Museums and Women (21 page)

Could I explain, to a crowd of riot-minded guitarists, how
real, if imperfectly read, these great names were to us? Or with what zest we executed the academic exercise, by now perhaps as obsolete as diagrammatic parsing, called
explication?
To train one’s mind to climb, like a vine on a sunny wall, across the surface of a poem by George Herbert, seeking the handhold crannies of pun, ambiguity, and buried allusion; to bring forth from the surface sense of the poem an altogether other, hidden poem of consistent metaphor and, as it were, verbal subversion; to feel, in Eliot’s phrase, a thought like an emotion; to
explicate
—this was life lived on the nerve ends. Ed was a master of explication; whatever on exams he lost on the facts he made up on the set passages. Once, for my amusement, he explicated a column of names in the Boston Telephone Directory and proved it to be really about night journeys, seed-planting rites, and the Eternal Return. Less playfully, beneath the surface text of history he spied the Christian counterpoint of Fall and Redemption, the radiant skeleton wrapped in earth’s distasteful flesh. Ed was a master, too, of literary gossip, an unprinted Lives of the Poets; he would tell me, with the deadpan rattle of a secret agent, how one night in Paris Pound saved Eliot from suicide, or what Wallace Stevens said to Marianne Moore before disappearing forever into the disguise of a Hartford insurance executive. On an occasion of rare excitement, fresh from a festive night in the offices of the literary magazine of which he was an editor, he brought back to our room a holy relic, a blank piece of paper upon which had been impressed the wet ring, now dried to near-invisibility, of a Martini glass set down by Conrad Aiken.

Ed’s devotion eventually earned him a martyrdom. At his oral exams, with a
summa
in the balance, he declined to discuss, on the ground that they were minor, a number of poets
including Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Pope; he was knocked down to a
cum
. Out of college, his talents for explication and passionate discrimination lacked a ready market. For a time, I would see him in New York, where he was always about to be interviewed for a job with some textbook publisher or news magazine. But even when he kept the appointment, he must have betrayed his opinion that the organization, let alone his prospective function within it, was impossibly minor, for he was never hired. He grew eccentric and fat. His striped shirts were worn dirty; his tiny tie knots looked pained. My wife and I had him several times to dinner. The last time, we discussed Proust, whom I, in my plodding way, had just begun to read. “Charlus,” Ed said. “What a horrible man! What a loathsome, incredible individual! Oh!” And, to our consternation, he couldn’t stop ranting; he drank all our brandy, smashed a lampshade, and left at two in the morning, still spewing abhorrence of Charlus. I walked him to the corner, where he embraced me. He would have kissed me, had I not ducked my head. Roommates make such gauche hellos and goodbyes. A few months later, I heard that Ed had found a job, and a year later that he was very good at it, and rising rapidly. His employer was the C.I.A.

So, students, when you revile the “power structure” and storm the Pentagon, you are disturbing a haven of old English majors. It is only Ed Popper in there, with his narrow shoulders, his nicotine-orange fingers, his first editions (worth hundreds now), his farmboy twang, his crucifix, and his eyes like blind blue targets. He was an Arabist first, and spent years in Beirut, Istanbul, and Damascus. In the middle sixties he was taught Lao and sent to Southeast Asia. Now, I believe, he is in South America, perhaps seeing with more than a poet’s
inner eye the orchidaceous canopies that dapple the Amazon’s gliding scum. Neither of us, surely, is capable of a “political” act; we rang doorbells for Stevenson, as I recall, because he seemed a poet
manqué
. When we met accidentally a year ago, before Ed disappeared into the “southern continent” that he refused to identify by name, and lunched in a Chinese restaurant, where he one-upped me by ordering in fluent Mandarin, I timidly asked about Vietnam. There must be, I suggested, some secret strategic reason, some resource worth fighting for. “Nonsense,” Ed said, “there’s nothing. Nobody wants it. We don’t want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn’t want it; it’s simply a question of annoying the other side. Vietnam, I’m afraid, is thoroughly minor.” Ed was impeccably dressed and slimmer—he had developed, I thought, the necessary hardness. He also told me, of my own poems, which had slowly begun to leak into print, that though I handled stanzaic patterns well I quite lacked resonance—which seemed true enough to be a reason not to see Ed soon again. I would rather look at a map, all those flat warring colors, and imagine him in it, a hidden allusion in the poem of the world.

