“Yes, Doc, I think so,” said Wilhelm, listening—a little skeptically, but nonetheless hard.
“… The interest of the pretender soul is the same as the interest of the social life, the society mechanism. This is the main tragedy of human life. Oh, it is terrible! Terrible! You are not free. Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out. You have to obey him like a slave. He makes you work like a horse. And for what? For who?”
“Yes, for what?” The doctor’s words caught Wilhelm’s heart. “I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “When do we get free?”
Tamkin carries on, catching and catching Wilhelm’s heart: “The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can’t be loved. Because the pretender is a lie. The true soul loves the truth.” Garble and gobbledygook, but with a magnetism that can seduce: love, truth, tragedy, the importance of one’s own depths. “As a matter of fact,” Tamkin winds up, “you’re a profound personality, with very profound creative capacities but also disturbances.” Wilhelm falls for all this and at the same time doubts. Tamkin soothes, procrastinates, plunges into tangential narratives, distracts, eats, philosophizes, and finally hands Wilhelm four stanzas of semiliterate self-help verse studded with greatness, joy, beauty, ecstasy, glory, power, serenity, eternity. “What kind of mishmash, claptrap is this!” Wilhelm shouts in his thoughts. Yet Tamkin continues to lure him; at the brokerage office, where the doctor, an operator, hurries from stocks to commodities and back again, Wilhelm’s breast swarms with speculations about the speculator: “Was he giving advice, gathering information, or giving it, or practicing—whatever mysterious profession he practiced? Hypnotism? Perhaps he could put people in a trance while he talked to them.”
In the large and clumsy Wilhelm there is a large and clumsy shard of good will, a privately spoken, half-broken unwillingness to be driven solely by suspicion: Tamkin is right to count two disparate souls—only, for Wilhelm, which is the pretender, which the true? Is hopeful trust the true soul, and suspicious doubt the pretender? Or the other way around? For a time it hardly matters: Tamkin is a doctor to Wilhelm’s sorrow, a teacher of limitlessness, a snake-oil charlatan whose questionable bottles turn out to contain an ancient and legitimate cure for mortality’s anxieties: seize the day. And he is the elfish light that dances over the blackened field, the ignis fatuus of wish and illusion, the healer of self-castigation. The effectively fatherless Wilhelm finds in Tamkin a fairy godfather—but, as might be expected in the land of wishes, one whose chariot melts to pumpkin at the end of the day. Yet again and again, swept away by one fantastic proposition or another, Wilhelm, moved, is led to respond, “This time the faker knows what he’s talking about.” Or: “How does he know these things? How can he be such a jerk, and even perhaps an operator, a swindler, and understand so well what gives?”
Wilhelm is absurd; sometimes he is childish, and even then, longing for pity and condemning himself for it, he muses: “It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.” In spite of a depth of self-recognition, he will burst out in infantile yells and preposterous gestures. Complaining to his father how his wife’s conduct and her attitudes suffocate him, he grabs his own throat and begins to choke himself. A metaphor turns into a boy’s antics. And after an argument with his wife on a public telephone—during which she accuses him of thinking “like a youngster”—he attempts to rip the telephone box off its wall. There is something of the Marx Brothers in these shenanigans, and also of low domestic farce. “I won’t stand to be howled at,” cries his wife, hanging up on him. But a man’s howl, of anguish or rage, belongs to the Furies, and is not a joke.
Nor is the timing of these incidents. It is the day before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, comprising the most solemn hours of the Jewish liturgical calendar. Old Mr. Rappoport, half-blind, whom Wilhelm encounters at the broker’s, reminds him of his synagogue obligations. Wilhelm replies that he never goes; but he reflects on his mother’s death, and remembers the ruined bench next to her grave. Dr. Adler, preoccupied with dying as his near destination, has no interest in religion. Wilhelm, though, is fixed on his own destiny, with or without God; and Tamkin is a fixer—a repairer—of destiny and of despair. Yet who is more farcical than Tamkin? Bellow once noted—commenting on the tone of traditional Jewish story-telling—how “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two. At times the laughter seems simply to restore the equilibrium of sanity; at times the figures of the story, or parable, appear to invite or encourage trembling with the secret aim of overcoming it by means of laughter.”
