “The Wealth of Nations,” another classic he’s never gotten to. Shakespeare and Dante are in heavy rotation, however, as is fiction until the Lost Generation. Nothing after Fitzgerald and Hemingway holds much interest for Helprin, which, he stresses, has everything to do with his personal taste and nothing to do with snobbery.
There’s nothing about Helprin’s oeuvre or demeanor that would suggest he is anything other than well-read. But if yielding at Dos Passos for some reason stirs up doubts about Helprin’s literacy, the thousands of volumes that line the shelves of Helprin’s Charlottesville home should put them to rest. I once heard that Helprin has every paper he’s ever written, going back to his undergraduate career at Harvard, if not high school.
I didn’t ask him about this because I didn’t want it to not be true. After our conversation, I’m certain it is.
Helprin is everything you want him to be. Smartly dressed in a light check blazer, occasionally self-effacing and always captivating, he’s like a character from one of his novels — the latest of which, “Elegy In Blue,” hits shelves this week. All told, he’s written nine novels, three collections of short stories, and three children’s books illustrated by “Jumanji” author Chris Van Allsburg.
In addition, Helprin maintains a steady stream of political commentary, weighing in on everything from copyright law to foreign policy from his regular spot in the Claremont Review of Books to the Wall Street Journal and beyond. Helprin’s fans, myself included, say he’s one of the greatest living American novelists. Helprin almost certainly wouldn’t say that about himself, which is likely why, despite a half-century in the public eye, he manages to fly somewhat under the radar.
Helprin’s relative anonymity is especially ironic considering his downright cinematic backstory. His mother was an actress in the Golden Age of Hollywood who left the Silver Screen to join the Group Theatre, a famous Method acting collective. His father, an American commando who worked for Winston Churchill during the Second World War, later became the head of London Films. It was there, in an office in Mayfair, that the first seeds for “Freddy and Fredericka” were planted by the king and queen themselves.
“Part of his job was, when the Queen and Prince Philip wanted to see a film, they would come in one Rolls Royce, no security or anything like that,” Helprin recalls. “He would greet them on the sidewalk and then escort them upstairs and into the screening room, where there was a buffet laid out with caviar and shrimp and everything, champagne, whatever.”
“And they would sit down, and then he would introduce the film, tell them about how it was made, what the subject was, whatever screen the film,” he continues. “And then afterwards, he would take questions from them, if they had any, and then escort them down to the street and see them off and say, thank you very much for coming.”
“They never thanked him, ever,” Helprin notes.
Helprin never forgot that. Not as he did his graduate work, which kept him at Harvard before taking him to Oxford; not during his time in the Israel Defense Forces, a tour of duty he embarked on after he was asked — and declined — to move to Cairo and serve as the Middle East editor for the New York Times.
Somewhere toward the end of his itinerant youth, he began a career as a writer. His first novel, “Refiner’s Fire,” was published in 1977. He achieved mainstream success with 1983’s “Winter’s Tale” and 1991’s “A Soldier Of The Great War.”
Photo by Mario Ruiz/Getty Images
It was during a three-month book tour for the latter novel that the seeds planted by his family’s royal connection finally began to sprout. It was the ’90s, and Charles and Di were all over the news. Seeing a man and a woman washing dishes at a restaurant kitchen one night, one of his daughters asked if the scullions were the duke and duchess.
Helprin saw an opportunity for “misapprehension,” which he calls “the funniest part of all humor.”
“If you think about the royals in Britain, they have so much opportunity for that because they live in a completely different world,” Helprin says. “But there’s even greater opportunity if they’re here amongst the colonials incognito.”
“Freddy and Fredericka” was a success in the United States. It was not published in Britain, where audiences were less receptive to Helprin’s take on the monarchy. Helprin has no regrets.
“I mocked the royals because they’re mockable,” he says. “They’re insanely mockable. They’re freaks, right? And they live in a freakish world.”
But Helprin appreciates that by separating their head of state and the head of government, the British monarchy “allows a really stable, decent government.” That attitude didn’t fly with “the loony Left” across the pond.
At least one person in Great Britain received a copy, however.
“Just by chance, I was invited to dinner that Prince Charles was supposed to attend in Washington, D.C.,” Helprin recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, you know what I better do? I better send Freddy and Fredericka to the palace,’ because, you know, to give them advance warning you don’t want to sandbag people.”
