by John Gardner
Mickelsson had gone to listen to him every time he could, the first professed revolutionary he’d met who wasn’t visibly crazy. Then, as suddenly as he’d arrived (they’d thought he was in the livingroom reading the paper), Stewart had vanished. F.B.I. men had come to the house to ask questions. “How long have you known Mr. Stewart, Professor?” “Do you know his present whereabouts?” “Have you ever been in Seattle?” They would not explain what the problem was. For the first time, Mickelsson had fully understood Ellen’s helplessness and anger, her impatience with “so-called Reason.”
Though he still disliked the plays her friends did—plays her writings (and many other people’s) gave what Mickelsson considered a kind of fraudulent legitimacy—plays which looked for inspiration to the French (whom, one and all, Mickelsson with whole-hearted bigotry believed and frequently declared to have been back-stabbers, fakes, and perverts at least back to Caesar’s time)—Mickelsson was a great deal more sympathetic than formerly to her aims. Though aims and means were, in Mickelsson’s opinion, inseparable, for the sake of domestic tranquillity he kept quiet, insofar as he was able, about Ellen’s preferred means. That Ellen’s friends were awakening audiences to the crimes of the age seemed to him unlikely. If anything, he thought, her Thespian warriors were playing the part of Stalin’s “useful idiots,” not raising consciousness (as the slogan makers of a later decade would love to say, innocent of any suspicion that they were quoting Carl Jung) but stiffening the resistance of a decadent society, hurrying up the inevitable clash, plowing and fitting the ground for dragons’ teeth. He might have thought it was his duty to protest, had not the Establishment seemed, by its violence and wonderful stupidity, so eager to deserve every pint of the bloodshed that was coming. The scent of war was everywhere, not just in the San Francisco area. And so he had sat at the desk in his upstairs study overlooking the street, writing papers, preparing classes, listening with the back of his mind for trouble in the children’s bedrooms, and letting Nature take its course.
Ellen thrived on it. Sometimes, he would swear—though all talk of the occult was to him claptrap—she would get a kind of halo or glowing aura when she and her friends brought off (and escaped alive) a particularly offensive “production.” Sometimes none of them, Ellen and her friends, would sleep for days, plotting against audiences or reviewing their successes. Then, inevitably, the reverse swing of the pendulum would come, the crash, as they called it. She would lie in bed crying, clinging to him as, in his childhood, he or, later, his younger sister and cousins, non-swimmers, would cling to an inflated rubber tube at the swimming-hole. “Oh God,” she would wail. “Oh God, Mick, take care of me!” He would explain to her, holding her, what he thought was going on psychologically, how the psyche was never fooled by ethical simplifications: the more fiercely one lied, however noble the purpose, the more fiercely the genetically programmed sense of human decency struck back. He would stare up at the ceiling, stroking her hair, cradling her as he would a child, explaining, explaining. By the time he got it clear, so that she could not help but understand, she would be sleeping. Even if she’d fully understood what he told her—he believed even now that what he’d said was true—she forgot it all as soon as she was back with her friends, “those dumb sons of bitches,” as he too often described them. Her depressions, at first infrequent, then more and more common, became darker. Sometimes when he came home from a lecture or convention he would find that Ellen had been in bed for two days and nights, leaving the children to fend for themselves. “The kitchen,” he would tell her, quietly, sternly, “looks like a God damned municipal dump.” “But what am I supposed to do?” she would wail. “I’m so fucking depressed.” She saw an analyst twice a week, which made Mickelsson seethe. (Mostly the cost, he would now admit.) Everyone knew she saw an analyst twice a week. “Come the revolution,” Mickelsson said, “the first middle-class parasites to go will be the analysts.”
