Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  In the general laughter that followed, Henry James’s voice droned right on: “She had been, as I have said, made, first of all, to I might almost say ‘feel,’ as indeed so had we all, an incapacity for that way of pleasurable residence within the walls of a house for which my companion had—oh, so rightly!—the word ‘contentment,’ this incapacity beautifully growing out of what I shall describe as a ‘warning’ which the poor dear lady had ‘received,’ all in a by no means restrained flutter, if I may say flutter; I rather thought that the dear lady, to put, for its effect on me, a slightly more ‘wingish’ word, flapped—”

  “By God,” said Conrad, “there was never anything like this!” Conrad had the most genuine and unaffected admiration for the Old Man’s magic use of words. I think Conrad felt that in his own novels he had made things too preposterously clear and that too many things happened. I remember once he jumped up from a couch on which he had been reading James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” and cried, “By God, there was never anything like this! The Old Fellow has actually told a story about a man to whom nothing at all happens! It makes my own Lord Jim, to whom everything at all happens, seem to rush about in a meaningless squirrel-cage of Occurrence!” It was weeks before I could calm him down, before I could dissuade him from a monstrous idea that had taken possession of him; namely, to write a novel in which not only nothing happened but in which there were no characters.

  I do not remember exactly how that remarkable afternoon ended. It seems to me, however, that Choate, by biding his time and resting up between anecdotes, was able to finish some few moments after James had ceased talking. “There is now, I brought out for my companion, nothing for us but to leave the theatre,” said James, in ending his story. “To which she—oh, so wonderfully—replied, ‘Oh.’” “He told me,” said Choate, “to call him a cab. ‘Very well, sir,’ I said, ‘you’re a cab.’” Conrad reached for his hat. “By God,” he said, “there never will be anything like this again!”

  The Preface to “The Old Friends”

  (After re-reading some of Henry James’s Prefaces, and previsioning, as who should say, what might have caught the Master’s acute ear and eager fancy at some American party or other in these so disturbed and disturbing present years.)

  In touching once again with my mind the beautiful terror of “The Old Friends,” I was instantly and with the greatest of sharpnesses confronted with the evoked figure of the poor dear lady with whose predicament my hostess of a long lost afternoon had been so prettily and intensely concerned as to cry out, in my fortunate hearing, “Ah, but doesn’t every husband, upon being asked by his wife to bring her a facial tissue, return, after a moment, with a clump of at least fifteen or twenty!” It had seemed to me, promptly enough, that this was the secret door to a moment of privacy and, indeed, intimacy through whose keyhole no gentleman of sensibility should permit himself the briefest of glimpses, and I had accordingly withdrawn to another corner of the lawn and the company of one I shall call Stephen Overleaf, with no disposition whatever to make an enchantment of my hostess’s remarkable exclamation or further to pursue her singular fragment of reassurance in any way at all. Alas, I had been conditioned by so many happy decades of devotion to the small trade, if I may so denominate it, of turning a few accidentally overheard words, in this instance twenty-eight, for the sake of exactitude, into a glimmering scene, equipped with all the properties and personae of drama, that I was destined, or, if you will, doomed, to carry the thing like a shining sword which grew and grew in length and brightness during my few minutes of pretending, I must confess it, an attentiveness to whatever poor Overleaf may have been trying to communicate.

