Twice Told Tales Read online

  Hence: sparring. Ducking, weaving, touching, panting, we were teaching each other the game in a match no one could win. Though, it turned out, someone could lose. My situation at the precise party-moment was the obverse of Katherine’s. She had left her family to come East, raging to be known. My family had left me two months before I met Katherine Eudemie; left me for California. My quotations from de Tocqueville about restless, rootless Americans had been useless.

  “There was no California, then,” my father said, with his optimism typically masquerading as logic. It was no help for me to point out that there was no California now either. Like Katherine he was enormously ambitious but it was not a vague, boundless ambition. It was precise and could be satisfied—by a great deal of money.

  Every enterprise failed him or vice-versa—it was never clear which was the case. He landed the first Volkswagen dealership in America. The guy with the second one made money. He bought land in Florida years after the whole country knew there was no land in Florida to buy. My mother’s bitter joke in Yiddish: “Your father, the alchemist in reverse. Fun gelt er macht dreck.” Somewhere in the sunshine of California shimmered more gold. Like all good alchemists he believed in the magic of wealth and that getting it was a reasonable even scientific matter. He had ideas, he had plans, he had methods, he had obsessions. What he never had was the gelt.

  I lingered on, pleasantly post-adolescent, amid the dreck of his dreams, carefully avoiding dreams of my own. All ambition was tainted. I assumed this was a temporary reaction. I had a tender tolerance for my own failure to get started.

  It was a lively time. A college degree, my conspicuous lack, had not yet achieved the status of a high school diploma. That is, you could still get a job without one. Before leaving for the Golden West my father had arranged for my Uncle Harry—the flip side of my father, a true Midas—to pull strings at Duell Sloane & Pearce, a small but classy publisher, and J. Walter Thompson, an epic advertising agency. At the same time, an editor at N.Y.U. Press had offered me a manuscript to copyedit, a book on the language of sexual relations. I toyed with them all; a kind of languorous, lingering, professional foreplay.

  “Getting involved with you is activity enough,” I told Katherine.

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “No, you are; the mad alien invader. You’re going to eat New York.”

  “I’m not that hungry.”

  “That’s because you haven’t had your first real taste.”

  “Oh? The review in the Times … ?”

  “True. A taste.”

  She regretted having confessed that her Chicago hotshot had helped her place her novel. We’d argued, sparred, clothing and ideas all in disarray: her half-slip, Dostoyevsky’s abominable politics, my shirt and half-opened fly, and the life and death of The Novel. Next to the bed on which we’d done everything except it, her ancient Royal Portable trembled on a tiny wooden table. She pointed to it.

  “That’s what placed my book.”

  “Easy does it,” I said. “It’s only been published and reviewed. It takes years to place a book.”

  “Is that a quotation?” she asked. Suspicion clouded the blue fields of her eyes.

  “No. Just a cheap irony of my own. But true, anyway.”

  “Is it so awful to want a place, my place?”

  I was merciless the way one is when being kept above bed instead of in bed.

  “Are you sure it’s your place—or a place; any place?”

  She pressed red lips to my neck and mumbled, “Don’t sell me so short. I’m not here just to make out. I want to find out, too.” She stood up, a tall blonde apparition of confusion, wisps of hair everywhere. She blew some from the corners of her wide mouth. “To find out,” she repeated.

  I decided to be stupid.

  “Find out what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything Jewish, you mean.”

  Without smiling she said, “That’s everything.”

  I grabbed her back to the bed, rolling on top of me; a roiling of unharvested wheat.

  “God, I give up! The only parts of you not full of goyish nonsense are these.”

  I attacked these with mouth and hands.

  All full of life, given the confusion, given the lust and the teasing, given the youth and the resentments. And all long before I had carved out my unique position as the bottom rung—America’s only life-long, freelance copyeditor; even longer before my surprise fame as a funeral eulogist—the Georgie Jessel of the small-fry literati—had reached and convinced Jackson Eudemie that no one but I would do for the obsequies of poor, premature Katherine. Talk about finding your place. We found our places. Or they found us.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I said in a rare abdication of irony. “No cosmetics. How do you do it?”

  “With mirrors,” she said. And, indeed, there were mirrors everywhere in that tiny Village apartment whose address I never knew.

  Typical of the time and the immigrant-bohemian-style, she was staying in an apartment which had been loaned to a professor friend and who, in turn, loaned it to her; if you can loan what does not belong to you. I would guess you would simply have to give it if it’s not yours. In any case, she had it—with no phone. One of the loaners or the other had carefully turned it off. It seemed to be significant that she could never get the address straight. It was one of those weird tripartite meetings of Christopher Street and two others. She always—the three times I went there with her—told the cab driver to turn here, turn there, stop here, and, presto, we were there. Where, we had no idea. (Once I went down to get cigarettes, just around the corner, and almost could not find my way back.) But when we were inside the apartment there were mirrors; tall, wooden, burnished, dark antique, a bureau mirror, tortoise-shell hand mirrors on every surface.

  Yet she didn’t seem to care for mirrors; not for makeup, not for fussing hair, not for anything. Except for the moment before we entered Trillings’ apartment. But that’s because on the way up I’d made her weep.

  We’d been talking about poetry as we walked. It’s hard to believe, writing from the embattled city of now, that we so obliviously let stars creep from behind clouds, let the half-moon lighten, let night and shadows form around us with perfect insouciance as we walked and talked the hundred blocks from the West Village to Riverside Drive and Morningside Heights. We felt safe from everyone except each other.

  “Why attack my poems?”

  “I’m not. They were beautiful.”

  “Were.”

  “Are. It’s their simple lyrical liberalism that worries me.”

  “Simple?”

  “You don’t even know which insult to get angry at. The word to worry about in that sentence is ‘liberalism.’” I can see now, hundreds of thousands of words later, the copyeditor being born.

  “You prefer fascism?”

  Remember, this was back when fascism referred mainly to the recent unpleasantness. She whirled on me, grabbed my shoulders and shook me, the way men shook women in old movies.

  “Are you doing this because I didn’t let you?”

  I took her hands from my shoulders and twisted an arm up behind her back. She was a broad-shouldered farmgirl, stronger than I was. I had to play tough.

  “Ah,” I said. “It wouldn’t be nice, not liberal, to be a son-of-a-bitch about your poetry just because you’re torturing me by holding off making the beast with two backs.”

  The image distracted her. “What’s that?” she said.

  “Othello. Act I, scene 3.”

  “You’re hurting my arm.”

  “Your trouble is not your parts, whether to allow me entry or not. Your problem is your heart.”

  “What’s wrong with my heart?”

  “It’s in the right place. You can’t be a serious writer if your heart’s in the right place. Look at Eliot, look at Lawrence …” We were outside the apartment now. She stared into the hall mirror.

  “Look at me,” she murmured, br
ushing at her wet cheeks, “do I look awful?”

  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.”