Seize the Day is such a parable; or, on second thought, perhaps not. The interplay of the comic and the melancholic is certainly there—but a parable, after all, is that manner of fable which means to point a moral, or, at the least, to invoke an instructive purpose. The “secret aim,” as Bellow has it, is generally more significant than the telling or the dramatis personae. Bellow’s fiction hardly counts as “moral” or instructive (though there are plenty of zealous instructors wandering through). His stories look for something else altogether: call it wisdom, call it ontology, or choose it from what Tamkin in free and streaming flight lets loose: “Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this.” A tornado of made-up maxims and twisted tales, Tamkin is among the great comic characters (comedy being a corridor to wisdom, though not the only one): that he flaunts his multiple astonishments in the modest compass of a short novel is a Bellovian marvel. And he is, besides, Bellow’s sentry in reverse, standing watch over an idea of fiction that refuses borders.
Bellow is sometimes said to be the most “European” of American writers—perhaps because of his familiarity with the century’s intellectual currents, his regard for history, the dense and forceful knit of his prose, the sense that nothing has been left out: that what is there is complete. That may be why one is compelled to think of the grand Russians when contemplating Bellow (hence Levin, hence Ivan Ilyich); even when his characters attend to the trivial, metaphysics enters—as when old Mr. Perls observes that in New York if “you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and the earth.” Wilhelm himself, in the subway tunnel under Times Square, invents a “larger body”—all the unsavory and strange-looking underground people united with him in “a blaze of love.”
The larger body, so to speak, of Seize the Day is the union of Wilhelm with Bartleby: one can imagine that if Melville had allowed Bartleby a voice beyond those ineluctable, forlorn, perplexingly spare syllables, Wilhelm’s own torrent of yearning, his thwarted expression of the higher consciousness, are what would have emerged. The linking of Bellow with Europeanness, on the other hand, equates depth and scope with those castled and worn and battered lands, overlooking Melville of New York—Melville who is not nearly an ancestor or relative of Bellow’s, but not a stranger either. Bellow’s famous sentence is irrefragably American, a wise-guy (or wisdom-guy) contrivance soaked in learning and pathos and irony and inquisitiveness and knowhow—and exactly balanced, in Seize the Day, between the con artist’s lingo and God’s machinery of existence.
In the last one hundred and forty years Bartleby’s Wall Street has altered past recognition. After the flash-by of only forty years Wilhelm’s Broadway is scarcely different. You are not likely to catch sight of Bartleby sidling by the Exchange in the deserted dusk of the business district, but up there on roiling Broadway, not far from the Gloriana and the Ansonia, you might possibly hear Tamkin still working his clientele, promising a killing in rye. So they live on, these two New York stories—as queerly close, in the long view, as the Twin Towers; two heartstruck urban tales made to outlast much else.
RUSHDIE IN THE LOUVRE
A WHILE AGO—it was in Paris, in the Louvre—I saw Salman Rushdie plain. He was sitting in a high-back
ed chair at the foot of an incalculably long banquet table fitted out with two rows of skinny microphones, each poking upward like a knuckly finger. His hands lay docile, contained, disciplined, on a dark-red leather portfolio stamped with his name in gilt. A gargantuan crystal chandelier, intricately designed, with multiple glinting pendants, hung from a ceiling painted all over with rosy royal nymphs—a ceiling so remote that the climate up there seemed veiled in haze. Who could measure that princely chamber, whether in meters or in history? And all around, gold, gold gold.
The day before, in a flood of other visitors, I had penetrated an even more resplendent hall of the Louvre, the Galerie d’Apollon—a long, spooky corridor encrusted with kingly treasures: ewers and reliquaries of jasper and crystal, porphyry vases, scepters of coronations anciently repudiated, and, forlorn in their powerlessness, the Crown Jewels. All these hide in the gloom of their glass cases, repelling whatever gray granules of light drizzle down from above, throwing a perpetual dusk over the march of regal portraits that once commanded awe, and now, in the half-dark, give out a bitter look of faint inner rot. Here, among its glorious leavings, one can feel the death of absolutism. “I can stand a great deal of gold,” Henry James once said; and so could the kings of France, and the Napoleons who succeeded them, all devoted to the caressings and lustings of gold—Midaslike objects of gold, soup bowls and spoons, fretwork and garnishings and pilasters of gold, gold as a kind of contagion or irresistible eruption.
