Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Now, of course, I see that my mother’s great misjudgment (and mine) was to assume that, contrary to what Donald had argued, it would be on the basis of social issues—such trivialities as their positions on human rights, war, poverty—that Americans would make up their minds as to which candidate they should elect. Instead, at my university, numerous young people voted for Reagan simply because they intuited that under his leadership they would stand a greater chance of getting very rich. And this, as it turned out, was exactly what happened.

  As for me, threading my way through a crowd of revelers on the way to my room that night, I felt not the slightest surprise, only a sense of digestive unease, to observe among the celebrants Donald and Lars, clinking glasses and laughing. When our eyes met they smiled at me pityingly, as if I were one of those aging hippies, throwbacks to a dead era, who can be found even today on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, shouting through bullhorns about the demise of People’s Park. Come join us, those smiles urged me. Give up your piety, which is out of fashion anyway, and accept that this is good for you. And they were right; it would prove to be good for me.

  Still, I wouldn’t join them. Instead I knocked on the door of my old and diehard allies, Jim and Ash, from whom, for a period of months now, I had been estranged. Jim grinned as he let me in. He didn’t seem surprised to see me; indeed, from the look on his face, I got the impression that he had been expecting my return all along.

  Without a word he shut the door behind me, shut the door on the outside revelry. Here music was playing too—the Supremes singing “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Most of the members of the little group were there, eating chocolate and graham crackers with a vengeance, drinking tea and Coke and in a few cases beer. For as it turned out, we did all have something in common, all of us in that little group, something that it had taken the mayhem outside, from which we had sought collective shelter, to illuminate: a horror at the outcome of the election. And though Jim welcomed me unhesitantly into this cozy atmosphere, though he made not a single allusion to that dissipated mob for the sake of which I had forsaken his reliable friendship, nonetheless I could hear beneath his hospitality the stern drumbeat of disapproval, the echo of unspoken words: “Why didn’t you listen to me? I could have told you they were no good.”

  Certain things had changed during my months of exile. Most notably, Ash now had a girlfriend, a very pretty sophomore named Julia Loomis who was unquestionably, according to my old way of looking at things, in his echelon, and who now sat to his left on the sofa, shaking her head sorrowfully even as Jim clucked with a curious admixture of regret and maternal satisfaction.

  After that, for a while, I stopped studying in the rear smoking section of the library; instead I sat in Jim and Ash’s room and finished my story about Matthew Spalding, of which I was very proud. The story, like the one my mother had dissuaded me from sending to the New York Times Magazine, seemed “adult,” for I had a great imitative faculty, and therefore had written it not in the intimate, conversational tone that came naturally to me (and of which, I hope, this narrative is an example), but rather in a style displaying the hallmarks of what would be labeled, a few years later, literary “minimalism”: the stark, pared-down present tense, bereft of description, the third-person voice that adopts no point of view but instead lets events “speak for themselves.” (If I put this last phrase in quotation marks it is only because I have learned that events rarely speak for themselves; instead, in most cases, they speak for people, for ideologies, for profit.)

  Because my transsexual professor responded to this new story with the sort of exuberant and substanceless praise from which one can extract little benefit or learning, I decided I would send it to Stanley Flint. Though we had not been in touch since the seminar had ended, I knew from Baylor that he was now teaching at a small, posh college in Vermont. Unlike me, over the intervening months Baylor had maintained a steady correspondence with Flint; even sent him a few stories, to which he had responded with his usual mix of passion and attack. She said that in his letters Flint often asked after me, which surprised me, and made me wonder whether he might still be unapprised of my decision to break with him, to remove myself from the cult, to trust him no longer. I suppose I imagined that because, during my summer in New York, I had sometimes spoken ill of him, word of my badmouthing must have necessarily gotten back to him; or even if it hadn’t (and in this supposition I revealed an unspoken truth, that I had not broken with the cult at all) that he must have intuited from a distance (for such was Flint’s capacity to pillage his students’ minds) my secret treachery.

  Yet if Baylor was correct, and in his letters to her Flint had asked after me, and even wrote of me with fondness, then perhaps I was wrong: a possibility, surprisingly, which filled me with hope, for in the intervening months I had started to miss the passionate engagement Flint brought to the teaching of writing: an enthusiasm that my current professor, for all his intelligence and charm, simply could not muster.

  Armed, then, with Flint’s temporary address, I typed up a fresh copy of my new story and sent it off to him. His reply arrived by post four days later.

  “Dear Bauman,” he wrote:

  Thank you for sending me your story. I’m sorry to say I’m not impressed by it. The problems are multiple, nor do I have time right now to go into every last one of them—that is a task for which I would require a classroom, a table and you in the hot seat across from me (but more about this later). Instead I shall say only that in attempting to emulate the so-called “minimalist” style you have mauled your natural tendencies (which are warmer than this), in effect, stifled your voice for the sake of mimicking the “fashionable”—in your case especially, a most dangerous habit.

