“I don’t think it’s any big deal for me to be writing about the South,” I went on, “it’s the place I know the best. Dem ole cotton fields at home.”
“I don’t mean that,” he replied. “It’s simply that you’re at the end of a tradition. You may think I’m ignorant about the South, the way I jumped you last Sunday so unmercifully and, I might add, so unpardonably about Bobby Weed. But I’m talking about something else now—writing. Southern writing as a force is going to be over within a few years. Another genre is going to have to appear to take its place. That’s why I’m saying you’ve got a lot of guts to be writing in a worn-out tradition.”
I was a little irritated, although my irritation lay less in the logic and truth of what he was saying, if indeed logical or true, than in the fact that such an opinionated literary verdict should issue from a research biologist at a pharmaceutical house. It seemed none of his business. But when I uttered, mildly and with some amusement, the standard demurral of the literary aesthete, he outflanked me neatly again.
“Nathan, you’re a fucking expert in cells,” I said, “what the hell do you know about literary genres and traditions?”
“In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man. I believe that, Stingo old pal—which is maybe why I care about you and your writing.” He paused and held out an expensive-looking silver lighter, with which he ignited the end of the Camel between my lips. “May I be forgiven for abetting your filthy habit, I carry this to light Bunsen burners,” he said playfully, then went on, “As a matter of fact, something I’ve concealed from you. I wanted to be a writer myself until halfway through Harvard I realized I could never be a Dostoevsky, and so turned my piercing mind toward the seething arcana of human protoplasm.”
“So you were really planning to write,” I said.
“Not at first. Jewish mothers are very ambitious for their sons and all during my childhood I was supposed to become a great fiddle player—another Heifetz or Menuhin. But frankly, I lacked the touch, the genius, although it left me with a tremendous thing about music. Then I decided to be a writer, and there were a bunch of us at Harvard, a bunch of very dedicated book-crazy sophomores, and we were deep into the literary life for a while. A cute little kindergarten Bloomsbury in Cambridge. I wrote some poetry and a lot of lousy short stories, like all my pals. Each of us thought we were going to outdo Hemingway. But in the end I had enough good sense to realize that as a fiction writer I was better trying to emulate Louis Pasteur. It turned out that my true gifts were in science. So I switched my major from English over to biology. It was a fortunate choice, I’m damned sure of that. I can see now that all I had going for me was the fact that I was Jewish.”
“Jewish?” I put in. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, only that I’m quite certain that Jewish writing is going to be the important force in American literature in the coming years.”
“Oh, it is, is it?” I said a little defensively. “How do you know? Is that why you said I had courage to write about the South?”
“I didn’t say Jewish writing was going to be the only force, just the important force,” he replied pleasantly and evenly, “and I’m not in the slightest trying to suggest that you might not add something significant to your own tradition. It’s just that historically and ethnically Jews will be coming into their own in a cultural way in this postwar wave. It’s in the cards, that’s all. There’s one novel already that’s set the pace. It’s not a major book, it’s a small book but with beautiful proportions and it’s the work of a young writer of absolutely unquestionable brilliance.”
“What’s the name of it?” I asked. I think my voice had a sulky note when I added, “And who’s the brilliant writer?”
“It’s called Dangling Man,” he replied, “and it’s by Saul Bellow.”
“Well, dog my cats,” I drawled and took a sip of coffee.
“Have you read it?” he asked.
“Certainly,” I said, lying with a bald and open face.
“What did you think of it?”
