All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 3

"Ah."

He was moving back to New York, he told me, to work on a short biography of the writer Isaac Babel. He would need someone to look over some Russian text for him. "It's either that or learn Russian. And I'm not Edmund Wilson." I smiled-I caught the allusion to Wilson's voracious reading in many languages in his composition of To the Finland Station To the Finland Station; it was the last allusion I would catch from Morris-and said I'd be happy to help.

"Then you can help me with something else, too," said Morris, "since you're my biggest fan. I'm moving this weekend, and your agency probably takes-how much do they pay you an hour for this?"

"Eight dollars."

"Right, and they charge me twenty. Ideally I need someone for an entire weekend-forty-eight hours, more or less. So how about let's split the difference-I'll pay you five hundred dollars and your train fare back, you make all the arrangements, pick up a U-Haul on Friday, we move my stuff into it, drive it up to New York, unload it into my apartment, you return it, go to Penn Station, end of game. What do you think?"

"What about the agency?"

"Screw the agency."

"Wow," I said. "You're my hero."

Morris laughed and we shook on it.

That night I invested some of my future earnings into a keg party at my house. Ali Dehestani got drunk and we wrestled in the backyard; he had four inches and forty pounds on me, but I was stronger. It was an even match. Jen Cohen got so drunk she pa.s.sed out on Ali's couch. Amy Gould for her part got so drunk, and so angry, when she saw me (briefly) kissing her friend Amanda that she kissed Ravi Winikoff, which was a surprise to everyone involved. And from my father's lovely ivy-bestrewn porch I made a speech about Isaac Babel: "They didn't let him finis.h.!.+" I cried. "Don't let them not let you finis.h.!.+ Finis.h.!.+ Finish while you can!"

My speech made no sense. Everyone cheered.

Two days later I picked up a smallish U-Haul, pulled it up to Morris's place, and very quickly with Morris lugged his boxes of books, and then his heavy wooden futon and his cherrywood writing desk into the truck, and then drove us to New York in three and a half hours.

On the way Morris talked to me about literature, politics, the movies. Henry Adams, when he met Swinburne, thought it would take him a hundred years to catch up to the poet's erudition, his learning, his reading. I felt a little like that with Morris, but I thought-I was young-that I could make up the difference in ten years. He was twelve years older than I was. I had two years to spare.

Also, Morris talked about publis.h.i.+ng. What a bunch of miserable careerists his contemporaries were.

"John Globus is a joke. It's a mystery he still gets published. This is what is known as publis.h.i.+ng inertia. They publish your next book because they don't want people to think that publis.h.i.+ng your previous book was a mistake.

"Joanne Simkin is actually Alfred Simkin's granddaughter, did you know that? One thing you learn in New York is that if it sounds like a relative, it's a d.a.m.n relative.

"Harold Phillips," Morris concluded. "How many times can you confess in print that you're a middle-aged mediocrity who is envious of his friends? Jesus. Don't read him."

I never had read him. In fact, I'd never heard of him, or any of the others-mediocrities, as it turned out, and careerists, careerists, careerists, every one. It was news to me. I dealt then exclusively with the great dead-and with Morris, who carried them all like a bright banner into the present.

But I sat there-or, rather, I sat at the wheel-and nodded. I was sure there was a good reason to beat up on these jokers, and after all here I was so serendipitously with Morris Binkel, and I did not want to seem like a fool.

"Judith Hestermann is a miserable excuse for a television critic. Her idea of greatness is the NBC Thursday-night lineup."

Morris shook his head and looked out at the woods of suburban New Jersey as we drove through them, alternating between the enormous shopping malls and the New Jersey state police. "Jesus, it's the chain mall archipelago," said Morris. "It's all malls and state troopers. These people on their death marches. You step outside J.Crew and they shoot you." He shook his head but also smiled-it was a good line.

Morris's apartment was a small, handsome one-and-a-half-bedroom on Riverside Drive. It looked out over the Hudson and on into New Jersey. Aside from the office, which we now repeopled with Morris's books, it looked surprisingly lived-in for an apartment he'd been gone from for a year. We moved him in and I took the U-Haul down to 23rd Street.

