The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  He dragged me over to a corner and took out a brochure from his breast pocket. “Let me read you a lecture I delivered in 1900,” he said. “It was later published, and created a furor in the whole medical world. It immediately put me in the front ranks of the great doctors of our generation. Why am I suddenly reading you a medical lecture? Because I want to show you that medicine is the highest form of poetry. First, listen to the beat and cadence of words that are recognized as classics of poetry, that no one doubts are rhythmic song:

  She walks in beauty like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

  Every schoolboy knows that this is poetry—‘She walks in beauty like the night.’”

  He almost chanted the lines, tapping out the rhythm with his feet, stressing the accented syllables and muting the unaccented. In his recitation he strove to demonstrate how beautifully chiseled each line was. “Keep in mind that same rhythm, that same music, and you’ll see that it’s exactly the foundation for my paper,” he said. “Remember, ‘And all that’s best of dark and bright.’ Now concentrate, it’s not that easy to understand. Free your soul, take your paws off your soul and let it sing to you andante cantabile.”

  He was transformed. His eyes turned moist, like rain-streaked windowpanes. His coarse features lightened, his foot beat time to the verse. His face flushed in a mix of shyness and pride. He looked like some provincial author, reading from a work into which he had poured his heart and soul—which was reason enough to set him ahead the table of the immortals, where they are served slabs of praise and leviathan-sized hunks of recognition and, as Hasidic Jews do from their rebbe, grab leftovers from the fingers of Shakespeare and Homer.

  Long after the Byronic enchantment of his lyrical model had faded from my mind, he continued to intone his medical masterpiece. He sang out the multisyllabic medical terms denoting all sorts of ugly, loathsome diseases of the blood, skin, digestive tract, and liver, to the tapping of his little, Terpsichorean feet, as though they were words in a dream, music for a dance.

  He read on and on, growing more and more flushed. After an hourlong performance, he returned the brochure to his breast pocket, remarking that he only wanted to show me what medicine is, its mystique, its music, its poetry, its intimation, provided that it’s being practiced by “a real doctor not a —.” He opened his fleshy lips wide and cackled as he once again pronounced his beloved word. His face regained its bluish-red blotches, everything returned to type. He shouted out the word again and again to make sure no one failed to hear it, and with the same exuberance that he had just spoken of Byron’s poetry—adding a dollop of national pride—he exclaimed, “A plague on the goyim, they should only have such a fabulous word!”

  2

  Sitting on a nearby bench, with two girls in tow, was a man with a square, gray beard, wearing a French yarmulke, a beret, that is. He had just finished a phlegmatic set of exercises and was now relaxing, flirting with the young women, who flirted right back. They looked the old man straight in the mouth, which issued a stream of youthful, seductive sounds, as if he were playing the flute. His voice was morning fresh and clear and held us all in thrall, particularly when he remarked that he had made sixty-seven Atlantic crossings but couldn’t remember a more delightful one than the present. “The air is like champagne,” he said, breathing in and out several times, with studied regularity.

  The doctor wasted no time in practicing his wiles on the young women, but they both fled, like frightened hens. After their hasty retreat, the graybeard, finding himself in exclusively male company, let pass a gross word at the expense of the girls, still in the same flutelike tones. He talked on and on about himself, but the more he talked, the less one knew him. His name was Lawson, and at one time, he said, “I came this close to being a millionaire. Today I’m a—who knows what I am?”

  But if he didn’t know what he was, he certainly knew everything else, and made no bones about it. “I know everything,” he declared, in his self-assured way and in the same flute-tone. He spoke four or five languages fluently. He was Gentile but was well informed on Jewish affairs. He knew everything there was to know about Zionism, he even knew the names of Yiddish newspapers …

