“It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones”: T. C. Boyle’s World’s End and the Burden of the Past Peter Freese ABSTRACT T. C. Boyle’s third novel World’s End (1987) is an accomplished historiographical metafiction whose many-stranded plot unfolds the history of two Dutch immigrant families and the indig- enous Kitchawanks in the Hudson Valley in the years between 1663 and 1694 and again in 1968/69. This essay investigates how Boyle uses the actual Peekskill Riots of 1949 as the starting point for a “pastless” would-be hippie’s search for his father and how he embeds this quest in a convoluted chain of events whose extensive timescale of three hundred years is offset by the spatial limitations of a narrowly circumscribed region. The essay then shows how Boyle combines historical accuracy based on personal experience and extensive research with flights of magical inventiveness and how he uses the regional superstition of the Dunderberg Imp as well as recurring intertextual refer- ences to the tales of Washington Irving to conflate the real and the magical in the fashion of his admired model Gabriel García Márquez. The essay then demonstrates how Boyle employs eating aberrations from cannibalism and terraphagia to binge eating and starvation to create surpris- ing links between colonial and present events, and how he uses the iterative motif of betrayal to develop a deterministic understanding of history. The essay concludes that Boyle’s idiosyncratic style, which is full of humorous comparisons, unexpected images and extravagant metaphors, is not only used for the satirical unmasking of human pretensions and social aberrations but also for the gradual unfolding of a bleakly pessimistic version of the New World’s past and present and a convincing rejection of the promise of the American Dream. World’s End was a way of redeeming some of the things from my past; it was an attempt to get some of it back, or at least to explore it, to think about it. […] As a kid I had no notion of the history and tradition of the Hudson Valley. Then eight or nine years ago I began to reread Washington Irving and to absorb the legends and myths surrounding the area. The whole experience brewed up some pretty potent material. In 1983 I spent four months there, working mainly at the Peek- skill Library and going to all the historic sites and homes. (qtd. Brisick) When, in 1987, T. Coraghessan Boyle published his third novel, World’s End, it was widely received as his breakthrough work. The laudatory reviews ranged from Benjamin De Mott’s praise that “World’s End is a smashing good book, the peak achievement thus far in a career that seems now to have no clear limits” to Michael Dolan’s statement that “with this book [Boyle] launches himself at the circle of such as Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner.” And Boyle’s fellow writer Russell Banks admiringly observed: “What knocked me out was the book’s ambition. It took [Boyle] out of the category of witty, clever social satire and put him in another league. He reached for the moon, and maybe he didn’t get it all, but he risked the talent, and that’s a scary thing to do” (qtd. Adams, “T. Coraghessan”). 46 Peter Freese In contrast to Boyle’s previous novels Water Music (1982), which fictionalizes the eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s adventures in Western Africa, and Budding Prospects (1984), which deals with illegal marijuana farm- ers in Mendocino County, California, the far-ranging and many-layered story of World’s End, according to Michiko Kakutani, “attempts not only to examine the implications of the American Dream, as [Boyle’s] done in earlier works, but also to tackle the complicated issues of freedom, class and race involved in the found- ing of our nation.” The convoluted story unfolds on Boyle’s home turf, and the central place of action, the town of “Peterskill-on-the-Hudson” (4), is a fictional projection of the City of Peekskill in Westchester County, New York, where Boyle was born in 1948. Boyle confirmed in several interviews that the details of the novel’s action are either taken out of his own contemporary world or are the re- sults of his copious historical research, and he admitted to Justin D. Coffin that “One genius critic said that World’s End is a kind of fictional autobiography. And I loved that, because that’s what it is. I don’t know my genealogy much: I would just rather invent it.” As in many of his novels, the seed from which Boyle develops his story is a particular historical event, the so-called Peekskill Riots of 1949. In the summer of that year, tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was growing and the House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating subversive activities by citizens suspected of Communist ties. In a climate that would soon bloom into what is known as McCarthyism, left-leaning Peekskill citizens dared to schedule a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress with the famous black baritone Paul Robeson in Lakeland Acres, north of the city, for August 27, 1949. Since Robeson was known for his civil rights activities, his anti-colonialism, and his positive view of the Soviet Union, a mob of self-styled patriots prevented this concert by attacking visitors and seriously injuring thirteen of them with stones and baseball bats, lynching Robeson in effigy, and burning a cross on a nearby hill. Afterwards, the Joint Veterans Council of Peekskill denied any involvement, the local police maintained that the riot had happened outside their jurisdiction, and the state police declared that no troopers had been requested. But union members and other left-wing locals did not give in and re-scheduled the concert for September 4. It took place on an abandoned golf course in Cortlandt Manor and was attended by 20,000 people, with security organized by the Communist Party and labor unions. Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Lee Hays, and other folk singers performed and then Robeson sang surrounded by bodyguards. But this time the protesters, many of them drunk, had positioned themselves along the road from the concert grounds and, shouting anti-black and anti-Jewish taunts, threw rocks at the cars and buses bringing the visitors home and dragged some of them from their vehicles and beat them up. Some visitors and union members, among them the writer Howard Fast, formed a non-violent line of resistance and sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” but with the police standing back, more than 140 people were injured and many vehicles were damaged. The two riots received na- tionwide coverage: churches, trade unions, and prominent individuals condemned the governor, the state, and the local police and called for an investigation, but the mainstream press and the local Peekskill officials argued that Robeson and “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 47 his fans had “provoked” the violence. With the riots remembered in numerous songs, videos, and films, the Peekskill authorities tried hard to get rid of their city’s unwanted fame as a haven of intolerance and bigotry, and as late as 1999 Westchester County held a “Remembrance and Reconciliation Ceremony, 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1949 Peekskill Riots,” at which Paul Robe- son, Jr., and Peter Seeger gave speeches. In 1989, Boyle told Jef Tombeur: “I grew up in one of the most liberal neigh- borhoods in America. […] I grew up amongst many Russian Jews who founded an anarchist colony which later became a Communist colony. One of the most liberal communities, certainly, in America […] and we felt very liberal about everything, radical almost.” For him, then, the memory of the riots must have been alive and embarrassing, and thus it is small wonder that he made not only the riots but also the world of the concert organizers central elements of World’s End. The novel’s protagonist, Walter Van Brunt, and his foster parents live in one of the “hundred identically cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalows” (212) in a colony that really exists—“Kitchawank Colony is a true place” (qtd. Tombeur). This is also the case with Walter’s friend’s cabin in the woods, about which Boyle said: “It would be nice to move to Tom Crane’s cabin, which exists, by the way, and which is in need of a tenant right now, and live a simpler life” (qtd. Adams, “An Interview” 55). And it is equally true with regard to the sailing boat Arcadia, which Tom Crane loves as “a miracle […] dedicated to all the great hippie ideals” (425) and which is a fictional variant of the folk singer Pete Seeger’s environmental sloopClearwater . World’s End consists of two parts, “Martyr’s Reach” and “World’s End,” whose titles refer to particular sections of the Hudson River and which contain nineteen and fifteen chapters respectively. The novel’s many-stranded action unfolds the multi-generational story of three families in the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries and reveals both the changes and the continuities in long-term histori- cal developments by moving back and forth between two widely different epochs. The “present” action, which deals with Walter Van Brunt’s search for his father and the accidents befalling him on his “hopeless quest” (395), takes place from 1968 to 1969 and fills twenty-four chapters (1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34).