Kafka Was the Rage Read online

  He waited while I sat there like a witness on the stand who can’t remember. Then he reached out his other hand so that he was holding the painting on either side, trapping it. Watching me all the while, he rotated it, like someone turning a wheel. Then he leaned it against the wall again, wrong side up. Look, he said. Turn them upside down and you can’t tell one from another.

  What? I stared at him in astonishment and a wave of disgust washed over me. He wasn’t smart after all. He was just a cop, an Irish cop.

  No, I said, that’s not true. It’s not that simple. But there was no point in arguing. I wasn’t talking to Meyer Schapiro; this wasn’t the New School. Anyway, my quarrel wasn’t with Scanlon—he was only an innocent bystander, after all, like me. We were just two men puzzled by love and art.

  I saw, at last, all at once, with a sadness that had been patiently waiting for me, that I would have to leave the painting. And that wasn’t all; it was more than that—I would have to leave Sheri there too, in that room, sprawled on the desk. It wasn’t, as Scanlon had said, a nice way to remember her.

  PART TWO

  After Sheri

  13

  There were lots of good talkers in the Village—that was mostly what we did—but Saul Silverman’s talk had high seriousness. This was one of our favorite phrases. It was from Matthew Arnold, whom none of us had ever read. It’s hard to explain what the expression meant to us—each of us would have given a different definition—but I suppose it meant trying to see the world as all of a piece. High seriousness meant being intimate with largeness, worrying on a grand scale. There was an evangelical element in it—Saul thought of ideas in terms of redemption. Our ideas would save us from our sins. He was a type that was fairly common at the time but that seems to have gone out of style.

  Talking was such a passionate act for Saul that he had grown a bushy mustache to conceal his mouth. To see the organ of his talk, the words being formed, the working of his lips and tongue, would have been too much. Sometimes he would put his hand over his mouth and speak through his fingers as well as his mustache. He had some kind of adenoidal impediment, so that he threw his head back when he spoke, like a rooster crowing.

  Saul reminded me of a boy named Meyer who was in my class in the fourth grade at P.S. 44 in Brooklyn. Meyer was thin, with dark crinkly hair and high, perpetually shrugged shoulders. His features were so emphatically articulated that even when he wasn’t doing anything he looked hysterical. When the teacher called on him Meyer would stand up in the aisle and throw his head back and gasp for air, pulling his voice unwillingly through his throat and sinuses and forcing it out of his nose. Once he got it out, his speech was extremely precise. He bit off his consonants and spat them into the room, and I remember thinking, though not in those terms, that it was the jagged precision of the words he used that made them pass with such difficulty.

  There were two or three other boys like Meyer in the school—skinny, with hawklike faces, curved noses, and strangled voices. They were all Jewish and I assumed in my mechanistic eight-year-old way that their trouble in speaking had something to do with the structure of their noses. I thought that speech was a kind of wailing for them, a cry of rage and despair. They were torn between the desire to hurl their words in our faces and a tradition of secretiveness. Their speech got as far as their noses, like a head cold, and stopped there.

  Though I was a good student, I knew I could never be as smart as those Jewish boys who were strangled by their smartness. They were bred to it—their minds had the quickness of racehorses. They had another advantage too: While I was essentially cheerful, filled with a distracting sociability, there was a brooding sadness in the most brilliant of the Jewish boys that turned them inward and made them thoughtful. I saw them as Martians, creatures from a more advanced planet. Next to them I would always be a southerner, a barbarian. They were at home in the city in a way that I wasn’t. Their racing minds were part of its teeming.

  You can’t say such things now without being called anti-Semitic—yet even with all my Catholic mythologies I don’t think that I was anti-Semitic. In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic—it was the first thing we noticed. It was as natural to us as our names. We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it. To us it was always Halloween. Most of our jokes were ethnic jokes—we hardly knew any other kind. We found our differences hilarious. It was part of the adventure of the street and of the school yard that everyone else had grown up among mysteries. Because we were always surprising to one another, there was an element of formality in our friendships.

