Dirk Wittenborn

10/02/2009

The murderous family secret that helped make the decade's great American novel

by Jane Graham

“There was a lingering sadness in my family growing up. They suffered an unusual tragedy, but I could never find out the full facts about it – I was stonewalled. No one would tell me the truth. If anything, I wrote this book because I yearned for an emotional honesty that wasn’t available in my own family.”

Not long before novelist Dirk Wittenborn was born, a man came to his family’s home in Connecticut, US, with a gun. After circling the property, he turned his back on the watching adults and three kids and went on to the home of a fellow doctor, whom he murdered. The man was a student involved in the experimental research of the author’s father, Dr JR Wittenborn, a pioneer in the world of psychopharmacology, or “drugs, learning and memory” as his son calls it.

Wittenborn believes the experience hung over his family for many years – it is unlikely that either of his parents, who are both dead, ever came to terms with the fear, guilt and gnawing, unresolved, bewilderment it created.

It is not surprising then that Wittenborn’s new semi-autobiographical novel Pharmakon pivots on this moment and its impact on the fictional Friedrich family. Written mostly from the point of view of the youngest son of four children (as Wittenborn is), Pharmakon is a wise, empathetic and constantly surprising family epic that follows the needy, likeable Zach as he grows up with a partial understanding of what happened at the bottom of the garden that day, both in terms of the facts and the psychological effects.

“I was human Prozac for my family,” he tells me on the phone from his home in New York. “I was profoundly aware of it. I wanted to distract them and myself from their constant depression. If you make other people laugh, you’ll laugh too.

“I never really understood their sadness until I really investigated what happened. Then I realised – you can get hold of some facts but really what defines you is what you don’t know, the unknowns in your life, the things that are only half right, your fears. Those are the things that make us truly unique, and that is what the effort of this novel is, to fill in those holes with fiction.”

Like Wittenborn, Zach is a people pleaser, desperate to say the right things and unlock his family’s unhappiness. At the centre of his ambitions is his scientist father William, a towering figure of disquiet, purpose and narcissism. The relationship, beautifully evoked and painfully true, is the beating heart of the novel. Wittenborn’s father loomed similarly large in his own childhood, and he remains ambivalent about both his dad’s achievements and the integrity of their relationship.

“My father could go on and off like a light switch,” he says. “He could be so charming and a raconteur and he could make you feel so warm and entertained and safe and then he would just turn to an analytical view of you – and suddenly you became a patient.

“He was a leading authority on medicine and learning, our house was a shrine to our father’s important work, but I don’t know how much he really learned. Then again, I know I’m like him and we were very close. There was a strange bond between us that was not always healthy but we could always amuse each other, even when he was very disapproving of what I was doing.”

Wittenborn is clear that, as long as his career was going well, his father derived “some pleasure” from his son, although his father’s ego – he was not above claiming his son’s work as his own – would have been troubled at the notion that he might be eclipsed by his offspring.

On the face of it, there was much for Wittenborn’s parents to show off about – by the early 1980s their son was writing for Saturday Night Live, had produced a novel, Zoe, and was a well-recognised face about New York, spending his time at exclusive haunts with beautiful and damned buddies like John Belushi and Janice Dickinson.

The decadent worlds Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney wrote about in that decade were populated by Dirk Wittenborns (he may indeed have inspired them – he knows both writers). He is not repentant about his “bad boy years”, but neither does he miss them.

“Those days, there was something wonderful about them, it was an adventure,” he says. “I stumbled into showbusiness and it was very hard to say no to the money and the life, and I wanted it too. I thought, fuelled by cocaine, work harder, eat less, I could have it all.

“I didn’t want to miss anything. I don’t regret it, I’m glad I survived it and I recognise that it lost its charm – the last two years were like a porno movie.”  

However, Wittenborn thinks there was something deeper at the heart of his escape, and, as in all good morality tales, he paid for his
adventure in the end. I spent my life trying to please but I never succeeded in pleasing my father. There came a point where I realised nothing would please him and that led to some self-destructive behaviour.”

Heavy drug use and illness saw Wittenborn almost lose his career in the mid-‘80s. He believes he “lucked out” when he survived a 14-hour operation during which his heart was removed from his body (a virus had been slowly calcifying the organ for months). His career back on track, a therapist helped him beat his writer’s block and get his second novel, Fierce People, completed.

Considering his own experience of drugs, as well as his father’s working relationship with them, it is not surprising Wittenborn remains fascinated and repelled by their various guises. In Pharmakon, he considers America’s love affair with anti-depressants and other forms of “happy pills”. William’s research centres around his obsessive desire to “prescribe happiness”, a compulsion Wittenborn feels is still growing in America.

“If I look at my life – and I’ve had quite a charmed life – discontent is what I feel most in the day,” he says. “I have to fill a blank page; I have a longing for another state. Happiness is an exception, joy is a rarity. In America, happiness is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights – ‘the pursuit of happiness’ – I’m not sure that’s so helpful.
“I sometimes began to wonder as I was writing this book, ‘Does this discontent breed ambition, is it why we invented the wheel’? Maybe it has an evolutionary purpose. If you just take a pill to make you feel okay about failure – yes, it has its value if people are on the brink of suicide, but a lot of people take drugs today just to avoid thinking about what they should be thinking about.”

A sobering thought as the economic downturn demands all of us reassess our lifestyles. Indeed, the change that has hit America will inform Wittenborn’s next work. “I’m writing now in view of what’s surfaced in American in the last six months,” says the author. “America had this belief in endless growth, things were always going to get better. Now they have to come to grips with downward mobility. Part of me thinks this is great. The greed, the ostentation, insatiable materialism so apparent – I’m glad that’s ended.”

Pharmakon (Bloomsbury) is out now