The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 32

Who is it that accuses me of having wounded you? Eddie Walish, that's who. He has become the main planner of college humanities surveys in the State of Missouri, I am given to understand. At such work he is wonderful, a man of genius. But although he now lives in Missouri, he seems to think of nothing but Ma.s.sachusetts in the old days. He can't forget the evil I did. He was there when I did it (whatever it_ really was), and he writes, "I have to remind you of how you hurt Carla Rose. So characteristic of you, when she was trying to be agreeable, not just to miss her gentle intentions but to give her a shattering kick in the face. I happen to know that you traumatized her for life." (Notice how the liberal American vocabulary is used as a torture device: By "characteristic" he means: "You are not a good person,_ Shawmut.") Now, were you really traumatized, Miss Rose? How does Walish "happen to know"? Did you tell him? Or is it, as I conjecture, nothing but gossip? I wonder if you remember the occasion at all. It would be a mercy if you didn't. And I don't want to thrust unwanted recollections on you, but if I did indeed disfigure you so cruelly, is there any way to avoid remembering?

So let's go back again to Ribier College. Walish and I were great friends then, young instructors, he in literature, I in fine arts-my specialty music history. As if this were news to you; my book on Pergolesi is in all libraries. Impossible that you shouldn't have come across it. Besides, I've done those musicology programs on public television, which were quite popular.

But we are back in the forties. The term began just after Labor Day. My first teaching position. After seven or eight weeks I was still wildly excited. Let me start with the beautiful New England setting. Fresh from Chicago and from Bloomington, Indiana, where I took my degree, I had never seen birches, roadside ferns, deep pinewoods, little white steeples. What could I be but out or place? It made me scream with laughter to be called "Dr. Shawmut." I felt absurd here, a camel on the village green. I am a high-waisted and long-legged man, who is susceptible to paradoxical, ludicrous images of himself. I hadn't yet gotten the real picture of Ribier, either. It wasn't true New England, it was a bohemian college for rich kids from New York who were too nervous for the better schools, unadjusted.

Now then: Eddie Walish and I walking together past the college library. Sweet autumnal warmth against a background of chill from the surrounding woods-it's all there for me. The library is a Greek Revival building and the light in the porch is mossy and sunny-bright-green moss, leafy sunlight, lichen on the columns. I am turned on, manic, flying. My relations with Walish at this stage are easy to describe: very cheerful, not a kink in sight, not a touch of darkness. I am keen to learn from him, because I have never seen a progressive college, never lived in the East, never come in contact with the Eastern Establishment, of which I have heard so much. What is it all about? A girl to whom I was a.s.signed as adviser has asked for another one because I haven't been psychoa.n.a.lyzed and can't even begin to relate to her. And this very morning I have spent two hours in a committee meeting to determine whether a course in history should be obligatory for fine-arts majors. Tony Lemnitzer, professor of painting, said, "Let the kids read about the kings and the queens-what can it hoit them?" Brooklyn Tony, who had run away from home to be a circus roustabout, became a poster artist and eventually an Abstract Expressionist. "Don't ever feel sorry for Tony," Walish advises me. "The woman he married is a millionairess. She's built him a studio fit for Michelangelo. He's embarra.s.sed to paint, he only whittles there. He carved out two wooden b.a.l.l.s inside a birdcage. " Walish himself, Early Hip with a Harvard background, suspected at first that my ignorance was a put-on. A limping short man, Walish looked at me-looked upward-with real shrewdness and traces of disbelief about the mouth. From Chicago, a Ph. D. out of Bloomington, Indiana, can I be as backward as I seem? But I am good company, and by and by he tells me (is it a secret?) that although he comes from Gloucester, Ma.s.s., he's not a real Yankee. His father, a second-generation American, is a machinist, retired, uneducated. One of the old man's letters reads, "Your poor mother-the doctor says she has a groweth on her Virginia which he will have to operate. When she goes to surgery I expect you and your sister to be here to stand by me."

There were two limping men in the community, and their names were similar. The other limper, Edmund Welch, justice of the peace, walked with a cane. Our Ed, who suffered from curvature of the spine, would not carry a stick, much less wear a built-up shoe. He behaved with sporting nonchalance and defied the orthopedists when they warned that his spinal column would collapse like a stack of dominoes. His style was to be free and limber. You had to take him as he came, no concessions offered. I admired him for that.

Now, Miss Rose, you have come out of the library for a breath of air and are leaning, arms crossed, and resting your head against a Greek column. To give himself more height, Walish wears his hair thick. You couldn't cram a hat over it. But I have on a baseball cap. Then, Miss Rose, you say, smiling at me, "Oh, Dr. Shawmut, in that cap you look like an archaeologist." Before I can stop myself, I answer, "And you look like something I just dug up."

Awful!

The pair of us, Walish and I, hurried on. Eddie, whose hips were out of line, made an effort to walk more quickly, and when we were beyond your little library temple I saw that he was grinning at me, his warm face looking up into my face with joy, with accusing admiration. He had witnessed something extraordinary. What this something might be, whether it came under the heading of fun or psychopathology or wickedness, n.o.body could yet judge, but he was glad. Although he lost no time in clearing himself of guilt, it was exactly his kind of wisecrack. He loved to do the Groucho Marx bit, or give an S. J. Perel-man turn to his sentences. As for me, I had become dead sober, as I generally do after making one of my cracks. I am as astonished by them as anybody else. They may be hysterical symptoms, in the clinical sense. I used to consider myself absolutely normal, but I became aware long ago that in certain moods my laughing bordered on hysteria. I myself could hear the abnormal note. Walish knew very well that I was subject to such seizures, and when he sensed that one of my fits was approaching, he egged me on. And after he had had his fun he would say, with a grin like Pan Satyrus, "What a b.a.s.t.a.r.d you are, Shawmut. The s.a.d.i.s.tic stabs you can give!" He took care, you see, not to be incriminated as an accessory.

And my joke wasn't even witty, just vile, no excuse for it, certainly not "inspiration." Why should inspiration be so idiotic? It was simply idiotic and wicked. Walish used to tell me, "You're a Surrealist in spite of yourself." His interpretation was that I had raised myself by painful efforts from immigrant origins to a middle-cla.s.s level but that I avenged myself for the torments and falsifications of my healthy instincts, deformities imposed on me by this adaptation to respectability, the strain of social climbing. Clever, intricate a.n.a.lysis of this sort was popular in Greenwich Village at that time, and Walish had picked up the habit. His letter of last month was filled with insights of this kind. People seldom give up the mental capital acc.u.mulated in their "best" years. At sixty-odd, Eddie is still a youthful Villager and a.s.sociates with young people, mainly. I have accepted old age.