I stifled a calculated yawn. “I thought it was pretty thin.” Actually, I was very much aware of the novel, but the petty spirit which so often afflicts the unpublished writer allowed me to harbor only a grudge for what I suspected was the book’s well-deserved critical approval. “It’s a very urban book,” I added, “very special, you know, a little too much of the smell of the streets about it.” But I had to concede to myself that Nathan’s words had disturbed me, as I watched him lolling so easily in the chair opposite me. Suppose, I thought, the clever son of a bitch was right and the ancient and noble literary heritage with which I had cast my lot had indeed petered out, rumbled to a feeble halt with me crushed ignominiously beneath the decrepit cartwheels? Nathan had seemed so certain and knowledgeable about other matters that in this case, too, his augury might be correct, and in a sudden weird vision—all the more demeaning because of its blatant competitiveness—I saw myself running a pale tenth in a literary track race, coughing on the dust of a pounding fast-footed horde of Bellows and Schwartzes and Levys and Mandelbaums.
Nathan was smiling at me. It seemed to be a perfectly amiable smile, with not a trace of the sardonic about it, but for an instant I felt intensely about his presence what I had already felt and what I would feel again—a fleeting moment in which the attractive and compelling in him seemed in absolute equipoise with the subtly and indefinably sinister. Then, as if something formlessly damp had stolen through the room, departing instantly, I was freed of the creepy sensation and I smiled back at him. He wore what I believe was called a Palm Beach suit, tan, smartly tailored and perceivably high-priced, and it helped make him appear not even a distant cousin of that wild apparition I had first set eyes on only days before, disheveled, in baggy slacks, raging at Sophie in the hallway. All of a sudden that fracas, his mad accusation—Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor!—seemed as unreal to me as dialogue spoken by the leading stinker in a long-ago, half-forgotten movie. (What had he meant by those balmy words? I wondered if I would ever find out.) As the ambiguous smile lingered on his face, I was aware that this man posed riddles of personality more exasperating and mystifying than any I had ever encountered.
“Well, at least you didn’t tell me that the novel’s dead,” I said at last, just as a phrase of music, celestial and tender, flowed down very softly from the room above and forced a change of subject.
“That’s Sophie who put the music on,” Nathan said. “I try to get her to sleep late in the morning when she doesn’t have to go to work. But she says she can’t. Ever since the war she says she could never learn again to sleep late.”
“What is that playing?” It was naggingly familiar, something from Bach I should have been able to name as from a child’s first music book, but which I had unaccountably forgotten.
“It’s from Cantata 147, the one that in English has the title Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,”
“I envy you that phonograph,” I said, “and those records. But they’re so goddamned expensive. A Beethoven symphony would cost me a good hunk of what I used to call a week’s pay.” It then occurred to me that what had further bolstered the kinship I felt for Sophie and Nathan during these nascent few days of our friendship had been our common passion for music. Nathan alone was keen on jazz, but in general I mean music in the grand tradition, nothing remotely popular and very little composed after Franz Schubert, with Brahms being a notable exception. Like Sophie, like Nathan too, I was at that time of life—long before Rock or the resurgence of Folk—when music was more than simple meat and drink, it was an essential opiate and something resembling the divine breath. (I neglected to mention how much of my free time at McGraw-Hill, or time after work, had been spent in record stores, mooching hours of music in the stifling booths
they had in those days.) Music for me at this moment was almost so much in itself a reason for being that had I been deprived too long of this or that wrenching harmony, or some miraculously stitched tapestry of the baroque, I would have unhesitatingly committed dangerous crimes. “Those stacks of records of yours make me drool,” I said.
“You know, kid, you’re welcome to play them anytime.” I was aware that in the past few days he had taken to calling me “kid” at times. This secretly pleased me more than he could know. I think that in my growing fondness for him I, an only child, had begun to see in him a little of the older brother I had never had—a brother, furthermore, whose charm and warmth so outweighed the unpredictable and bizarre in him that I was swift to put his eccentricities quite out of my head. “Look,” he went on, “just consider my pad and Sophie’s pad as a couple of places—”
“Your what?” I said.
“Pad.”
“What’s that?”
“Pad. You know, a room.” It was the first time I had ever heard the word used in the argot. Pad. I liked the sound.
