Twice Told Tales (3 page)

Awful?

She looked to be a wonderful, blonde portion of bruised innocence; terrorized by my attack, eager for the encounter to come, but terrified, too. Her Chicago mentor had been the go-between, had started her off. Now waited the dark intellectuals of New York, formidable, desirable, equal parts threat and promise.

My memory of the occasion, the guests, the conversation, is all quite vague. Since my life changed irrevocably that night—an event I’m still sorting out here—it’s entirely possible that I confused people who were actually present with writers I met, read, or copyedited years later; possible that I have confused bursts of impromptu eloquence with what has been written and published since.

A minor legend has been formed around those days and these people. A kind of post–Lost Generation Goy’s Guide to Literature. (I borrow the term from Katherine. She kept what she called her Goy’s Guide to New York in which she would note this or that word … pronouncing it with the care of a Japanese trying out an English word or phrase.)

“What does Chutz-pah mean?”

“Never mind. You have it.”

And after someone complimented her: “What does Shayne-Punim mean?”

“A thing of beauty and a joy forever.”

She also noted names with equal care. A partial listing in Katherine’s Goy Guide: Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Mailer (early), Harold Rosenberg, Philip Rahv, Bellow (very early), Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx, who, unfortunately, could not be at the party, but whose presence was still felt.

The war had been fought, fascism had been defeated, and the question of Utopia, of socialism, was on everybody’s mind.

On these minds especially.

Some minds.

Someone has said, when the half-gods go the gods arrive. What’s more likely: when the gods go the
half
-gods arrive. Still, Mount Olympus has many addresses. And if these were half-gods, they would do!

I was still young. Not as young as Katherine Eudemie, who had after all written a novel called
The Country of the Young.
But young enough to be most attentive. I knew I was surrounded by a few rough equivalents of Apollo, Hermes, and that gang. If any of you want to get demanding about this, at least I’m sure about Auden. He didn’t say much but he was on the premises. Though neither he nor Dwight Macdonald could get into Katherine’s Guide, being goys themselves.

I’d read Dwight Macdonald’s magazine
Politics.
And I’m pretty sure he was pouring a Scotch next to me at the makeshift bar; a large bear of a man with a Vandyke beard similar to my father’s. Like my father he talked about money; apparently one could not make a living writing book reviews.

Hold it! I’m remembering Jacques Barzun. Also Isaac Rosenfeld (who I think may have been dead by then) and Norman Mailer. Put Rosenfeld down as a possible but not a strong one.

I’m afraid the only certainties I retain are the words; about them I am positive!

“A list of the writers of our time shows that liberal-progressivism was a matter of contempt or indifference to every writer of large mind
—
Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann (early), Kafka, Yeats, Gide, Shaw—probably there is not a name to be associated with a love of liberal democracy or a hope for it …”

Dammit, I remember Trilling saying that or something very like it, but he
couldn’t
have. In fact, it turns out to be an entry in one of the journals he’d been keeping for years. Yet what he said threw Katherine Eudemie into a state of crazed rebellion, starting with an alcoholic catatonia and ending with sexual frenzy. Around those words and that state developed much of the evening’s excitement: with results as varied as one desecration and one eventual marriage to Jackson Eudemie. Yes, he was present that night. How could he not be?

If Trilling’s statement, accurate to the occasion or not, strikes you as less than shocking these days, remember, it was only six years earlier that the worldwide executioners had stopped mass-producing victims. And imagine Katherine, a child-bride and child-widow, as I learned minutes later, drawn from the conservative Middle West to Liberal New York. Consider her confusion, carrying her wounded heart right where it belonged, full of compassion, justice, and hope, only to be told that her international grand passions, her Prousts, her Joyces, her Eliots, had other fish to fry.

She downed two glasses of wine immediately. When more upsetting words arrived she downed two more.

“Don’t try to keep up with me,” she warned. “Jews can’t drink.”

She entered a sort of catatonic trance, during which we met, in quick order, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Jackson Eudemie, Lionel Abel, William Barrett, Jackson Eudemie, Norman Mailer, and Jackson Eudemie. I began to notice that Mr. Eudemie was hanging around us. I guessed
I
was not the attraction.

