Somebody had picked her up and brought her to Levin’s apartment, to a party reeking of tobacco smoke and cheap wine. She had heard of him but hadn’t read a single line of his writing. She was put off by his arrogance, pomposity, and scorn. He sat on the spacious bed as if it were a throne. He behaved like a lord, and treated those present as his subjects.
“He was court jester and lord all in one. On the bed he looked like the crazy captain of a sunken ship.”
With gestures he commanded attention and “awarded” his subjects. He would gesture to somebody to pass him their cigarette; he’d take a puff or two and back he’d send it; from another he’d sip from their glass and give it back. It was as if he loved commanding everyone to serve him but the things he required were so paltry that turning him down would have seemed silly. Some sat next to him on the bed. She remembered an episode with a friend of Levin’s. Because of her smile, which seemed frozen to her face, the woman had resembled a toy doll. Levin loved to “terrorize” his friends with gifts, something The Widow only later figured out. He gave the woman something warm and woolen—between a kerchief and a shawl. His “show” in doing so drew the attention of everybody at the party: first he insisted on having the woman unwrap the gift but she did so too slowly for his taste. Levin nervously grabbed the present from her hands, impatiently ripped off the paper, and draped the shawl over her head, which was obviously uncomfortable for the woman, she felt in all of it an act of violence, not goodwill, and she was right. Levin arranged the kerchief on her head, adjusted it as if he were a photographer preparing his subject for a photograph, and then, having had enough, he yanked the kerchief off and announced loudly, “Ah, Masha, you’ll never be Ingrid Bergman!”
The Widow had been slightly sickened by the scene and asked where the bathroom was. Out of curiosity she opened the medicine cabinet, where she was greeted by vials of medicine lined up on the shelf like little soldiers. And here, one thing completely unrelated to the other, in the indifferent space of somebody else’s lavatory, as she read the labels on the little bottles, she burst into tears, precisely as if the milligrams, medical terms, and instructions on the containers (3x1, 1x1) were ciphers encoding her destiny going forward. She was swept by a dull inertia, although the feeling also electrified her. Perhaps this was how people contemplating suicide felt . . .
“We never know what attitudes or situations contain the potential to enthrall us. There are moments in which we can slip and careen off in some different direction than we’d meant to go. Such situations or attitudes might, for instance, be decisive for me but not for you. Levin had perfect intuition, perhaps only misanthropes have such intuition. I think he sensed that a change of some sort happened during my brief absence, because when he caught sight of me he slapped the bed with an imperious whack and commanded me, with a gesture, to sit next to him.”
She sat down so compliantly that she surprised herself. He ordered her, again by gesture, to put her feet up on the bed, and she, by gesture, responded that she probably first ought to take off her shoes, and he abruptly, and almost roughly, pulled her legs, still shod, onto the bed, and then, arms crossed over chests, they sat next to one another without a word.
Levin seldom looked people in the eye. Instead he’d tuck his head into his shoulders and sniff the air around him. That’s how it was then, he watched her out of the corner of his eye, obviously pleased with the outcome of the situation. He stretched out on the bed with the same ease that other people walk or sit. She felt a peculiar lassitude, whether pleasant or unpleasant she couldn’t say, course through her veins like a drug. She had the feeling that on the bed, on that anchored craft, she’d be afloat for a long time to come . . .
The Widow grinned . . .
“Who knows what was buzzing around in my crazy young head at the time! I loved reading. Love of letters and a fascination with a living writer are not so very original at that age, are they? Literature has kept itself afloat on that, on the enchantment women feel for books and writers. Into the foundation of every male national literature (there are only male national literatures) are built the time, energy, and the imagination of nameless female readers. But you know that full well yourself, lelkecském . . .”
The Widow’s pleasure at alluding to her age, more by tone than words, and in addressing people younger than herself with lelkem or lelkecském (Hungarian words she had kept in her vocabulary, meaning darling or my dear), and her unassuming theatricality—all this belonged to the stylistic repertoire of now-vanishing East-European intellectual mannerisms, which The Widow herself had identified, with Levin, as his “pomposity” . . .
“And then again,” she went on, “we are all vampires and feed on the blood of others. In this free-for-all of ‘promiscuity’ there are people who do not depend on others, and this makes them unusually attractive, but also despised. Levin was one such person. Literature was his only abiding fascination, perhaps because everything else could be taken from him. Literature nobody could take from him. Does that kind of allure make writers great? This I can’t say. Levin was obsessed with literature his whole life, literature was his only passion . . .”
“You mentioned an episode with Nabokov?” I asked cautiously.
“Ah, this was an innocent detail, yet so embarrassing . . . At one time Levin wrote to Nabokov, asking if they could meet. Nabokov never replied. Once, however, Levin blurted to a journalist that he’d exchanged a letter or two with Nabokov and Nabokov had written a few lines praising Levin’s literary talent with words so laudatory that Levin couldn’t actually bear to repeat them. Nabokov never openly exposed Levin, if he even knew of the little fabrication. And besides, Levin died first; Nabokov outlived him by ten years, so any such disavowal would be interpreted as churlishness on Nabokov’s part and malevolence rather than the truth. And so, lelkem, began the legend of how Levin was Nabokov’s sole equal as a literary rival, and that for years he’d languished in Nabokov’s shadow, mainly because of ‘damned geography,’ which only seems foolish at first glance. However, if you think a bit more about it, ‘damned geography’ really does determine literary destinies, as do gender, class, social status, good luck—the sort gamblers rely on . . .”
