Agape Agape (7 page)

the keyboard half as big as the piano itself. It's all like, it's like a kind of plagiary, like Gottschalk composing his bar room player piano music fifty years before the player was invented, like my own ideas being stolen before I even had them since I'm clearly the one person qualified for a piece of work like this one, first because I can't read music and can't play anything but a comb. Second because I use only secondhand material which any court would dismiss as hearsay so we can reduce it to gossip like everything else, and finally. Finally I really don't believe any of it. You see? I don't really believe you can take ninety-six people, that's almost two hundred hands, take out some of them like the sleigh bells there's still more than a hundred-odd hands doing entirely different things, guiding bows across strings pressing the neck so fast it's dizzying, fingers pushing, plunging valves, keys opening holes and closing them, the clarinet changing whole registers translating every jot and tittle on the score into a stab, a wail, a delicate lonely suspense, a blast to wake the dead, sforzando, piano God knows what all of it going on at once but not exactly all at once because what's coming out of all this is a Pastoral Symphony, what's rising to the heavens is Bruckner's Eighth or Mozart's D Minor Piano Concerto, what overwhelms the senses is Eliot's “music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts” but isn't that then, isn't that the hallucination? Transforming this chaos of hands guiding bows, fingers plunging valves resolving this clutter of physical of, you see? I can't think about it, I can't not think about it but when I try not to think about it I go absolutely crazy but that's, no. Can you hear me? Listen. Start back with these three wait, two pianos, first the enemy Flaubert asked to be liberated from. No more piano! I said, only that small group of minds, ever the same, to pass on the torch. And the second one, Peter Ibbetson's enigmatic little square piano that will not surrender its secrets, leaving him helpless before an instrument he cannot play, a score he can't read, finding its author one day walking across Hampstead Heath with Henry James and a new idea for a story, begging the American novelist to write it, good God what it might have turned into in James's delicate hands! But James handed it back yes and here's the third one, the third piano, a big semigrand by Broad-wood, brought to Paris by La Petite Vitesse freshly tuned for the hands of the man once the best pianist of his time at the Leipzig Conservatory, but now fallen to poverty and deceit, borrowing money, betraying and cheating anyone in reach, bullying anyone less talented, that is to say everyone, in the name of the art which he still holds bitterly sacred, supplying his miserable needs with any dodge he can devise, treating a young woman suffering from severe pain with an approach floating up from central Europe, where my golden Sigi had opened the era of psychoanalysis with a paper on the psychological mechanism of hysteria and was already embracing “free association” to replace hypnosis, left in the hands of those who've departed most lamentably from his own ideal most ably represented by the scapegrace now seated on the divan opposite the suffering girl looking at him fixed in the whites of his eyes. He passed a hand on her forehead and temples, and down her cheek and her throat till her eyes closed and her face emptied. Was she still in pain? Oh! presque plus du tout, monsieur! she cries out and he, stunned by the shock of her cri du coeur ringing in the rafters, asks to look into her mouth, finding its roof like the dome of the Panthéon with room for toutes les gloires de la France, its entrance like the middle porch of Saint Sulpice, not a tooth missing, the bridge of her nose like the belly of a Stradivarius, what a sounding board! She must come back to be cured of her pain when it returns, he will play Schubert and her voice will be trained, meanwhile she shall see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing, think of nothing but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali! And the world at large but America in extravagant particular would hear nothing, talk of nothing, read nothing, but Trilby, Trilby, Trilby, nothing but the inevitable stage production of Trilby where even the soft felt hat worn there became and is still called a trilby. People went trilby mad. You had to be there. Can you hear me? The America of discovering your hidden talent, of self-improvement, of one born every minute. Over there, dying Offenbach's one wish, to see the premiere of his Tales of Hoffmann, had come a year too late with its mechanical dolls by Spalanzani passing off one as his daughter for poor Hoffmann to fall in love with, and a girl in act three who sings herself to death. But three years? Svengali and a friend teaching Trilby eight hours a day morning noon and night for three years, violin and Svengali with his little flageolet, Gott im Himmel! Wieder zurück! The most astoundingly beautiful sounds ever heard from a human throat, one note drawn through all the colors of the rainbow as Svengali's eyes directed her, the greatest contralto, the greatest soprano the world had ever known till that terrible night in Drury Lane when Svengali died in the box opposite and it was all over. Can you hear me? I'm, no, get my breath can't get my breath, what it's all about anyhow, that note drawn through the rainbow as his eyes directed this Other he had created feel like myself just the breathing, the breathing the, not being able to, to make these wonderful sounds he'd wanted and nothing else, to think his thoughts and wish his wishes, all of it nothing but Svengali's love for himself turned inside out wasn't it, yes! Yes and that, where did that come from! Finally yes that, where it's all been going from the start, that cry from Michelangelo, O Dio, o Dio, o Dio, Chi m'a tolto a me stesso Ch'a me fusse più presso O più di me potessi, che poss' io? O Dio, o Dio, who has taken the one closest to me who could do more than no, no it's not that pedestrian it's fifteenth, sixteenth century Italian nearer poetry, Who nearer to me Or more mighty yes, more mighty than I Tore me away from myself. Tore me away! che poss', what can I do? I'll tell you che poss' io! Get him back, whoever took this Other, tore away the closest to me who could do more yes wheel up the player, put a roll in and start pumping all trying to get out from under this cumbersome damn thing with its tiny fingers get a fine burnished player inside a case, a cocoon, says one pupa to the other as a butterfly passes, you'd never get me into an outfit like that, O Dio, o Dio, odious, repugnant, from odium, hatred, odisse to hate God the bed-maker you hear me Svengali? That old friendship between myself and myself broken by age coming on, left my ideas and opinions to suit public opinion and be part of it a, a yes a nonperson looking back at the arrogant self-made self when you were the finest pianist at the Leipzig Conservatory before it was torn from you, before your love of singing became a croak in your throat and before you became Trilby's Self who could do more till Age finally took you and the magnificent voice that we'd heard, that the world had heard when she sang the Impromptu was yours wasn't it Svengali! You singing with her voice, wasn't it! Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it's become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that's become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that's everything out there is the greater one that transforms you good God, Pozdnyshev, those words that Levochka gave you to transform the whole thing when “music carries you off into another state of being that's not your own, of feeling things you don't really feel, of understanding things you don't really understand, of being able to do things you aren't really able to do” yes, that transforms that transfigures you yourself into the self who can do more! That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