  “I like Jews,” he said, “but they have to be real Jews. I don’t like bluffers. I can bluff with the best of them. I once told Otto—we were on a first-name basis—that he was a louse, neither Jew nor Turk.” I presumed he meant Otto Kahn, the famous investment banker. “‘Otto,’ I said, ‘you’re a louse.’ And he answered me, ‘Vincent, you’re right, but we live in this world and have to make a few dollars.’ That’s why that rabbi of yours is such a prince. ‘Stephen,’ I said to him”—surely this was Rabbi Stephen Wise—“‘it must be very hard on you to be the leader of such a stubborn people,’ and he laughed in his deep, bass voice. Now, Felix”—this I took to be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter—“was an altogether different sort of Jew than Otto. And ah, yes! I knew old man Jacob, that little Jew with the German accent, who raked in all that gold in America, the philanthropist who left a pittance to Jewish charities.” Was he talking about the revered Jacob Schiff? “But one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that. Of course, Otto’s dead too, and I’d like to know what saints he sat himself down with in heaven. I bet he snubbed your holy men and went right for the Christian martyrs. I love Jews. I must have a Jewish soul. Ninety percent of my lovers were Jewish, as were my first two wives, neither of whom asked for a cent in alimony. I once said to Roosevelt, ‘Who are you kidding? You talk Socialism to the capitalists and capitalism to Socialists!’ The president doesn’t mind being teased. He’s a politician through and through, also a great statesman, a real American. What’s a real American? First and foremost, a family man. Had I been a good family man, I’d be on top of the world now. Unfortunately, I’ve got wild blood in me.”

  The doctor, who was forced into silence by this verbal deluge, at last saw his chance in the notion of “wild blood.” He began to lecture on how one must learn to curb impetuous behavior. Mr. Lawson interrupted with an authoritative medical lecture of his own. This was too much for the good doctor, and when I saw that he was ready to explode, I took pains to inform Lawson that we were in the presence of one of New York’s most eminent surgeons. But Lawson wasn’t impressed and was ready with a tale about his own close friendship with Doctor Alexis—Before he even had a chance to say the surname, the doctor jumped up, his bluish-red blotches filling with blood, turning his face as purple as eggplant. “Tell your Alexis that he’s a —,” he sputtered, pronouncing his beloved word with such force that even a non-Jew might grasp its meaning. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Does Lawson know?” the graybeard chuckled. Indeed, he knew full well, and the mere fact that a non-Jew understood the meaning of his precious word calmed the doctor somewhat. “Don’t work yourself up,” Lawson continued. “Your pulse must be beating like a jackhammer.”

  “Don’t you worry about my pulse,” said the doctor, calmer now. “Leave that to me. And what, may I ask, is your profession?”

  Mr. Lawson replied with as many as twenty answers, but both the doctor and I were left none the wiser as to what it was that he actually did. There was a hint of involvement with high finance, Wall Street, money—money that grows and money that sinks into the ground. One day a yacht, and the next, a gas pipe or a rope around the neck. “It’s a jungle out there,” he said, “full of wild beasts that go for your throat, thieves who steal millions from you with a smile. But I know how to play their game. Take copper, for instance.”

  “Let’s not,” the doctor retorted, again jumping up from his seat, as if he were about to have a heart attack. “Don’t tell me about copper! You’re a fake, a scoundrel, a liar! I lost $250,000 on copper. All my hard work and toil, gone up in smoke, because of copper! And Mr. Marcus and his bank took the rest,
emptying me out. That will teach you about copper. Liar! Wall Street thief !”

  Just then, the doctor’s wife happened by and tried to quiet him as best she could. The doctor was shaking. He was especially upset by the fact that Mr. Lawson was sitting there calmly, a smirk on his face. Grasping at a straw, he called out, “So, he thinks he knows about copper, too, that —,” giving his beloved word a final spin, as he let himself be led away, like a child, by his wife.

  Mr. Lawson was unruffled. In his finest voice, now pitched to a key of compassion, he was ready with another roulade. “There they are,” he trilled, “the sacrificial victims, in their tens of thousands, all across America, the trusting souls who spat back the whole Coolidge prosperity and the Hoover two-chickens-in-every-pot, right back into the pockets of Wall Street. I feel pity for the doctor. Had I known, I wouldn’t have mentioned copper, not for a million dollars. Poor man! Such people are bound to get hurt.” He spoke with counterfeit zeal, and it was obvious that he didn’t give a hoot, not even about the humiliation he had inflicted.

