Vintage Reading (24 page)

The whole novel is like that, a succession of dreams, reveries and horrors punctuated by intervals of waking consciousness. Soon, the line between what’s real and what’s not blurs. The reader first struggles to maintain the distinction. But ultimately, he’s swept along on the tide of Meyrink’s imagination, and the line breaks down altogether. The sensation is freeing.

To be sure, conventional plot elements coexist with the fantastic. A villainous junk dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, wishes to reveal an affair between one Dr. Savioli and a local countess. The sly, scheming Charousek, meanwhile, seeks revenge on Wassertrum. Hillel, knowledgeable of Kabbala, the body of mystic Jewish belief, gives Pernath spiritual sustenance. We encounter hidden letters, clandestine meetings, crowded evenings spent at Loisitschek’s, the local haunt for neighborhood lowlifes ...Most of these more realistic scenes are set in the dark rooms, lightless alleys and gloomy stairways and passages of the Prague ghetto. Yet they are like the clear light of day compared to Pernath’s encounters with the Golem and his own hidden past—truly, dark nights of the soul.

At least by one translation from the German, Meyrink’s novel is sometimes choppy, its dialogue archaic, its pages cluttered with exclamation points and other typographical devices, its story unnecessarily twisted back on itself. Still, the ambience created is haunting. One senses a gifted amateur at work, a writer of extraordinary gifts who has yet to refine his craft. Indeed,
The Golem
was Meyrink’s first novel, and appeared when he was 47, after an already full life spent as banker, champion athlete, occultist, prison inmate (three months for embezzlement), and finally short story writer and editor.

He died in 1932. A few years later
The Golem
and the other works of Gustav Meyrink were among the first to be burned by the Nazis.

____________

By W. Somerset Maugham
First published in 1944

The settings are exotic, the characters memorable, the story believable. But what most stays with you about W. Somerset Maugham’s
The Razor’s Edge
is the curious way in which the main character inhabits the distant periphery of the novel, not its center.

Early on, Maugham’s lengthy and affectionate description of Elliott Templeton places this art dealer, rake, and connoisseur of decadence at stage center. Only imperceptibly does one realize that no, it’s not Elliott but Larry Darrell—“a pleasant-looking boy, neither handsome nor plain, rather shy and in no way remarkable”—who is the main character. We normally see Elliott up close, while Larry remains shadowy, and this inversion of foreground and background runs all through the novel, haunting it.

The story takes place in the years after World War I. Larry, a veteran of aerial dogfights over Europe in which he was almost killed, has just returned to Chicago. He is a changed man. While his friends hurry back to promising careers, he seems bent on a mysterious personal quest. He won’t talk about his war experiences. He spends hour upon hour in the library reading, studying, thinking.

At first it seems he may yet marry Isabel, the charming but willful daughter of Elliott Templeton’s sister. There’s only one hitch. He has no job, and shows no inclination to get one. Rather, he’s perfectly willing to live on his meager trust fund. He wants to “loaf,” he tells Isabel, by which he means to study, travel and experience the world. She declines his offer of marriage, and instead marries Gray Maturin, the solid, resolutely conventional, cliché-bound son of an investment broker.

Years pass. The stock market crashes, sweeping away the Maturin fortune (though Gray manages to keep Isabel in Dior dresses). The action shifts to Paris and to the Riviera. Larry is rarely seen. At one point, he takes up with a childhood friend from Chicago, with whom he used to read poetry, but who has now descended to a life of drunkenness and wanton sensuality. Ultimately, he travels to India and meets a guru, Shri Ganesha.

The narrator of these events is pictured as far removed from them. He learns what happens, often years later, only through long conversations with the principals. The reader, in turn, learns of them third-hand, and then only when the narrator sees fit to tell us. It is a curious device. But it works: the mystery deepens, the alpine mist enveloping Larry and his life thickens.