It isn't easy to write with arthritic fingers. My lawyer, whose fatal advice I followed (he is the youngest brother of my wife, who pa.s.sed away last year), urged me to go to British Columbia, where, because of the j.a.panese current, flowers grow in midwinter, and the air is purer. There are indeed primroses out in the snow, but my hands are crippled and I am afraid that I may have to take gold injections if they don't improve. Nevertheless, I build up the fire and sit concentrating in the rocker because I need to make it worth your while to consider these facts with me. If I am to believe Walish, you have trembled from that day onward like a flame on a middle-cla.s.s altar of undeserved humiliation. One of the insulted and injured.

From my side I have to admit that it was hard for me to acquire decent manners, not because I was naturally rude but because I felt the strain of my position. I came to believe for a time that I couldn't get on in life until I, too, had a false self like everybody else and so I made special efforts to be considerate, deferential, civil. And of course I overdid things and wiped myself twice where people of better breeding only wiped once. But no such program of betterment could hold me for long. I set it up, and then I tore it down, and burned it in a raging bonfire.

Walish, I must tell you, gives me the business in his letter. Why was it, he asks, that when people groped in conversations I supplied the missing phrases and finished their sentences with greedy pedantry? Walish alleges that I was showing off, shuffling out of my vulgar origins, making up to the genteel and qualifying as the kind of Jew acceptable ( just barely) to the Christian society of T. S. Eliot's dreams. Walish pictures me as an upwardly mobile pariah seeking bondage as one would seek salvation. In reaction, he says, I had rebellious fits and became wildly insulting. Walish notes all this well, but he did not come out with it during the years when we were close. He saved it all up. At Ribier College we liked each other. We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing. My success in musicology may have been too much for him.

Eddie told his wife-he told everyone-what I had said to you. It certainly got around the campus. People laughed, but I was depressed. Remorse: you were a pale woman with thin arms, absorbing the colors of moss, lichen, and limestone into your skin. The heavy library doors were open, and within there were green reading lamps and polished heavy tables, and books ma.s.sed up to the gallery and above. A few of these books were exalted, some were usefully informative, the majority of them would only congest the mind. My Swedenborgian old lady says that angels do not read books. Why should they? Nor, I imagine, can librarians be great readers. They have too many books, most of them burdensome. The crowded shelves give off an inviting, consoling, seductive odor that is also tinctured faintly with something pernicious, with poison and doom. Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. And you, an underpriestess of this temple stepping out to look at the sky, and Mr. Lbeck, your chief, a gentle refugee always stumbling over his big senile dog and apologizing to the animal, "Ach, excuse me!" (heavy on the sibilant).

Personal note: Miss Rose never was pretty, not even what the French call_ une belle laide, or ugly beauty, a woman whose command of s.e.xual forces makes ugliness itself contribute to her erotic power. A_ belle laide (it_ would be a French ideal) has to be a rolling-mill of l.u.s.ts. Such force was lacking. No organic basis for it. Fifty years earlier Miss Rose would have been taking Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. Nevertheless, even if she looked green, a man might have loved her_-_loved her for her timid warmth, or for the courage she had had to muster to compliment me on my cap. Thirty-five years ago I might have bluffed out this embarra.s.sment with compliments, saying, "Only think, Miss Rose, how many objects of rare beauty have been dug up by archaeologists__-_the Venus de Milo, a.s.syrian winged bulls with the faces of great kings. And Michelangelo even buried one of his statues to get the antique look and then exhumed it. "But it's too late for rhetorical gallantries. Vd be ashamed. Un-pretty, unmarried, the nasty little community laughing at my crack, Miss Rose, poor thing, must have been in despair.__ Eddie Walish, as I told you, would not act the cripple despite his spiral back. Even though he slouched and walked with an outslapping left foot, he carried himself with style. He wore good English tweeds and Lloyd & Haig brogans. He himself would say that there were enough m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic women around to encourage any fellow to preen and cut a figure. Handicapped men did very well with girls of a certain type. You, Miss Rose, would have done better to save your compliment for him. But his wife was then expecting; I was the bachelor.

Almost daily during the first sunny days of the term we went out walking. I found him mysterious then.

I would think: Who is he, anyway, this (suddenly) close friend of mine? What is this strange figure, the big head low beside me, whose hair grows high and thick? With a different slant, like whipcord stripes, it grows thickly also from his ears. One of the campus ladies has suggested that I urge him to shave his ears, but why should I? She wouldn't like him better with shaven ears, she only dreams that she might. He has a sort of woodwind laugh, closer to oboe than to clarinet, and he releases his laugh from the wide end of his nose as well as from his carved pumpkin mouth. He grins like Alfred E. Neuman from the cover of Mad_ magazine, the successor to Peck's Bad Boy. His eyes, however, are warm and induce me to move closer and closer, but they withhold what I want most. I long for his affection, I distrust him and love him, I woo him with wisecracks. For he is a wise guy in an up-to-date postmodern existentialist sly manner. He also seems kindly. He seems all sorts of things. Fond of Brecht and Weill, he sings "Mackie Messer" and trounces out the tune on the upright piano. This, however, is merely period stuff-German cabaret jazz of the twenties, Berlin's answer to trench warfare and exploded humanism. Catch Eddie allowing himself to be dated like that! Up-to-the-minute Eddie has always been in the avant-garde. An early fan of the Beat poets, he was the first to quote me Allen Ginsberg's wonderful line 'America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

Eddie made me an appreciative reader of Ginsberg, from whom I learned much about wit. You may find it odd, Miss Rose (I myself do), that I should have kept up with Ginsberg from way back. Allow me, however, to offer a specimen statement from one of his recent books, which is memorable and also charming. Ginsberg writes that Walt Whitman slept with Edward Carpenter, the author of Love's Coming-of-Age;_ Carpenter afterward became the lover of the grandson of one of our obscurer presidents, Chester A. Arthur; Gavin Arthur when he was very old was the lover of a San Francisco h.o.m.os.e.xual who, when he embraced Ginsberg, completed the entire cycle and brought the Sage of Camden in touch with his only true successor and heir. It's all a little like Dr. Pangloss's account of how he came to be infected with syphilis.

