‘Not just this second, I believe‚’ I answered, raising myself on my haunches and standing up, to let my legs think and the traffic of my heart run free again. ‘Not so very much just this second. But if you mean that I think to be called original is great praise, is rare praise, is, in point of fact, the only real praise – you’re quite right in that, Miss Susie – spot on. We use the word now to mean personal or unique; we mouth such nonsense as most original – and, worse still, we qualify even that. The most original whatever of the year. Whereas‚’ I declared, a mouthful and a sentence in itself, bit off in anger. I had found my stride now, literally and figuratively, and paced along the shore of newspaper at the foot of the couch, from the television perched awry upon the phonebook, to Aaron’s inflatable baseball bat, yellow and squeaky and shiny, propped in the corner of the front doorway. ‘The great thing about being original is that the only year that matters is the first one – everything after that is echoes. Original has nothing to say about the personal or the unique. It means simply of beginnings; something begins with me. Across the great colour-coded board of history, one of the lines, no matter how small, starts here.’ And Pitt banged his breast. Pitt was tumescent, towering.
‘That’s not what original means‚’ Susie declared, cold as cucumbers. ‘Original’s just the word you use, when you can’t think of anything else nice to say. Anyway, you weren’t original at all – you borrowed it all from Syme, and you may as well have left it unborrowed.’
‘Second hand’, I said, slowing down in breath and foot, ‘is better than third or fourth or fifth – which is what most people deal in. I believe that second hand is the best I can do. Pitt has a poor mind, but he spends wisely. He hunts for bargains, for tsatskes, as your mother would say. You should know.’
‘That’s another thing‚’ Susie said, and left it at that.
I stood and she sat in silence. The evening pressed upon us again, like a subtle flood we had neglected to keep at bay – spilling over and running through all our cracks, spreading to a broad expanse of dark and loneliness. I had been back only a week, but the water between us, crossed at first by the sudden bridge of arrival, had become impassable again, at least not without a thorough drenching.
‘I know you think I’m stupid‚’ she said, pressing her hands upon her lap. ‘I know you think I’m – unambitious. That I don’t care a bit about changing worlds or setting up monuments of Miss Susie Wielengrad for future ages. That I’m quite happy to leave things as I found them. That I take things as they are. But the fact is’ – and here the edge of her voice grew sharp, her hands unclasped – ‘I Know How To Live. Never mind if it’s all fifth hand. I was taught well. I knew what part of town to grow up in – Yorkville, between 2nd Avenue and the East River. I knew the best restaurants, the bagel bakery, the German coffee house to go to. I knew where to shop. I knew what to wear and when to wear it – the fashions, and which of them to follow, which to ignore. I knew who to have over for Sunday brunches and what to talk about and what to think about. The best new books; the bad ones it was OK to read on holiday. The walks to take on sunny mornings along the river, while the men played chess on the cold stone tables. The longer, colder walks in Central Park. That the only time it wasn’t tacky to wear my Barnard sweatshirt was jogging on the weekends along the side-streets between 1st and East End Avenue. Yes, I was a snob – I am a snob. We all dressed up for Friday nights at the synagogue on 79th Street, and we looked at the families in the pew behind us as if they were a little further from God. I knew just how much to believe – how much was appropriate – what I should never mind about, and when it was OK to be sentimental. I went to all the best galleries, and wasn’t too shy to say I liked art pretty. I never thought to leave my mark on the world – because I knew my place in it, and was never ashamed of simply being happy.
‘Even if it was all fifth hand; who cared? But now‚’ and here she took my hand, roughly, and pulled me towards the door and into the night and we stood on the driveway under a hundred stars (not a thousand or a handful, but a hundred, a compromise between the dull glow of the city and the enormity of the country), ‘I step outside and wonder where is the stink, where is the stink, and the beeping of the garbage trucks, and the dirty streets and the doormen watering them and the trash bags heaped on the corners? This isn’t home; I wasn’t taught how to live here. Where are the shops along the avenues, the bars, restaurants, hardware stores, cafés with cheap tables on the pavement? Where are the tailors and the laundrettes, squeezed into the ground-floor apartment blocks along the side-streets? Where are the girls from Brearly I used to know, and the aunts living ten blocks down, and the kids I taught and ran into Saturday nights at the kosher Italian? There is nothing here for me.’ And she sat down and shoved up on the hood of the Volvo, hoping to appease me by unhappiness, by the tenderness of misery, but I was only angry now, Pitt rising and venomous at last.