Walking over to the subway-Morris told me to take a cab but I wanted to ride the subway-I pa.s.sed through Chelsea. I had never seen so many beautiful people. I was sweating, tired, gruesome, and these people had left their houses looking like movie stars- perhaps they were movie stars? One fell behind on such things in college, or anyway I did-and, oh G.o.d, what would it take to live in such a place? What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash? And yet I thought that I could do it. These people looked soft, for all their movie-star hard bodies. They looked like they were unsure of what they wanted in life but that they suspected they'd gotten it. They hoped anyway that this was it.

By the time I got back Morris had set up shop and he'd even photocopied some Babel stories for me. I showered-his shower was clean, his towels were reasonably new.

"It's nice here," Morris called out from the living room as I got dressed.

"Yes," I agreed, when I walked out.

"My wife just left me," he said. "Did I mention that? I had a lovely wife and she's gone." I didn't say anything to that.

"My going to Hopkins for a year was the last straw. She decided I was sleeping with all the grad students."

I could not understand, at the time, the allure of grad students.

Morris stood with his big hands in his pants pockets by the big window that looked out to New Jersey, over the Hudson, the sky now beginning to dim and the lights like little candles beginning to burn on the other side. "Should we go to a party?" he said.

So we did.

What did I want from Morris Binkel? The man was practically a sociopath. He had been in New York so long, had ingested there so many values that he at heart despised, that he knew to be false and cruel, that, in angrily rejecting them, he felt also the extent to which he was beholden to them, and grew angrier still. He could no longer read five pages of anything without losing his temper, without clutching his chair in rage. Surely he'd be dead by forty. And yet the great ones were like this. And Morris, I think, had greatness in him, even if he squandered it. His anger at his era rose like vomit to his throat.

I was twenty years old. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty, and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha-so that's who you are. But these people themselves, laughing and not-laughing, kissing and not-kissing, they themselves are young, and so then you begin to think, if you're twenty or twenty-one, when you are young, that these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed-up friends and girlfriends-that it's not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it's so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you've got it. You can be like me, if that's what you want. something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it's so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you've got it. You can be like me, if that's what you want.

We went to the party, which was in Brooklyn. For a long time we rode the train as Morris explained various things to me about the world of literature, by which it turned out Morris meant the world of publis.h.i.+ng. He rarely discussed actual literary works; he knew all the writers personally, so he just gave me the straight dope.

We'd drunk a bottle of wine from Morris's cabinet and when we arrived at last the party was well under way, and everyone greeted Morris with a mixture of regard and something like relief-I don't know-or fear. As we stood getting acclimated, people would come up to him and welcome him back to New York, and then comment on his latest broadside in the New American. New American. "What you did to Phillips, my G.o.d," said one kindly-looking man who seemed about Morris's age (most of the others were slightly younger), identified to me by Morris later as a socialist history professor. "What you did to Phillips, my G.o.d," said one kindly-looking man who seemed about Morris's age (most of the others were slightly younger), identified to me by Morris later as a socialist history professor.

"Oh, I didn't really-" Morris protested demurely.

"No, he had it coming," said the man, then turned to me: "Morris is like American foreign policy. The only thing he knows how to do is bomb people. But sometimes the people he bombs really deserve it."

Morris laughed happily.

At some point Morris went outside for a cigarette, leaving me on my own. Naturally I went to the kitchen to fetch another beer. I had been drinking heavily now for several years, and I'd had only five beers this evening so far, not very much for me at the time, but Morris and I had forgotten, somehow, to eat, so I was reasonably drunk, and when I found a woman-a fairly stunning woman, maybe just a few years older than I was but a whole world away from me, with blue eyes in a round, pretty face, and long curly black hair spilling over her back, in jeans, in a kind of low-cut black short-sleeve s.h.i.+rt with ruffles along the hem-this was not how girls dressed at Harvard-and several bracelets, bangles they're called, on her wrists and hoop earrings in her ears-a real woman, in other words, which I was not used to-when I saw her standing before the refrigerator, I felt stymied, and I blushed. I was wearing a polo s.h.i.+rt from the Harvard Coop and jeans while everyone around wore a sport coat, and this woman was looking at me with amus.e.m.e.nt in her eyes.