  I still felt some of this surprise, this formality, this mystery, when I was with Saul. He too had a face like an exclamation and a curved nose that the mustache tried to soften. He was small and slight and already balding, as if he had talked his hair off, had raised his eyebrows so many times that his hair had been pushed back once and for all.

  Saul was one of the last of a line of romantic intellectuals. Not satisfied to change the way people thought, he wanted to change the way they felt, the way they were, their desires. He was a reformer at heart, but it was not people’s politics he wanted to influence; it was their sensibilities. He thought such changes could be brought about by making distinctions. He saw everything as a making of distinctions. He amassed them the way other people amassed money or possessions. He pursued them as some men pursue women. One day, when all the distinctions had been made, we would know what beauty was, and justice.

  While we were close friends, there were many things I didn’t know about Saul. The war still hovered over us; there was a sense of pushing off from it. Yet I had no idea what Saul had done during the war, whether he had been in the service or exempt for some reason. Though I didn’t care one way or the other, it was odd that I didn’t know about those three or four years of his life. He had a job after the war, but I couldn’t have said what he did. I walked him home all the time, yet I had never been in his apartment. When I picked him up there, he was always waiting for me downstairs.

  Occasionally Saul referred in a convoluted, Jamesian way to a female companion, but I never met her, and I sometimes thought that she was only a theory of femininity, a sketch for a character. It was hard to picture Saul with a woman. He never talked about sex, and I wondered whether he made love or distinctions with this shadowy creature.

  When he got sick Saul was working on a review for The New Leader. Isaac Rosenfeld, who was the book editor, sometimes gave reviews to friends, or friends of friends, even when they hadn’t published anything before. This was not as frivolous as it sounds, because the Village was full of young men like Saul who could be trusted to turn out a decent piece. Just as Negroes knew about jazz, Jews were expected to know how to write reviews.

  Isaac had given Saul The Well Wrought Urn, by Cleanth Brooks, a collection of essays on wide-ranging subjects like romanticism, irony, and great neglected poets, and Saul was rereading all the original texts to refresh his memory. At the rate he was going it would have taken him a year to write the review, a review of one thousand words.

  At first when he got sick Saul thought he had the flu, because it was going around. When the symptoms persisted, he suspected mononucleosis. He was tired all the time and we had to give up our late-afternoon walks, when we would stroll through the Village like a couple of peripatetic philosophers.

  He disappeared for a while. There was no answer when I called him at home—I didn’t have his number at work—and I couldn’t imagine where he was. I thought of his invisible female companion and wondered whether he might, after all, be spending his evenings with her.

  Then he phoned me from his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn. He felt exhausted, he said, and needed someone to look after him. I offered to go and see him, but he put me off. I found out later that he was having tests in the hospital.

  A couple of days after that, he called again and asked me to come to Brooklyn. His illness, he said, was serious.

  Serious? I said. How do you
mean, serious?

  He laughed. Then he said, High serious.

  Saul’s mother was a widow, a small, neat woman with a bony face like his and anxious eyes. She had a painful smile, as if she had been musing on the fact that she belonged to the first generation of Jewish mothers to be categorically discredited by their sons. In the current issue of Partisan Review there was a story about a Jewish mother, another widow, who had thrown herself across the door of her apartment, defying her son to return to his tenement in Manhattan without the bag of food she had prepared for him. In his desperation, driven wild by love and rage, the son had beaten her about the head and shoulders with a rolled copy of The New York Times. Everybody in the Village was talking about the story, which was by a writer we had never heard of. What a stroke! they were saying—to beat his mother with the Times.

  Of course Saul’s illness, whose exact nature was still unknown to me, put a great strain on his mother. She had taken a position toward it and developed a defensive strategy. Saul would be all right, she said, if he would only let himself relax. She believed that his illness was caused by tension, or even by attention, because, like those Jewish boys in P.S. 44, Saul always paid attention. He never relaxes, she said to me. He thinks too much; he takes the world on his shoulders. She watched him constantly to see whether he was thinking. She had a plan to keep him from thinking, and it was clear that she regarded me as a threat to that plan.