Then the decade had turned; they were now in Providence—after one year in Heidelberg, Germany—good for him and, sadly, good for her. San Francisco was dead. The Actors’ Workshop had moved to New York and promptly failed; the mime troupe was mostly in jail, or so he’d been told. She had begun to put up posters—in her study, in the kitchen—about women’s rights. He’d been largely in agreement with what the posters said, with one or two reservations, and they’d sometimes, like superior people, joked about it. He hadn’t understood that the complaint was personal. He did the dishes, some of the cooking, some of the house-cleaning. She’d never wanted to be in on the handling of the money, or so he’d thought; he’d given her an allowance. “Like a child,” she said once. “But, Jesus,” he said, injured and astounded, “Jesus Christ!” Full of doubts, because Ellen was inexperienced and impetuous, he’d given her control of their finances. It was a burden he was glad to be rid of, of course, though he worried. And even now he had not fully understood that she considered him an absolute, unreconstructible male chauvinist pig. Then came—though they’d somehow missed it in San Francisco, or so he believed (now he sometimes wondered)—liberated sex. She’d gone to conventions on contemporary drama and had “slept with people”—both women and men—as she was careful to report. (It had been happening for some time when she finally brought it out, both of them drunk, sitting happily in front of the fireplace.) His world reeled; then he began to do the same at philosophy conferences. On principle, he thought. Versuchen wir’s! (“It’s a fact,” he would sometimes tell male friends, when he was as blurry of eye as an ocean creature, “the most sexually ravenous beasts in the world are woman philosophers.” He would leer crazily—so he saw himself—like his strangely innocent football friends, long ago, when they talked about “beaver.”) Unlike Ellen, he was unable to bring himself to report his sins, even drunk. When they had fights about Ellen’s playing around—a phrase that, inexplicably, filled him with rage—it always seemed later that it was not her infidelity that brought on the fights, nor his guilt at his own unconfessed infidelity, but the gin they’d drunk. It had seemed not in the real world, as real human beings, that they attacked each other, but as brightly painted puppet-like creatures in an eerie projection, a dream-world where blows (they had often come to blows—Mickelsson holding back, doing damage enough, Ellen laying in on him with everything she had, pitifully girlish, though sometimes he came out with a puffy face) had no force, whatever their violence, and words, whatever their viciousness, would prove hard to remember later. In the morning they would be careful of each other, as of people who’ve been wounded and will never again be whole. He understood only now, he believed, what had really been going on. They’d both been idealists. They’d been brought up, both of them, in families where fidelity was assumed, the marriage bond inviolable; and when they’d left that pattern, following the fashion of their friends and time (Ellen smiling, Mickelsson looking dangerously intense), enjoying the usual excitement of the chase and the cheap thrill of liberation, they’d become like lost children. Decency striking back. They’d become anxious. Soiled. (She too had known it. He remembered how one morning, after he’d fallen asleep dead drunk on the livingroom carpet, he’d awakened to find that she’d laid out tulips in a circle all around him.) Mickelsson’s greatest pleasure, toward the end of their marriage, had been lying in bed with her, holding her quietly in his arms as she slept. If dawn had never come, or the next night’s party, the next philosophy or drama convention, they would doubtless have lasted forever, like their parents.
“Is she happier without you?” Jessica asked.
“On the whole,” he said, then quickly raised his hand, palm out. “No pun intended! Purest accident!”
She shook her head, excusing it. “As my aunt Rose used to say, ‘God spare us.’ ” She tried to hide a yawn.
He put his hand back down onto Jessica’s foot. “Anyway, yes, she’s happier. I hope. Fine young buck to keep her company—another ‘theater person.’ I pay them handsomely to stay out of my hair.”
She stu
died his eyes, suspicious. “How handsomely?”
“Thousand a month,” he said. “Most months.”
“That’s crazy!”
He shrugged. “It’s all I can afford.”
A tuck came to the corner of her mouth, making the dimple show, and after she’d thought for a moment, she said, “You’re establishing a precedent, you know. When you get into court you’ll be stuck with it.”
He made his face worried. “You think I should’ve hit her with a hammer?”
She shook her head slowly and looked up at where the wall met the ceiling. “I think you should try to be more serious about all this.”
He squeezed her foot, then playfully ran his fingertips halfway to her knee. “First thing tomorrow,” he said. It came to him, all at once, that the room had grown light. The birds were singing like crazy. “Gee-whillikins,” he said, looking at his wristwatch, “it’s time for you to get up and jog!”
She laughed. “No chance! You want to sleep in the guest room?”
He checked her eyes. “There’s only one bed in the world I want to sleep in right now,” he said; when her face showed panic, he added quickly, though it was not what he’d meant to say—and perhaps, he would think later, not even what Jessica had wanted him to say—“and that’s at my apartment.”
“You won’t fall asleep driving there?” She frowned, eyelids partly lowered.
“How far is it? Half a mile?” He shrugged and leaned forward as if to get up, but he didn’t yet.
“You’ve been drinking, though. Are you sure you’re awake enough?”