  The doctor was now circling the deck, and as he passed by, he threw angry stares at Lawson, who looked back, still in his phony pitying mode, with the same poisonous smirk on his face that said he wouldn’t give the doctor a nickel even if he were about to go under. On his third circuit, the doctor stopped and, as if nothing had happened, addressed Mr. Lawson. “Do you play chess?” he asked. “Ah good, you do. If you’re such a smart man, let’s see if my knight can take your rook.” Turning to me, he said, “Come join us, you can kibitz.” I declined the pleasure and remained on deck, joining the promenaders instead.

  The Bessarabian Jew from Bogotá caught up with me.

  “Hey,” he said, “I’ve been looking for you for days, but couldn’t find you. Where have you been hiding? With whom have you been keeping company? Goyim, I bet, especially Gentile women, shikses. You see that shikse over there, the one with the bare legs? She sits there knitting, damn her, and won’t give you the time of day. I’ve been circling around her since the first day aboard. You think I’m the only one? There’s a whole pack of hungry wolves after her, but she won’t look at anyone. You think that that little minx doesn’t know she’s being looked at? Oh, she knows! She lives for this, she loves it! If you think she’s a beauty, forget it. She’s no way what people consider a beauty. In fact, she’s as far from being beautiful as I am from Bogotá. She’s all skin and bones, with legs like snakes. Look how she twists and untwists those legs, how she twines one around the other. She knows all the tricks. She even has hooded eyes, from all those sinful thoughts of hers. What’s the matter? You don’t believe me? I know what I’m talking about. I’m an expert on these matters. I’m ready to bet that all those great beauties you read about in history books weren’t really beauties at all. Your Helens, your Cleopatras, they were all emaciated wretches, like that one over there. They’re wicked, they are! They’ve swallowed hellfire and don’t deign to smile at any man, lest it give him pleasure or, God forbid, give them some pleasure, too. They keep on swallowing fire, until they catch the right fish, the one they’ve been on the lookout for, and, poor sucker, he has to pay for the sins of his gender. They drive him crazy and burn him to death. You think I don’t know that I should run as far as I can from those witches? Yet I’ve been circling this shikse like an idiot for days, with no more notice from her than she’d pay to a radish or an onion. Anyway, you be well. I’m going back to my circling. I know it’s hopeless, but maybe something will come of it.”

  Nearby, a heated discussion about books was in progress, and my Danish friend, who was among the participants, used every trick to draw me into the conversation. He asked my opinion on this and that, casting a variety of nets in the attempt to land me. I resisted with all my powers.

  A rail-thin young man, with a small, narrow head, was giving his expert opinion of the American publishing business, of Greenwich Village and a brother who’d fallen into its clutches—a professional free spirit who had already been an anarchist, a Wobbly, Socialist, Communist, and was now a homosexual. The Dane had earlier given me the lowdown about this skeletal young man—first, that he wasn’t as young as he appeared, that he was stuffed with money, and that he was head of a long-established American publishing house, inherited from his father and grandfather, that specialized in textbooks for colleges and high schools. He was also twice divorced and had had two children with each of the wives. This was his first vacation in twelve years. He was on his way to Germany to acquaint himself with German publishing and make business contacts. He was constantly sending radiograms to his firm, uneasy about having left it in strange hands. As someone who worked hard himself, he wanted to make certain that his employees were doing the same.

  I also happened to know that this publisher was something of a Jekyll and Hyde. His days aboard ship were spent exclusively in the company of men, not even looking at a woman, but at night he would dress up and proceed to the ballroom to pick up female companions whom he would then drag to the bar and from the bar to the deck, and there into the darkest corners. At night he suddenly turned nearsighted and recognized not a single one of the men with whom he had spent pleasant afternoons. Similarly, in the daytime he never acknowledged any of the nighttime women. He practiced double-entry bookkeeping. The days were for serious thinking and sharpening his wits, the nights for lovemaking.

