Last month, Don DeLillo had lunch in Greenwich Village with one of the characters from his latest novel. His companion, Bobby Thomson, is a 74-year-old, retired paper salesman, a modest and amiable widower living in New Jersey. He is also, for Americans, a talismanic figure of the 1950s, the man who struck the home run that won a crucial baseball game for the Giants against the Dodgers.
That game is the starting point for DeLillo's epic subterranean history of the Cold War, Under- world. "I wanted to send him a signed copy of the book," says DeLillo of Thomson, "and I asked my publishers to get his address if they could. At the same time, unknown to me, he had been trying to find me because people had been talking to him about the book. People from all over the country were sending him reviews that had pictures of him with them. He found me before I found him."
Thomson told DeLillo that people still talk to him all the time of that moment in 1951 when he hit his famous home run. Their memories are frozen in the same way that they were when they heard of John F. Kennedy's death. DeLillo, whose novel Libra, winner of the first Irish Times International Literature Prize, deals with that latter event, describes Thomson as the "anti-Oswald", the boyish, joyous counterpart who captured a moment of innocence before America's slide into paranoia and confusion through the Cold War. "He talks about people coming up to him all the time - guys who were soldiers in foxholes in Korea with radios, listening to Armed Forces Radio when it happened, and their amazement, their jubilation. People tell me that they were 10 years old when it happened but they remember what they were wearing. It's still a mystery to me why this event had such an impact but it has to have something to do with there being a more unified society, a society that didn't rerun everything constantly and exhaust an event before midnight on the first day, as happens all the time since technology advanced to that point." DeLillo himself was 15 at the time of the game and remembers its impact. Unlike the main character in Underworld, he was not listening to it on a portable radio on the roof of his tenement building in the Bronx. But he had a "clear image" of that building in his head: "It's the building he lives in which is across the street from the house I lived in. I didn't have a portable radio. I didn't listen to games on the roof. And I wasn't a Dodger fan; I was a Yankee fan and slightly aloof from this ball-game. I was interested because the Yankees had already won their pennant and were waiting for the winners of this game."
There's a sense indeed that what matters to DeLillo about those memories is not the physical playing of the games but the imaginative wonder of the radio commentaries. In Underworld, the man doing the commentary on the game recalls when he used to do studio re-creations of distant games, inventing the action from a few pieces of information coming in on the telegraph wires:
You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants, and it is remarkable, thinks Russ, how much earthly disturbance, how much summer and dust the mind can manage to order up from a single Latin letter lying flat.
Since this could be a metaphor for novel-writing, it is not surprising that it has lodged in his head. "I remember listening after school when broadcasters did not travel with teams as freely as they do now. So there was a programme that was presented by Marty Gluckmann and Burt Lee Jnr. called Today's Baseball. And the whole thing was done in a studio in New York. And the announcer would say `And now Marty Gluckmann and Burt Lee Jnr. with . . . [De DeLillo makes a cracking noise with his mouth so perfectly imitative of the hard high-pitched whack of bat on ball that to hear it again on tape is to catch yourself in a momentary, instinctive ducking motion] . . . Today's Baseball'."
What drew him to the famous Giants-Dodgers game as a starting point for a novel was the front page of the New York Times for October 4th, 1951, the day after the game. "There were two headlines on the front page. One pointing out that the Giants had won the pennant dramatically - it was very unusual for the Times to put a sports story on the front page. And the matching headline was that the Soviets had exploded a nuclear weapon. And when I saw this, it was a shock and a mystery and a feeling of eeriness. And I suppose what I sensed most clearly was the power of history and the desire to enter it again. In a way, I think at some level I was a little homesick for the three-odd years I'd spent writing Libra. I wasn't consciously looking for another historical subject but it hit me between the eyes. There was some mystery about these two headlines, so typographically mated, so symmetrical, like two pieces of ancient pottery that someone might try to fit together."
The glue in this case was the further discovery that J. Edgar Hoover, long-time head of the FBI and fountainhead of Cold War paranoia, was at the game that day. "When I discovered this, I thought somebody is telling me I have to write this novel because he provided the link with the Soviet explosion on the other side of the world and allowed me to introduce it into the frame of the ballgame. If Hoover hadn't been at the game, I don't know if there would have been a novel."
He is still unsure about what kind of inner connection there might be between a sensational ballgame and a key moment in the Cold War but in the course of writing the 800-page novel, he began to see them as the end of an era and the beginning of another. "I suppose by the time I finished I realised there is a relationship between these two events. The ballgame was a unifying and a largely joyous event, the kind of event in which people - kids especially - go running out of their houses to share their feelings with others. And it was an event not primarily defined by television. But with the onset of the Bomb, I think the communal spirit became associated with danger and loss rather than celebration. And the sense of catastrophic events framed and defined by TV - assassinations, terrorist acts - became stronger and stronger. To me the ballgame came to mark a kind of transitional moment between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War." Underworld became a kind of inner, private history of the Cold War itself from 1951 to the early 1990s, "a period in which paranoia replaced history in American life". There are many underworlds in the book - subway graffiti writers, buried plutonium, the use of landfill sites to dispose of rubbish, a man in a basement room with a shotgun - but through them all DeLillo wanted to maintain "a sense of an under-history taking place, people connected in the shadow of the bomb".
The novel spans the period of his own adult life, a life shaped in imperceptible but inescapable ways by the overarching power of the nuclear stand-off. It draws on two kinds of place, two sorts of impulse, that continue to haunt him. One is the working-class community - for him Italian-American and Catholic - of the Bronx, where he grew up. "My best friend's father was a cab driver. My uncle who lived upstairs was a printer. And my father had a clerical job which meant a lot to him. But he had the same education that they had - he had barely finished high school. He spoke in double negatives his whole life but had a clerical job in Metropolitan Life and went to work in a suit and tie, which was important for him. But he was just like the rest of them. They all read the Daily News and the Mirror."