Please forgive this, Miss Rose. It seems to me that we will need the broadest possible human background for this inquiry, which may so much affect your emotions and mine. You ought to know to whom you were speaking on that day when you got up your nerve, smiling and trembling, to pay me a compliment-to give me, us, your blessing. Which I repaid with a bad witticism drawn, characteristically, from the depths of my nature, that h.o.a.rd of strange formulations. I had almost forgotten the event when Walish's letter reached me in Canada. That letter-a strange megillah_ of which I myself was the Haman. He must have brooded with ressentiment_ for decades on my character, drawing the profile of my inmost soul over and over and over. He compiled a list of all my faults, my sins, and the particulars are so fine, the inventory so extensive, the summary so condensed, that he must have been collecting, filing, formulating, and polis.h.i.+ng furiously throughout the warmest, goldenest days of our friends.h.i.+p. To receive such a doc.u.ment-I ask you to imagine, Miss Rose, how it affected me at a time when I was coping with grief and gross wrongs, mourning my wife (and funnily enough, also my swindling brother), and experiencing Edad con Sus Disgracias,_ discovering that I could no longer straighten my middle finger, reckoning up the labor and sorrow of threescore and ten (rapidly approaching). At our age, my dear, n.o.body can be indignant or surprised when evil is manifested, but I ask myself again and again, why should Eddie Walish work up my faults for thirty-some years to cast them into my teeth? This is what excites my keenest interest, so keen it makes me scream inwardly. The whole comedy of it comes over me in the night with the intensity of labor pains. I lie in the back bedroom of this little box of a Canadian house, which is scarcely insulated, and bear down hard so as not to holler. All the neighbors need is to hear such noises at three in the morning. And there isn't a soul in British Columbia I can discuss this with. My only acquaintance is Mrs. Gracewell, the old woman (she is very old) who studies occult literature, and I can't bother her with so different a branch of experience. Our conversations are entirely theoretical.... One helpful remark she did make, and this was: "The lower self is what the Psalmist referred to when he wrote, 'I am a worm and no man.' The higher self, few people are equipped to observe. This is the reason they speak so unkindly of one another."

More than once Walish's doc.u.ment (denunciation) took off from Ginsberg's poetry and prose, and so I finally sent an order to City Lights in San Francisco and have spent many evenings studying books of his I had missed-he publishes so many tiny ones. Ginsberg takes a stand for true tenderness and full candor. Real candor means excremental and genital literalness. What Ginsberg opts for is the warmth of a freely copulating, manly, womanly, comradely, "open road" humanity which doesn't neglect to pray and to meditate. He speaks with horror of our "plastic culture," which he connects somewhat obsessively with the CIA. And in addition to the CIA there are other spydoms, linked with Exxon, Mobil, Standard Oil of California, sinister Occidental Petroleum with its Kremlin connections (that is_ a weird one to contemplate, undeniably). Supercapitalism and its carcinogenic petrochemical technology are linked through James Jesus Angleton, a high official of the Intelligence Community, to T. S. Eliot, one of his pals. Angleton, in his youth the editor of a literary magazine, had the declared aim of revitalizing the culture of the West against the "so-to-speak Stalinists." The ghost of T. S. Eliot, interviewed by Ginsberg on the fantail of a s.h.i.+p somewhere in death's waters, admits to having done little spy jobs for Angleton. Against these, the Children of Darkness, Ginsberg ranges the gurus, the bearded meditators, the poets loyal to Blake and Whitman, the "holy creeps," the lyrical, unsophisticated h.o.m.os.e.xuals whose little groups the secret police track on their computers, amongst whom they plant provocateurs, and whom they try to corrupt with heroin. This psychopathic vision, so touching because there is, realistically, so much to be afraid of, and also because of the hunger for goodness reflected in it, a screwball defense of beauty, I value more than my accuser, Wal-ish, does. I truly understand. To Ginsberg's s.e.xual Fourth of July fireworks I say, Tee-hee. But then I muse sympathetically over his obsessions, combing my mustache downward with my fingernails, my eyes feeling keen as I try to figure him. I am a more disinterested Ginsberg admirer than Eddie is. Eddie, so to speak, comes to the table with a croupier's rake. He works for the house. He skims from poetry.

One of Walish's long-standing problems was that he looked distinctly Jewy. Certain people were distrustful and took against him with gratuitous hostility, suspecting that he was trying to pa.s.s for a full American. They'd sometimes say, as if discovering how much force it gave them to be brazen (force is always welcome), "What was your name before it was Walish?"-a question of the type that Jews often hear. His parents were descended from north of Ireland Protestants, actually, and his mother's family name was Ballard. He signs himself Edward Ballard Walish. He pretended not to mind this. A taste of persecution made him friendly to Jews, or so he said. Uncritically delighted with his friends.h.i.+p, I chose to believe him.

It turns out that after many years of concealed teetering, Walish concluded that I was a fool. It was when the public began to take me seriously that he lost patience with me and his affection turned to rancor. My TV programs on music history were what did it. I can envision this-Walish watching the screen in a soiled woolen dressing gown, cupping one elbow in his hand and sucking a cigarette, a.s.sailing me while I go on about Haydn's last days, or Mozart and Salieri, developing themes on the harpsichord: "Superstar! What a horses.h.i.+t idiot!"

"Christ! How phony can you get!"

"Huckleberry Fink!"

My own name, Shawmut, had obviously been tampered with. The tampering was done long years before my father landed in America by his brother Pinye, the one who wore a pince-nez and was a music copyist for Sholom Secunda. The family must have been called Shamus or, even more degrading, Untershamus. The untershamus,_ lowest of the low in the Old World synagogue, was a quasi-unemployable incompetent and hanger-on, tangle-bearded and cursed with comic ailments like a large hernia or scrofula, a pauper's pauper. "Orm, "_ as my father would say, _"aufsteifeivent. " Steiffleivent__ was the stiff linen-and-horsehair fabric that tailors would put into the lining of a jacket to give it shape. There was nothing cheaper. "He was so poor that he dressed in dummy cloth." Cheaper than a shroud. But in America Shawmut turns out to be the name of a chain of banks in Ma.s.sachusetts. How do you like them_ apples! You may have heard charming, appealing, sentimental things about Yiddish, but Yiddish is a hard_ language, Miss Rose. Yiddish is severe and bears down without mercy. Yes, it is often delicate, lovely, but it can be explosive as well. "A face like a slop jar,"

"a face like a bucket of swill." (Pig connotations give special force to Yiddish epithets.) If there is a demiurge who inspires me to speak wildly, he may have been attracted to me by this violent unsparing language.

As I tell you this, I believe that you are willingly following, and I feel the greatest affection for you. I am very much alone in Vancouver, but that is my own fault, too. When I arrived, I was invited to a party by local musicians, and I failed to please. They gave me their Canadian test for U. S. visitors: Was I a Reaganite? I couldn't be that, but the key question was whether El Salvador might not be another Vietnam, and I lost half of the company at once by my reply: "Nothing of the kind. The North Vietnamese are seasoned soldiers with a military tradition of many centuries-really_ tough people. Salvadorans are Indian peasants." Why couldn't I have kept my mouth shut? What do I care about Vietnam? Two or three sympathetic guests remained, and these I drove away as follows: A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded b.a.l.l.s. Twaddle! I thought. I said, "Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?"

That did it, and now I take my daily walks alone.