"Hi," I said, looking down at the floor.

"You're Morris's friend," she said.

I looked back up. "Well, sort of."

"That's an intriguing response!" she said, laughing. Her earrings and her hair jangled when she talked. Her eyes laughed differently from how her mouth laughed.

"Thank you," I said.

"And?"

"I moved Morris up here. I was working at the agency. Uh. Instead of tutoring SATs."

She nodded encouragingly. I told the rest of the story a bit more coherently.

"So he owes you money," she concluded.

I hadn't thought of it that way. This girl was way out of my league.

"Join the club," she added.

And I certainly hadn't thought of that. But then this sudden revelation-that Morris was not good with money, or not to be trusted, and that this woman and I were bound together by this- emboldened me.

"I'm Keith," I said.

"Hi, Keith," she said. "You'd like to get a beer, wouldn't you?"

"Yeah," I admitted.

She stepped aside. As I reached in, I thought of something. I said, "Would you like one?"

"Yes."

I took out two and opened them carefully with the Miller Genuine Draft bottle opener on my key chain.

"Nifty," said the woman, accepting her beer. "I'm Emily," she now said, proffering her hand.

So I said, again, "Hi."

"So you go to Harvard?" she said, and when I nodded, she went on: "Does it suck?"

"Kind of."

"Yeah. I went to Swarthmore and we were always pretty sure Harvard sucked."

"Yeah. Kind of."

When she told me what school she'd gone to, it gave me some a.s.surance. Not the school, but just the fact that she'd gone to a school, at one time.

"We always thought there was something wrong with everyone who went there," she went on. "Just-something weird."

I thought about this a moment. "That's true," I said. "But it raises a kind of epistemological problem. Because I can tell you what's wrong with everyone else-but what's wrong with me?"

She laughed. "Ah," she said. "That's the thing."

I was immensely pleased. I was holding a conversation with a real woman, and I had made her laugh. Wait till-but who could I tell who would understand? Not Ali Dehestani. And Amy Gould would only get angry. As I pondered this problem Morris materialized beside us. Emily's countenance changed. He leaned over and hugged her more intimately than seemed appropriate with me standing there. She knew him well. But-I half stutteringly thought to myself-he'd been married until recently! And he was such a jerk! Emily! Hey!

Then again, I did not begrudge Morris this beautiful woman with her sharp tongue and her simple grown-up jewelry. He had published so much more than I had.

That was the turning point in the evening. Pretty soon Morris took both me and Emily home in a cab, and they set me up nicely on the couch, and they did not make too much noise in Morris's room, which was considerate, and in the morning they made me eggs, and I sight-translated some pa.s.sages from Babel's story "Guy de Maupa.s.sant," about a young man, like me a little, who helps a rich man's beautiful wife translate some stories by Maupa.s.sant and then seduces her. I had not seduced anyone, but I had seen something, or I had begun to see something, there was a glimmer that I saw, of how things worked-and that was what the story was about. I explained this to Morris and Emily, though leaving myself out of it, of course, and they were pleased, Emily especially. "Keith's a lot smarter than I was when I was twenty," she said. It had turned out that Emily was closer to thirty than to twenty. "Is he smarter than you were, Morris?"

Morris smiled, and held the smile a beat too long. "Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote about her husband at the beginning of the Terror," he said, going back to pouring coffee and divvying up the remains of some crumb cake. "He looks out the window of their Moscow apartment at all the people going about their business-it's 1936 or so-and says: 'They think everything's fine, just because the trams keep running.'" He put the coffeepot in the sink. "There's this thing about guys from Harvard. They think everything's fine, just because they went to Harvard. And for them, you know, it is. Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a nice life for himself in New York if only he went to Harvard."

Emily blushed-I saw it, I still see it now-and I looked at Morris, looked at him anew. Because the whole thing seemed to be directed at Emily, not at me: This is how brutal I am, Morris seemed to be saying, this is how much of a d.i.c.k I can be. Any promises I made you are null and void and not to be believed.