DeLillo lives now in the quiet suburb of Bronxville but much of the novel is set on his old stomping ground. "I went back maybe a dozen times while I was writing the book. Probably, if I were living in Zimbabwe and simply couldn't get back, I don't think it would have made much of a difference really. There are streets which are intact, almost exactly as they were, right around the corner from where I lived. The house I grew up in is there. What's changed is that across the street they knocked down two apartment buildings and put in townhouses, so that's an enormous physical and, for me, psychological, change. Other streets, segments of streets, buildings, are all there and look exactly the same. So it's curious to go back and find that much of it is preserved. There is also, of course, two or three blocks away, a sense of wasteland and ruin."
His visits to the world of his childhood and adolescence did not encourage any sense of nostalgia, though. He was determined to remember accurately. "And what I remembered was the physical work that people were doing: collecting garbage and beading dresses, sledge hammering sidewalks and all the rest of it. So that the working-class aspect is something that I did not want to leave out. The other curious thing - and this was unintentional - I saw when I was reading galleys for the last time, was that there are very much fewer compound words, hyphenated words in that part of the book. It's a little less literary and more direct. This is something I didn't realise I was doing. So in an unintended way, the language of the book reflects my own passage out of those narrow streets and into the wider culture."
That passage took him from the familiar urban world of the Bronx to the second kind of landscape that haunts his imagination - the desert, which is, for him, "an antidote to the city. It's the bright side of the moon of New York." It sums up for him the other side of America, the wide-open apocalyptic strangeness that had its clearest expression in the weirdness of the Cold War. He encountered it when he was 22 or 23-years old, just out of college and working for an advertising agency.
"I found myself in west Texas for a very brief time and it had an effect on me. I was there to work on an ad for Sears truck tyres. And I came upon this extraordinary spectacle in the desert of a nine-mile circuit on which they tested these tyres. These guys drove around and around this circuit in the middle of the desert. And occasionally one of them would fall asleep and drive into the desert and his vehicle would turn over and he'd die. It had a certain fascination for me."
That image of amnesia, of a vast, secretive geography replacing history, haunts much of DeLillo's work and returns in Underworld. "For me, history begins to disappear when I leave the city and enter the flat landscape of a desert area. Perhaps geology appears and archaeology, but history tends to disappear. It's just the other side of the coin from urban life for me. There is something not only aesthetically pleasing about it but something ascetic about it that I suppose surfaces more readily in that geography than it does in an urban environment."
Across these contradictory landscapes of city and desert, Underworld traces the public forces that worked their way under the skin of private lives, becoming visible only when the era ended. The novel is an act of recovery, an attempt to come to terms with a set of massive events that remained curiously inarticulate. "I think the influence of the Cold War is so deep that I'm not sure how you recover it from that depth unless you write about it. Writing is just a deeper form of concentration, so it forces you to think about these things. The Cold War in America is utterly different from the Cold War in, say, Germany. Here, it's inevitably associated not just with danger but with popular culture. You think of the mutant monster movies and then you think of Cadillacs and tail-fins and Jayne Mansfield."
"This all becomes a Cold War reality rather than just a pop art. There's a curious combination of associations, so that the design of a vacuum cleaner makes you think of a Sputnik, because in fact vacuum cleaners were designed to look like space satellites. That's what happens in this culture. The consumer impulse becomes associated with whatever reality is informing our psychology, even a deadly dangerous reality.
"You lived with two levels of danger. The first was the possibility of a nuclear conflict. And the second, a little less definable, was a sense of randomness and ambiguity that flowed from the assassinations and social disruptions of the 1960s. In a way, except for specific moments of clear danger, it was hard to be serious about the possibility of nuclear destruction. But it did seep into the consciousness of individuals. Kids were ducking under their desks in those drills. There was a model nuclear shelter in Grand Central Station. There was a curious split between reality and what we couldn't quite accept as reality but could become so at any time."
As he did in Libra, where Oswald and Jack Ruby were central characters, DeLillo interweaves real people like Hoover and the persecuted comedian Lenny Bruce with fictional creations. The use of real people is, in a sense, a way of acknowledging a debt to reality itself. "I feel a certain conscientiousness in handling this kind of material. I do think that the Oswald of Libra is surely as close to the real Oswald as I could possibly make him to the best of my abilities. And I'd say the same for Lenny Bruce and Hoover here. I certainly did not intend to use them as departure points for something else." But there is also, he says, a real difficulty in the use of historical characters. "The problem that they present in the writing is: How do you create fictional characters who at some level are equal to the real characters? Obviously, the historical characters carry with them the enormous power that their acts imbue them with. There's no way a writer could create a character so powerful, a character who carries such enormous intensity out of television sets and movie screens and newspapers. So on the one hand you're borrowing significance, you're borrowing an aura from pre-existing reality, but in another sense it's quite a humbling experience. Because it's inconceivable, really, that the other characters you create are going to match what we know about the historical figures."
Many readers will dispute that judgment. Underworld will probably be one of the defining novels of the post-War period, though DeLillo himself thinks that we are only beginning to grapple with the nature of the Cold War world.
"We're just beginning to think about what happened in those years and what didn't happen. In Germany, the country was unified. In the Soviet Union, the country split apart. But in most of the West, there's no clear tangible sign that we'd been through an enormously important period. It seems to me that we're in a curious transitional phase between the end of the Cold War and whatever comes next. Who knows what that might be?"
Underworld by Don DeLillo is published by Picador (£18 in UK)