  What I would suggest is that you start lobbying immediately to get me a new post at your great university, bearing in mind that should you succeed your place in whatever room I am assigned will be guaranteed. Really, Bauman, I’d like to conk you on the head, or conk myself on the head, for failing to drum enough of the truth into you when I still had you as my élève.

  I enclose a copy of the lit mag from this godforsaken little college where I have been exiled, and featuring a story by Baylor which I managed to get into it. But most of the other pieces therein are unrelenting shit.

  I beg you to accept my apologies for the abruptness and, I fear, hardness of this letter. Please know that I have written so only because I care about you.

  Yours,

  Stanley Flint

  Reading this letter over again today, I’m struck by its wisdom and sincerity. Reading it then, in the arrogance of my youth, I took offense at it—and not merely because Flint had not liked my story, also because I interpreted his rejection, fundamentally, as a rather sneaky attempt to persuade me that my chances for success as a writer depended utterly on him, and that therefore for my sake (as opposed to his) I should immediately, and almost single-handedly, arrange for him to be rehired. What frustrated me was the sense that he was more interested in getting back his old job than in helping me—which might well have been the case, at least in part. And yet by grabbing onto his desire to return to the university as a justification for ignoring every valid thing he said, I gave in again to the shoddy, cheating strain in my character. I also made a mistake—one that, as the years passed, I would come to regret more and more.

  All of which is a long way of saying (nervous, Mr. Flint, I am now committing the sin of “throat-clearing”) that I never answered the letter.

  Ahem.

  Then history, as it occasionally does, knocked me over and trod upon my back, intruded upon my naive belief that by necessity large events occur at a distance from ordinary life, in remote regions from which foreign correspondents report them in newspapers.

  One cold day, a few weeks after I failed to answer Stanley Flint’s letter, a madman shot the president of the university. Apprehended, the madman said he had done it to prove his love for the very TV star across from whom I had sometimes sat in the
rear smoking section of the library, or bumped into at parties. Suddenly journalists and plainclothes detectives mobbed our quiet campus. Coming out of class, I’d see a fixture of my mother’s little kitchen television screen, the man who delivered the news to her faithfully every weeknight before dinner, asking Jim Sterling’s opinion of the affair.

  In the library someone told me that the FBI had called Gretchen in for questioning—not because they suspected her of having any involvement in the assassination attempt, but because, as one of the TV star’s friends, it was thought she might be able to shed some light on the lunatic’s motives.

  I worried (and perhaps rather hoped) that the police would call me in for questioning. Instead they called in Donald.

  By a freakish coincidence, the weekend after the shooting, the TV star was scheduled to appear in a play, her first on-campus theatrical outing. The director of the play happened to be Stanley Flint’s son, who was a member of the university’s thespian club. At first everyone assumed, in the wake of what had happened, that the performance would be canceled, or short of that, that the TV star would be replaced by an understudy—until it became clear that the president would recover, at which point the TV star, displaying that “show must go on” fortitude so characteristic of good actors, announced through her press agent that she had no intention of reneging on her obligation. This decision only brought more attention to the play, tickets to the opening night of which suddenly became as sought after as those to one of Vladimir Horowitz’s rare concerts. Fortunately Jim Sterling, with uncanny foresight, had bought four in advance, three of which, after great pondering and analysis, he decided to give to Julia, to Ash, and to me.

  I remember that night vividly—and not for the reasons you might think. Yes, of course, pushing through the clutch of reporters that had gathered outside the auditorium, I enjoyed the heady sensation of importance with which the occasion was invested, as if we were key witnesses going into a courtroom. I also enjoyed (why not admit it?) the knowledge that in having a ticket I had become, very briefly, part of an elite, someone who, for this night at least, held power in his hand, in the form of a tiny stub of paper I could have sold for hundreds of dollars if I’d chosen to. Not only that, but Jim had managed to get us the best seats in the house. To our right sat the same reporter who had endowed the fiction prize I had won, while a few rows behind us (in the worst seats in the house) I could glimpse Lars and Eve and Donald, to whose friendly waves I responded brusquely. And then there was the empty seat in the row in front of ours, the one we kept eyeing with curiosity until at the last minute, quite literally as the lights dimmed, Stanley Flint himself hurried in and claimed it.

  At the sight of him my heart began to race. Suddenly I worried that he would rebuke me, scream at me, as he had in class, for never answering his letter. The matter of where I might hide during intermission preoccupied me until the end of the play’s first act. Then the lights came up: I watched carefully to see in which direction Flint was going, so that I might go in the opposite one.

  And of course, because I was staring at him, our eyes met; I smiled and waved. Flint’s gaze was out of focus. He waved back, though uncertainly, and put on his trench coat. Was it possible that he hadn’t recognized me?

  Suddenly I did an about-face and approached him. “Hello,” I said.