  I had blundered into an old debate and it was a relief when Saul suggested that we go for a walk. We hadn’t taken a walk together in what was for us a long time. His mother immediately objected that it would tire him but then she saw in his face that she tired him more. Still, as we put on our coats there was an appeal in her eyes. She was asking me not to take him on an intellectual bender, not to make him think. “You can go to Prospect Park,” she said, grasping at the straw that there was less incentive to think in a park.

  The day was sunny and cold, as if Brooklyn had been preserved in a refrigerator for us. Saul was silent for the first few minutes, digesting his mother’s absence, adjusting his breathing. He wore a navy blue knitted cap she had insisted on and a heavy, dark, timeless-looking overcoat, like a chesterfield. I had never seen the coat before—it must have been his father’s. It was too big for him and muffled his gestures.

  Poor thing, he said, still going back to his mother, it’s hard on her. She’s an intelligent person, yet all her impulses are maternal and stereotypical. She feels the falseness of her position, but she can’t help it. She struggles against the stereotype like a woman in labor, but nothing new comes forth.

  At the entrance to the park a vendor was selling kosher frankfurters and knishes. The knishes smelled good, but under the circumstances—under what circumstances?—I didn’t think it was the right time to eat a knish. With the sun buttering it up, the park was warmer than the street. Though most of the trees were bare, there were enough evergreens scattered around to keep the landscape from looking stripped or naked. Children raced by on skates and bikes, like leaves blowing. People walked dogs and there were squirrels and pigeons along the path.

  She keeps running baths for me, Saul said. She tries to drown my thoughts, like kittens.

  I was studying him out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge how sick he was. I didn’t feel that I could ask him—his sickness had become a part of his secretiveness, his Jewishness, which was even more pronounced now that he was back in Brooklyn at his mother’s house. He didn’t look sick, yet there was something in his voice—a remote hilarity—that hadn’t been there before. Also—and this was a detail I would notice—his sentence rhythms were different.

  Though I hadn’t been in Prospect Park for more than ten years, I knew it well. When I was eight or nine I was a great reader of Tarzan books and Prospect Park was later to become my jungle, my Africa. With the odd literalness of young boys I took the word prospect in a different sense, as referring to my own prospects, which were as yet wide open.

  I used to bicycle to the park from my side of Brooklyn. It was several miles, but this was nothing on my bike. I chased butterflies with a net and mounted them on cardboard squares. Sometimes I rented a boat with money from my newspaper route and rowed to the end of the lake. What I liked especially about Prospect Park was the fact that, once you were well inside, you couldn’t see buildings, as you always did in Central Park.

  You know, I said to Saul, I used to play here.

  So did I, he said. I probably saw you.

  What did you think of me? How did I impress you?

  Look at that silly goy, he said. What a goyish bicycle.

  I used to catch butterflies. I rowed a boat.

  He smiled. Yes, you would. If I had seen you I would have pitied and envied you.

  He was looking around at the park as if he was taking notes, summing it up, trying to arrive at a definition of the ideal park. He was comparing this one to other parks he had only read about: the Bois de Boulogne, the English Gardens in Munich, the Boboli in Florence. His peculiarities made him so real that I could have hugged him.

  The path rose up to a little hill and I noticed that Saul was breathing hard. He was staring, too, staring at the pavement as if he had to concentrate on walking. This was the first real sign of his sickness and it seemed crazy to go on keeping quiet about it. Saul, I said, what is actually the matter with you? How long will it be until you can come back?

  He took me by the arm, as if I was the one who was sick, and drew me off the path to a bench overlooking the lake. The bench was placed with an unerring sense of rightness. All by itself on a little curve of the bank, it was overhung by a tree that seemed to embrace it.

