Flying to America (42 page)
Florence I have decided is evading the life-issue. She is proposing herself as more unhappy than she really is. She has in mind making herself more interesting. She is afraid of boring us. She is trying to establish her uniqueness. She does not really want to go away. Does Onward Christian know about the Important Lakes of the World? Terminate services of employees when necessary. I terminate you, brightness that seems to know me. She proceeded by car from Tempel-hof to a hotel in the American zone, registered, dined, sat in a chair in the lobby for a time observing the American lieutenant colonels and their healthy German girls, and then walked out into the street. The first German man she saw was a policeman directing traffic. He wore a uniform. Florence walked out into the traffic island and tugged at his sleeve. He bent politely toward the nice old
American lady. She lifted her cane, the cane of 1927 from Yellowstone, and cracked his head with it. He fell in a heap in the middle of the street. Then Florence Green rushed awkwardly into the plaza with her cane, beating the people there, men and women, indiscriminately, until she was subdued. The Forms of Address, shall I sing to you of the Forms of Address? What Florence did was what Florence did, not more or less, she was returned to this country under restraint on a military plane. “Why do you have the children kill everybody?” “Because everybody has already been killed. Everybody is absolutely dead. You and I and Onward Christian.” “You’re not very sanguine.” “That’s true.” For an earl’s younger son’s wife, letters commence:
Madam . . .
“We put in the downstairs bathroom when Ead came to visit us. Ead was Mr. Green’s sister and she couldn’t climb stairs.” What about Casablanca? Santa Cruz? Funchal? Málaga? Valletta? Iráklion? Samos? Haifa? Kotor Bay? Dubrovnik? “I want to go to some
other
place,” Florence says. “Somewhere where
everything is different
.” For the Talent Test a necessary but not a sufficient condition for matriculation at the Famous Writers School Baskerville delivered himself of “Impressions of Akron” which began: “Akron! Akron was full of people walking the streets of Akron carrying little transistor radios which were turned on.”
Florence has a Club. The Club meets on Tuesday evenings, at her huge horizontal old multibathroom home on Indiana Boulevard. The Club is a group of men who gather, on these occasions, to recite and hear poems in praise of Florence Green. Before you can be admitted you must compose a poem. The poems begin, usually, somewhat in this vein: “Florence Green is eighty-one/ Nevertheless she’s lots of fun . . .” Onward Christian’s poem began “Through all my clangorous hours . . .” Florence carries the poems about with her in her purse, stapled together in an immense, filthy wad. Surely Florence Green is a vastly rich vastly egocentric old-woman nut! Six modifiers modify her into something one can think of as a nut. “But you have not grasped the living reality, the essence!” Husserl exclaims. Nor will I, ever. His examiner (was it J. D. Ratcliff?) said severely: “Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.” “The aim of literature,” Baskerville replied grandly, “is the creation
of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.” Joan says: “I have two children.” “Why did you do that?” I ask. “I don’t know,” she says. I am struck by the modesty of her answer. Pamela Hansford Johnson has been listening and his face jumps in what may be described as a wince. “That’s a terrible thing to say,” he says. And he is right, right, entirely correct, what she has said is the First Terrible Thing. We value each other for our remarks, on the strength of this remark and the one about the Andrews Sisters, love becomes possible. I carry in my wallet an eight-paragraph General Order, issued by the adjutant of my young immaculate Army to the troops: “(1) You are in this Army because you wanted to be. So you have to do what the General says. Anybody who doesn’t do what the General says will be kicked out of the Army. (2) The purpose of the Army is to do what the General says. (3) The General says that nobody will shoot his weapon unless the General says to. It is important that when the Army opens fire on something everybody does it together. This is very important and anybody who doesn’t do it will have his weapon taken away and will be kicked out of the Army. (4) Don’t be afraid of the noise when everybody fires. It won’t hurt you. (5) Everybody has enough rounds to do what the General wants to do. People who lose their rounds won’t get any more. (6) Talking to people who are not in the Army is strictly forbidden. Other people don’t understand the Army. (7) This is a serious Army and anybody that laughs will have his weapon taken away and will be kicked out of the Army. (8) What the General wants to do now is, find and destroy the enemy.”
