Kafka Was the Rage Read online

  What it is you want that you don’t have? Dr. Schachtel asked.

  I hesitated. I felt like a high jumper poised for his run. And just at that moment, I caught Dr. Schachtel’s eyes. They were shuttling across the room, following some secret trajectory of their own, when I caught them and held them as if I had grabbed him by the lapels. It was too good an opportunity to waste. I want to be transfigured, I said.

  I don’t know whether he was surprised by this, but I was. I had never even used the word transfiguration before, as far as I could remember, never thought about it. I didn’t know what I meant by it, yet I knew that it was true, that it described how I felt. When I came out with the word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood.

  In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness. Think of the men in D. H. Lawrence’s novels. Think of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain—you probably read it in German. They’re no longer schoolteachers or engineers or whatever they were before, but heroic figures. They’re exalted; they’re blessed.

  I supposed, I said, that love would change me, too, would advance me somehow. Because without that, it’s just sex, just mechanics. And while sex is fine—it’s wonderful; it can be like flying—it isn’t enough. It doesn’t explain, doesn’t justify the whole business. It can’t account for two thousand years of poetry, for all the laughing and crying. There has to be something else, something more. Otherwise, love wouldn’t be so famous; we wouldn’t be carrying on about it all the time. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

  I stopped for breath. Dr. Schachtel’s eyes had escaped and I couldn’t catch them again. I was confused. I felt that I was back on the deck of a ship in Yokohama harbor talking to myself under the yellow lights. It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

  I saw Dr. Schachtel eleven times. He was intelligent, astute, even charming, but I never gave him a chance. I suppose that like a good analyst he wanted to see my personality grow, while what I needed was for it to be shrunk to a more manageable size. It was much too big for me.

  I insisted on presenting my problems, such as they were, in the abstract, and the abstractions of psychoanalysis were no match for mine. How can I distinguish, I asked Dr. Schachtel, between anxiety and desire? Is sex a defense against art? Is disappointment inevitable, like the death instinct?

  What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. Of course, that’s what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

  8

  One night while we were making love, Sheri screamed. She had never screamed before, and it took me by surprise. It was a loud scream, right in my face, which was close to hers. Her mouth opened very wide and I could see all the way to the back of her throat, to her uvula. I saw the fillings in her teeth, the far end of her tongue, the shiny red inside of her cheeks.

  Her eyes were open, looking at me while she screamed. I thought I must have done something wrong. What’s the matter? I said. Are you all right? I knew that women sometimes screamed while making love, but she had never screamed before, and besides, it wasn’t like her. I thought I might have hurt her and I stopped what I was doing, even though it was nothing special or unusual. I could have hit a sensitive spot, or maybe she wasn’t feeling well.

  Is something the matter? I asked, but of course she didn’t answer. She didn’t believe in questions. But what was I supposed to do? Did she want me to keep on, or stop? I didn’t want to stop—I was too far in to stop.

  I began again, very gently, hardly moving—and she screamed again. It occurred to me that the neighbors could hear her. I would see those screams in their eyes when we met in the hallway or on the street. But why should she start screaming now? When would I come to the end of her originality? Also, there was something odd about her screams, something not quite right. They were not like the screams you hear in movies, cries torn from the throat. I remembered Fay Wray in King Kong—she was a lusty screamer.

  Most screams are wide-open vowel sounds—ah, oh, or ee—that come up from the diaphragm. They’re raw and unmodulated, which is why they’re startling. But Sheri’s screams were not like that. She screamed up in her sinuses, like a factory whistle. It was a blue note, a diphthong.

  Her voice sounded hoarse, and I thought of the hoarse cry of the peacock, a phrase from a book. I remembered a line from a Surrealist poem: “The hyena’s oblong cry.” That’s the way my mind was tending.

  Sheri’s face when she screamed was not screwed up around the eyes or distorted. It was only her mouth that screamed. She wasn’t like the girl in the Munch painting whose scream occupies her whole face. Sheri looked as if she was gargling. She let the scream out like an alarm clock that goes off when you can’t remember why you set it.

  Maybe her screams were meant as a riddle or conundrum. Perhaps she was punctuating unspoken sentences. Anything was possible.

  It also seemed to me that they were a bit stale, her screams. I got the feeling that she was palming off on me some secondhand screams left over from her old life, her inscrutable past. This is what I was thinking as I lay there, half in, half out.

  9

  For most of the people in Meyer Schapiro’s class at the New School, art was the truth about life—and life itself, as they saw it, was more or less a lie. Art, modern art, was a great, intense, but at the same time vague promise or threat, depending on how you looked at it. If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality.