“Anyway, consider yourself welcome up there anytime you want to play the records during the day when Sophie and I have gone to work. Morris Fink has a passkey. I’ve told him to let you in anytime you want.”
“Oh, that’s really too much, Nathan,” I blurted, “but God—thanks.” I was moved by this generosity—no, nearly overwhelmed. The fragile records of that period had not evolved into our cheap items of conspicuous consumption. People were simply not so free-handed with their records in those days. They were precious, and there had never been made available to me so much music in my life; the prospect which Nathan offered me filled me with cheer that verged close to the voluptuous. Free choice of any of the pink and nubile female flesh I had ever dreamed of could not have so ravishingly whetted my appetite. “I’ll certainly take good care of them,” I hurried to add.
“I trust you,” he said, “though you do have to be careful. Goddamn shellac is still too easily broken. I predict something inevitable in a couple of years—an unbreakable record.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“Not only that, not only unbreakable but compressed—made so that you can play an entire symphony, say, or a whole Bach cantata on one side of a single record. I’m sure it’s coming,” he said, rising from the chair, adding within the space of a few minutes his prophecy of the long-playing record to that of the Jewish literary renaissance. “The musical millennium is close at hand, Stingo.”
“Jesus, I just want to thank you,” I said, still genuinely affected.
“Forget it, kid,” he replied, and his gaze went upward in the direction of the music. “Don’t thank me, thank Sophie. She taught me to care about music as if she had invented it, as if I hadn’t cared about it before. Just as she taught me about clothes, about so many things...” He paused and his eyes became luminous, distant. “About everything. Life! God, isn’t she unbelievable?” There was in his voice the slightly overwrought reverence sometimes used about supreme works of art, yet when I agreed, murmuring a thin “I’ll say she is,” Nathan could not even have been faintly aware of my forlorn and jealous passion.
As I have said, Nathan had encouraged me to keep Sophie company, so I had no compunction—after he had gone off to work—about walking out in the hallway and calling up to her with an invitation. It was Thursday—one of the days off from her job at Dr. Blackstock’s, and when her voice floated down over the banister, I asked if she would join me for lunch in the park a little after noon. She called out “Okay, Stingo!” cheerily, and then she fled from my mind. Frankly, my thoughts were of crotch and breast and belly and bellybutton and ass, specifically of those belonging to the wild nymph I had met on the beach the previous Sunday, the “hot dish” Nathan had so happily served me up.
Despite my lust, I returned to my writing desk and tried to scratch away for an hour or so, almost but not quite oblivious of the stirrings, the comings and goings of the other occupants of the house—Morris Fink muttering malevolently to himself as he swept the front porch, Yetta Zimmerman clumping down from her quarters on the third floor to give the place her morning once-over, the whalelike Moishe Muskatblit departing in a ponderous rush for his yeshiva, improbably whistling “The Donkey Serenade” in harmonious bell-like notes. After a bit, while I paused in my labors and stood by the window facing the park, I saw one of the two nurses, Astrid Weinstein, returning wearily from her night-shift job at Kings County Hospital. No sooner had she slammed the door behind her in the room opposite mine than the other nurse, Lillian Grossman, scurried out of the house on her way to work at the same hospital. It was difficult to tell which of them was the less comely—the hulking and rawboned Astrid, with her pinkish, weepy look of distress on a slablike face, or Lillian Grossman, skinny as a starved sparrow and with a mean, pinched expression that surely brought little comfort to the sufferers under her care. Their homeliness was heartrending. It was no longer my rotten luck, I reflected, to be lodged under a roof so frustrating, so bereft of erotic promise. After all, I had Leslie! I began to sweat and felt my breath go haywire and something in my chest actually dilate painfully, like a rapidly expanding balloon.