In the book’s opening pages, the narrator apologizes for calling it a novel, insisting that all the events and characters are real. Indeed, the narrator bears the name of Maugham, who wrote a novel called
The Moon and Sixpence
, which the real Maugham did write. No doubt the biographers can say whether the author’s apology is just a literary device or, on the other hand, means that Larry, Isabel and Elliott really lived.

But it hardly matters. Fiction or fact,
The Razor’s Edge
illuminates the conflict between the pull of the spirit and the pleasures of home, family, work and social life. Maugham sympathizes—a little too unambivalently for my taste—with Larry’s spiritual side. Indeed, in a whodunit-like twist, Isabel stoops to a contemptible and destructive act that casts all she represents of the earth-bound and the conventional in the blackest light.

Eventually, Larry gives up his slim inheritance and plans to return to the United States, to bring some of the wisdom of the East to his spirit-starved homeland. This he will accomplish, he tells Maugham, by buying a taxi cab, which will give him both the mobility and livelihood he needs. In America, he explains, “it would be an equivalent to the staff and the begging-bowl of the wandering mendicant.”

Since that conversation, the narrator tells us, he has heard nothing of Larry. But “I have never since taken a taxi, in New York, without glancing up
on the chance that I might meet Larry’s gravely smiling, deep-set eyes.”

Many readers of
The Razor’s Edge
will find themselves looking for him, too.

____________

By Thomas Merton
First published in 1948

In the final pages of
The Seven Storey Mountain
, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk living in the Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky, complains to God: “You have contradicted everything. You have left me in no-man’s land.” For while now at last committed to solitude and the contemplative life, he is still being urged by the abbot to write poems, books, even essays and magazine articles for the world down below.

Son of an accomplished English painter and his American wife, a former student at Cambridge University and New York’s Columbia, well-trained in the ways of intellectual and literary life down in the world, Merton, it seems, has a double vocation. And his need to express his thoughts on paper interferes with his hard-won new life as a white-robed member of the order. “There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister,” he writes, leaving him in bondage to “contracts, reviews, page proofs and all the plans for books and articles that I am saddled with.”

Though the conflict surfaces only late in the book, there are whispers of it all along.
The Seven Storey Mountain
is, first of all, a spiritual autobiography, full of Merton’s crises of faith and doubts about his true vocation, and finally his slow, winding journey up to Gethsemane. He recounts his early travels with his father in the monastery-studded French countryside, his days at boarding school and in the university, his adolescent insecurities, his flirtations with communism, his disillusionment with the clamorous world of striving and success, and his conversion to Catholicism.

But always in the background, though never much credited, is Merton as a serious student of literature and philosophy. Indeed, most of his friends are
novelists, poets or other literary types, and he himself teaches literature and writes.

The chasm between his two halves is enormous, perhaps greater than even Merton realizes. In one paragraph he can rhapsodize about Mary, Our Lady, mother of God, seemingly lost in clouds of what the less spiritually inclined might write oft as much hocus-pocus. And then in the next paragraph, he’ll land solidly back on earth, every trace of religiosity extinguished, bringing to life some mundane human experience, often quite sardonically.

Take his depiction of radical chic, circa 1936, at a party held in a Park Avenue apartment of a Barnard College student and Young Communist League member. “There was a big grand piano on which someone played Beethoven while the Reds sat around on the floor. Later we had a sort of Boy Scout campfire group in the living room, singing heavy Communist songs, including that delicate anti-religious classic, ‘There’ll be a pie in the sky when you die.’”

Or consider how he describes English sentimentality as a “big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside ... games of cricket in the long summer afternoon ... and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart.”

This is someone who, six years after joining the monastery, can admit: “Is there any man who has ever gone through a whole lifetime without dressing himself up, in his fancy, in the habit of a monk and enclosing himself in a cell where he sits magnificent in heroic austerity and solitude, while all the young ladies who hitherto were cool to his affections in the world come and beat on the gates of the monastery crying, ‘Come out, come out!’” Merton, it seems to me, acts more surprised than he has any right to be when he complains that the writer that is his other half “meets me in the doorway of all my prayers, and follows me into church. He kneels with me behind the pillar, the Judas, and talks to me all the time in my ear.”