And I answered that I wasn’t taught how to live; that I never knew what to think or how to dress. That my father dropped out of high school to serve in Korea, because that’s what a young man did. ‘Don’t interrupt me, Susie – I know you know this – I’ve earned the right of repetition.’ All that was left of him by the end was too much kindness and a stupid humility and a tinkering obsession with his no-good job that was the only place his smarts had to go. (A certain amateur interest in immortality, an obsession not unlike my own, with the structures supporting the permanent monuments of our civilization – in his case, office blocks; in my own, books – and a firmly held belief that he could simplify the scaffolding.) My mother had an incident (with a boy and a bottle) in college and came home and never got over it and never talked about it and met my father in night school, where he was trying to get up in the world and she was trying to get back, and they married and both stopped dead where they were, because all they really wanted to do was avoid fuss. They avoided fuss until she died. Never underestimate the amount that gets done and doesn’t get done in the world out of the honest desire to avoid fuss.
So I was never taught how to live or what to think. Pitt had to go about all of that for himself. Pitt had to crib the material first hand. And so I declared to her, in the faint half-chill of summer midnight, to the bow of the crickets and the soft cymbal of the front-yard sprinklers, the words of the great Syme, uttered nearly two centuries before: ‘Let me not be among those wealthy men who pay their servants to attend to the tasks they should perform themselves. Let me then be among the servants, if you grant me leave to go over even old ground with a fresh hand, a clear head, and a curious heart.’
‘Oh, Pitt‚’ she cried, tucked up on the hood, ‘I wouldn’t mind so much, only all this has happened before. And if I hear again how your father nursed secret ambitions to … I don’t know what – I’ll scream.’
‘My father is a self-educated man …’
‘Your father is an uneducated man …’
‘Who wishes to better himself – yes, just that, though you flinch at the low-class phrase; better himself. And there’s nothing more honourable than …’
‘I can’t bear it – all these wasted lies.’
‘His book on the history of scaffolding, a first-hand account, could make his name in a small way, and that’s all he wants, and more, really, than he dreams of …’
‘You’re just the sort of man to come up with some elaborate nonsense to prove what nobody else would bother to boast of even if it were true. You’re too enthusiastic – it puts people off. You get these ideas and let them run away with you, that’s what Bunyon said; and this isn’t the first time. I said to him, Don’t get me started. What about that thesis you never finished at Oxford, where you wrote, against the best advice of all your tutors, about the history of silence –’
‘Only think, Susie‚’ I interrupted, a fresh vein pricked, a fresh flow of life’s blood pouring forth – ‘the single language of human thought utterly unchanged by time. Gestures of rebellion or contemplation that never lo
se their prime – that never require translation. The syntax, the punctuation of our thoughts – arranging them, filling the gaps between every spoken word, as much greater than the words themselves as the sea is greater than the shore. The first, most fundamental right we possess, to remain silent; Cordelia’s privilege and Hamlet’s final thought. History and literature are filled with the several often contradictory uses to which silence is put: political rebellion, and political punishment, and political consent; spiritual purification, and spiritual condemnation, and spiritual isolation. Silence invites and denies and ignores and distils, protests and represses and leaves us all for dead in the end – the dial tone equally of life and death. Can you think of a nobler subject to pursue?’
I had grown quite overheated by the flame of a former inspiration, quite red in the face, puffing and bedewed – conscious that when the fire went out the cold of misery would surge around again. Susie looked at me, and reminded Pitt suddenly and most improbably of the ham-fisted lawyer in The Caine Mutiny, who had prompted a necessary outbreak to prove a point, but disliked the job, and felt sick about it – an unflattering resemblance, I know, that did no justice to the thick bob of her hair, the wonderful little Jewish stubbornness of her nose, the rich, wide mouth and perfect, peach-shaped, apple-coloured, orange-scented cheeks.