I want to go somewhere where everything is different.
A simple, perfect idea. The old babe demands nothing less than total otherness. Dinner is over. We place our napkins on our lips. Quemoy and Matsu remain ours, temporarily perhaps; the upstairs bathroom drips away unrepaired; I feel the money drifting, drifting away from me. I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I edit . . . but I explained all that. In the dim foyer I slip my hands through the neck of Joan’s yellow dress. It is dangerous but it is a way of finding out everything all at once. Then Onward Christian arrives to resume his yellow overcoat. No one has taken Florence seriously,
how can anyone with three hundred million dollars be taken seriously? But I know that when I telephone tomorrow, there will be no answer. Iráklion? Samos? Haifa? Kotor Bay? She will be in none of these places but in another place, a place where
everything is different.
Outside it is raining. In my rain-blue Volkswagen I proceed down the rain-black street thinking, for some simple reason, of the Verdi
Requiem.
I begin to drive my tiny car in idiot circles in the street, I begin to sing the first great
Kyrie.
I
have decided to form a new group and am now contemplating the membership, the prospective membership, of my new group. My decision was prompted by a situation that arose not long ago vis-à-vis the symphony. We say “the symphony” because there is only one symphony orchestra here, as opposed to other cities where there are several and one must distinguish among them. The situation had to do with an invitation my wife received from Barbet, the artist, to attend the symphony with him on the evening of the ninth of March.
My wife, as it happened, was already planning to attend the performance of the ninth of March with her friend Morton. Barbet had extra tickets and wanted my wife to join his group and was gracious enough to enlarge his invitation to include my wife’s friend, Morton. My wife could join his group, Barbet said, and took special pains to make clear that this invitation extended to Morton also. My wife responded, with characteristic warmth, with a counter-invitation, saying that she already had tickets for the ninth of March including extra tickets, that Barbet was most welcome to join her group, the group of my wife and Morton, and that the members of Barbet’s group were also most welcome to join my wife’s group, the group consisting, at that moment, of herself and Morton. My wife had
previously asked me, with the utmost cordiality, if I wished to go to the symphony with her on the ninth of March, despite being fully apprised of my views on the matter of going to the symphony.
I had replied that I did not care to join her at the symphony on the occasion in question, but had inquired, out of politeness, what the program was to be, although my wife is fully aware that my views on the symphony will never change. My views on the symphony are that only the socially malformed would choose to put on a dark suit, a white shirt, a red tie, and so on, black shoes, and so on, and go to the symphony, there to sit pinned between two other people, albeit one of them one’s own warm and sweet-smelling wife, for two hours or more, listening to music that may very well exist, in equally knowing and adroit performances, in one’s own home, on records. That is to say that such people, the socially malformed (my wife, of course, excepted), go to the symphony out of extramusical need, clear extramusical need. But because of the raging politeness that always obtains between us I asked her what the program was to be on the ninth of March, and she told me that it was to be an all-Laurenti evening.
Laurenti is a composer held in quite high esteem hereabouts, perhaps less so elsewhere but of that I cannot judge, he is attached to the symphony as our composer-in-residence. It was to be, she told me, an all-Laurenti performance with just a bit of Orff by way of curtain-raiser, the conductor of the symphony, Gilley, which he pronounces “Gil-lay,” having decided that Orff would make an appropriate, even delicious, curtain-raiser for Laurenti. While I am respectful of Laurenti’s tragedy, what is called in some circles Laurenti’s tragedy — that he has not a shred of talent of any description — still the prospect of sitting tightly wedged between two other human beings for the length of an all-Laurenti evening would have filled me with dismay had I not been aware that the invitation from my wife was perfectly pro forma. It appears that Gilley is sleeping with Mellow the new first-desk cellist, who sits at the head of the cellos with her golden cornrows, or so it is said at the Opera-Cellar, where I have a drink from time to time, especially often during the rather hectic
period when my wife was both chairperson of the Friends of French Art Fandango and head whipper-in for the Detached Retina Bal.