Thus I came to the notion of sexual fulfillment, which is another of those items I mentioned a while back and which I considered to be so richly a part of the fruition of my new life in Brooklyn. In itself this saga, or episode, or fantasia has little direct bearing on Sophie and Nathan, and so I have hesitated to set it down, thinking it perhaps extraneous stuff best suited to another tale and time. But it is so bound up into the fabric and mood of that summer that to deprive this story of its reality would be like divesting a body of some member—not an essential member, but as important, say, as one of one’s more consequential fingers. Besides, even as I set these reservations down, I sense an urgency, an elusive meaning in this experience and its desperate eroticism by which at least there may be significant things to be said about that sexually bedeviled era.
At any rate, as I stood there that morning, tumescent amid my interrupted labors, I felt that there was being thrust on me a priceless reward for the vigor and zeal with which I had embraced my Art. Like any writer worth his salt, I was about to receive my just bounty, that necessary adjunct to hard work—necessary as food and drink—which revived the fatigued wits and sweetened all life. Of course I mean by this that for the first time after these many months in New York, finally and safely beyond peradventure, I was going to get a piece of ass. This time there was no doubt about it. In a matter of hours, as certainly as springtime begets the greening leaves or the sun sets at eventide, my prick was going to be firmly implanted within a remarkably beautiful, sexually liberated, twenty-two-year-old Jewish Madonna lily named Leslie Lapidus (rhyming, please, with “Ah, feed us”).
At Coney Island that Sunday, Leslie Lapidus had virtually guaranteed me—as I shall shortly demonstrate—possession of her glorious body and we had made a date for the following Thursday night. During the intervening days—looking forward to our second meeting with such unseemly excitement that I felt a little sick and began off and on to run a mild but genuine fever—I had become intoxicated mainly by a single fact: this time I would surely succeed. I had it sewed up. Made! This time there would be no impediments; the crazy bliss of fornication with a hot-skinned, eager-bellied Jewish girl with fathomless eyes and magnificent apricot-and-ocher suntanned legs that all but promised to squeeze the life out of me was no dumb fantasy: it was a fait accompli, practically consummated save for the terrible wait until Thursday. In my brief but hectic sex life I had never experienced anything like certainty of conquest (rarely had any young man of that time) and the sensation was exquisite. One may speak of flirtation, the thrill of the chase, the delights and challenges of hard-won seduction; each had its peculiar rewards. There is much to be said, however, for the delectable and leisurely anticipation which accompanies the knowledge that it is all ready and waiting and, so to speak, in the
bag. Thus during those hours when I had not been immersed in my novel I had thought of Leslie and the approaching tryst, envisioned myself sucking on the nipples of those “melon-heavy” Jewish breasts so dear to Thomas Wolfe, and glowed in my fever like a jack-o’-lantern.
Another thing: I had been almost beside myself with a sense of the rightness of this prospect. Every devoted artist, however impecunious, I felt, deserved at least this. Furthermore, it appeared that in all likelihood if I played my cards right, remained the cool exotic Cavalier squire whom Leslie had found so maddeningly aphrodisiacal at our first encounter, if I committed no hapless blunders, this God- or perhaps Jehovah-bestowed gift would become part of a steady, even daily functioning arrangement. I would have wild morning and afternoon romps in the hay and all of this could only enhance the quality of my literary output, despite the prevailing bleak doctrine concerning sexual “sublimation.” All right, so I doubted that the relationship would involve much in the way of high-toned love, for my attraction to Leslie was largely primal in nature, lacking the poetic and idealistic dimension of my buried passion for Sophie. Leslie would allow me for the first time in my life to taste in a calm, exploratory way those varieties of bodily experience which until now had existed in my head like a vast and orgiastic, incessantly thumbed encyclopedia of lust. Through Leslie, I would at last assuage a basic hunger too long ruthlessly thwarted, And as I waited for that fateful Thursday meeting, her remembered image came to represent for me the haunting possibility of a sexual communion which would nullify the farcical manner in which I had transported my mismanaged and ungratified and engorged penis across the frozen sexual moonscape of the 1940s.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 173