  The husband with the embarrassing burden of facial tissues would be, it had come to me, not in any sense senile or even senescent, but a gentleman of known, perhaps renowned, taste and sensitivity, whose sudden appearance, in the midst, let us say, of an elegant assemblage of ladies and gentlemen of quality, or of such as now remains, with nearly one-sixth of the entire contents of a container of tissues, would have the effect, not of a tiny helpful domestic gesture, but, I saw it in all clarity, of a dreadful symptom of some gradual but enormous dissolution. It had been my good fortune, since fact has a habit, almost a style, of standing in the way of fiction, not to have caught the name of the poor dear lady who had found herself, perhaps more than once, so overladen with a superabundance of absorbancy, if I may so describe her special plight. Thus I was left with nothing more ponderable than the purest possible speculation, out of which the artifice of my craft produces its sometimes interminable proliferations. I had been on the point of turning away from Overleaf to join a small group of friends on another part of the lawn when, ever so much to my dismay, he complicated the purity of my design by mentioning the name of the poor encumbered lady, which was, for my dissembling purposes, Edith, and adding to this identification a minuscule key of his own in the words, “You have heard, of course, about the dilemma of poor Longstreth, or rather the quandary into which his dilemma has placed John Blaker?” I am, to be sure, supplying these names out of the sheerest fancy, since my concern was, as ever, not with what was actually happening to any living person, but with the fits and starts of my own creative agility. Nonetheless, it seems advisable to throw in a tiny gleam of fact at this juncture, since one had, in truth, popped into my awareness with Overleaf’s interrogation. John Blaker, poor Edith’s husband, was, then, in his true identity, a writer of considerable achievement, in whose company I had occasionally lingered, but never actually dwelt, the first quite long enough, however, to have caught the tail end of a truth about him which was to be enlarged, by my prying curiosity, into the very crux of my delightful project. Blaker had, like some 90 per cent of the writers I have known or met in these hysterical years, but recently gone into what is over-lightly and vulgarly alluded to as a “tail-spin” or “nose-dive,” the pressures of authorship and of peaceful coexistence and of domestic and neural upset having taken their steady toll of his psychological balance. There had come a time, now misty in my remembrance, for the chronology of actuality is ever out of joint with the clock of creativity, and such small realities of the case as came into my possession were soon integrated into my private scheme of elaboration, when poor Blaker had found himself turning in desperation to the one solid rock to which he felt he could in all security cling, his good wife having reverted, as the result of pressures of her own, into the disconsolate period of her first marriage. She had, in fine, taken to addressing poor Blaker not as John, but as Gregory, and this had operated to persuade our friend that he was, in short, losing his grip and identity. In such a situation it is of the very fabric of the writing man to turn to his particular Rock of Ages for solace and reassurance, to be bolstered by the comforting knowledge that at least one person in a crazy world has not yet gone crazy himself. This one person, it must now shine out for my readers, as it still continues to glow, in spite of the years between for me, [was] the figure I have designated as Herbert Longstreth.

  The sense which inevitably came to me, literally took me by storm, that my central most dolorous figure was not to be poor dear Edith, nor yet her beshrewed mate, but Herbert Longstreth, had taken me by the throat a moment after I had, with the customary gracious twaddle, thanked my hostess for a pleasant afternoon and had made my homeward way alone down a darkling avenue. The prospect that fairly glittered for me, that would have outdone the sun in radiance had there been a sun to outdo, was the gratifying, the joyful one of so entangling the urgent necessities of Blaker’s hope of saving himself with the stealthy but monstrous decline of Longstreth as a possible haven and sanctuary that, in the end, they must both be magnificently lost in a veritable labyrinth of chaotic inability to “get through” to each other and establish even a glimmer of recognition or of old relationships. The impact of this forlorn prefiguration had the effect of so vastly overwhelming me with dejection that I was on the point of abandoning the whole pattern, but in the extremity of age I long
ago discovered that such a letting go is not long to be contemplated, and I set about that dramatization of incidents of which “The Old Friends” is, I have the vanity to protest, so compactly made up.

  That what I may be privileged to call the “perspicuity of impingement,” the attainment of perfection of focus, if you will, has become more and more difficult with the weathering of the years, may be put down, first of all, to the pressures and stresses of our confused and confusing middle-century and, secondly, oh, indubitably, to the simple chronological truth that my experience of my own species has extended, so to measure it, from the Battle of Fredericksburg to the advent of the hydrogen bomb. Thus, the setting off of the small phenomenon of too many tissues from ever so many thousands of other manifestations of peculiarity stored in my memory, acted at first to deter, yet once again, the compulsive nagging of the drama that was forming in my mind. It seemed, at the earliest of junctures, all but impossible to find a “soundness” of character and incident against which I should be able to play my dreadful show of dissolution. What I am hovering about here, what I am quite reluctant to expose in the barest of terms, is the shaking truth that there is no dependable soundness any longer in the manners and motives of a species whose ultimate goal seems to be that of achieving a cruising speed that will shatter the radiance barrier. Nonetheless, and ever so slowly, I found myself conceiving of a sequence of meetings between Blaker and Longstreth, during which it should almost imperceptibly transpire that neither one has, from the very outset, actually “placed” the other. This abominable but, you must grant me, utterly delicious meaninglessness of contact and communication presented one quite formidable fear, the fear of setting down dialogue into which my readers might never be able, even for the briefest moment, to get their teeth. In such a monstrous contingency, it was dazzlingly clear to me that the central dissolution might be that of myself as narrator. I had magnificently survived the human eccentricities and peculiarities of the age of the four-wheeler, the strains of which had been scarcely more than vexatious owing to the blessed circumstance that nothing whatever, more disconcerting than the untoward, had happened during the somnolent decades of the walking stick and the hansom cab. But I was to reach for my effects, in the tortured case of poor dear Longstreth and poor dear Blaker, in an atmosphere of aberration, fixation, compulsion, hallucination, and com—I do abhor the word—plexes. If I should slip off my rocker, to name the major danger vulgarly, I wondered how, in the name of all that was merciful, I should be able to find my way, quite simply, back.