“I’m Jackson Eudemie.”

“So I gather.”

“I’m an editor at Doubleday. What do you do?”

“She’s a writer.”

“Can’t
she
speak?”

“Sometimes.”

“I’ll wait.”

He was tall, knife-thin, and seemed calm compared to that roomful of desperate characters. I don’t mean desperate in the usual psychological way. I’m sure you know the kind of people whose every sentence, even the joking ones,
especially
the joking ones, imply hidden high stakes.

“I’ve been thinking more and more how much all of us comfortably ignore the demonic; yet it’s everywhere now.”
Well, that kind of thing only said better, of course. But everything important; everything having
reach!

Jackson Eudemie, on the other hand, was a kind of early-California. Cool when cool was still personal idiosyncrasy; before it became a cultural style. (And before it became a corrupt noun.) I shook him long enough to talk with some concern to Katherine.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re hiding out. Vanished behind your eyes.”

“Leave me alone. Everybody isn’t Jewish. I’m trying to work up my
chutz-pah.
Besides I hate what Trilling said.”

Then she told me swiftly and sotto voce about her husband dying in shellfire at Normandy. Katherine and her husband, a couple of Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party kids, protesting the war, pushing socialism. (Trotsky and Marx came to
their
party.) But the war gobbled them up and spat them out. Widowed and not yet twenty-two, Katherine fled to Chicago, where she wrote a novel about a couple of Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party kids who believed and got to be, respectively, dead and widowed, all in the name of liberal democracy. Wrote it, however, with all the terrific modernist tricks you could pick up by smart reading and hanging around certain circles at the University of Chicago. She’d never expected to have her personal tragedy go smash against the new life she and her first novel had made.

“Doug volunteered,” she said. “He didn’t wait to be drafted. He
wanted
to sign up.”

“And Ezra Pound didn’t. Is that what’s throwing you for a loop?”

“Don’t try to out-tough me. It’s too easy.”

“You’re going to do fine with this crowd. You think talk is serious. On the other hand, you’ll have to give me a few minutes to get used to the idea that you never told me you were a widow.”

“You never asked.”

I was floundering, trying to pull her out of her funk. For the next half-hour or so I swam amid the themes and variations being sung all around me: “Demands of the Zeitgeist … Delmore and failure … Freud and Kafka …”

Or it may have been Delmore and Freud and Kafka and failure—it doesn’t really matter.

No superior smiles, please. Ideas have a life cycle—youth, middle age, old age—like people: and there’s that wonderful moment before they become conventions or gossip, when they ring like bells in the air of the mind. This was one of those moments. There was nothing stale or chewed over in this stuff then. All fresh as the milk that still came daily in glass bottles. Thus, bear in mind: I’m not dismissing with irony. I’m trying to remember and report with as much innocence as I can muster.

Nobody mentioned the war, pleasantly or unpleasantly. Russia was spoken of twice—once with warmth, once with anger.

After her first descent into shock Katherine rallied. Wine was her adrenalin. The more she took, the more animated she became. Groups formed around her. Jackson Eudemie’s patience paid off. Finally, it turned out, Katherine
could
indeed speak. Words, laughter, wit, everything poured out as often as wine. She was the quintessential Golden Goya. (Useless to tell her that she had been using the masculine form of the noun.) She, trying to enchant the local rabbis, and Jackson, fighting for his share. For me, I was thinking about the dark death hidden behind all the yellow hair and stubborn eagerness to succeed, behind all the left-of-center laughter.

I was dimly aware that Katherine was conquering. The more aware I became, the more I withdrew to my own glass. Finally, I peeled Jackson from her side and we left. On the way home—a reeling, hundred-block drunken ballet of reversed steps—we had it all out. It was impossible to know who was drunker, or who was more in trouble.

“People don’t die for anything, you know. They just die.”

“A lie.”

“Then you like human sacrifice?”

“I used to respect sacrifice.”

“I haven’t noticed.”

“What does that mean?”

“You seem to be here to get, not to give up.”

“I’m here to give and get.”