“I’m terrific,” he said. “Listen, don’t see me to the door. Stay right here. Close your eyes. You need a blanket?”
She shook her head.
Now at last, reluctantly, he did rise. He moved toward the head of the couch, where he could look down at her face. Her pallor startled him. What if his keeping her up all night made her ill? Jews were a sickly people. Brilliant and good-hearted, but prone to allergies and infirmities. He pointed at the bridge of her nose as if his hand were a gun. “Close your eyes,” he said. “I’ll let myself out. The door locks automatically, doesn’t it?”
“Mmm,” she said. “To tell the truth, I really am fading.”
“Good. Sleep, then. You’re sure I can’t get you a blanket?”
She moved her head, just a little, from side to side on the couch cushion.
“You haven’t closed your eyes,” he said.
She smiled. Her eyelids fluttered, then lowered. She seemed asleep already.
He bent down, thinking of kissing her on the lips, then kissed her on the forehead. As he straightened up, he saw a shine on her cheek—the path of a tear. He stood as if frozen in a slight bow, startled, his hands clasped in front of him. After a moment he took his pipe from the coffeetable and hung it between his teeth, then crossed silently to the door and let himself out.
Mickelsson sighed, coming out of his dreams and memories, finding himself in Binghamton already, without any sense of how he’d gotten there. The shadow of the Jeep on the road beside him darted along too quickly, like something overtaking him. Traffic churned around him—pickup trucks, buses, hurrying cars—demanding his full attention as no doubt it had done for miles now, though his mind had been elsewhere. He hunted for his pipe, stuck it in his mouth mechanically, eyes on the road, and lit it. Monday. Plato and Aristotle at ten. Ruefully, he shook his head.
Now the campus opened out in front of him, an immense factory-complex of aluminum and brick. Possibly the ugliest campus in America. So he had thought when he’d first arrived, shuddering at his fall. He could not say that, with increasing familiarity, the campus had become more pleasing to the eye. But his heart calmed at sight of the place, exactly as—after his hours of classes and conferences—his heart would calm, late tonight, when he burrowed into the darkness of the Endless Mountains.
Plato and Aristotle at ten. A course for beginners.
Taught by Peter J. Mickelsson.
Incredible.
6
“But what was ‘Plato saying,’ really?” he inquired of his class, or rather, looking over them, one eyebrow lifted, inquired ironically of the empty blackboard at the back of the room. He leaned forward, waiting, though they all seemed persuaded that the question was rhetorical—bent over their notebooks, pencils poised, ready to write down and underline and adorn with multiple exclamation points whatever it should turn out that, according to Professor Mickelsson, Plato was saying. The semester was only three weeks old. Most of his students were freshmen or sophomores, shining-faced innocents waiting eagerly for wisdom, or what they took for wisdom—things they could write down and make use of in life, like algebraic method or the rhyming saws one picked up, as they’d no doubt learned by now, in the Anguish Department (“ ‘Forlorn!’ The very word is like a bell …”)—each of them dressed in the uniform of the age, formerly the uniforms of streetworkers or cowboys, bleached-out jeans and workshirts their mothers had bought them (so Mickelsson imagined) at Saks, watching him with interest, hair-triggered to laugh if he should happen to make a joke, or groan if he should ask them to take out paper for a quiz, and groan again when he said “Time’s up!” Only one of the students in this class, the would-be suicide he’d met during the summer, Michael Nugent, was a junior—not that one would have guessed. He showed no sign of the typical junior’s amused, glossy confidence. He seemed, if anything, even more earnestly out after wisdom than his classmates, watching Mickelsson like a crazed hawk, now grinning, now showing fear, sometimes looking around in troubled rage, as if, for some reason, he’d come to hate it that he’d been born a carnivore yet could not help seeing his classmates as chickens and mice.
Mickelsson was seated, as usual, on the front of his desk, his pipe in his hand, his heavy right leg swinging. On the tree outside his window, a half-dozen leaves had turned bright yellow. Two young sparrows darted back and forth near the glass as if trying to get a look at the clock. Alan Blassenheim, probably the brightest of this semester’s crop—though hopelessly, frantically in love with his own wild, undisciplined opinions and mildly corrupted, Mickelsson suspected, by a business-world background (his father was “in plastics”) that would tend to make him unduly quick to compromise, too easily satisfied by the stylish and commercial—poor Blassenheim looked powerfully tempted, almost driven, to raise his hand, whether or not he was sure he knew the answer. He had the ways of an athlete: Get in there and fight, don’t think! Mickelsson averted his eyes from Blassenheim’s, lest he lead the boy into temptation.