AFTERWORD

Agapē Agape
is William Gaddis's swan song, his most concentrated fiction, and the one work where he risks a direct address to the reader. The distillation of a project that occupied him throughout his professional life, this final fiction began as an exhaustive social history of the player piano in America, whose lineaments can be read in the thousands of notes, clippings, working papers, drafts, and snippets that Gaddis left at his death. Organized roughly, like all of his manuscripts and background materials, into numbered cardboard boxes, the remains of his research match the narrative description: among the working papers, one finds a chronology from the player's invention in 1876 to 1929, “when the player piano world and everything else collapsed.” Handwritten reminders, in a hand whose changes can be discerned over half a century, appear in the margins, or on whatever scraps of paper he had around. “Chaos theory as a means toward order,” reads one note among the strips and folders that Gaddis would refer to when composing his last work. After a career spent imagining in detail the vast systems and multiple voices of an emerging global culture—in works that have themselves been called “systems novels”
¹
—Gaddis at the end would reflect primarily on his own private system of assembling materials and putting words down on paper.

As with all of his books, for
Agapē Agape
much of the working material was cut out from popular magazines and newspapers. (Even the high literature, art, music, and technology references that made him seem forbiddingly “erudite” to some readers often came out of daily papers, or this material was sent to him by acquaintances; possibly more came to him this way than from books.) Often, Gaddis would combine strips on a single topic or under a single date and tape them all the way along one side, on a single long page. When correcting galleys and typescripts, he would insert words and small phrases by hand, but he preferred to lay in new material in typed strips cut with scissors. Composition, for Gaddis, was a distinctly material practice, involving a literal organization and arrangement of found materials, even as his narrator struggles literally to hold himself together. In a sense, the writer becomes the page on which he's writing: the wreck of an old man in
Agapē
has rusting staples in his legs, and his skin is like tissue paper from the drugs he's been taking. He worries that his books will be left on the shelf, unread, while his unpublished research molders in the boxes stacked around him. But as long as he goes on reading, revising, adding to the manuscript, he will stave off death and madness and keep the work from becoming “what it's about”: entropy, chaos, loss, and a mechanized culture indifferent to the cultivation of particular, individual talents.

This is the theme he would come back to, obsessively, in the very last working papers and at the last page of
Agapē:
“Discover yr hidden talent,” “yr unsuspected talent,” “disc secret talent” all appear on one page of notes, along with “the self who could do more” (three times, with variations). The notetaking evidently continued weeks and months past the time when he'd declared the manuscript finished—confirming a lifelong habit he had of writing past a book's end. That's how it went with
The Recognitions,
which Gaddis completed half a century before, when he still had on his desk pages of “outlined notes . . . for spinning out the novel's conclusion” (letter to Steven Moore, April 7, 1983). And the succeeding books each took off, in their turn, from the leftover drafts of work that preceded it until, at the end of his life, Gaddis determined to transform his accumulated research into one gemlike meditation without false illusions or consolations.

The player-piano history, had it been completed, would have been an impressive coda to the fiction. As scholarship, it would have put Gaddis belatedly in the tradition of those North American writers on media and technology—Lewis Mumford, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman—who could perceive technology's aesthetic consequences and wellsprings. As literary criticism, much of what Gaddis intended had already been accomplished by Hugh Kenner in
The Counterfeiters.
As a conceptual work, the history could scarcely have rivaled Walter Benjamin's “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Gaddis knew this; he knew that his contribution to the study of mechanization and the arts had already been accomplished, indirectly, with his novels. But the accumulated research of half a century weighed on him during these final years, demanding an outlet. He worked hard on the history through 1996 and early 1997, when he discovered that he would not have long to live. By that time, however, he had already decided to re-format the work as a fiction, having finally realized that his own raillery on the subject was more interesting to him than “a dim pursuit of scholarship headed for the same trash heap I'm upset about in the first place.”
²

Once he had finally set aside the history, Gaddis used his boxes of snippets to create a character who had an obsession identical with his own, whose lived experience and efforts at composition could dramatize both the possibilities and “the destructive element” within an emerging technological order. Later, in 1998, when he was commissioned by DeutschlandRadio to write a play suitable for broadcasting, he responded with a fragment unlike anything he—or anyone else—had ever written: a one-act monologue entitled
Torschlusspanik
(the fear of doors closing, of opportunities lost, of staying single, and—not least—of going unread). The work was translated and broadcast on March 3, 1999, three and a half months after Gaddis died. At his death, a somewhat longer typescript of eighty-four pages, intended by Gaddis for posthumous publication, was sent to his agent under the same title he had used for the history:
Agapē Agape.
His last words sound and read less like a deathbed utterance than a posthumous one, from beyond the grave—less a lament, finally, for his own passing than an honest expression of fear at where technology is taking the world.