  The group that had gathered around the publisher kept growing, but the Dane was still bothered by the fact that I was keeping my distance and kept trying to bring me into the discussion. He therefore directed everyone’s attention to me by announcing: “Be careful what you say, there’s a writer over there who’s eavesdropping on every word you say. He may want to write about you.” The tactic worked and the Dane got what he wanted. Now it would have been impolite of me not to join the circle, so I did, but not as a participant, only as a reluctant listener. The publisher took it upon himself to reassure everybody.

  “Here on the water, we have no fear of writers,” he said. “The sea has immunized us against all authorial onslaughts. A writer needs real people to base his characters on, and we are mere passengers. That’s a wholly different category. Passengers at sea are rootless, whereas fictional characters must have solid ground under their feet. The sea is solid ground only for sailors, so to speak, whereas for us the sea is happenstance. Perhaps the sea represents all our unconscious fears, but what’s a writer to do with that? How can he capture us? How can he create conflict, when we’re all so careful not to step on one another’s toes? What problems can he attach to us, when we are all without problems? And if we do have a real moral and ethical past rather than just a virtual existence, we have left it behind on shore. What is most important, though, is that our meeting at sea was not planned but a random accident. We’re joined on the Olympic by chance, which is not enough to bind us together. If we like, we could talk ourselves into believing that we are the last morality-free generation on earth, without roots, but with an unspoken fear that the ship might sink and we would then meet our common fate. In other words, that fear might be our bond. But this theme is so trite that no writer, I’m sure, would want to touch it.”

  A discussion ensued about the respective attributes of sea literature and its dry-land equivalent, and everybody wanted to hear my opinion on the subject. I was rescued by a sudden, unexpected turn in the discussion, initiated by one of the participants, a high-school principal from somewhere out west, with large, tobacco-stained teeth, a prominent jaw, and big fists, which he pounded each time he wanted to make a point.

  “Writers are poisonous snakes,” he pronounced. “As members of society, they’re the lowest of the low. They should be confined to iron cages, and whenever they let out a cackle that they are about to deliver themselves of a manuscript, their composition should be taken from them between the iron bars with the same obstetrical care that a venomous tongue is removed from a snake. Their works belong to the people, but the psychopaths themselves should be isola
ted from society, and not just from society, but from one another, because they devour each other, like cannibals. Being a writer is the most egocentric thing you can imagine. Writers are all sick people, a bunch of degenerates.”

  The Dane looked worried for my sake, fearing a scandal. He was sure that I’d feel mortally insulted and sought to ease what he thought was my discomfort by softly letting me know that a writer had stolen the principal’s wife and that the two had run off together. However, the principal had decisive views not on writers alone. He also railed against New York and New Yorkers. If it were up to him, he probably would have consigned New Yorkers to cages as well.

  “New Yorkers are a poisonous race,” he said. “I was once in New York for a few days and it was a nightmare, a city of pirates. New Yorkers even begrudge one another their wives. You’re never safe walking down Broadway with your own wife. At every corner, there were men leering at her, even men who had women of their own. It’s just pitiful to see those creatures fighting their animal natures to preserve a semblance of civilization. You’re in constant fear that someone will knock you over the head with a hammer and make off with your wife. Disgusting! New York’s one big pornographic city, fit for just dime-store romances.”

  Among the group that had formed around the combustible principal, who had now seized the reins of the discussion, were a dentist and his seventeen-year-old son headed for the Soviet Union, who spent their days aboard ship reading from the same book. The dentist was going to study the problem of hygiene in the Soviet Union and, so as not to arrive there totally ignorant, was reading the currently popular Red Medicine, and also urging it on his son. The son read faster than the father and was constantly waiting for him to catch up. The boy kept looking up at the sky and down at the sea, and daydreaming. The father was in no hurry. He read the same page twice, even three times and covered it with notes. The boy stuck out his tongue and left it there. He warmed himself in the sun and made darting, boxing movements at his father, who never noticed the flying fists, impervious to the danger. When the father finally turned the page, the son gave it a quick glance, sucked up the contents like an electric vacuum cleaner, and was again free as a bird.