‘Then why didn’t you finish it?’ she said, sliding off the Volvo. ‘Why did you – give up’ (the word Pitt would have chosen is flinch) ‘and run to New York?’
My fire was almost spent, my heart more and more choked in its own ash. ‘Because‚’ I sighed, ‘on that particular question … I ran out of things to say.’
‘And this time round‚’ Susie answered my sighing, breath for breath, ‘it’s hollow worlds.’
The great stupidity of life lies in the necessary repetitions, and this was an old argument, well grooved, running upon familiar lines. I marvelled (not for the first time) at our terrible, almost noble, even courageous, capacity to repeat and repeat and repeat; and imagined (not for the first time) the impossible spacious sweetness of a life in which everything was said only once. (Perhaps it would be very lonely.)
‘What if I were right this time?’ I said, quietly, across the little private corridor of evening air between our faces, three feet long, a head wide, above the pebbled cement of the driveway, in the broad expanse of night. ‘What if Pitt made good?’
‘Maybe‚’ she answers, quite calm and cold and matter of fact, pushing the loose net of the screen door with the flat of her small hand, and going inside, ‘I don’t want you to make good this time. I want you to make bad. I want to go home and give up. Maybe’, she repeats, ‘that’s what I want this time.’
*
And yet Pitt is an optimist, as I said before – Pitt is brave, redoubtable, a wonderful word that means nothing less than the ability to suffer doubt and faith in equal replaceable measures, again, again. And as I climbed the ivory tower towards Bunyon’s corner office, my heart rose once more at every step. How grand a thing is possibility, simpler and sweeter in its way even than triumph. For triumph brings with it a world of complications and fresh puzzles, but possibility is plain as a die or a coin, sharp-edged, straight-sided, offering the prospect of a single answer: yes. The hint and hope of a yes at every spin or turn. (Or, in my case, laborious submission of a phonebook-thick wedge of manuscript; but the principle, I insist, remains the same.) I had come to revise my opinions of – well, since Susie has broached the word, I may as well follow suit – Syme’s hopelessness:
I discovered among Sam’s papers an almost endless stream of denials, both equivocal and unequivocal; interested denials and uninterested denials; formal and informal denials, in pure and broken English; refusing funds, government cooperation, access to records, machinery, venues for lectures and demonstrations, employment, publication – all faithfully preserved by a Either who seemed to consider even the proof of rejection as some evidence of the esteem in which his son was held, some indication of the circles in which he moved. I, on the other hand, could not repress a kind of frustration – not unmixed by pity and admiration – at the … stupidity‚ I wish to say, but soften it to insensitivity, of a man who beats his fist so long against an unanswered door.
The door I beat at was answered, by a bellowed ‘Enter’, and I shouldered my way, briefcase first, into the room. Bunyon sat as I had imagined him, with his New Balance sneakers propped upon the desk, left over right, in a leaning tower pointing impossibly high at the stippled cardboard ceiling. A collared shirt fell unbuttoned at his neck, whence a tuft of grey hairs bristled, suggesting by some curious association the overwhelming urge of the man to scratch himself. ‘Pitt, my dear Pitt‚’ he cried, swinging himself to his feet to impress upon me once again the undeniable fact of his great, his superior, height, and took me wildly by the hand. ‘Have a seat.’
Pitt looked about him. There were three chairs in the room, and by some acrobatic feat Bunyon had now managed to occupy two of them, one by bottom, another by a draped leg. The third, a little wicker seat, stood across the desk, heaped to its frail arms with manuscript, whose title page bore the unmistakable blocks of meaningless lettering that promise such horrible repetition on the pages beneath. Pitt removed, by delicate operation, these pages. Pitt perched.