  With the dim stained-glass light of the slides and the hushed atmosphere, Schapiro’s classes were like church services. Culture in those days was still holy. If he had chosen his own church, it would have been Romanesque—yet there was something fundamentalist in him, too. He made you want to get up and testify, or beat a tambourine.

  I went to him as students twenty years later would go to India. I wanted to believe in something, anything, to become a member of a cult. My family had been neither religious nor cultivated and, coming from New Orleans, we had always been outsiders in New York. At Brooklyn College, everyone had been a Communist but me.

  Modern painting was one more exclusion, one more mystery from which I was shut out. I used to feel this way when people talked about politics, but I didn’t mind so much because I wasn’t interested in politics. And besides, I secretly thought I was right. I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics. It was the adolescence of politics, an awkward stage you had to pass through. But when it came to modern art, I was afraid that maybe the others were right, that I would never be hip or sophisticated, would never belong. I’d never know that smug sense of being of my time, being contemporary.

  Perhaps this sounds like a fuss over nothing, but when you’re young, everything matters, everything is serious. And besides, I was living with a modern painter, I slept with modern painting. The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment.

  There were all sorts of stories about Schapiro. It was rumored that the first time he went to Paris he never sat in a café or walked beside the Seine, but spent all his time in museums and libraries. It probably wasn’t true, but it fitted him, this story. Reading had turned him into a saint or angel of scholarship, but in some ways I suspected that he was a martyr too, a Saint Sebastian shot through with arrows of abstraction. A rival critic said that Schapiro loved not paintings but the explanations they made possible, and that he valued a painting in proportion to the ingenuity you needed to appreciate it.

  Schapiro was about forty at the time. He was a slender, medium-sized man with a classi
cally handsome Semitic face, bony and ascetic, but lit up like a saint’s or a martyr’s. He wore, as far as I can remember, the same suit all the time, a single-breasted gray herringbone, and he had two neckties.

  Like many educated New York City Jews of his generation, Schapiro dentalized his consonants—or perhaps he had a slight lisp that he tried to overcome—and this gave his speech a sibilance, as if he was whispering, or hissing, secrets. The impression of secrecy was increased by the fact that he didn’t seem to be talking to us, but to the paintings themselves, like a man praising a woman’s beauty to her.

  Sometimes he was so brilliant that he seemed almost insane to me; he seemed to see more than there actually was—he heard voices. His knowledge was so impressive as to appear occult. Because he chanted his lectures, he was like a medieval cantor or Gregorian monk.

  We were so awed by him that when he said something witty, we were afraid to laugh. It was like the German translators taking the puns out of Shakespeare on the assumption that he had not written them, that they had been added by hacks. I wonder now whether Schapiro ever noticed how tense we were, how pious. Did he realize that students were dropping out all the time, to be replaced by other students?

  They didn’t drop out because he was disappointing—in fact, it might have been better if he had disappointed us now and then. What drove even his admirers away was a certain remorselessness in his brilliance. It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something; there was no escape. It was like a fate.

  Perhaps the things he said have now become commonplaces of art criticism, but at the time they were revelations to me. And of course he talked about painters like van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso, who are old masters today. Then, only forty years ago, they were revolutionaries; we still believed in revolutions.

  I remember Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne’s landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping.

  Schapiro said that when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn’t afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible.

  One night I smuggled Sheri into the class. It was easy because of all the turnover and the flurry of enthusiasm. The room sloped like a theater and we sat up in the back. Schapiro was going to talk about Picasso, and the place was jammed, with people crouching on the steps in the aisle. Picasso was a perfect subject because there was so much to explain.

  Schapiro spoke rapidly, rhythmically, hardly pausing for breath. When he said that with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck. As he went on, Schapiro’s sentences became staccato, cubistic, full of overlapping planes. I was so excited that I took Sheri’s hand in mine.

  I felt myself gaining confidence. It was such a relief to me to know that art could be explained. If I couldn’t love art for itself, I could love it, like Schapiro, for the explanations. It was better than never to have loved at all.

  He was discussing an early still life of Picasso’s, an upended table covered with a white cloth, a bowl of flowers, and a bottle of wine, all paradoxically suspended in space. What we were seeing, Schapiro said, was the conversion of the horizontal plane—the plane of our ordinary daily traversal of life—into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.

  His voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the projector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque gesture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassembled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in Sheri’s.

  And then we were hurrying down the aisle, stepping over murmuring bodies in the half-light of the screen. We were in the hallway on the second floor, running up the stairs.

  On the roof of the New School, there was a deep purplish glow, a Picasso color, the swarthy light that settles on great cities at night. The wind lifted Sheri’s hair, but it was not cold for October. The world was warmed by art, like fire.