He turned now to me and added quickly, "I'm not saying you're a mediocrity. I'm just outlining the sociology of the thing. You might be a genius, for all I know."

I nodded gratefully, and that was that. In between sips of coffee Morris had concluded that I was a mediocrity-or a genius. I happened to know already that I was neither-that if I applied myself, I'd be fine, more than fine, and if I didn't, I would probably fall through the cracks. I knew that. What I hadn't known was something else. Looking at Morris looking out the window across the Hudson, I suddenly wanted very badly to cry. Not for myself, for the first time, maybe, in my life-I had managed just by sitting here quietly to get the better of Morris, to cause him to falter into rudeness-but for myself in ten years, because the other thing I suddenly knew was that Morris's life was a very likely life, the sort of life one could end up having, if one was not very careful, and I knew, already, in addition to knowing that I was neither mediocrity nor genius, that I was not very careful at all.

"When you are young," Morris said now, looking out his window, his back to us, "and you're on your way, and you have everything before you and everyone with you-you don't know anyone else-and you look at all the others with their screwed-up lives and you know you'll do things differently, you know you will, and you do. You are kinder, gentler, you are smarter. And then one day you look up and you've done all the things you said you were going to do but somehow you forgot something, something happened along the way and everyone's gone, everything's different, and looking around you see you have the same screwed-up life as all those other idiots. And there-you are."

He turned back to us and bravely smiled.

Ten years later, when I stood in a room in Brooklyn-a slightly younger room than the one Morris had taken me to, then, though that may have been an optical illusion, and there were women in the room who looked at me, now, the way Emily had looked at Morris then, sort of, because like Morris I had won a place for myself among them, among them and above them, and also because I had made a mess of my life in the way that Morris, in his time, had made a mess of his-and, standing in this room, I suddenly apropos of nothing heard someone make an unkind remark about Morris, and then look up at me, for approval, not knowing what I thought-what did I think? Well, I thought that if you have made a career of denouncing careerism, eventually some-one's going to call you a nasty name. Someone had called Morris Binkel a nasty name and I did not speak up in his defense. In fact I agreed. And I thought of the train ride home from New York that weekend, with $500 in my pocket after all, and still high on the things I had seen, wanting to tell people on the train about them, share this with them somehow, knowing that Ali and Ravi and Amy would not really understand, sensing already that they would not be interested in what I'd learned in New York, in fact no one would be interested-despite Morris's remark, which by then I had dismissed, I shone on that train and glowed, and I launched, self-important, into Morris's first chapter-it was the only chapter he'd ever write-of his book on Isaac Babel.

Babel had moved to Petersburg when he was nineteen years old. He met Maxim Gorky, who told him that his stories were good, but his writing was too pretty. He should learn something about life.

Babel was in Petersburg when the Bolsheviks seized power. Later on, he claimed to have been an officer of the Cheka-most likely, he had run some errands for them. Then he went off as a journalist with a Cossack division invading Poland. This experience formed the basis for his cla.s.sic book of stories, Red Cavalry. Red Cavalry.

Red Cavalry made Babel famous. It was the first great Soviet book. Gorky protected him, and he was beloved. made Babel famous. It was the first great Soviet book. Gorky protected him, and he was beloved.

Then Stalin came and Babel stopped writing. He claimed to have become a "master of silence," but it was clear to everyone that he was simply a sensitive instrument; under conditions of total fear, it was impossible to write.

In 1936 Gorky died. "No one will protect me now," Babel told his wife. Three years later, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and shot. He was forty years old.

I still remember-how well I remember-looking out the window of that train. We were blazing down the final stretch of rail before Baltimore, toward the roads and mult.i.tudinous lacrosse fields and the late-night ice cream shop of my youth; Ali was going to meet me at the train station in exchange for a six-pack of beer. No one would ever arrest me at my house, take me to the bas.e.m.e.nt of Lubyanka, and shoot me in the back of the head. Nonetheless I knew what Morris's book was telling me, what the book he never finished was telling me. In that train, on those rails, some premonition of the truth brushed against my side.

His Google.

Something in reference to a man who subscribes to an agency for "clippings," to send him everything "that appears about him"-and finds that nothing ever appears. That he never receives anything.