‘I have read’, Bunyon began, advancing at once into the academic arena, and prowling about, ‘your delightful, your exquisite little account of Captain Syme’s discoveries. (Is that what we should call them? I defer. Captain, by the by, was his final rank, I believe, having looked into the matter some time ago myself.) A terrific piece of historical legerdemain – I congratulate you, Pitt, warmly, Pitt. A wonderful stroke of luck, this Müller fellow, though a bit of a limp handshake, I think you’ll agree, on his own terms. Still, a real old-fashioned, stuck-in-the-stove-pipe treasure. Simply, a joy.’
Bunyon had a remarkable ability to damn not by faint but by enthusiastic praise. I knew his way, of course, foresaw the stinger waggling in the tail – yet I could not prevent in myself a slight swelling, out of that pride we all possess, which believes the most exuberant flattery to be in fact the plainest common sense, and wonders more that it should be so rare than that it has come at last. Pitt murmured a little, of course, and blushed – though, to be honest, Pitt struggles both with murmur and blush, the former often exploding into growls, the latter lost in native rosiness. However, Pitt’s blushes soon soured, mottled too deep for pleasure; and the growls came naturally.
‘A great pity’, Bunyon continued, without the least check in his stride, ‘that this will never do. No, it will not do.’
He lifted a heap of papers from the floor and dropped them heavily and dustily upon the green leather of his Civil War desk. I recognized them at once – even the shapes of paragraphs and the riddle of lettering too small to read grow familiar as a face, as the lines of a face, to an author. Only these were now scored by red ink, squiggled and desperate marks, evidence of a bloody battle. I rather feared that I – that Syme and I and Müller – had been defeated.
‘The trouble with you’, Bunyon continued, in his affectionate, intimate way, as if I had asked him, in all honesty, out of friendship, to tell me what it was, ‘is that you have always been interested in – conception. Conception, I know, is a blessing, but as Pitt conceives – friend, look to it. We, at the Department of History, University of Texas, Sub-department of Science – the little body under my special charge and care – deal in Ideas. By which I mean’, he declared, in a rough breath, warming to his theme, and winching his legs heavily to the ground, ‘an idea is simply what happens to a conception when the paint dries – until then, I’m afraid, it’s off limits. Can’t be sat on, leaned against, used or sold – can’t be touched, I’m afraid, Pitt. Them’s the rules. You have presented me here with a wonderful – if slightly dubious (you know it, Pitt, I know it – we must be cruel to be kind, even with ourselves, especially with ourselves) – moment of conception. A fascinating thing, no doubt �
�� when the brush is dipped and touches the blank canvas. But we don’t deal in moments of conception, you and I. Wrong trade. We deal in the history of ideas.’
‘I don’t understand‚’ said someone, who seemed to have borrowed the voice of Pitt, and made it squeak. (How terrible are the habits of humility, how deep ingrained. Christ has a great deal to answer for in praising the meek. Pitt’s mother was meek, by name and nature. Pitt’s father dined happily on humble pie, and ate up the crumbs. Pitt in the packed arena of his own skull is a champion equal to a thousand lions; but step for once out of that noble theatre and he flinches and ducks his head. His heart sinks to his boots and he steps on it. How much of misery begins not in true cowardice but the show of it.)
‘I don’t say it’s hopeless‚’ Bunyon assured me, delighted at his own condescension and general bonhomie. ‘I don’t say that.’
‘But words are things‚’ Pitt spluttered, roused at last to resistance by a memory of the distinctly reified words of Dr Edith Karpenhammer, which she spat out (slightly stained by lipstick) at a meeting of the Blue-stocking Society convened upon the question of ‘The Power of Language’. ‘And a small drop of ink‚’ I continued, heartened as always by the fibre of quotation, ‘falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands – perhaps millions – think.’
‘That’s just it‚’ Bunyon said, suddenly brisk, indicating by a change in the weather, a touch of the north in the wind of his speech, that it was time for me to go. ‘Exactly so. Show me the ink. Show me evidence of the revolutionary geognostic theory that inspired Wegener. Show me Syme’s conception with the paint dried – the idea. Show me, in short – for nothing else will do – a copy of the New Platonist.’
The Syme Papers Page 27