It is very beautiful here, with snow mountains and still harbors. Port facilities are said to be limited and freighters have to wait (at a daily fee of $10,000). To see them at anchor is pleasant. They suggest the "Invitation au Voyage," and also "Anywhere, anywhere, Out of the world!" But what a clean and civilized city this is, with its clear northern waters and, beyond, the sense of an unlimited wilderness beginning where the forests bristle, spreading northward for millions of square miles and ending at ice whorls around the Pole.

Provincial academics took offense at my quirks. Too bad.

But lest it appear that I am always dis.h.i.+ng it out, let me tell you, Miss Rose, that I have often been on the receiving end, put down by virtuosi, by artists greater than myself, in this line. The late Kippenberg, prince of musicologists, when we were at a conference in the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, invited me to his rooms one night to give him a preview of my paper. Well, he didn't actually invite me. I was eager. The suggestion was mine and he didn't have the heart to refuse. He was a huge man dressed in velvet dinner clothes, a copious costume, kelly green in color, upon which his large, pale, clever head seemed to have been deposited by a boom. Although he walked with two sticks, a sort or diable boiteux,_ there was no one faster with a word. He had published the_ great work on Rossini, and Rossini himself had made immortal wisecracks (like the one about Wagner: "Ila de beaux moments mais de mauvais quarts d'heure")._ You have to imagine also the suite that Kippenberg occupied at the villa, eighteenth-century rooms, taffeta sofas, brocades, cool statuary, hot silk lamps. The servants had already shuttered the windows for the night, so the parlor was very close. Anyway, I was reading to the worldly-wise and learned Kippenberg, all swelled out in green, his long mouth agreeably composed. Funny eyes the man had, too, set at the sides of his head as if for bilateral vision, and eyebrows like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge. As I was reading he began to nod. I said, I m afraid I'm putting you to sleep, Professor."

"No, no-on the contrary, you re keeping me awake," he said. That, and at my expense, was genius, and it was a privilege to have provoked it. He had been sitting, ma.s.sive, with his two sticks, as if he were on a slope, skiing into profound sleep. But even at the brink, when it was being extinguished, the unique treasure of his consciousness could still dazzle. I would have gone around the world for such a put-down.

Let me, however, return to Walish for a moment. The Walishes lived in a small country house belonging to the college. It was down in the woods, which at that season were dusty. You may remember, in Florida, what New England woods are in a dry autumn-pollen, woodsmoke, decayed and mealy leaves, spiderwebs, perhaps the wing powder of dead moths. Arriving at the Walishes' stone gateposts, if we found bottles left by the milkman we'd grab them by the neck and, yelling, hurl them into the bushes. The milk was ordered for Peg Walish, who was pregnant but hated the stuff and wouldn't drink it anyway. Peg was socially above her husband. Anybody, in those days, could be; Walish had below him only Negroes and Jews, and owing to his Jewy look, was not secure even in this advantage. Bohemianism therefore gave him strength. Mrs. Walish enjoyed her husband's bohemian style, or said she did. My Pergolesi and Haydn made me less objectionable to her than I might otherwise have been. Besides, I was lively company for her husband. Believe me, he needed lively company. He was depressed; his wife was worried. When she looked at me I saw the remedy-light in her eyes.

Like Alice after she had emptied the DRINK ME bottle in Wonderland, Peg was very tall; bony but delicate, she resembled a silent-movie star named Colleen Moore, a round-eyed ingenue with bangs. In her fourth month of pregnancy, Peg was still working at Filene's, and Eddie, unwilling to get up in the morning to drive her to the station, spent long days in bed under the faded patchwork quilts. Pink, when it isn't fresh and lively, can be a desperate color. The pink of Walish's quilts sank my heart when I came looking for him. The cottage was paneled in walnut-stained boards, the rooms were sunless, the kitchen especially gloomy. I found him upstairs sleeping, his jaw undershot and his Jewish lip prominent. The impression he made was both brutal and innocent. In sleep he was bereft of the confidence into which he put so much effort. Not many of us are fully wakeful, but Walish took particular pride in being alert. That he was n.o.body's fool was his main premise. But in sleep he didn't look clever.

I got him up. He was embarra.s.sed. He was not the complete bohemian after all. His muzziness late in the day distressed him, and he grumbled, putting his thin legs out of bed. We went to the kitchen and began to drink.

Peg insisted that he see a psychiatrist in Providence. He kept this from me awhile, finally admitting that he needed a tune-up, minor internal adjustments. Becoming a father rattled him. His wife eventually gave birth to male twins. The facts are trivial and I don't feel that I'm betraying a trust. Besides, I owe him nothing. His letter upset me badly. What a time he chose to send it! Thirty-five years without a cross word. He allows me to count on his affection. Then he lets me have it. When do you shaft a pal, when do you hand him the poison cup? Not while he's still young enough to recover. Walish waited till the very end-my_ end, of course. He_ is still youthful, he writes me. Evidence of this is that he takes a true interest in young lesbians out in Missouri, he alone knows their inmost hearts and they allow him to make love to them-Walish, the sole male exception. Like the explorer McGovern, who went to Lhasa in disguise, the only Westerner to penetrate the sacred precincts. They trust only youth, they trust him, so it's certain that he can't be old.

This doc.u.ment of his pulls me to pieces entirely. And I agree, objectively, that my character is not an outstanding success. I am inattentive, spiritually lazy, I tune out. I have tried to make this indolence of mine look good, he says. For example, I never would check a waiter's arithmetic; I refused to make out my own tax returns; I was too "unworldly" to manage my own investments, and hired experts (read "crooks"). Realistic Walish wasn't too good to fight over nickels; it was the principle that counted, as honor did with Shakespeare's great soldiers. When credit cards began to be used, Walish, after computing interest and service charges to the fourth decimal, cut up Peg's cards and threw them down the chute. Every year he fought it out with tax examiners, both federal and state. n.o.body was going to get the better of Eddie Walish. By such hardness he connected himself with the skinflint rich-the founding Rockefeller, who wouldn't tip more than a dime, or Getty the billionaire, in whose mansion weekend guests were forced to use coin telephones. Walish wasn't being petty, he was being hard, strict, tighter than a frog's a.s.s. It wasn't simply basic capitalism. Insofar as Walish was a Brecht fan, it was also Leninist or Stalinist hardness. And if I was, or appeared to be, misty about money, it was conceivably "a semi-unconscious strategy," he said. Did he mean that I was trying to stand out as a Jew who disdained the dirty dollar? Wanting to be taken for one of my betters? In other words, a.s.similationism? Only I never admitted that anti-Semites of any degree were my betters.