-Henry James, Notebooks

His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed . . . it was cruel. It wasn't nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he knew people with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even knew people like Mark, Mark Grossman, who had never published, who had kept silent, but whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the urologist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed ten-kilometer runs. But Sam wondered-the afternoon was young and there was time for it-whether Mark might not be better off. He would finish his dissertation eventually; it would receive a listing in an electronic catalog. There, he would finally say when that moment came, I too am Grossman.

Sam: not Grossman. Sam: not even the size of Sam of old, Sam of last year, Sam of two weeks ago. After he'd failed to produce the great Zionist epic he'd been contracted to produce, after he'd stopped writing the occasional online opinion piece on the Second Intifada, after Talia had returned, angrily, to Tel Aviv, and Arielle had moved, icily, to New York, and he'd resumed his temp job to begin paying back his advance, there was, in the world, increasingly less Sam. He backed away from the computer, into the dark heavy tapestry that split his living room in two and made of this pathetic little desk and shelf, with its ma.s.s of undigested papers, its pile of battered books-a tax-deductible home office. Occasionally he photographed it, this consolation, this small triumph over the masters of his fate. His Google too had been a consolation once: if in those heady days, a book deal in his pocket, a girlfriend of complex cosmetic habits in his bedroom, his little AOL mailbox was momentarily silent and unmoving, he simply strolled over to Google to confirm that he still existed. Did he ever! Three hundred some odd pages of Samuel Mitnick on the World Wide Web, accessible to people everywhere, at any time. Want some Sam? Here you go. Some more? Click, click. Even absolutist states, even China, had Google- and there were a lot of people, he'd thought then, in China.

But not enough, apparently, or maybe they just weren't clicking through . . . for here he was. He wasn't due at Fidelity until four, it was barely one, and he needed to get out. Tomorrow night his date with Katie Riesling, author of s.e.x advice, he should really stay and clean up, clean himself up, but this apartment was more than he could bear. And, in any case, if Katie hadn't seen the signs by now, she'd never see them. His unreliable car; his jeans with a hole in them just above the ankle. From what? He had no idea. They would have dinner, dinner at Jae's, the place where people saw you in the window when they walked by. He looked too shoddy to leave the house but he left the house. Out there: no Google; in here: Google; on Google: no Sam.

Or almost no Sam. Twenty-two. He was at twenty-two and plunging.

He patted his pocket for keys and moved out the door. Sam had other problems, maybe, or anyway the world did. Enter MISERY or ILLNESS or PLAGUE and what you saw was pages upon pages. PALESTINE. SHARON-ARAFAT. OCCUPATION. U.N. RESOLUTION 242. Put things in quotes and you narrowed the search, and even then "INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING A BOMB TO KILL JEWS WITH" or "DIRECTIONS TO THE NEAREST VILLAGE WHERE I CAN SHOOT ARABS"-very popular searches, page after virtual page of results. Sam would never have so many hits.

He headed to the 1369 on foot. There were sufficient humiliations in his life that he didn't need also to drive down to Inman Square and fail to find a parking spot.

The important part, in terms of your Google, was not to die. An initial spike from the obituaries, the memorial blog entries ("unfulfilled promise," "so much promise," "he never quite filled out his promise"), but in the long term a catastrophe. Yet what would be the opposite of dying, Google-wise? What would be the anti-death? He wondered this as he bought his Ethiopian coffee to-stay and sat down in the gloom of Cafe 1369. He arranged himself at one of the tiny tables and began his work hour by staring with disbelief at the praise lavished on the book he'd brought with him. The living writers of the world were Sam's enemies, Sam's nemeses. Sam was once a living writer himself, even better than a living writer, a future writer-there'd been a picture of Sam in one of the publisher's catalogs.

Fame-fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a huge oak tree and make fake farting sounds with its hands. He unfolded his notebook. Inside, his notes toward greatness. Though he seldom read them over, the thought of losing the notebook troubled him. Consider Emerson: where would we be without his notebooks? Sam had recently photocopied the entire thing, just in case.

Yesterday's work was a list:

Melissa Jenna Sally S.