by Jay Hopler
It was not boredom that let my attention shift, though I knew the Miescher story. It was pleasure. I was pleased with my last lecture, and I’d ridden out the fuss generated by the first three. My tour d’horizon of a hundred thousand religions—Neanderthal funerary rites to the leadership cults of certain socialist republics—had dismayed some by its evenhandedness. But anger rose against my assertion that, since religious practice was universal to all known societies, it must have a genetic base and therefore be the product of evolutionary pressure. I invoked E. 0. Wilson: “Religions, like all other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.” The bishops’ anathemas, the millennial disgust of politicians and New Agers, a cranky death threat down the phone, the wounded letters to the press demonstrated that we do not live in a secular age. The death threat—a man’s voice perhaps, pretending to be a woman’s—simply informed me that a congregation had paid for the hire of my killer. Briefly, I was demonized; I had my fifteen minutes. Then the public mind, like that of some giant, squalling baby, was distracted by a newer, brighter thing. I had survived.
I looked around. At the next table, the girl was being helped through the menu by her father. Like me, he had to slide his glasses down his nose to see the print. The girl leaned fondly against his arm. Would I ever have a child? Was it too late?
Meanwhile, Jocelyn, enjoying the triple privilege of age, eminence, and the bestower of a gift, told his story. Miescher pressed on. He assembled a team and set about working out the chemistry of what he called “nucleic acid.” Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written—adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine. But it meant nothing. And that was odd, especially as the years went by. Mendel’s work on the laws of inheritance had been generally accepted. Chromosomes had been identified in the cell nucleus and were suspected of being the location of genetic information. Now, thanks to Miescher, it was known that DNA was in the chromosomes, and he had described its chemistry. In 1892, in a letter to his uncle, he had speculated that DNA might code for life, just as an alphabet codes for language and concepts.
“It was staring them in the face,” Jocelyn said. “But they couldn’t see, they wouldn’t see. The problem, of course, was the chemists. …”
It was hard work, talking against the din. We waited while he drank his water. The story was for Clarissa, an embellishment on her present. While Jocelyn was resting his voice, there was movement behind me. I was obliged to pull in my chair to let the girl through. She went off in the direction of the lavatories. When I was next aware of her she was back in her seat.
“The chemists, you see. Very powerful, rather grand. The nineteenth had been a good century for them. They had authority, but they were a crusty lot. Take Phoebus Levene at the Rockefeller Institute. He was absolutely certain that DNA was a boring, irrelevant molecule containing random sequences of those four letters, A, C, G, and T. He dismissed it, and then, in that peculiar human way, this became a matter of faith with him, deep faith. What he knew, he knew, and the molecule was insignificant. None of the younger chaps could get round him. It had to wait for years, until Griffiths’s work on bacteria, in the twenties. Which Oswald Avery picked up in New York—Levene was old by then, of course. Oswald’s work took forever, right up into the forties. Then Alexander Todd, working in Cambridge on the sugar-phosphate links; then in ‘52 and ‘53 Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin; and then Crick and Watson. You know what poor Rosalind said when they showed her the model they had built of the DNA molecule? She said it was simply too beautiful not to be true.”
The accelerated roll call of names and his old chestnut—beauty in science—slowed Jocelyn into speechless reminiscence. He fumbled with his napkin. He was eighty-two. As student or colleague, he had known them all. And Gillian had worked with Crick, after the first great breakthrough, on adaptor molecules. Gillian, like Franklin herself, had died of leukemia.
I was a second or two slow on the uptake, but Jocelyn had lobbed me an excellent cue. I reached under my chair and could not resist the chocolate-box lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. …” Clarissa smiled. She must have guessed that after all her labor and triumph she might be getting Keats, but she could not have dreamed of what was now in her hands, in plain brown paper. Even before the wrapping was off she recognized it and squealed. The girl at the next table turned in her seat to stare, until her father tapped her on the arm. Foolscap octavo in drab boards with back label. Condition—poor, foxed, slight water damage. A first edition of his first collection, “Poems,” of 1817.
“What presents!” Clarissa said. She stood and put her arms around my neck. “It must have cost you thousands.” Then she put her lips to my ear. “You’re a bad boy to spend so much money. I’m going to make you fuck me all afternoon.”
“Oh, all right,” I said. “If it’ll make you feel better.”
It is a temptation to invent or embellish details about the table next to ours, to force memory to deliver what was never captured. But I did see the man, Colin Tapp, put his hand on his father’s arm as he spoke, reassuring him, soothing him. It is also difficult to disentangle what I discovered later from what I sensed at the time. Tapp was in fact two years older than me, his daughter was twelve, and his father seventy-three. I did nothing so deliberate as speculate about their ages. By now my attention was not wandering—our own table was absorbing, we were having fun. But I must have assumed a good deal about the relationships of our neighbors, and done it barely consciously—out of the corner of my eye, wordlessly, in the preverbal language of instant thought that linguists call “mentalese.” The prepubescent girl I did take in, however glancingly. She had that straightbacked poise some children adopt, self-possession attempting worldliness and disarmingly revealing its opposite. Her skin was dark, her black hair was cut in a bob, and the skin on her neck was paler than the rest—the haircut was recent. Or were these details I observed later, in the chaos, or in the time after the chaos?