I wasn't trying to be absentmindedly angelic about my finances. In fact, Miss Rose, I was really not with it. My ineptness with money was part of the same hysterical syndrome that caused me to put my foot in my mouth. I suffered from it genuinely, and continue to suffer. The Walish of today has forgotten that when he went to a psychiatrist to be cured of sleeping eighteen hours at a stretch, I told him how well I understood his problem. To console him, I said, "On a good day I can be acute for about half an hour, then I start to lade out and anybody can get the better of me." I was speaking of the dream condition or state of vague turbulence in which, with isolated moments of clarity, most o us exist. And it never occurred to me to adopt a strategy. I told you before that at one time it seemed a practical necessity to have a false self, but that I soon gave up on it. Walish, however, a.s.sumes that every clever modern man is his own avant-garde invention. To be avant-garde means to tamper with yourself, to have a personal project requiring a histrionic routine-in short, to put on an act. But what sort of act was it to trust a close relative who turned out to be a felon, or to let my late wife persuade me to hand over my legal problems to her youngest brother? It was the brother-in-law who did me in. Where others were simply unprincipled and crooked, he was in addition bananas. Patience, I am getting around to that.

Walish writes, "I thought it was time you knew what you were really like," and gives me a going-over such as few men ever face. I abused and badmouthed everybody, I couldn't bear that people should express themselves (this particularly irritated him; he mentions it several times) but put words into their mouths, finished their sentences for them, making them forget what they were about to say (supplied the plat.i.tudes they were groping for). I was, he says, "a mobile warehouse of middle-cla.s.s spare parts," meaning that I was stocked with the irrelevant and actually insane information that makes the hateful social machine tick on toward the bottomless pit. And so forth. As for my supernal devotion to music, that was merely a cover. The real Shawmut was a canny promoter whose Introduction to Music Appreciation_ was adopted by a hundred colleges ("which doesn't happen of itself") and netted him a million in royalties. He compares me to Kissinger, a Jew who made himself strong in the Establishment, having no political base or const.i.tuency but succeeding through promotional genius, operating as a celebrity... . Impossible for Walish to understand the strength of character, even the const.i.tutional, biological force such an achievement would require; to appreciate (his fur-covered ear sunk in his pillow, and his small figure thrice-bent, like a small fire escape, under the wads of pink quilt) what it takes for an educated man to establish a position of strength among semiliterate politicians. No, the comparison is far-fetched. Doing eighteenth-century music on PBS is not very much like taking charge of U. S. foreign policy and coping with drunkards and liars in the Congress or the executive branch.

An honest Jew? That would be Ginsberg the Confessor. Concealing no fact, Ginsberg appeals to Jew-haters by exaggerating everything that they ascribe to Jews in their pathological fantasies. He puts them on, I think, with crazy simplemindedness, with his actual dreams of finding someone's a.n.u.s in his sandwich or with his poems about sticking a d.i.l.d.o into himself. This bottom-line materialistic eroticism is most attractive to Americans, proof of sincerity and authenticity. It's on this level that they tell you they are "leveling" with you, although the deformities and obscenities that come out must of course be a.s.signed to somebody else, some "morphodite" f.a.ggot or exotic junkie queer. When they tell you they're "leveling," put your money in your shoe at once, that's my advice.

I see something else in Ginsberg, however. True, he's playing a traditional Jewish role with this comic self-degradation, just as it was played in ancient Rome, and probably earlier. But there's something else, equally traditional. Under all this all-revealing candor (or aggravated self-battery) is purity of heart. As an American Jew he must also affirm and justify democracy. The United States is destined to become one of the great achievements of humanity, a nation made up of many nations (not excluding the queer nation: how can anybody be left out?). The U. S. A. itself is to be the greatest of poems, as Whitman prophesied. And the only authentic living representative of American Transcendentalism is that fat-breasted, bald, bearded h.o.m.os.e.xual in smeared goggles, innocent in his uncleanness. Purity from foulness, Miss Rose. The man is a Jewish microcosm of this Midas earth whose buried corpses bring forth golden fruits. This is not a Jew who goes to Israel to do battle with Leviticus to justify h.o.m.os.e.xuality. He is a faithful f.a.ggot Buddhist in America, the land of his birth. The petrochemical capitalist enemy (an enemy that needs s.e.xual and religious redemption) is right here at home. Who could help loving such a comedian! Besides, Ginsberg and I were born under the same birth sign, and both of us had crazy mothers and are given to inspired utterances. I, however, refuse to overvalue the erotic life. I do not believe that the path of truth must pa.s.s through all the zones of masturbation and b.u.g.g.e.ry. He is consistent; to his credit, he goes all the way, which cant be said of me. Of the two of us, he is the more American. He_ is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters-I've never even been proposed as a candidate-and although he has suggested that some of our recent presidents were acidheads, he has never been asked to return his national prizes and medals. The more he libels them (did LBJ use LSD?), the more medals he is likely to get. Therefore I have to admit that he is closer to the American mainstream than I am. I don't even look like an American. (Nor does Ginsberg, for that matter.) Hammond, Indiana, was my birthplace ( just before Prohibition my old man had a saloon there), but I might have come straight from Kiev. I certainly haven't got the build of a Hoosier-I am tall but I slouch, my b.u.t.tocks are set higher than other people's, I have always had the impression that my legs are disproportionately long: it would take an engineer to work out the dynamics. Apart from Negroes and hillbillies, Hammond is mostly foreign, there are lots of Ukrainians and Finns there. These, however, look completely American, whereas I recognize features like my own in Russian church art-the compact faces, small round eyes, arched brows, and bald heads of the icons. And in highly structured situations in which champion American executive traits like prudence and discretion are required, I always lose control and I am, as Arabs say, a hostage to my tongue.

The preceding has been fun-by which I mean that I've avoided rigorous examination, Miss Rose. We need to get closer to the subject. I have to apologize to you, but there is also a mystery here (perhaps of karma, as old Mrs. Gracewell suggests) that cries out for investigation. Why does anybody say_ such things as I said to you? Well, it's as if a man were to go out on a beautiful day, a day so beautiful that it pressed him incomprehensibly to do_ something, to perform a commensurate action-or else he will feel like an invalid in a wheelchair by the seash.o.r.e, a valetudinarian whose nurse says, "Sit here and watch the ripples."

My late wife was a gentle, slender woman, quite small, built on a narrow medieval principle. She had a way of bringing together her palms under her chin when I upset her, as if she were praying for me, and her pink color would deepen to red. She suffered extremely from my fits and a.s.sumed the duty of making amends for me, protecting my reputation and persuading people that I meant no harm. She was a brunette and her complexion was fresh. Whether she owed her color to health or excitability was an open question. Her eyes were slightly extruded, but there was no deformity in this; it was one of her beauties as far as I was concerned. She was Austrian by birth (Graz, not Vienna), a refugee. I never was attracted to women of my own build-two tall persons made an incomprehensible jumble together. Also I preferred to have to search for what I wanted. As a schoolboy, I took no s.e.xual interest in teachers. I fell in love with the smallest girl in the cla.s.s, and I followed my earliest taste in marrying a slender van der Weyden or Lucas Cranach woman. The rose color was not confined to her face. There was something not exactly contemporary about her complexion, and her conception of gracefulness also went back to a former age. She had a dipping way about her: her figure dipped when she walked, her hands dipped from the wrist while she was cooking, she was a dippy eater, she dipped her head attentively when you had anything serious to tell her and opened her mouth a little to appeal to you to make better sense. In matters of principle, however irrational, she was immovably obstinate. Death has taken Gerda out of circulation, and she has been wrapped up and put away for good. No more straight, flushed body and pink b.r.e.a.s.t.s, nor blue extruded eyes.

