78 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020that follow shimmer with exactitude
and madness.Finally, broken-willed, he consented to
turn, dreading the thing that might
confront him in the window. There, in
place of the declining sun, he saw in-
numerable misshapen discs stretched
in limitless perspective to an expanded
horizon. It was a parody of the honest
mariner’s sighting. Each warped ball
was the reflection of another in an in-
dex glass, each one hung suspended,
half-submerged in a frozen sea. They
extended forever, to infinity, in a uni-
verse of infinite singularities. In the
ocean they suggested, there could be
no measure and no reason. There
could be neither direction nor horizon.
It was an ocean without a morning,
without sanity or light.B
y the time Bell’s biography reaches
the tragedy at Port Said, we are
only thirty-two pages into a six-
hundred-page work. Stone soon gets
out of the Navy (“I actually had a
pretty good time in the Navy,” he later
said), tries journalism, gets married,
goes to New Orleans, sells encyclope-
dias, and witnesses overt Southern
racism up close. He works as a census
taker, and gives jazz- poetry readings.
(“Sometimes,” he recalled of those
readings, “after Tulane football games,
the players would come in and throw
bananas at us. This cost them noth-
ing, since the bananas, in bunches off
the dock, were hung from the ceiling
and the bar pillars.”) By 1962, he and
his wife have moved to San Francisco,
where he falls in with Ken Kesey’s
Merry Pranksters and spends some
time traveling with them and getting
high and noting what hallucinogens
do to the psyche—in one case, caus-
ing him to see physical manifestations
of the notes Coltrane played during a
concert, unaware meanwhile that he
had stepped on a nail. (“When I took
my shoe off it seemed that my sock
was drenched in blood—bright blood,
the color of John Coltrane’s soprano
sax riffs.”)
He also has a stroke of luck: the
woman he married, Janice Burr, was a
loving and loyal companion, and
mother to two of his children. Early on,
she recognized that for him, “drinking
was already a necessity,” and she
emerges in this biography as a supportto him throughout his life. The story
of Robert Stone’s career is consequently,
at least in large part, about their mar-
riage, as well as, with his increasing
stature following the success of Dog
Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, the at-
tendant book tours, the teaching, the
screenwriting, the awards, the friend-
ships, and— perhaps most of all—the
substance abuse.
No one can smoke, drink “hero-
ically” (Bell’s word for it), and do
drugs with any regularity without
some unwholesome systemic results,
and the last third of this biography
tells the inevitable story of Stone’s
physical decline. It is not an account
for the faint of heart. What’s remark-
able is that despite his afflictions,
Stone was still able to do so much good
work before his death in 2015. At the
time of the completion of Bay of Souls,
in 2003, Bell observes, Stone had
“been to hell” and “had come to the
edge of losing absolutely everything—
not just Janice and his marriage but
his very life and breath.”
Stone’s struggle with alcohol in-
formed much of his writing. In A Hall
of Mirrors, once Rheinhardt accepts
the job at the conservative radio sta-
tion, the boss, Bingamon, seals the
deal by offering Rheinhardt a glass of
Southern Comfort, which he reluc-
tantly drinks. What follows is a para-
graph that only an alcoholic could
write, and it fuses power, vision, and
the demonic.When it was down he knew it had
been a mistake. After the first warm
relaxation he felt the sudden careen-
ing of his brain, the dives; standing a
foot from Bingamon with the glass in
his hand, the foolish smile still on his
face, he was plunging headlong into
the dives, the whirling breathless
curves that led, always to the lights—
he could see them down at the bot-
tom, flashing yellow and red. He had
to get out now, he told himself. He
had to get out.That’s what a devil’s bargain looks
like, and there’s no escape; you don’t
get out of it.
Few other American writers of his
period, with the notable exception of
Denis Johnson, seem to have be-
lieved in demons as firmly as did
Stone. At the beginning of Dog Sol-diers, a journalist named John Con-
verse finds himself on a bench in
Vietnam with a middle-aged woman,
a missionary. She tells him that up
north in Ngoc Linh they worship Sa-
tan. When Converse informs her
that, like most people, he doesn’t be-
lieve in Satan, because it’s too
“spooky,” the woman replies, “People
are in for an unpleasant surprise.”T
he En glish novelist Wynd-
ham Lewis wrote in his novel
Self Condemned (195 4) t h a t ,
“like all good Americans they”—his
British characters—“came to realize
that it was only the comic that mat-
tered,” and if Stone’s work is notable
for its darkness, that darkness also
served him as a resource for wild
laughter. Consider, in A Flag for
Sunrise, the protagonist Holliwell’s
drunken speech to an angry univer-
sity audience in a fictional Central
American nation: “ ‘In my country
we have a saying—Mickey Mouse
will see you dead.’ There was silence.
‘There isn’t really such a saying,’
Holliwell admitted.”
In 2010, I found myself dining alone
in a little northern Minnesota restau-
rant and had brought along Stone’s
second collection of stories, Fun with
Problems (2010), for company. He was
a wonderful short-story writer, and
his story “Helping” has been widely
anthologized. While waiting for my
fish sandwich, I began reading the
volume’s fourth story, “The Wine-
Dark Sea,” and came to a passage in
which a character named Eric, “a few
weeks out of rehab” and driven by
wine and what the narrative calls
the “spell of his demon,” begins to
expound to his friends the truth be-
hind appearances. In the attack on
the World Trade Center, he claims,
there were no actual planes. We were
all fooled and deluded by “fractal im-
aging.” Inspired and lifted up, Eric
begins to sound like someone on
midnight AM radio or like the shab-
by stranger who sits down next to
you in the waiting room for an en-
lightening chat.
“You guys heard about history being
mere fiction. That’s the way it’s always
been. Heard of the Romans?” Eric de-
manded. “They never existed!” He
raised his voice. “It’s baloney. I mean,·