James was enchanted; for him that rash of gold hinted at no disease, whether of self-assertion or force of terror. He equated the artist’s sovereign power with what he had “inhaled little by little” in the Gallery of Apollo—“an endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures,” a glory that signified for him “not only beauty and art and supreme design but history and fame and power.” On his deathbed, confused by a stroke, he imagined himself to be Napoleon in the midst of a project of renovating the Louvre: “I call your attention,” he dictated to his secretary, “to the precious enclosed transcripts of plans and designs for the decoration of certain apartments of the palaces here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who are to take them in hand.”
James’s Napoleonic hallucination of 1916 has been realized seven decades later. Artists and workmen have taken the Louvre and the Tuileries in hand. There are cranes and sandy excavations—a broad tract of these at the end of the gardens of the Tuileries abutting the Louvre—and then, suddenly, there is the great living anti-Ozymandian I. M. Pei Pyramid, swarming with visitors, a peaked postmodernist outcropping of glass and steel in the wide square courtyard of this brilliant old palace: a purposeful visual outrage conceived in amazing wit and admirable utility, flanked by a triplet of smaller pyramids like three echoing laughters. The apartments of the Louvre’s Richelieu wing, where Rushdie sat—balding, bearded, in sober coat and tie—was undergoing reconstruction: visitors’ shoes left plaster-powder footprints on the red-carpeted grand stair. But visitors were few, anyhow, during the renovation, when the Richelieu was closed to the public. On the day Rushdie came, the entire Louvre was closed, and the Richelieu wing was effectively sealed off by a formidable phalanx of security men in black outfits, with black guns at their hips. Rushdie’s arrival was muted, unnoticed; out of the blue he was there, unobtrusive yet somehow enthroned—ennobled—by the ongoing crisis of terror that is his visible nimbus.
He was attending a seminar of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, the brainchild of then President François Mitterrand. The Academy’s president, appointed by Mitterrand, is Elie Wiesel, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and there are nine other Nobel-winning members, among them Wole Soyinka of Nigeria (in Literature), and the Americans Joshua Lederberg (in Medicine and Physiology) and Toni Morrison (the 1993 laureate in Literature). The official meeting place of this newborn organization—it is still in the process of formulating its by-laws and refining its overall aims—is in the Richelieu apartments. Unlike the twilight majesties of the Gallery of Apollo, the Academy’s space is brightly warmed in sun from immense windows. Peering out, one sees a bit of courtyard, but mainly the long line of an encircling balcony, ranged with mammoth stone figures in plumed Monte Cristo headgear and buckled eighteenth-century pumps, the very soles of which seem mountainously tall. It is as if hallucinations can inhabit even daylight. A low door—low in relation to the ceiling—opens into what might pass for a giantess’s pantry, a series of closets white with plaster dust and smelling of an unfinished moistness, and then a sort of gangway leading to just-installed toilets. On the day Rushdie came, it was up to an armed guard to decide whether or not to let one through to the plumbing.
The other end of this vast sanctum is the threshold to salon after palatial salon, magnificence serving as vestibule to still more magnificence, everything freshly gilded everywhere: the Napoleonic dream re-imagined for the close of a century that has given new and sinister vitality to the meaning of absolutism. The gas chambers and the ovens; the gulag; and finally the terror that invents car bombs, airplane hijackings, ideological stabbings of civilians at bus stops, the murder of ambassadors and Olympic athletes and babies in their cribs, the blowing up of an embassy in Buenos Aires, the World Trade Center in New York, the financial district of London, a restaurant in Paris, a synagogue in Istanbul. Under the shadow of this decades-long record, the setting of a price on a novelist’s head is hardly a culmination, though it is surely, in an era of imaginative atrocity, a new wrinkle, a kind of hallucination in itself. Hallucination, after all, is make-believe taken literally; dream assessed as fact.