What I said to you in pa.s.sing the library would have appalled her. She took it to heart that I should upset people. Let me cite an example. This occurred years later, at another university (a real one), one evening when Gerda put on a dinner for a large group of academics-all three leaves were in our cherrywood Scandinavian table. I didn't even know who the guests were. After the main course, a certain Professor Schulteiss was mentioned. Schulteiss was one of those bragging polymath types who gave everybody a pain in the a.s.s. Whether it was Chinese cookery or particle physics or the connections of Bantu with Swahili (if any) or why Lord Nelson was so fond of William Beckford or the future of computer science, you couldn't interrupt him long enough to complain that he didn't let you get a word in edgewise. He was a big, bearded man with an a.s.sault-defying belly and fingers that turned back at the tips, so that if I had been a cartoonist I would have sketched him yodeling, with black whiskers and retrouss fingertips.

One of the guests said to me that Schulteiss was terribly worried that no one would be learned enough to write a proper obituary when he died. "I don't know if I'm qualified," I said, "but I'd be happy to do the job, if that would be of any comfort to him." Mrs. Schulteiss, hidden from me by Gerdas table flowers, was being helped just then to dessert. Whether she had actually heard me didn't matter, for five or six guests immediately repeated what I had said, and I saw her move aside the flowers to look at me.

In the night I tried to convince Gerda that no real harm had been done. Anna Schulteiss was not easy to wound. She and her husband were on the outs continually-why had she come without him? Besides, it was hard to guess what she was thinking and feeling; some of her particles (a reference to Schulteiss's learning in the field of particle physics) were surely out of place. This sort of comment only made matters worse. Gerda did not tell me that, but only lay stiff on her side of the bed. In the field of troubled breathing in the night she was an accomplished artist, and when she sighed heavily there was no sleeping. I yielded to the same stiffness and suffered with her. Adultery, which seldom tempted me, couldn't have caused more guilt. While I drank my morning coffee Gerda telephoned Anna Schulteiss and made a lunch date with her. Later in the week they went to a symphony concert together. Before the month was out we were babysitting for the Schulteisses in their dirty little university house, which they had turned into a Stone Age kitchen midden. When that stage of conciliation had been reached, Gerda felt better. My thought, however, was that a man who allowed himself to make such jokes should be brazen enough to follow through, not succ.u.mb to conscience as soon as the words were out. He should carry things off like the princely Kippenberg. Anyway, which was the real Shawmut, the man who made insulting jokes or the other one, who had married a wife who couldn't bear that anyone should be wounded by his insults?

You will ask: With a wife willing to struggle mortally to preserve you from the vindictiveness of the injured parties, weren't you perversely tempted to make trouble, just to set the wheels rolling? The answer is no, and the reason is not only that I loved Gerda (my love terribly confirmed by her death), but also that when I said things I said them for art's sake, i. e., without perversity or malice, nor as if malice had an effect like alcohol and I was made drunk on wickedness. I reject that. Yes, there has to be some provocation. But what happens when I am provoked happens because the earth heaves up underfoot, and then from opposite ends of the heavens I get a simultaneous shock to both ears. I am deafened, and I have to open my mouth. Gerda, in her simplicity, tried to neutralize the ill effects of the words that came out and laid plans to win back the friends.h.i.+p or all kinds of unlikely parties whose essential particles were missing and who had no capacity for friends.h.i.+p, no interest in it. To such people she sent azaleas, begonias, cut flowers, she took the wives to lunch. She came home and told me earnestly how many fascinating facts she had learned about them, how their husbands were underpaid, or that they had sick old parents, or madness in the family, or fifteen-year-old kids who burglarized houses or were into heroin.

I never said anything wicked to Gerda, only to provocative people. Yours is the only case I can remember where there was no provocation, Miss Rose-hence this letter of apology, the first I have ever written. You are the cause of my self-examination. I intend to get back to this later. But I am thinking now about Gerda. For her sake I tried to practice self-control, and eventually I began to learn the value of keeping one's mouth shut, and how it can give a man strength to block his inspired words and to let the wickedness (if wickedness is what it is) be absorbed into the system again. Like the "right speech" of Buddhists, I imagine. "Right speech" is sound physiology. And did it make much sense to utter choice words at a time when words have sunk into grossness and decadence? If a La Rochefoucauld were to show up, people would turn away from him in mid-sentence, and yawn. Who needs maxims now?

The Schulteisses were colleagues, and Gerda could work on them, she had access to them, but there were occasions when she couldn't protect me. We were, for instance, at a formal university dinner, and I was sitting beside an old woman who gave millions of dollars to opera companies and orchestras. I was something of a star that evening and wore tails, a white tie, because I had just conducted a performance of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater,_ surely one of the most moving works of the eighteenth century. You would have thought that such music had enn.o.bled me, at least until bedtime. But no, I soon began to spoil for trouble. It was no accident that I was on Mrs. Pergamon's right. She was going to be hit for a big contribution. Somebody had dreamed up a schola cantorum, and I was supposed to push it (tactfully). The real pitch would come later. Frankly, I didn't like the fellows behind the plan. They were a bad lot, and a big grant would have given them more power than was good for anyone. Old Pergamon had left his wife a prodigious fortune. So much money was almost a sacred attribute. And also I had conducted sacred music, so it was sacred against sacred. Mrs. Pergamon talked money to me, she didn't mention the Stabat Mater_ or my interpretation of it. It's true that in the U. S., money leads all other topics by about a thousand to one, but this was one occasion when the music should not have been omitted. The old woman explained to me that the big philanthropists had an understanding, and how the fields were divided up among Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Ford. Abroad there were the various Rothschild interests and the Volkswagen Foundation. The Pergamons did music, mainly. She mentioned the sums spent on electronic composers, computer music, which I detest, and I was boiling all the while that I bent a look of perfect courtesy from Kiev on her. I had seen her limousine in the street with campus cops on guard, supplementing the city police. The diamonds on her bosom lay like the Finger Lakes among their hills. I am obliged to say that the money conversation had curious effects on me. It reached very deep places. My late brother, whose whole life was devoted to money, had been my mother's favorite. He remains her favorite still, and she is in her nineties. Presently I heard Mrs. Pergamon say that she planned to write her memoirs. Then I asked-and Nietzsche might have described the question as springing from my inner Fatum_-"Will you use a typewriter or an adding machine?"