Still, he did it: At the age of 36, he became a monk. And he lived that way until his death, at the age of 59. Few readers will be so moved by Merton’s
example that they’re ready to follow him into the cloister; most will not share his faith, much less his devotion. Still, there is much here for them, too. For while Merton climbs the mountains, he tells us much about the valley below in which the rest of us reside.

“We live in a society,” he writes, “whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.”

A degree of serenity awaits us, Merton’s life suggests, if we can but shut up long enough, cease our striving long enough, to listen and to see.

____________

By John Gunther
First published in 1949

“He had the most brilliant promise of any child I have ever known,” one of his doctors said after he died. He played the recorder, collected stamps, sailed and rode. He performed chemistry experiments, studied Einstein’s theory of relativity. He was genuinely kind and good; even as a teenager, he was protective of others’ feelings. He displayed high intelligence and lively wit. Once, asked what he wanted to eat when at last freed from the medically prescribed diet on which he’d been placed, he replied: “A glass of full milk, an artichoke with hollandaise sauce, spaghetti and meat balls and a chocolate ice-cream soda.”

His name was John Gunther, namesake of his father, the best-selling author of
Inside Europe
and its successors. He would have been70 at century’s end, but he died at age 17, of a brain tumor, in 1947.
Death Be Not Proud
—the title comes from a poem by John Donne—is his father’s memoir of the final 15 months of his life.

During that period, his parents sought treatment or cure in specialist after specialist. They tried surgery, X-rays, a peculiar mustard treatment, and a controversial low-salt, low-sugar, low-protein diet that for a while seemed to arrest the tumor. Sometimes, Johnny seemed to get better; once or twice, he improved so dramatically they were left jubilant at the prospect of cure. But always the tumor returned—though never, up until the day he died, did it undermine his intellect. Only the worsening left side of his body hinted at the eruption in the right occipital lobe of his brain.

His parents consulted 32 or 33 physicians by the time Johnny died. The author hints that this ran into a lot of money, and that he was in debt, but in
the end Johnny benefited from almost limitless medical resources, including some of the foremost specialists in the United States and Canada. Access to medical care in this country, we’re reminded, is not now, and never has been democratic. Yet even the finest medical care is sometimes powerless to defy nature’s will.

Though a story of one boy’s illness and death,
Death Be Not Proud
also grants insight into a remarkable family inhabiting a rarefied world. There is, of course, the author himself, a globe-trotting figure who inhabits an elegant Park Avenue world of maids and fine restaurants in the years before New York became so difficult; who counts among his friends famous publishers and authors; whose report on the day’s activities is apt to include mention of a Book-of-the-Month Club sale.

Then there is Johnny, the dying prodigy, who comes alive not alone through the filter of his father’s perceptions but through his own letters to parents, teachers and friends, and through diary entries. If death is made more tragic in proportion to the nobility of the life it extinguishes, Johnny’s is a great tragedy.

Finally, there is Frances Gunther, the author’s divorced wife, who during Johnny’s illness moves from her house in the country to John’s Manhattan apartment, while John camps out at a nearby hotel. Even from John Gunther’s account it’s plain that mother and son shared a special relationship, that Johnny could talk to her as he probably couldn’t to his father, that for the two of them Jesus and Buddha, truth and goodness, lived.

In a brief final chapter, we encounter Frances in her own words, close up. If John Gunther is all journalistic restraint, Frances is all poetry, passion and lofty ideals. “I was trying to create of him a newer kind of human being: an aware person, without fear, and with love: a sound individual, adequate of life anywhere on earth, and loving life everywhere and always. We would talk about this as our experiment together.”