Long before he dreamt himself the imperial Napoleon ordering the rehabilitation of the Louvre, Henry James had a dream of limitless terror. The dream was of the Gallery of Apollo—but now those inhalations of absolutism were wholly altered: what had been seen as the potency of fame and the absolute rule of beauty and art turned away its sublime face to reveal absolutism’s underside, a thing uncompromisingly deadly, brutal, irrational. Artist and dreamer, James in his nightmare is being pursued down the length of the Galerie d’Apollon by an “appalling” shape intent on murdering him. (Note the dreamer’s pun: Apollo, appalling. Supremacy transmogrified into horror.) A door is shut against the powerful assassin; the assassin—“the awful agent, creature, or presence, whatever he was”—presses back. And then, all at once, in a burst of opposing power, the dreamer defends himself: “Routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall,… over the far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for his life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows on the right.”
Not far from the Gallery of Apollo, the Richelieu apartments of the Louvre do not quake with the storm of nightmare, but the members of the Academy (men and women from the four corners of our slightly ovoid planet), discreet, courtly, inhale the appalling breath of the pursuer. The image of routing is dim: what weapon is there against a hidden assassin who may strike a moment from now, or tomorrow, or the day after? The arsenal of intellect—what we mean by the principles or intuitions of culture—is helpless before such willed, wild atrocity: anybody here might overnight become Rushdie. The Academy’s President, a survivor of Auschwitz, has already been Rushdie: a human being pitilessly hunted as prey. No one cranes down the endless table, with its line of microphones, to gape at this newest human prey; yet Rushdie’s quiet reality is electrifying, a prodigy in itself. It is his first appearance at a meeting since his unanimous election to the Academy. His arrival was hinted at—discreetly, elusively—by President Wiesel the evening before, but would the man who is hunted and stalked actua
lly show up? His plain humanity is a marvel—a fellow sitting in a chair, loosening his tie, taking off his jacket as the afternoon warms. He is no metaphor, no legend, no symbol. His fame, once merely novelist’s fame, is now the fame of terror. A writer has been transmuted into a pharaoh, wrapped in hiddenness, mummified in life. It happens that Rushdie nowadays looks more scribbler than pharaoh: a certain scruffiness of falling-out hair and indecisive beard, the telltale fleshiness of the sedentary penman; the redundant mien of someone who hates wearing a tie. How different from that slender princeling who, at the Forty-eighth International PEN Conference in New York in 1986, stood up to speechify in the aisle! What we saw then was a singularly beautiful young man got up in a bright Indian (or perhaps pseudo-Indian) tunic, black-haired, black-eyed, as ravishing in outline as some gilt Persian miniature. I no longer recollect what he said on that occasion, though I retain something of his point of view: rigidly “Third World,” loyally “progressive.” A document protesting Middle Eastern terrorism was circulating through that body for some days; Rushdie did not append his name to it.
The bristling protection that surrounds him now is an offense, an enormity: professional, determined, watchful, admitting no breach; above all, conducted on a kingly scale. There is a twist of corruption—civilization undone—in Rushdie’s necessary retinue, a retinue that shocks: all these sentries, these waiting police cars in the courtyard, dedicated to the preservation of a single human life. Or one could easily, and more justly, claim the opposite: that it is civilization’s high humane standard, a society’s concrete and routine glory, that so much sheltering force should be dedicated to the protection of one man under threat. But the first response is the sharper one: the sensation of recoil from the stealthily meandering armed men in black, the armed men lurking on the way to the toilet, the squad of armed men churning in this or that passageway or bunched oddly against a wall. When, at the beginning of the year, President Mitterrand came for the official inauguration of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, the crush of television cameras, reporters, ambassadors, distinguished oglers, assorted intellectuals, and the charmed hoopla of fervent French gloire brought in the wake of the President’s footsteps a troop of security men drumming over the Louvre’s burnished floors—but there was nothing grim in that train. It signified honor and festivity. Monarchs and presidents may have to live like targets in danger of being detonated; for their guests at a celebration, though, that busy retinue, however fearsomely occupied, registers as innocently as a march of bridesmaids. Rushdie, by contrast, is tailed by a reminder of death. Whoever is in a room with him, no matter how secured against intruders, remembers that the would-be assassin is on the alert for opportunity, whether for greed or for God.
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