Levin, a Russian Jew, had had a complex biography, or more precisely a bio-geography. After the revolution, instead of heading West as did most Russians, more by chance than deliberate decision he went in the opposite direction, eastward to China and then Japan, and from there to Hong Kong, whence, in 1954—thanks to a gesture of the Dutch government’s with a commitment to accept four hundred Russian refugees from the Hong Kong refugee camp—he arrived in the Netherlands in 1955. Upon his arrival, he settled at Lange Voorhout 78 in The Hague, at Het Russenhuisje, the Little Russian House, in the former offices of Queen Wilhelmina, who had donated the royal property to an ecumenical foundation that turned it into a haven for elderly Russian refugees. Six years later, Levin moved from The Hague to Paris. There was a curious twist between The Widow’s and Levin’s biography. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, she and her parents found themselves among two hundred thousand Hungarian refugees in the Netherlands, whence, after her parents died, she moved to Paris, where she and Levin met. Although the Dutch were kind and generous hosts, The Widow remembered the Netherlands as a mind-numbing limbo, like the half-life of Sleeping Beauty’s glass casket. Levin described the same process of mind-numbing when he sojourned in Hong Kong, in the refugee hotel he wrote about in his novel The Peninsula Hotel, and waited for destiny to catapult him to the other side of the world. Like Levin, she and many other émigrés developed a certain sensitivity to spaces, cities, landscapes, street names, hotels, places, as if the environment in which we find ourselves is nothing more than the symbolic staging for the higher powers that determine our lives. “Take Switzerland, for example . . .” sighed The Widow with a touch of drama. “It’s the most dangerous country in the world! The Swiss make the finest watches, but when you’re there you can never tell the time; the minu
te and hour hands melt away as soon as you cross the Swiss border, the watch on your wrist goes haywire. In that little country, it’s as if you might drown in a glass of water, lose your way so completely that no one will ever find you again . . .”
I knew that the story of the Far-East routes of Russian emigration had not been given even a tenth of the attention dedicated to the Russian diaspora in western Europe and America, perhaps because they were both more modest and more complex and (to Europeans and Americans) more challenging to understand. All in all, the émigré stories about Russians in Iran, Indonesia, China, in Harbin and Shanghai, Japan, in Australia remained incomplete, untold, or simply out of focus. Levin himself was a cynic who expressed no sympathies for the Whites or the Reds. Sometimes he would merely defend his geo-biography, which was understandable. He had spent too much energy on continually conquering, adopting, and abandoning places to allow himself the luxury of indifference.
“Triviality is the salt of everything, triviality is the wind that moves the whole mechanism, lelkem,” continued The Widow. “The great names of art survive thanks to the trivial; the artwork by itself is clearly not enough. Indeed, why are we so sure that Van Gogh is still relevant thanks to his genius, while underestimating the detail of the severed ear? What do you remember living modern artists by? Is there a single one of them, man or woman, who has done nothing to scandalize the public? Where is a selfless, modest artist, show me! All artists are myth-makers. Some succeed in becoming famous while others do not. I am certain that Nabokov belongs to the myth-makers, that he was consciously or unconsciously raising himself a monument . . .” said The Widow brightly.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, if you think about it, what all of us experience as ‘artwork’ is always related in some way to the circus, the art of the country fair, the oldest art in the world.”
“An example would make it easier for me to follow what you’re saying . . .” I said.
“Clear examples are more readily found in the modern visual arts, in theater, performance art, than in literature. Still, here is a fresh one: of late, the literary marketplace has developed a penchant for long novels and many writers seem to be competing for who can write the longest-winded work. Everybody is suddenly awed by page count and they automatically declare these novels remarkable . . .”
“Well, many of them are, indeed, good.”
“Perhaps. But that initial awe at the number of pages has become, too readily, an aesthetic category. Is a novel of over a thousand pages the only ‘true novel’? This includes awe at hyper-productive authors; then the cruel declaration of the demise of authors who have not succeeded in coming out with a new book every year or two. What about the bookies who place bets on literary awards! All this is closer to categories of tenacity, brawn, and circus strongmen than it is to traditional aesthetic categories. Or take, for instance, what we call experimental literature. Experimental literature, today, implies themes of the bizarre, the weird, a literary manuscript that is more invalid-like than it is a work of literary skill, concept, and knowledge. The Modernist concept of experimental literature is quite different from today’s. The freak-show equivalent to today’s experimental literature would be ‘little people,’ ‘bearded ladies,’ ‘men of rubber,’ and so forth. The circus act is the oldest ‘artistic’ formula in the world, which many of us still carry in our cultural memory. As academic aesthetic arbitration is disappearing, and as the significant theories of art are all dead today, the only compass available for determining the difference between artistic and non-artistic work remains what is closest to the proto-idea of art, meaning the circus act,” concluded The Widow.