  Imagine, Saul said when we had settled ourselves, that you’re a character in a well-written and original novel, a person remarkable for your poise, wit, and presence of mind.

  Gladly, I said. I can think of several such novels, dozens of them, in fact. But what am I to be poised and witty about?

  About not making a fuss, he said. I want you to enter into a conspiracy with me, to join a movement, sign a manifesto, against the making of fusses.

  This was alarming, but I kept up the sprightliness. Why should I make a fuss?

  He pulled off the knitted cap. It wasn’t that cold in the sun. His hair was standing up in a funny way. He said, I’m not coming back.

  His words went into my head like a shooting pain and I looked away across the lake. People were strolling along a path on the other side. The lake wasn’t very wide here and I could see the calm, parklike expressions on their faces. A little boy came up from behind us and threw a stone into the water. A pigeon pecked at a candy wrapper and the wind rustled a dismembered newspaper in the wire trash basket. The homeliness of the park, its sweetness, was so piercing that I felt I had been wasting my life.

  When Saul said he wasn’t coming back, I was sure that he had tuberculosis. It was thin, intense people like him who got it. He would have to go to a dry climate, Arizona or New Mexico. I said, It’s TB you have, isn’t it?

  He was squeezing the knitted cap in his hands. He plucked a white cat hair from the nap and let it fall from his fingers. No, he said, I haven’t got TB. If it were only that. His lips went on moving silently beneath his mustache and as I watched it flutter, I wondered whether he would cut it off now that he was sick. A phrase came into my head: The quality of mercy is not strained.

  Saul looked around as if he was afraid of being overheard. He put his hand up and felt his hair. I have leukemia, he said.

  Leukemia? I said. The word was so unexpected. It seemed raucous to me, as if a bird—a tropical bird, a parakeet or a toucan—had cried out from one of the bare trees.

  I know, he said, I know. Why should I have leukemia? Where did it come from? How did it find me? He made a fist with his left hand and clapped his right hand over it as if he was corking a bottle.

  Slow down, I said, you’re going too fast. What makes you think you have leukemia? How can you be so sure? You can
’t get leukemia just by saying it.

  I was talking nonsense, yet I hoped to believe it. Let’s go back and start from the beginning, I said. You felt sick and you went to the doctor. He examined you, took blood, a urine specimen, and so on and sent them to the laboratory. Then you went back again and he told you that you have leukemia? This is what actually happened?

  If we reconstructed the circumstances, two critics, two close readers like us, we might find that the doctor and the lab technicians had made an unwarranted assumption. Saul loved to point out unwarranted assumptions. Sometimes he read books just for the pleasure of laughing at their logic.

  I know what you’re thinking, he said. I went through the same progression. You’re going to tell me that they misread the evidence—as if it was a poem. You’re going to remind me of Seven Types of Ambiguity. But there is no ambiguity—I’ve got leukemia. Believe me—I’ve got it.

  I didn’t know whether I believed him or not. We never believe such things until they’re over. You need leisure to think about tragedy. Maybe you can face it only in the absence of the person, after the fact. Or you can do it only when you yourself are in despair.

  You know what it’s like? Saul said, coming out of nowhere like that? It’s like getting a threatening letter from someone you don’t even know. When the doctor pronounced the word leukemia, I nearly slapped him in the face. I screamed Fuck! and Shit! But what good does it do to go on like that? I don’t see why I should disease the way I speak.

  I realize, he went on—he was talking in a rush—I realize that to make a fuss is a normal reaction, but why should we? We’re not ordinary people, you and I—I don’t see why we should feel obliged to become ordinary now.

  He had worked it all out. Like his mother, he had taken a position, developed a strategy. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He made it into a rhetorical gesture. What I’m asking you to do, he said, is to go on being yourself. I need you to be yourself—don’t turn pious on me. For the sake of our old conversations, for the sake of our friendship—for the sake of literature, if you like—don’t speak to me in a hushed voice. Don’t patronize me.