God Speaks

T
HE WORLD IS MOCKED
—belittled, perforated—by the success of our contemporaries in it. The realm of deeds and wealth, which to a child appears a gaudy heaven staffed with invincible powers, is revealed as a tattered heirloom limply descending from one generation of caretakers to the next. In the ten years since our graduation, one of my Harvard classmates has become a Congressman; another a bit movie actor, whose specialty is playing the “goofy” guy in those beach-party movies that co-star Fred MacMurray and Elvis Presley; a third a professor of Celtic languages at Brandeis. Three others have annual incomes of over a hundred thousand a year. Which these three are, the class report (a fat red paperback) does not say. Nor does it say anything, beyond a curt forwarding address in Kabul, of my old tennis opponent Gish Imra, whose fate has been the noblest and strangest of all; for, if I read the newspapers right, he has become not merely important but divine.

The numinous rumor haloing his slight and sallow person—
with his slicked-down hair the no-color of cardboard and his lavender little lips like the lips of a sarcastic prepubescent girl—seemed, when I knew him, a kind of undergraduate joke. I understood only that his father was the “profoundly venerated” chieftain of the Shīgar tribe of Nuristan. Two years ago (that is, in 1962) when his father died, in an assassination so ambiguous in its effects that both the Russians and the C.I.A. were rumored to be responsible, the newspapers printed some helpful, if not entirely enlightening, background material. I synopsize briefly:

The region of Central Asia now called (though not by its own inhabitants) Afghanistan has been overswept by many political and religious tides—Greek and Arab from the west, Mongol from the north, Buddhist and Hindu from the east. The old Afghan chroniclers, surprisingly, call themselves the Children of Israel and claim descent from King Saul. Under the Kushan dynasty, derived from the Yue-chi tribe that expelled the Parthians in the first century
A.D.
, the Buddhist religion was established. Huns ousted the Buddhists; Turkish adventurers brought Islam; Genghis Khan devastated the dynasty of Ghor. Aloof from these conversions and counter-conversions stood the mysteriously fair-skinned people of the Hindu Kush, a mountain range in the region north of Kabul traditionally known as Kafiristan, “The Country of Unbelievers.” The region is impenetrably wild. The mountains are so steep some valleys are in shadow for six months of the year. Landslides of loose scree occur. Mulberries grow, and the ibex flourishes. A legend traces the human inhabitants back to stragglers from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Hindu Kush on his way to the Indus in 327
B.C.
But Alexander did battle in the Kunar Valley with a blond and warlike race called, then, the Aspasians. The Kafirs worshipped a pantheon
of gods that included Imra the Creator and Gish the God of War, drank gross amounts of wine, kept slaves, robbed strangers, lived in tall wooden houses, and spoke, valley by valley, mutually unintelligible dialects of Dardic. Their women were, and are, renowned for handsomeness.

In 1895 the amir Abdur Rahman, with British complicity, on the provocation that the Russians might annex the area, sent his gigantic commander Ghulam Haider Khan on a campaign to convert the Kafirs by the sword—the last such conversion in history. The Kafirs succumbed, and the region was christened Nuristan, “The Country of Light.” However, one pocket of resistance remained, in the remote valley inhabited by the Shīgar tribe. Winter snows sealed the valley off, and the legions of Ghulam Haider Khan turned back. In celebration, the Shīgars, who numbered not more than twelve thousand, gave their chief, my tennis friend’s great-grandfather, the name Gish Imra—as if we were to call a President Thor Jehovah. Probably the Shīgar chieftains were already semi-deified. The ancient ceremony, for instance, whereby on the day of the vernal equinox the chief would take for himself as much treasure (lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, rubies from the famous mine in the Jagdalak Pass, and, in recent times, wrist-watches from Switzerland) as he could hoist with a straight right arm onto an altar five feet high has many analogues in Frazer.