“Put it this way. It may or may not be, as Miss Mariani points out …” He nodded polite acknowledgment toward the girl who’d raised the issue—a young woman thin of arm and leg, large of face, heavy of eyelid. She sat hungrily smoking a cigarette, awkwardly knocking the ashes off onto a makeshift ashtray of folded notebook paper. “That is,” he said, “it may or may not be that, as I. F. Stone argues, Socrates was a fascist and Plato, as his defender, must have been more or less the same. It’s a question we can hardly judge directly, of course, since none of us was there.” He smiled and they dutifully smiled with him. “All we have is Plato’s writings, so the only question we’re competent to deal with is, ‘Just how fascistic is Plato’s Republic?’ ”
He paused for an instant, making sure of their attention. Most of them were writing furiously in their notebooks. Miss Mariani made a show of looking interested, as if her question about Plato’s fascism had been, for some time now, a matter of concern to her. Not that he blamed the poor girl. It was a bitch, trying to learn what to ask, what to think, what to do to get attention. It was cruelly unfair and always had been, the whole teaching-and-learning business. He wished the whole lot of them back in Eden, where all you had to know was the difference between apples. “You’ll notice that Stone is very quick to use phrases like ‘Plato was saying.’ Should that bother us at all? Any reasonable objections?”
He waited, hoping for any hand but Blassenheim
’s or Nugent’s, the terrible two. Nothing, of course, not even from them, and of course nothing from poor Miss Mariani. He sighed. “All right. Plato—‘the dramatist,’ as we called him earlier, as some of you may recall—” He smiled; they smiled. “Plato, or Socrates, or some Socrates invented by Plato and not necessarily to be confused with either Socrates or Plato—somebody, anyway—argues in The Republic that the masses can’t be trusted. Is that fascism, in itself?” They waited and, when the pause lengthened, looked up expectantly. “At least we can grant that it’s an excusable mistake,” he said. He raised his pipe to his lips and pulled. It was out. “Think of Hitler’s Third Reich.” Usually when you dropped an allusion to Hitler their interest increased, as if the subject guaranteed that now, at last, you must say things worthy of their notebooks. “A mass of citizens full of ignorant opinions, mainly, of course, ‘the Wagnerian morass,’ as Nietzsche calls it, anti-Semitism” (Nugent nodded quick, angry agreement). “… a madman willing to make use of anything for his own aggrandizement …” He found the matches, lit one, and held it above the pipebowl, hurriedly moving the flame from side to side. “To what extent can we pin such things on Plato? Certainly The Republic has no room for a Hitler; Socrates explicitly condemns that kind of thing, and he speaks persuasively on how it comes about, how the mob wants simple answers and the strong man, the bully, comes along and offers them.”
“Just like Reagan,” Nugent said, pretending to be talking to himself. Mickelsson decided to ignore it. There was much one might say of Mr. Reagan as bull to the Nietzschean “herd“—Nietzschean buffoonery vs. Hollywood buffoonery, that is, “harmonious classicism” housed in cowboy good intentions and fangless wit. But it was hardly to the point.
“Try this, then,” he said. (Nugent was still muttering.) “Does the fascism we’re annoyed by lie in the stupidity of the masses, that is, their preference for cheap solutions backed by force—mental fascism? Obviously, Socrates frowns on that too.” Some of the class nodded. “But think, now. Perhaps we can nail Plato yet! Possibly the problem was deeper, the very concept, however blurry in the German mind, of transcendent ideals against which multitudes of people can be measured—Gypsies, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, not just Jews, though mainly Jews, certainly. Was the problem—the tendency toward fascism—the belief in ‘transcendent ideals’ against which whole groups of people, as I was saying, can be measured and found to be ‘defective’? Transcendent ideals—immutable forms, the Realities behind Actuality: as some would put it—are much frowned upon these days. Even Heidegger, whose philosophy gave a certain comfort to the Nazis, had no patience for transcendent ideas; and the feeling’s standard—the existentialists, the so-called hermeneutics …” He watched the class write down existentialists, hermeneutics. He swung his leg.