It could be relied upon that Barbet, being an artist, would respond with enthusiasm to the notion of yet another disastrous all-Laurenti evening, possibly with the idea of mocking Laurenti behind his hand, although Barbet, as an artist, would not literally mock Laurenti behind his hand but rather in speech, or ironic speech rotten with wit. Barbet, being an artist of a particular kind, no doubt feels that a mocking attitude is appropriate to an artist of his kind, known not only hereabouts but in much larger cities, cities with two and even three distinct symphony orchestras, not even counting a Youth Symphony or one maintained by the Department of Sanitation. Barbet’s reputation rests, not unimpressively, upon his “Cancelation” paintings — or simply “cancellations,” in the language of his métier — a form he is believed to have invented and in which he displays his rotten wit along with the usual exhausting manual dexterity. The “cancellations” are paintings in which a rendering of a well-known picture, an Edvard Munch, say, has superimposed on it a smaller, but yet not small, rendering of another but perhaps not so well known picture, an El Lissitzky, say, for example the “Untitled” of 1919–20, a rather geometrical affair of squares and circles, reds and blacks, whose impetuses not only contest, contradict, the impetuses of the Munch, the Scandinavian miserablism of the Munch, but effectively
cancel
it, an action one can see taking place before one’s eyes. I must say in his defense (because what Barbet is doing, has been doing all his life as a painter, is fundamentally indefensible), I must say in Barbet’s defense that the contestation between the two paintings he has chosen to superimpose, one on the other, is of a very high order, is of substantial visual interest just
as paint,
and that the way the historically unrelated paintings relate to each other
as forms or collections of forms
is a value in addition to the value one awards the destructive act that is the soul of Barbet’s painting, as much as the decayed wit displayed in titling these things “Improved Painting #1,” “Improved Painting #2,” “Improved Painting #19 — all these values must be taken into
account in deciding whether or not Barbet should be shot, on the basis of ill will. But because Barbet is one of our few, our very few, genuine artists, we embrace him. This is not to say that the work of many other painters not our own is not similarly indefensible and that they, too, from a strictly construed moral-aesthetic standpoint, should not be shot. There are forty-four examples of Barbet’s work in the museum, I refer to our quite grand local museum, in which my wife’s family’s money has had quite an important role over the years; it can be imagined how much I detest the phrase “provincial museum” but there is no other way of describing the place, which is, of course, quite grand, with its old part done in the classical mode and its new part done in a mode that respects the classical mode to the point of being indistinguishable from the classical mode but is also fresh, new, contemporary, and ironic.
This Morton who has been my wife’s friend for ten years at least, who is forever calling her on the telephone so that I have come to recognize his voice although I have never met him — I recognize not only his voice but the characteristic pause before he asks if my wife is there, the freighted pause, I recognize that and say yet, Morton, just a moment, I’ll see if she’s in — this Morton, on the other hand, is a singer, and thus has no irony. He has, however, a legitimate interest in the symphony, as well as a truly frightening voice, easily recognized, a bass voice of remarkable color and strength, and patina; it is not wrong to add “patina” since this Morton is a man of a certain age, not old in any sense, but not young either, and of course not new to my wife, whose constant companion he has been for the past ten years. Morton does not go to the symphony or to musical occasions of any sort merely to make jokes or scoff behind his hand. And considered in the light of the possible attendance of someone like Morton, a sage and well-tempered listener, even some of Laurenti is perhaps worth hearing, the “Songs” perhaps, which draw from reviewers notices that begin “Among the best, perhaps, of this fluent but uneven composer’s efforts are the ‘Songs.’” I must tell you that last night I slept with my wife, I use the term “slept with” in the sense of congress, it was four-fifteen in the morning and
I awoke with an itch to sleep with my wife, who was sleeping beside me as she has every night for the past fifteen years or thereabouts. My wife appeared to me to be a young person, that was interesting, I of course have no idea how I appeared to her but she appeared to me to be a young person and together after arduous endeavor we achieved quite sublime heights of sexual communion, such as one does not often achieve, we achieved that, at about four-fifteen in the morning, last night, the children sleeping soundly, the dog awake, she said in the morning, “Good morning, sexy boy.”