“So I sent it to the palace,” he explains, “and then without any word whatsoever, I was just disinvited to the dinner.”
Had he met Charles, Helprin says, he would have “approached him as an American.”
“We don’t believe that people are born with privilege, that, in other words, that privilege is legitimate, that they’re entitled to it, and we see them eye to eye,” Helprin adds. “That’s what America is about, and that there’s a very, very powerful force behind that, our history, our power, our ethos and the founding, which was, I think, divinely inspired.”
“If I’m sitting across from the King of England,” Helprin says, “I don’t feel lesser in any way.”
It’s a line that could have been spoken by most of Helprin’s protagonists. The typical Helprin hero is a kind of Aristotelian great-souled man with a Brooklyn accent. Most of Helprin’s novels take place in and around New York City, where Helprin was born and lived the first five years of his life, and a city that still captivates him and feels like home, despite the oppressive scale of “way too tall” buildings and the scourge of bike messengers zipping around with food, “because everybody has to have instant gratification.”
Of all Helprin’s New York novels, “Winter’s Tale” stands alone. Set simultaneously at the turns of the 20th and 21st centuries, the novel has at least 100 characters, a lengthy subplot about rival 19th-century newspaper barons, a magical realist upstate New York town with its own magic language, and a flying white horse.
That barely scratches the surface of what “Winter’s Tale” is about, and I’m not sure I could accurately describe it if I tried. The book has stuck with me, almost haunted me, for years. Whenever I’ve read another of Helprin’s books, I hope to find within it the key to understanding it. I never have.
Helprin, it seems, is in the same boat.
“I can’t explain it, but it possessed me day and night,” he says. “I would spend days in the New York Historical Society … and I’d walk the streets, looking at things and getting very, very obsessed and emotional about it.”
“So in a sense, I’m not the one to explain it, because it seizes me as much as other people who report that it did the same to them,” Helprin adds. “I felt as if I was just a medium of something that was speaking through me.”
To the extent that the book is about one thing, Helprin says, it’s about justice. Divine justice.
“People say God works in mysterious ways. Well, they’re not necessarily mysterious,” he says — they just come “from the past.”
“Who said that everything has to be made right in the timeline that we can perceive? Maybe it’s different, maybe from the divine perspective, the timeline is infinitely long, and the balances are affected and affect justice over a long period of time, so that after an injustice, maybe 20 years later, there’s some sort of a compromise,” Helprin adds.
“If you look at the whole of humanity and the whole of the universe as being one construct, if you think that from the divine perspective, that’s what it is, because you see from very far away, and it’s as one thing actually, without time.”
Photo by John Mahler/Toronto Star via Getty Images
We mortals, of course, cannot see as God sees. But this is what Helprin aims to do in his novels. More than that, it’s how he sees the world, day in and day out.
“If you ask my wife, she would tell you, it’s very difficult to be married to me,” he says. “Very, very difficult.”
To stay grounded while thinking these lofty thoughts, Helprin works. He has been an agricultural worker, a surveyor, a dishwasher, and a stevedore.
“I spend so much time working, doing hard, physical, exhausting labor, that while I’m doing that often I think of things and think of what I’m going to do about the book, and when I get the chance to actually write the book, I’m so grateful for it because it’s different from, you know, spending hours on a tractor in the hot sun or getting rid of trees that fall,” he says. “So you come in from the heat and the dust and the dirt and the blood — if you work on a farm, you’re gonna have a lot of blood, and you’ll be lucky if you keep your fingers when you come in — then you have a refuge. And it’s a great privilege.”
“It’s almost like — to return to where we started — almost like being a royal,” he adds.
Helprin is on the cusp of turning 80, and while he says nothing to suggest that he wants to give up the punishing labor that’s driven so much of his life (and allowed him never to take a publisher’s advance), mortality is at least a little on his mind.
“Elegy In Blue,” he notes, “is probably not going to be my last book, as I’m working on another one. But, who knows, I may not be able to finish the other one. I might die before I do.”
Like his novels, Helprin feels neither outdated nor contemporary. He is a man out of time, a bridge between this century and the last who would likely feel equally at home in both. He speaks as he writes, and he lives like the characters he creates, a true American original.
But, unsurprisingly, the anti-monarchist with Tory sensibilities does miss the world he grew up in.
“I have to say, I do miss it, I really do,” he says. “When you’re going to be 80, then you’ll probably miss it, too. You know, that’s the way it is. And it’s okay.”