  He turned. As always he smelled of steam and cities.

  “Bauman,” he said in his slight southern lilt.

  “Very nice to see you,” I continued, not sure what to call him now—Stanley? Flint? Mr. Flint?—as well as astonished by the surge of affection rising in my throat, by that need for his attention which I had made such an effort to suppress in myself, and which, by never answering his letter, I had more or less ruined any chance of seeing fulfilled.

  He was not looking at me. He was looking over my shoulder.

  “Terrible, what’s happened,” I said.

  “Mmm,” he answered, distracted, though not necessarily by me.

  “Your son’s a wonderful director,” I went on. “I think he’s done a fantastic job.”

  “Really? I can’t tell, myself.”

  “Take my word for it.”

  He coughed. “Listen, Bauman, I must be going, I see over there some other former darlings of mine, to whom I need to offer salutations. Good to see you, young man.”

  Patting me on the shoulder, he left. I watched him disappear into the crowd. And why was it that a feeling of bereavement suddenly stole over me, one that made no logical sense, since Flint’s words had been kind—too kind, even? For they were not the words one used when speaking to a friend, they were the words one used when bidding farewell to someone going off on a voyage from which he will very likely never return, final words, from which I was able to extract either what Flint, in his clever cruelty, intended me to extract—that he had given up on me; that he had no hope for me; that I was no longer one of his “darlings”—or else (and this was to me an even less palatable possibility) that I simply didn’t matter to him anymore; that I was nothing to him; one face among hundreds.

  I wandered away. In a comer near our seats Jim and Ash and Julia were dissecting the play. What I wanted more than anything, right then, was to run up to them, to tell them what had happened, to see reflected in Jim’s eyes the pity he would no doubt feel for Flint, or at least the Flint I would paint for him: self-serving, jealous, giftless. “It’s all rather sad,” I could hear Jim saying—and indeed, he might have said those very words, except that this time I did not hurry over to him; I did not camouflage my regret with anger, as I had so many times in the past. Instead I stayed where I was, watching the back of Stanley Flint’s head grow ever more remote, as once again, and not for the last time, he was lost to me.

  4. TITLES NOT TO BE READ BEYOND

  ONE WINTER MORNING during my junior year I found a letter from the magazine in my mailbox. At first I assumed it would turn out to be one of those cut-rate subscription offers that as a student I was always receiving, until I noticed that my name and address had been typed using an old-fashioned typewriter on which both the “a” and the “m” jumped up. Inside, typed in the same manner, and corrected in one spot with Liquid Paper, was the following note:

  Dear Mr. Bauman,

  This is a fan letter. I have just read your story “Weight” in Watermark [a student magazine], and it is terrific. You have a great ear for dialogue and an eye for detail. Also, you’ve pulled off something difficult: putting yourself not only in a woman’s shoes, but in an older woman’s shoes, with utter conviction. Others around here have read the story too and are equally impressed, and if you write any more, we hope you’ll let us see them.

  Sincerely,

  Edith Atkinson

  Rereading this letter nearly twenty years later (in the interval the magazine has undergone upheavals and reincarnations that in those days would have been unthinkable; Edith is long retired; of those “others” to whom she refers so coyly, none remains), I see in it all the hallmarks of the magazine’s old sense of itself as an institution too firmly rooted in the soil of American culture, too canonical, if you will, ever to fall prey to commercial realities. This confidence is evident, for example, in the seemingly effortless transition from “I” to “we” that Edith makes in the last sentence, a transition intended, I now know, to underscore the fact—made manifest also in her decision not to indicate her tide nor to say how she came to read a story published in an undergraduate magazine in the first place—that the letter, though signed by one “Edith Atkinson,” has in fact been drafted by the hovering spirit of that self-incarnating entity, the magazine itself.

  Another aspect of this letter that today takes me by surprise: even in 1981, when such usages were already out of fashion, the telephone number is given according to the old formula OXFORD 3-1414: a testament (along with Edith’s stubborn refusal to exchange her old Remington for one of the new IBM Selectrics then coming onto the market, and that would soon themselves be rendered
obsolete by the earliest versions of the personal computer) to the magazine’s view of itself as exempt from, perhaps even beyond the reach of, technology, time, history.

  The first thing I did after I received the letter was to run over to Jim and Ash’s room and read it to them. Then I telephoned my mother. Then I typed out a polite note to Edith Atkinson, indicating that I would like to send her more stories.

  Her reply arrived the following week. Yes, she said, she would be delighted to read more of my work. Hastily I pulled together my oeuvre, which at that point consisted of four stories, the latest of these, “String,” being the saga of Matthew Spalding’s suicide attempt. (I had a fondness for one-word titles in those days.) It was a story of which, despite Stanley Flint’s blandishments, I felt especially proud.

  Ten days later they all came back. “Dear Mr. Bauman,” Edith wrote: