Darconville's Cat (62 page)

  At the end of the week, he had his evening with
Prof. McGentsroom, philosophical chat over wine in his
sitting-room, a sensible and spontaneous amicability that built up
in Darconville defenses against his weakness and took his mind off
the intentionally brief letter, posing several distinct questions,
he that morning mailed to Virginia. It had grown late and was soon
time to start for home, the full harvest moon whitening the front
porch where he thanked his host who accompanied him out.

  “You’ve been very kind, the whole month. I can’t
thank you enough.”

  Prof. McGentsroom’s eyes twinkled.

  “It’s true.”

  “My dear child,” smiled the old scholar, gently
bowing his white head, “we surely can’t do enough for the princely
relative of Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville now, can we?”

  Darconville was astounded. It wasn’t important
perhaps but it was something he thought no one knew, and yet, if
known, it somehow bespoke an uncanny, even relentless investigation
of him, a shadowing that, taking such a curious turn, now unsettled
him.

  “Please,” he swiftly asked, “who told you about
that?”

  “Oh dear,” cried McGentsroom, biting his thumb in
embarrassment over the apparent blunder. “Does that bother
you?”

  “Who—could have known? And whoever it is,” asked
Darconville, upset at his own stammering, “w-what has he to do with
me? My goodness, is that why I’ve been brought to Harvard?”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I must know.”

  Prof. McGentsroom blinked sadly, bewildered as to
what he could now possibly do to explain what, for the reaction, he
couldn’t understand. He became confused. Then he fumbled out a
piece of paper and without a word—strangely, it seemed the best of
the worst possibilities—wrote down the title of a book, waited,
with trepidation added the author’s name, and then gave it over. It
was as if he had written the names of sixty devils. He gravely,
compassionately, took Darconville’s hand and, pausing to add
something, found he couldn’t. A goodnight at that juncture, he
felt, could only have sounded insolent.

  LXIV

  September 26

  That strain once more; it bids remembrance rise.

        —OLIVER
GOLDSMITH,
The Captivity

  LATER THAT NIGHT when Darconville returned to his
rooms he found Spellvexit sitting on a telegram. He tore open the
envelope and read:

        SEPT. 26

        YOU NEEDN’T COME
I LOVE YOU LETTER FOLLOWS

                          ISABEL

  He was still awake in his chair holding the message
long after dawn had crept up Bow St. and pressed its haggard face
against the window, and shortly thereafter the morning bells from
the steeple of St. Paul’s pealed and promised a new day. But that
morning at Mass he distractedly wondered why he wasn’t yet at
peace. What was it?

  Then he remembered.

  LXV

  Odor of Corruption

  I shall teach thee terrible things.

        —WILLIAM
HALLGARTH

  WIDENER LIBRARY is closed on Sundays. The following
morning, however, Darconville was waiting on the front steps, a
coverlet of morning dew blanketing the Yard, and when the doors
opened he went straight to the card-catalogue and began to thumb
through the listings, his fingers still cold from the vigil
outside. He wrote down a number but in the stacks, when he couldn’t
find the particular title he wanted among several linguistic works
by the same author, was told by a librarian that it was a special
section book (an XR number), kept on the ground floor in a cage.
Showing his faculty card, he was led downstairs, asked to wait, and
eventually given the book:
Christianity and the Ages Which It
Darkened
by Dr. Abel Crucifer. He took a seat, opened randomly
to a chapter, and read:

  The Socratic manner is not a game at which two
people can play. I suggest he wanted it that way, transmogrifying,
way back when, an aesthetic into a pseudo-ethical world and leaving
as a legacy to western man the total betrayal of all degree,
priority, and place. In this chapter, “
Womanity
,” let us
consider how in the ultimate demonetization of old values he
established a platform for radical feminism: the topsyturvification
of the sexual order which has subsequently set in motion a growing
regiment of Bluestockings, trousered females, and odier freaks of
nature who happened to be born of a sex of which they failed to be
the ornament. In the failed marriage of Socrates was man betrayed.
Madame Defarge didn’t want justice, she wanted testosterone. Hello,
Medusa, here are my stones.

  It is no secret that this low-bred male concubine of
Archelaus named Socrates (469-399 B.C.) had an extreme influence on
philosophy. That is the central miracle of the man. Born on the 6th
of Thargelion of the sculptor, Sophroniscus, and midwife,
Phaenarete, he was ill-shaped, ridiculous in carriage, and
habitually dressed like a craptoad, his general appearance, no
doubt, best put somewhere between a wishnik and a Jewish
candy-store proprietor. He was almost certainly a pedicator.
Juvenal refers to “the foulest sewer of Socratic sodomy.” Firmicus
speaks of “Socratic buggery.” It is of course the modern fashion to
doubt the pederasty of the master of Hellenic sophrosyne, the
“Christian before Christianity,” but even if we are overapt to
apply our twentieth-century prejudices and prepossessions to the
morality of ancient Greeks who would have specimened such
squeamishness in Attic salt such a worldwide term as Socratic love
can hardly be explained by the
lucus-a-non-lucendo
theory.

  The man had no special education. He was an
autodidact—and was very probably unable to read. A pedant,
nevertheless, he knew that he knew nothing (Ap.
23 AB
,
Symp.
216 D
) which did not prevent him, however, from
seeking the reaches of an Atopia that actually was never there. His
dissatisfaction with natural philosophy is well-known, less so,
perhaps, his utter rejection of natural science (
Xen
. Mem.
I
,
i
,
llff
.,
Arist
. Met.
XIII
,
4
). He claimed he heard voices—the
classical smokescreen—and, with imperturbable serenity, explained
he took his mission in life from a reply of the Delphic oracle: to
set in man an inner unrest and bring him into embarrassment
(
aporeis
,
Theaet
.
149A
), his attempt to
recoin current values developing into a kind of barren and
allocritical eristic that took pleasure in the invention of clever
but worthless fallacies, berced, every one of them, by his own vile
insecurity and then sent out on a spin to brain the human race like
a disselboom!

  Poor in fortune, unlucky with women, hopelessly
unfit for any office in the Republic, he spent most of his days
working his trade (making claypots), bumsucking about for friends,
and drinking neck to neck with anybody who’d listen to him. He
craved the acceptance of society— especially women—and would go to
any lengths to insinuate himself with them, even if the
transvaluation of current thinking itself was required to do so.
What then, specifically, did he transvalue? Pay attention, I will
bequeath you a funny story if you prove to misunderstand the
following argument. It is offered less for your edification than
for my own sense of well-being. Say survival. I see your brain
jailed by a Skuld.

  Darconville laughed. It was iconoclastic, comic,
absurd.

  The philosophy of the West owes its origin chiefly
to the Greeks of the late Hellenic period. Your average schoolboy
will testify, correctly, to the fact that although a slight state
of decline was evident in fifth-century Athens—the City That Loved
Beauty—a wonderfully simple view of man still held: he was taken to
be
whole
, with no distinction made between his visible and
invisible aspects. The traditional Greek view would never have
conceded that men and women could be valued on the strength of
their so-called invisible or “psychological” characteristics as
considered separate, say, from visible or bodily ones. (The
classical Greek dramatists
never
brought into the
amphitheatre characters with inexplicable psychological problems:
aprioristic madness never went unexplained, and critical mental
states, always given with sufficient evidence as to how they came
about, were related to demonstrable tragedy.)