Should I have said that?_ Did I actually say_ it? Too late to ask, the tempest had fallen. She looked at me, quite calm. Now, she was a great lady and I was from Bedlam. Because there was no visible reaction in her diffuse old face, and the blue of her eyes was wonderfully clarified and augmented by her gla.s.ses, I was tempted to believe that she didn't hear or else had failed to understand. But that didn't wash. I changed the subject. I understood that despite the almost exclusive interest in music, she had from time to time supported scientific research. The papers reported that she had endowed a project for research in epilepsy. Immediately I tried to steer her into epilepsy. I mentioned the Freud essay in which the theory was developed that an epileptic fit was a dramatization of the death of one's father. This was why it made you stiff. But finding that my struggle to get off the hook was only giving me a b.l.o.o.d.y lip, I went for the bottom and lay there coldly silent. With all my heart I concentrated on the Fatum. Fatum_ signifies that in each human being there is something that is inaccessible to revision. This something can be taught nothing._ Maybe it is founded in the Will to Power, and the Will to Power is nothing less than Being itself. Moved, or as the young would say, stoned out of my head, by the Stabat Mater_ (the glorious mother who would not stand up for me),_ I had been led to speak from the depths of my Fatum._ I believe that I misunderstood old Mrs. Pergamon entirely. To speak of money to me was kindness, even magnanimity on her part-a man who knew Pergolesi was as good as rich and might almost be addressed as an equal. And in spite of me she endowed the schola cantorum. You don't penalize an inst.i.tution because a kook at dinner speaks wildly to you. She was so very old that she had seen every sort of maniac there is. Perhaps I startled myself more than I did her.

She was being gracious, Miss Rose, and I had been trying to go beyond her, to pa.s.s her on a dangerous curve. A power contest? What might that mean-Why did I need power? Well, I may have needed it because from a position ot power you can say anything. Powerful men give offense with impunity. Take as an instance what Churchill said about an MP named Driberg: "He is the man who brought pederasty into disrepute." And Driberg instead of being outraged was flattered, so rhat when another member of Parliament claimed the remark for himself and insisted that his was the name Churchill had spoken, Driberg said, "You?_ Why would Winston take notice of an insignificant f.a.ggot like you!"_ This quarrel amused London for several weeks. But then Churchill was Churchill, the descendant of Marlborough, his great biographer, and also the savior of his country. To be insulted by him guaranteed your place in history. Churchill was, however, a holdover from a more civilized age. A less civilized case would be that of Stalin. Stalin, receiving a delegation of Polish Communists in the Kremlin, said, "But what has become of that fine, intelligent woman Comrade Z?" The Poles looked at their feet. Because, as Stalin himself had had Comrade Z murdered, there was nothing to say.

This is contempt, not wit. It is Oriental despotism, straight, Miss Rose. Churchill was human, Stalin merely a colossus. As for us, here in America, we are a demotic, hybrid civilization. We have our virtues but are ignorant of style. It's only because American society has no place for style (in the sense of Voltairean or Gibbonesque style, style in the manner of Saint-Simon or Heine) that it is possible for a man like me to make such statements as he makes, harming no one but himself. If people are offended, it's by the "hostile intent" they sense, not by the keenness of the words. They cla.s.sify me then as a psychological curiosity, a warped personality. It never occurs to them to take a full or biographical view. In the real sense of the term, biography has fallen away from us. We all flutter like new-hatched chicks between the feet of the great idols, the monuments of power.

So what are words? A lawyer, the first one, the one who represented me in the case against my brother's estate (the second one was Gerdas brother)-lawyer number one, whose name was Klaussen, said to me when an important letter had to be drafted, "You_ do it, Shawmut. You're the man with the words."

'And you're the wh.o.r.e with ten c.u.n.ts!"

But I didn't say this. He was too powerful. I needed him. I was afraid.

But it was inevitable that I should offend him, and presently I did.

I can't tell you why._ It's a mystery. When I tried to discuss Freud's epilepsy essay with Mrs. Pergamon I wanted to hint that I myself was subject to strange seizures that resembled falling sickness. But it wasn't just brain pathology, lesions, grand mal chemistry. It was a kind of perversely happy _gaiet de coeur.__ Elements of vengefulness, or blasphemy? Well, maybe. What about demonic inspiration, what about energumens, what about Dionysus the G.o.d? After a distressing luncheon with Klaussen the lawyer at his formidable club, where he bullied me in a dining room filled with bullies, a scene from Daumier (I had been beaten down ten or twelve times, my suggestions all dismissed, and I had paid him a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer, but Klaussen hadn't bothered yet to master the elementary facts of the case)-after lunch, I say, when we were walking through the lobby of the club, where federal judges, machine politicians, paving contractors, and chairmen of boards conferred in low voices, I heard a great noise. Workmen had torn down an entire wall. I said to the receptionist, "What's happening?" She answered, "The entire club is being rewired. We've been having daily power failures from the old electrical system." I said, "While they're at it they might arrange to have people electrocuted in the dining room."

I was notified by Klaussen next day that for one reason or another he could no longer represent me. I was an incompatible client.

The intellect of man declaring its independence from worldly power-okay. But I had gone to Klaussen for protection. I chose him because he was big and arrogant, like the guys my brother's widow had hired. My late brother had swindled me. Did I want to recover my money or not? Was I fighting or doodling? Because in the courts you needed brazenness, it was big arrogance or nothing. And with Klaussen as with Mrs. Pergamon there was not a thing that Gerda could do-she couldn't send either of them flowers or ask them to lunch. Besides, she was already sick. Dying, she was concerned about my future. She remonstrated with me. "Did you have to needle him? He's a proud man."

"I gave in to my weakness. What's with me? Like, am I too good to be a hypocrite?"

"Hypocrisy is a big word.... A little lip service."

And again I said what I shouldn't have, especially given the state of her health: "It's a short step from lip service to a.s.s kissing."

"Oh, my poor Herschel, you'll never change!"

She was then dying of leukemia, Miss Rose, and I had to promise her that I would put my case in the hands of her brother Hansl. She believed that for her sake Hansl would be loyal to me. Sure, his feeling for her was genuine. He loved his sister. But as a lawyer he was a disaster, not because he was disloyal but because he was in essence an inept conniver. Also he was plain crackers.

Lawyers, lawyers. Why did I need all these lawyers? you will ask. Because I loved my brother fondly. Because we did business, and business can't be done without lawyers. They have built a position for themselves at the very heart of money strength at the core of what is strongest. Some of the cheerfulest pa.s.sages in Walish's letter refer to my horrible litigation. He says, "I always knew you were a fool." Himself, he took the greatest pains never to be one. Not that any man can ever be absolutely certain that his prudence is perfect. But to retain lawyers is clear proof that you're a patsy. There I concede that Walish is right.