“We are on our way back, metaphorically speaking, to the art of the country fair?” I asked.
“So it would seem. What about the literary festivals that have recently become the most popular form of literary entertainment? In each European country you have a dozen international literary festivals every year. This money could be spent in more useful ways, everybody knows that, but it bothers no one. Today literary festivals are not so different from medieval country fairs, where the fair-goers stroll from tent to tent, from fire-eaters to jugglers. Writers today no longer burden their audience with a reading, they ‘perform.’ The audience, whose standards for reception have been honed by television and the internet, are more and more ignorant about literature, what they want is fast, unambiguous entertainment . . .”
Everything The Widow said sounded convincing. We had coffee and the famous Neapolitan sfogliatella, a little pastry with ricotta and thin layers of pastry shaped like a seashell, and then we went back to the hotel. I was planning to leave early the next morning, but The Widow warmly proposed . . .
“Why not ask the organizers to change your flight? Stay another day or two, lelkecském. I have nothing scheduled. We’ll explore the city together. Have you been to Naples before?”
She was right. Here I was in Naples for the first time in my life and I was in no rush. I kept having the feeling there was something else The Widow meant to impart.
7.
Museo Capodimonte
The kind organizers not only changed my flight, but they moved me from the expensive hotel, for which they had been paying, to an inexpensive bed & breakfast for which I would pay. The B&B was on Piazza Bellini. I was in the very heart of Naples, in the Centro Storico, and I had another whole day and a half free.
The next morning, after breakfast, I bid goodbye to the organizers and conference-goers and arranged to meet The Widow at Piazza Municipio. Three tourist buses were leaving from there to tour Naples: the red one, Route A, Luoghi dell’Arte; the purple one, Route B, Veduta del Golfo; and the green one, Route C, San Martino. We chose the Luoghi dell’Arte tour with the option of hopping afterwards onto a bus that was going in the opposite direction, along the Bay of Naples through Chiaia.
We took our seats on the open roof. The day was dazzling, the sky blue, and Naples spread out before us like an accordion. Pitura pompeiana streamed down the façades, washed out and worn in some places, crackled in others, and yet in others, glistening and fresh . . .
We got off the bus at the Museo di Capodimonte. The museum was housed in a grandiose, pleasantly cool palace. We strolled through, examining at a leisurely pace several of the museum’s treasures by Titian, Caravaggio, Breughel, stopping before Parmigianino’s breath-taking Antea, and then lingering before what must have been the most hideous exhibit in the entire museum: the canvases of Joachim Beuckelaer, a Flemmish sixteenth-century master who instructed the Italians, particularly Vincenzo Campi, on the depiction of food. We were enthralled for a time by these grotesquely sumptuous compositions of people and food, the contrasts between the silk sheen on the women’s finery and the slabs of lard-streaked pork flesh on their laps; between their mother-of-pearl complexions and the kitchen knives as long as swords in the women’s white hands. Parmigianini’s was a grotesque gigantism of abundance: chickens, hens, turkeys, partridge and quail, game, and sides of pork, beef, and lamb, an array of fish and shellfish, fruits and vegetables . . . People with detached, solemn expressions sank into the food they were displaying to the eyes and brush of the painter, and blended with it.
At the museum café we bought bottles of juice and went out to the park. The air was fragrant and sweet. I’d almost forgotten the meaning of the phrase “heady air.” The air truly was heady. The Widow and I sipped our juice and listened to the chirping of birds. Then The Widow looked over at me with her frank gaze . . .
“I owe you an apology for our performance together on the panel, lelkecském. The people yesterday came to see me, not you. I’m so sorry about that. Especially because defeat could be read on your face. Your chin quivered, you were on the verge of tears. I’m sorry, but somehow I’m guessing this is not the first time this has happened to you. Literary life is exciting only when you’re at your desk between four walls. All else evokes a feeling of defeat, both human and professional, if serious writing
can even be deemed a profession. I was the ‘little Buddha’ yesterday, people came to bow down to me. Not to me personally, who knows to whom or to what, really. And literature lovers do adore their celebrities. Compared to you, I’m a literary celebrity. Don’t frown, you, yourself, know this to be so, the less genuine the grounds there are for fame, the more a person qualifies for the celebrity orbit. For it’s the members of the audience who set the bar, not us. And once the public reaches a critical mass, they disapprove of standards they would not themselves be able to meet or at least grasp. For the people who sat in the hall yesterday, I was a walking spool onto which they could wind their fantasies and their never-articulated beliefs. Am I a creative person? No, I am not. I have spent years working on Levin’s books, publishing new editions, signing contracts for the translations, managing and maintaining his archive. From time to time I’d find a misplaced poem, story, or a page from his diary . . . He was a master at misplacing his things, have I not already told you this, lelkem? Did I say anything worthwhile yesterday? No, I did not. And if you were to take all those people who attended our panel yesterday and lay them on a psychotherapist’s couch, not a one would be able to admit to several glaringly obvious things . . .”
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