“When does the giving start?”

“Don’t mix up art with sex.”

“No chance of confusion with you.”

She broke our alcoholic lock-step to kiss me. In the midst of all the scents of a May night on New York streets—exhaust fumes mixed with soft spring air, distant cooking odors—I smelled berries.

“There,” she said after the longest kiss we’d had yet, “just to introduce some confusion.”

“What’s that taste? What were you drinking?”

“Gin.”

“Ah. Juniper berries. I thought you smelled like country.”

“Clement Greenberg said I looked like an American Modigliani. He wants to have lunch.”

“He wants
you
for lunch. They’re going to eat you alive. I didn’t see him there.”

I’d never seen Greenberg so how would I know? But I was beyond the minor inconsistencies for the moment.

“And Phillip Rahv said
Partisan Review
is having a special issue on American Values and would I contribute.”

“Will you contribute?”

By now we were probably somewhere down around Hudson Street; a triangular little park, a few benches, less city than Village. She slapped herself down on a park bench, spreadeagled her long arms on the back slats, and called out to anyone who would listen:

“It is spring. It’s almost three o’clock in the morning. I’ve lost a husband and I thought I would die but I guess I didn’t and I’m sorry I never told you before. But I’m young. I know young people in novels never say that—but
I’m young
and I’ve arrived here, but I haven’t quite arrived yet and, yes, oh yes, I will contribute, Katherine is here and whatever the question is never mind, because the answer right now is, yes, I’ll contribute.
I will contribute!
”

She slipped the shoulders of her dress down with a rush of unsuspected perfume as soon as we were inside the door and the wonderful confusion between sex and art, between giving and contributing, between mourning and success began between us. The bed was low, low, practically just a great mattress on the floor and next to it as we turned and turned above and below each other the beat-up Royal portable typewriter trembled on its little table, trembled as much as we. The insult of a gulf between the Liberal Imagination and the great writers of the West did not seem a pressing issue at that moment. For that moment Katherine was reconciled. She would contribute.

We turned for hours. Once or twice surprise rang in the air.

“Wonderful …”

“What?”

“You—swallowed …”

“Is that so special?”

I was not sober enough to chart the geography of my inexperience.

“It’s—very nice …”

She rose on an elbow, a dim shape of delight in the dark.

“Hell,” she said and suddenly I heard a Midwestern music in her voice. “I swallowed in college. Hell’s Bells,
I swallowed in high school.
”

Such, such were the joys which accompanied us to sleep. I woke panicked. I knew only two things. That I was finding it hard to breathe and that I had to get out of there and never come back.

It sounds theatrical, synoptic, as I tell it to you now. But Katherine’s hunger had become, as I slept, a presence, stifling, terrifying. All that energy dedicated to conquest,
without details.
It was too general; it blanketed the world. Her grief was too distant for me to handle; her hope was too pressing. Her innocence was worse than my father’s. By yielding to me in the drunken coda to the Trilling party she’d involved me in some extended rape, some violation of which tonight’s episode was only a part. She would swallow and be swallowed up by the great mouth of New York. All those mouths with their eloquent tongues forming language, poems, stories, essays, novels, special issues devoted to Swallowing and Being Swallowed in America—they would devour Katherine while she devoured them. It was a contest of cannibals I could not bear to watch or be a part of.

I dressed in the dark and was out in the hallway in minutes. That was when I performed the crazy ritual—what I’ve thought of ever since as the “desecration.” I took out a large handkerchief and blindfolded myself. My balance was off and I swayed for a moment, fleeing that low, low bed into the blindfolded darkness. The idea itself was simple enough to be comical. I would protect myself from ever falling back again.

I’ve told you how complicated the apartment’s location was. I knew that if I groped my way down the stairs and out into the labyrinth of streets and somehow reached, say, Sheridan Square, without actually seeing where I was, I’d never find my way back. There was no phone, we had no friends in common; end of comedy.

All of which tells you that I knew I’d fall back again if I could. I had little faith in my own detachment. I tripped over a garbage can and dragged orange rinds, wet newspaper, and coffee grounds with me for blocks.