At our table, Clarissa had resumed her seat, and the conversation concerned young men put down or otherwise blocked by older men—their fathers, teachers, mentors, or idols. The starting point had been Miescher and his teacher, Hopper Seyler, who had held up publication of his student’s discovery of phosphorous in cell nuclei. Seyler also happened to be the editor of the journal to which Miescher’s papers had been submitted. From there—and I’ve had time to trace our conversation backward—from Miescher and Seyler, we arrived at Keats and Wordsworth.
Clarissa was our main source now, although outside his subject Jocelyn knew a little about most things, and he knew the famous story of the young Keats going to visit the poet he revered. I knew of the visit from Clarissa’s researches. In late 1817, Keats had been staying at an inn, the Fox & Hounds, by Box Hill on the North Downs, where he finished his long poem “Endymion.” He stayed on for a week and walked the downs in a daze of contentment. He was just twenty-two, he had written a long, serious, beautiful poem about being in love, and by the time he returned to London he was feeling high. There he heard the news and rejoiced: his hero, William Wordsworth, was in town. Keats had already sent his “Poems,” with the inscription “To W. Wordsworth with the Author’s sincere Reverence.” (That would have been the one to give Clarissa. It’s in the Princeton University Library; there are many uncut pages.) Keats had grown up on Wordsworth’s poetry. He called “The Excursion” one of the “three things to rejoice at in this Age.” He had taken from Wordsworth the idea of poetry as a sacred vocation, the most noble endeavor. Now he persuaded his painter friend Benjamin Robert Haydon to arrange a meeting. They set out together from Haydon’s studio at Lisson Grove to walk to Queen Ann Street and call on the great genius. In his journal, Haydon noted that Keats expressed “the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect.”
Wordsworth was a notorious grouch at that stage of his life—he was forty-seven—but he was
friendly enough to Keats, and after a few minutes of small talk asked him what he’d been working on. Haydon jumped in and answered for him, and begged Keats to repeat the ode to Pan from “Endymion.” So Keats walked up and down in front of the great man, reciting in “his usual half-chant (most touching) …”
It was at this point in the story that Clarissa fought the restaurant clamor and quoted:
Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
And when the passionate young man was done, Wordsworth delivered into the silence his dryly dismissive verdict: “a Very pretty piece of Paganism”—which, according to Haydon, was “unfeeling and unworthy of his high Genius to a young Worshipper like Keats, and Keats felt it deeply,” and never forgave him.
“But do we trust this story?” Jocelyn said. “Didn’t I read somewhere that we shouldn’t?”
“We don’t.” Clarissa counted off the reasons. Haydon wrote his account thirty years later, not long before he went completely mad. He wanted to get at Leigh Hunt, who was putting about his own version of the meeting even though he hadn’t been there. By then Haydon also had a grudge against Wordsworth for not lending him money. Haydon didn’t mention the story in the diary he kept at the time. Nor did Wordsworth. Keats made no reference to it in his letters, and a couple of weeks later he was reciting his poetry in front of Wordsworth again and eating dinner with him. And how much of an insult was it really? In those days, “pretty” retained the meanings of clever, or skillful, or well-turned. Dorothy wrote, in 1803, about her brother’s use of the word getting him into trouble in Scotland.
If I had stood up while Clarissa was telling us this and turned toward the entrance, I would have seen, across half an acre of talking heads, two figures come in and talk to the maitre d’. One of the men was tall, but I don’t think I took that in. I knew it later, but a trick of memory has given me the image as if I had stood up then: the crowded room, the tall man, the maitre d’ nodding and gesturing vaguely in our direction. And then what, in fantasy, could I have done to persuade Clarissa and Jocelyn and the strangers at the next table to leave their meals and run with me up the stairs to find, by interconnecting doors, a way down into the street? On a score of sleepless nights I’ve been back to plead with them to leave. Look, you don’t know me, but I know what is about to happen. I’m from a future tainted by grief. It was a mistake, it doesn’t have to happen. We could choose another outcome. Put down your knives and forks and follow me, quick! No, really, please trust me. Just trust me. Let’s go!
But they do not see or hear me. They go on eating and talking. And so did I.
I said, “But the story lives on. The famous put-down.”
“Yes,” Jocelyn said eagerly. “It isn’t true, but we need it. A kind of myth.”
We looked at Clarissa. I may have given the impression that she was the lecturing type, like those academic friends whose conversational style has been corrupted by years of teaching. But she wasn’t like that. She may have been crazy now and then, playing tricks with her size, but she wasn’t dull. She was reticent about what she knew really well. I once went down on drunken knees at a beach party to get her to recite “La Belle Dame sans Merci” from memory. But today we were celebrating; we were celebrating her, her birthday, her book, and the things she knew.