My brother, Philip, had offered me a business proposition, and that, too. was my fault. I made the mistake of telling him how much money my music-appreciation book had earned. He was impressed. He said to his wife, "Tracy, guess who's loaded!" Then he asked, "What are you doing with it? How do you protect yourself against taxes and inflation?"

I admired my brother, not because he was a "creative businessman," as they said in the family-that meant little to me-but because... Well, there is in fact no "because," there's only the given,_ a lifelong feeling, a mystery. His interest in my finances excited me. For once he spoke seriously to me, and this turned my head. I told him, "I never even tried to make money, and now I'm knee-deep in the stuff." Such a statement was a little disingenuous. It was, if you prefer, untrue. To take such a tone was also a mistake, for it implied that money wasn't so hard to make. Brother Philip had knocked himself out for it, while Brother Harry had earned heaps of it, incidentally, while fiddling. This, I now acknowledge, was a provocative b.o.o.boo. He made a dark note of it. I even saw the note being made.

As a boy, Philip was very fat. We had to sleep together when we were children and it was like sharing the bed with a dugong. But since then he had firmed up quite a lot. In profile his face was large, with bags under the eyes, a sharp serious face upon a stout body. My late brother was a crafty man. He laid long-distance schemes. Over me he enjoyed the supreme advantage of detachment. My weakness was my fondness for him, contemptible in an adult male. He slightly resembled Spencer Tracy, but was more avid and sharp. He had a Texas tan, his hair was "styled," not barbered, and he wore Mexican rings on every one of his fingers.

Gerda and I were invited to visit his estate near Houston. Here he lived in grandeur, and when he showed me around the place he said to me, "Every morning when I open my eyes I say, 'Philip, you're living right in the middle of a park. You own a whole park.' "

I said, "It certainly is as big as Douglas Park in Chicago."

He cut me short, not wis.h.i.+ng to hear about the old West Side, our dreary origins. Roosevelt Road with its chicken coops stacked on the sidewalks, the Tal-mudist horseradish grinder in the doorway of the fish store, or the daily drama of the Shawmut kitchen on Independence Boulevard. He abominated these reminiscences of mine, for he was thoroughly Americanized. On the other hand, he no more belonged on this Texas estate than I did. Perhaps no one belonged here. Numerous failed entrepreneurs had preceded him in this private park, the oilmen and land developers who had caused this monument to be built. You had the feeling that they must all have died in flophouses or on state funny farms, cursing the grandiose fata morgana that Philip now owned, or seemed to own. The truth was that he didn't like it, either; he was stuck with it. He had bought it for various symbolic reasons, and under pressure from his wife.

He told me in confidence that he had a foolproof investment for me. People were approaching him with hundreds of thousands, asking to be cut into the deal, but he would turn them all down for my sake. For once he was in a position to do something for me. Then he set his conditions. The first condition was that he was never to be questioned, that was how he did business, but I could be sure that he would protect me as a brother should and that there was nothing to fear. In the fragrant plantation gardens, he flew for one instant (no more) into Yiddish. He'd never let me lay my sound head in a sickbed. Then he flew out again. He said that his wife, who was the best woman in the world and the soul of honor, would respect his commitments and carry out his wishes with fanatical fidelity if anything were to happen to him. Her fanatical fidelity to him was fundamental. I didn't understand Tracy, he said. She was difficult to know but she was a true woman, and he wasn't going to have any clauses in our partners.h.i.+p agreement that would bind her formally. She would take offense at that and so would he. And you wouldn't believe, Miss Rose, how all these clichs moved me. I responded as if to an accelerator under his fat, elegantly shod foot, pumping blood, not gasoline, into my mortal engine. I was wild with feeling and said yes to it all. Yes, yes! The plan was to create an auto-wrecking center, the biggest in Texas, which would supply auto parts to the entire South and to Latin America as well. The big German and Italian exporters were notoriously short of replacement parts; I had experienced this myself-I had once had to wait four months for a BMW front-wheel stabilizer un.o.btainable in the U. S. But it wasn't the business proposition that carried me away, Miss Rose. What affected me was that my brother and I should be really a.s.sociated for the first time in our lives. As our joint enterprise could never in the world be Pergolesi, it must necessarily be business. I was unreasonably stirred by emotions that had waited a lifetime for expression; they must have worked their way into my heart at a very early age, and now came out in full strength to drag me down.

"What have you got to do with wrecking automobiles?" said Gerda. "And grease, and metal, and all that noise?"

I said, "What has the 1RS ever done for music that it should collect half my royalties?"

My wife was an educated woman, Miss Rose, and she began to reread certain books and to tell me about them, especially at bedtime. We went through much of Balzac. _Pre Goriot__ (what daughters can do to a father), Cousin Ports_ (how an elderly innocent was dragged down by relatives who coveted his art collection)... One swindling relative after another, and all of them merciless. She related the destruction of poor Csar Birotteau, the trusting perfumer. She also read me selections from Marx on the obliteration of the ties of kins.h.i.+p by capitalism. But it never occurred to me that such evils could affect a man who had read about them. I had read about venereal diseases and had never caught any. Besides, it was now too late to take a warning.

On my last trip to Texas I visited the vast, smoking wrecking grounds, and on our way back to the mansion Philip told me that his wife had become a breeder of pit bulldogs. You may have read about these creatures, which have scandalized American animal lovers. They are the most terrifying of all dogs. Part terrier, part English bulldog, smooth-skinned, broad-chested, immensely muscular, they attack all strangers, kids as well as grownups. As they do not bark, no warning is given. Their intent is always to kill, and once they have begun to tear at you they can't be called off. The police, if they arrive in time, have to shoot them. In the pit, the dogs fight and die in silence. Aficionados bet millions of dollars on the fights (which are illegal, but what of it?). Humane societies and civil liberties groups don't quite know how to defend these murderous animals or the legal rights of their owners. There is a Was.h.i.+ngton lobby trying to exterminate the breed, and meantime enthusiasts go on experimenting, doing everything possible to create the worst of all possible dogs.

Philip took an intense pride in his wife. "Tracy is a wonder, isn't she?" he said. "There's terrific money in these animals. Trust her to pick up a new trend. Guys are pouring in from all over the country to buy pups from her."

He took me to the dog-runs to show the pit bulls off. As we pa.s.sed, they set their paws on the wire meshes and bared their teeth. I didn't enjoy visiting the pens. My own teeth were on edge. Philip himself wasn't comfortable with the animals, by any means. He owned them, they were a.s.sets, but he wasn't the master. Tracy, appearing among the dogs, gave me a silent nod. The N