  A low skylight rose up out of the roofline. It was dimmed, an empty studio. The near side was perpendicular, and then it sloped away. Sheri leaned over it, so that the upper part of her body, her head, arms, and shoulders, sprawled down the slope and her sex pointed at the sky. I paused to take a breath and allow my heart to beat. It’s a perfect world, I thought, if you understand it. I let the wind pass over us while Sheri gleamed in the dark. When I connected myself to her, we were the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. We converted the horizontal plane into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.

  10

  When I moved in with Sheri, I assumed that now my adult sexual life would begin. Until then, my experience had been limited to what I thought of as collegiate episodes and wartime acts. Now I imagined myself plunging into sex, diving into a great density of things to do. I felt like a person who is about to go abroad for the first time.

  But what actually happened was that Sheri and I began not at the beginning, as I had hoped, but at the end of sex. We arrived immediately at a point where, if we had gone any further, what we did would have had to be called by some other names—yoga, mime, chiropractic, or isometrics. We were like lovers in a sad futuristic novel where sex is subjected to a revolutionary program.

  Sex has traditionally been associated with joy, which is an old-fashioned, almost Dickensian notion—but Sheri understood, as we do today, that sex belongs to depression as much as to joy. She knew that it is a place where all sorts of expectations and illusions come to die. Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

  Sometimes I thought of sex as a flight from art, a regression to instinct, but there was no escaping art when I was in bed with Sheri. She reminded me of some lines Wallace Stevens wrote about Picasso. How should you walk in that space, Stevens asked, and know nothing of the madness of space, nothing of its jocular procreations? For Sheri, sex was like space, the jocularity of space. It was a foyer to madness, a little picnic of madness. In her more benign moments, when she was feeling almost sentimental, she was Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. She descended into my arms. Like art, sex with her was a shudder of hypotheses, a debate between being and nonbeing, between affirmation and denial, optimism and pessimism, illusion and reality, coming and going.

  Most people would say that lovemaking is a defense against loneliness, but with Sheri it was an investigation of loneliness, a safari into its furthest reaches. She had a trick of suspending me at a high point of solitariness, when I was in the full flow of that self-absorption that comes over you as you enter the last stages of the act. She would stall or stymie my attempts to go ahead and finish—she’d hold me there, freeze me there, as if to say, See how alone you are! And then I would float above her, and above myself, like an escaped balloon.

  Sex with Sheri was full of wreckage. It was like a tenement that has been partly demolished by a wrecker’s ball, so that you can see the terrible biological colors people painted their rooms, the pitiful little spaces they chose for themselves. You could see their lives crumbling like plaster. While Sheri and I were lovers, we were also enemies. Each of us hated and feared what the other stood for. In my heart I thought of her as weird and in her heart she saw me as ordinary. We disagreed on most things; all we had in common was desire, perhaps not even that.

  She said that I was trying to destroy her. Destroy was one of her favorite words. She would stretch it out—destroyyy—as if it w
as onomatopoetic, as if it made a rending sound. When I answered that I was only trying to understand her, she said that to be understood was a false agreement, like orgasm.

  She showed me just enough of herself to keep in touch. She was only physically evident—visible, palpable, audible. I could smell and taste her, although she had hardly any animal effusions. When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.

  I chased her, like a man chasing his hat in a high wind, and she kept blowing away. It wasn’t love or desire I felt most clearly with her, but anxiety. She blurred my own sense of what was real, so that I had to keep checking, keep tabulating. I was like someone who, after a shock, feels himself all over. Because Sheri never said, I’m hungry, It’s cold in here, or What time is it? I was always on the verge of forgetting that there were such things as hunger, cold, and time, that life was a condition.

  Being with her was like having a permanent erection: It aches after awhile. I needed to be bored now and then—boredom is a time for imagining—but she wouldn’t let me. She said that boredom was a domestic emotion.

  It was as if we were in a race—a race toward some final, all-inclusive formulation. From time to time, I would think I was gaining on her, that we were talking about the same things, turning into a couple, presenting a united front to the world—but then she’d put on a burst of speed and leave me behind. It reminded me of a six-day bicycle race, with first one, then the other forging ahead. We went back and forth like this—and then she simply outdistanced me once and for all. She did this in the middle of the night, while I was asleep—it was like her to present herself as a dream.

  I woke up, to find that she was not in the bed. We slept entwined, like interlocking initials, and I was so used to her lying on top of me in the narrow bed that when she wasn’t there to hold me down, I floated to the surface of sleep. It was unusual for her not to be in the bed—she never woke in the night. She slept deeply, abandoning herself to it. Sleeping was the only thing she did with abandon, the only time she was anonymous.