  I shall not, for the benefit of such first readers as may wish to be taken by surprise, name or number in all their exquisite detail the threads and textures of my little puzzle, but, rather, confine these ritualistic mumblings of remembered excitements to a basic indication of warp and woof, trusting that, in tracing the final scheme of my tapestry, I do not become strangled, as it were, in the very weave and figure of our friends’ horrid predicaments. An intertwining of the imbalances, both real and pretended, of our male unfortunates and their mates was, it quickly occurred to me, the very foundation of what continually shone out for me as our conspiracy. Edith, I perceived, to get on with it before the tangled web quite confounds this small effort of reconstruction, should “see” her first husband, poor Gregory, at every turn and corner, although he is in no wise there, having, to be abrupt about it, long since, I make no bones about it, died. This apparition must take the form of a retaliation for that embarrassment of—let me come out with the very word—Kleenex, which was, au fond, quite all that I had to begin with. It was to be, then, the “appearances” of Gregory which should drive poor Blaker to seek the comfort of the good Longstreths’ assistance, but Longstreth—the beauty of this little turn of plot quite took my breath away—should, for retaliatory purposes of his own, be in the very midst of a magnificent pretending himself, namely, that his wife, who was always present, was, to his mind and eye, never there! At this glittering point of involvement I concluded, naturally enough, from the artistic viewpoint, that Mrs. Longstreth must also play some wonderful trick upon him. Here I needed, on Longstreth’s part, a small crotchet, maggot, or compulsion upon which Lydia Longstreth could play her own little game of alarm and enlargement.

  This compulsive act finally took the form for me of Longstreth’s placing the wastebasket in the bathtub each night before going to bed, or, indeed, each evening before venturing out of the house for any purpose whatever. This simple gesture, called forth by the not unusual fear that wastebaskets may catch fire and consume one’s house, is not in itself alarming in any profound sense, and it remained for me to transfigure it, as who should say. His wife, then, because of her own pretended failing grasp of the structures of immediacy must be painstakingly developed into a woman who no longer cares, to put it brutally, whether the house burns down or not. In point of fact, it may be her latent purpose to accomplish this very end, a proposition which at once illuminates, as by a show of searchlights, the loss of her own belief in poor Longstreth’s significance as sanctuary. This, in its turn, would further and wonderfully sharpen our sense of poor Blaker’s lostness when, at the farthest end, he calls so desperately upon his old guide and mentor for spiritual sustenance and emotional rehabilitation. Lydia Longstreth, I decided, should persuade her husband to put into the bathtub, not the wastebasket to which he was in the habit of tossing carelessly extinguished cigarets, but a brand-new metal receptacle which should be kept in the bathroom, all empty, for this one and only purpose. The meaninglessness of the compulsive act would thereby assume the proportions of the extremest futility and, I need scarcely belabor the point, inevitably result, if not in the burning down of the house, most surely in the collapse of minds and marriage, the effect of which upon Blaker should be, of course, staggering.

  Whether Longstreth or Mrs. Longstreth, or both, even in these treacherous years of uncertain balance, could conceivably be “thrown” by the empty receptacle, whether it was, in short, enough, formed a dilemma of long concern to me, but I steadfastly refrained from, I sternly straight-armed, the temptation to introduce a psychiatrist into our little muddle, which was already losing lucidity with sufficient celerity. The temptation lay, I do admit it, in the frolic urge, common to most authors of our time, to bring in an authority on the psyche for the impish purpose of taking him “apart.” This disassembling was to be signalled by the professional gentleman’s distraught suggestion that the estranging couple should “put both baskets in the bathtub,” but I hasten to repeat that some inner check dissuaded me from this extra and alien convolution. I take it as a matter of statistical truth that for every psychiatrist who “comes apart” there are, at a rough hazard, at least a hundred who mentally survive their patients, and this I regard as the happiest of circumstances. Moreover, I recommend the certainty of the small statistic to my more facetious colleagues in search of comic characters.

  I needed, at this far point of ravelling and unravelling, a final twist of the threads of posture and imposture, to which I was inspired, by some dynamics of insight whose process now completely evades my memory. It consisted, however, in the delightful notion that Longstreth, in greeting his old friend John Blaker on the latter’s final visit, is wearing, for all the warmth and coziness of the Longstreth drawing room, not one hat, but, to get his wife “down”—I throw it out vulgarly—and quite coincidentally to drive his frightened old friend away from his door forever, two. But I shall leave our poor lost conspirators at this gleaming point, lest these prefatory reminiscences fairly outreach in area my little novella itself.