  The general pre-Socratic view of life as they knew
it, therefore, was monistic, Unitarian, whole. There is no dispute
whatsoever about that And although the handwashing,
departmentalized little scientists and seers of today now regard
man as a psycho-physical twin of himself, a psychosome—some kind of
metaphysical chest-of-drawers composed of soul, mind, and body—the
early wholesome Greeks made no such arbitrary divisions. The
“wholeness” of man! Can anyone disagree that it was a healthy and
fully salvific view of what he aspired to be, shoring up identity
and mocking the currently fashionable bit of legerdemain which
condones and excuses, almost automatically, a score of revolting
human excesses committed in the name of lofty intentions? The
brainless incompetence we forgive! The philosophical idealism we
cite lest we censure! To the pre-Socratics those tidy distinctions
would have been dismissed as a counterproductive fragmentation
which could only lead to the kind of society we have today, where,
thanks to that little ill-born, thrusting Father of Abstract
Definitions, forcible-feebles can now accede to high political
office, the poor are twigged of their money in the name of
religion, and screeching amazonians-in-pantsuits, shitfitsresses,
and children-hating ballockscourers can legitimately go larking
about the world with more complaints than Job and a bellyful of
abortifacients all in pursuit of a freedom they can’t temper with
responsibility and as an excuse for a higher liberation they’ve
never deserved! Blindfolded, you can at least see the blindfold,
can’t you? It’s only to witness what your wit won’t see.

  A librarian walked by rolling a bookcarrier.
Darconville looked up and, turning a page, went back to the mad
polemic in front of him, amused and fascinated and disgusted.

  The Greek expression for a good man—
kalos
kagathos
—explied both good-looking and morally good, a notion
at once attic, simple, and undevious, with the body and soul fully
integrated, valued as one, unseparated in wholeness: boul or, say,
sody. There were no pea-and-thimble tricks effected to propagate
the careers of incompetents, liars, or faith-thumping dwales who
spoke of what perversely they either couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Man’s
integrity, as we use the term, is not unrelated to the etymological
denotation it more strictly conveys. You work out the syllogism
yourself. I’ve a philosopher to kill.

  During the fifth century, under Pericles, the Greeks
reached an order of highest perfection—in art, poetry, sculpture,
architecture, medicine, history, drama, and science; it was
plenitude, a paradise in terms of man’s effort that was the closest
thing to the eye of God where the expression
to kalos
kagathos
served: the union of the beautiful and the wise (so
one translation might be), which gives birth to the good. Then
sometime about 428 B.C. Socrates, patron saint of equivokes,
fartwhooshed onto the scene with his little grab-bag of famous
questions, the type of which, when asked, perversely became answers
(
iezetazeis eautos kai tous allous Ap
.
28E
,
38A
). I look back to Maieuticville and see a
self-absolving bore, an inkle-beggar with his pockets full of
Crito’s money, a farting whaw-drover with ears like a question mark
and more gall than bladder. The problem now was to ingratiate
himself, advance, become accepted. He stole his method from Zeno of
Elea. He hung around young and impressionable people. And he
claimed that he had supernatural monitors and was open to some kind
of divine pipeline, the source of which inspiration history might
better trace to the dark den of his occasional companion-in-arms,
the hetaira Diotema of Man-tinea, to whose symposia, one imagines,
everyone was invited save other women and wives, possibly making of
them—
termagants
?

  The silly revisionism bewildered Darconville. He
shook his head over the compounded lunacies, wondering just where
all this went. What nonsense! What nothings!

  Socrates began to preach duality, and except for
several contemporary quacks of disapproval—Aristophanes, among
others, and now mine, thank you very much—he got away with it for
two thousand years
! Think of it! He turned philosophical
contemplation into enigma, called ignorance real wisdom, sabotaged
tradition, ended no dialogue but in disillusionment, and yet all
the while actually claimed that he knew nothing, taught nothing,
learned nothing! Curiously, this didn’t stop him—or others.
Unhappily, he had two apprentices—you know them as Xenophon and
Plato, the Hellenic Mutt and Jeff—both of whom ingeniously saw fit
to transmit to following generations the quintessence of what diat
misinformed little bum-biter [
in the near margin someone had
written the word “blasphemous”
] left behind, the which may be
put in five philosophical headings:

  1. The soul’s independence of the body

  2. The soul’s superiority over the body