While the religious antecedents of this throne are obscure, its modern political career is a matter of record. The first Gish Imra was a prodigious brute who maintained his tribe, of necessity, in a state of impregnable ferocity. No European traveller or Moslem emissary is known to have returned from an audience with him, and in Nuristani art he is always represented simply as the sun—with blank features, circular face,
and stylized radii. His son, who succeeded him in 1915, travelled with a bodyguard of two thousand men to Kabul to exchange rugs, pledges, and mulberry butter with the amir Habibullah, who had recently extended leniency to the Ghilzais and Mangals of Khost. Thus begins the recognized autonomy of the Shīgars under the amir. Shīgar tribesmen fought beside Amanullah in his war with the British in the summer of 1919, but remained aloof when, ten years later, his excessively progressive regime collapsed under pressure from the fanatical south. The second Gish Imra died, at the age of ninety-three, in 1946, whereupon his son, who in the nineteen-thirties had enjoyed a position in the League of Nations and in café society, succeeded him. An unhappy and thoroughly Europeanized man, the third Gish Imra, when he was not wintering in Cannes or Menton, fortified himself against the tireless machinations of the amirate with perhaps excessive helpings of American advice and French cuisine. Our mission in his court, headed by the shadowy “Major Damon,” was never officially acknowledged, and Congressional investigations ran dry in the sands of obfuscation. The French foodstuffs, including truffles and goose livers, were imported into the fastnesses of the Hindu Kush on the backs of goats organized into fragrant caravans.

My friend had been tutored at home, schooled in Bern, and sent to Harvard as a political gesture, much as his father had gone to Oxford. His tennis, learned in Switzerland, was stronger from the backcourt than at the net. His backhand was slightly wristy, his serve loopy and fat; but his forehand, administered with a powerful straight right arm, came off the bounce with a pace that constantly surprised me, for Gish Imra could not have weighed more than one hundred and fifteen pounds. He drove a little red MG with numerous
gears, and it was in this car that we went, on one occasion, into Boston, still in our tennis whites, to have dinner together. It was late in the spring, and perhaps the approaching end of our senior year had prompted his unexpected invitation. Gish kept habitually aloof, and after his sophomore year did not have roommates. I had met him when we were both freshmen, working off our physical-education requirements with tennis, which I had learned on some pitted public courts in Pennsylvania. My game, then as now, in I suppose the American style, disdained solid ground strokes for a hopeful mishmash of reckless, glamorous “gets” and satisfying overhead smashes. Despite his smaller size and soft serve, he beat me as often as I beat him. We were well matched, and each spring, until we graduated, on one of those sudden soft days when the classroom window is thrown open above the bust of Emerson and the Radcliffe girls venture down to the Charles with books and blankets, he would call me up and in his formal, faintly mischievous voice offer to renew our competition. I was pleased to accept. After a winter of sitting I needed the exercise, and I suppose, having this dim sense of his “divinity,” I was flattered.

I recall our dinner imperfectly. I remember that it was still daylight outside, that the restaurant was the old Nile, long since vanished, and that the manager had frowned at our bare legs as we walked in. I remember the glow of the jukebox selector on my left, and the thoughtful pallor of my companion’s face, and the startling ease with which he downed two very dry gimlets. But I do not remember the conversation that led up to the brief exchange I will never forget. It must have been by way of “Cross-currents.” Though he was a Government major and I in Mathematics, we were, that year, taking one course in common—a popular Comp. Lit. concoction
designated “Cross-Currents in Nineteenth-Century Thought.” The course, taught by a beetle-browed ironist from the University of Chicago, dealt with four thinkers—Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevski—who with their different strokes had paddled against the liberal, progressivist mainstream of their century. I dimly recall expressing to Gish my enthusiasm for Kierkegaard, and perhaps I confessed, in passing, the fact that I, like Kierkegaard, was a Lutheran.