“It isn’t true, but it tells the truth. Wordsworth was arrogant to the point of being loathsome about other writers. Gittings has a good line about his being in the difficult second half of a man’s forties. When he got to fifty, he calmed down, brightened up, and everyone around him breathed. A year later, Keats was dead. There’s always something delicious about young genius spurned by the powerful. You know, like The Man Who Turned Down the Beatles for Decca. We know that God, in the form of history, will have his revenge. …”
The two men were probably making their way between the tables toward us by then. I’m not sure. I have excavated that last half minute and I know two things for sure. One was that the waiter brought us sorbets. The other was that I slipped into a daydream. I often do. Almost by definition, daydreams leave no trace—they really do dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain. But I’ve been back so many times, and I’ve retrieved it by remembering what triggered it: Clarissa’s A year later, Keats was dead.
The words, the memento mori, floated me off. I was briefly gone. I saw them together, Wordsworth, Haydon, and Keats, in a room in Monkhouse’s place on Queen Ann Street, and imagined the sum of their every sensation and thought, and all the stuff—the feel of clothes, the creak of chairs and floorboards, the resonance in their chests of their own voices, the little heat of reputation, the fit of their toes in their shoes and the things in their pockets, the separate assumptions about their recent pasts and what they would be doing next, the growing, tottering frame they each carried of where they were in the story of their lives—all this as luminously self-evident as this roaring restaurant, and all gone.
What takes a minute to describe took two seconds to experience. I returned, and compensated for my absence by telling a genius-spurned story. A retired-publisher friend had told me that back in the fifties he had turned down a novel called “Strangers from Within.” (By then, the visitors must have been ten feet away, right behind our table. I don’t think they even saw us.) The point about my friend was that he only discovered his error thirty years later when an old title turned up at the place where he used to work. He hadn’t remembered the name on the typescript—he was reading dozens every month—and he did not read the book when it finally appeared. Or at least not at first. The author, William Golding, had renamed it “Lord of the Flies” and had excised the long, boring first chapter that had put my friend off.
I think I was about to draw my resounding conclusion—that time protects us from our worst mistakes—but Clarissa and Jocelyn were not listening. I too had been aware of movement to one side. Now I followed their sight lines and turned. The two men who had stopped by the table next to ours seemed to have suffered burns to the face. Their skin was a lifeless, prosthetic pink, the color of dolls, or of medical plasters—the color of no one’s skin. They shared a robotic nullity of expression. Later, we learned about the latex masks, but at the time these men were a shocking sight, even before they acted. The arrival of the waiter with our desserts in stainless-steel bowls was temporarily soothing. Both men wore black coats that gave them a priestly look. There was ceremony in their stillness. The flavor of my sorbet was lime, just to the green side of white. I already had a spoon in my hand but I hadn’t used it. Our table was staring shamelessly.
The intruders simply stood and looked down at our neighbors, who in turn looked back, puzzled, waiting. The young girl looked to her father and then back to the men. The older man put down his empty fork and seemed about to speak, but he said nothing. A variety of possibilities unspooled before me at speed: a student stunt; venders; that the man, Colin Tapp, was a doctor or a lawyer, and these were his patients or clients; some new version of the kissogram; crazy members of the family come to embarrass. Around us the lunchtime uproar, which had dipped locally, was back to level. When the taller man drew from his coat a black stick, a wand, I inclined to the kissogram. But who was his companion, now slowly turning to survey the room? He missed our table, it was so close. His eyes, piglike in the artificial skin, never met mine. The tall man, ready to cast his spell, pointed his wand at Colin Tapp.
And Tapp himself was suddenly a second ahead of us all. His face showed what we didn’t understand about the spell. His puzzlement, congealed in terror, could not find a word to tell us, because there was no time. The bullet struck through his white shirt at his heart. He was lifted from his chair and smacked against the wall and thrown back down to catch another in the throat. The first high-velocity impact forced a fine spray, a blood mist, across our tablecloth, our desserts, ou
r hands, our sight. My first impulse was simple and self-protective: I did not believe what I was seeing. Clichés are rooted in truth: I did not believe my eyes. Tapp flopped forward across the table. His father did not move, not a muscle in his face moved. As for his daughter, she did the only possible thing—she passed out. Her mind closed down on this atrocity. She slipped sideways in her chair toward Jocelyn, who put out a hand—the instincts of an old sportsman—and, though he could not prevent her fall, he caught her upper arm and saved her head from a bang.
Apart from that, we could not move. Or speak. And the men? They walked away. The tall one tucked the gun and silencer into his coat as he went. They moved swiftly toward the entrance. Only two tables had witnessed the event. There may have been a scream, and then, for seconds on end, paralysis. Further off, no one heard a thing. The chatter, the chink of cutlery against plates, went stupidly on.
Then I looked at Clarissa. Her face was horribly rouged. She mouthed a single word at me which I did not catch, and if I had I would not have understood its significance. She was looking at me, communicating with a kind of pulsing, pleading silence, pushing me toward a simple fact. And then I got it, it came to me without effort, in the same neural flash of preverbal thought that comprehends relation and structure all at once, that knows the connection between things better than the things themselves. The unimaginable lodge. Our two tables—their composition, the numbers, the sexes, Clarissa’s size, our relative ages, my glasses …
