by Lorin Stein
—Philosophers, Santayana said, eat what’s put before them.
—High table at Harvard will be amused. I’m awfully pleased you could come.
A handsome young barbarian out of Kipling, the captain’s manners were derived from a nanny and from a public school and modified by an officer’s mess. The British are charming among equals and superiors, fair to underlings, and pleasantly artificial to all except family and closest friends.
—But you can’t, you know, saddle yourself with being a foreigner, I gather your family is Spanish but that you are a colonial, growing up in Boston and all that. Most colonials are more English than the English. You see that in Canadians. Your George Washington Irving, we were told at school, is as pukka British as any of our authors. Longfellow also. Same language, I mean to say.
—My native tongue is Spanish.
—Not a trace of accent. Of course you don’t look English, I mean American, but then you can’t go by that, can you? Most of the Danes I’ve seen look more English than we do, when they don’t look like Scots. You look South American. It’s the moustache and the small bones, what? I know a Spanish naval officer with absolutely the frame of a girl. Probably cut my throat if I were to say so, devilish touchy, your Spaniard. Doesn’t Shakespeare say so somewhere?
—I’m various kinds of hybrid. Bostonians are a breed apart in the United States. I can lay claim to being an artistocrat, but only through intermarriages. As a Catholic I’m an outcast, and as a Catholic atheist I am a kind of unique pariah.
—That’s jolly!
—I am, I think, the only materialist alive. But a Platonic materialist.
—I haven’t a clue what that could mean. Sounds a bit mad.
—Doubtless it is. This wine is excellent.
—No offence, my dear fellow, you understand? Our fire needs a lump or two of coal. Horrocks!
—The unexamined life is eminently worth living, were anyone so fortunate. It would be the life of an animal, brave and alert, with instincts instead of opinions and decisions, loyalty to mate and cubs, to the pack. It might, for all we know, be a life of richest interest and happiness. Dogs dream. The quickened spirit of the eagle circling in high cold air is beyond our imagination. The placidity of cattle shames the Stoic, and what critic has the acumen of a cat? We have used the majesty of the lion as a symbol of royalty, the wide-eyed stare of owls for wisdom, the mild beauty of the dove for the spirit of God.
—You talk like a book, what? One second, here’s somebody coming. Sorry to interrupt.
Horrocks opened the door to admit a seven-foot corporal, who saluted and stamped his feet.
—Sir, Collins’s taken ill, sir. Come all over queasy like, sir, and shivering something pitiful, sir.
Captain Stewart stood, found a notecase in his jacket on the back of a chair, and ordered the corporal to pop Collins into a cab and take him to the dispensary.
—Here’s a quid. Bring back a supernumerary. Watkins will sub for you.
—Sir, good as done, sir.
—Thank you, corporal.
And to Santayana, picking a walnut from the bowl and cracking it expertly:
—Hate chits. Rather pay from my own pocket than fill up a form. I suppose I have an education. Latin and Greek are cheerful little games, if you have the brains for them, and most boys do. Batty generals in Thucydides, Caesar in Gaul throwing up palisades and trenching fosses. Never figured out Horace at all.
—There are more books in the British Museum about Horace than any other writer.
—My God!
—Civilization is diverse. You can omit Horace without serious diminishment. I look on the world as a place we have made more or less hospitable, and at some few moments magnificent. When would you have liked to live, had you the choice, and where?
—Lord knows. Do drink up. Horrocks will think you don’t appreciate the Bank of England’s port. Eighteenth century? On the Plains of Abraham. The drums, the pipers, the Union Jack in the morning light. Wolfe reciting Gray’s Elegy before the attack, to calm his nerves. Wouldn’t have thought that there was a nerve in his body. Absolute surprise to the French, as if an army had appeared from nowhere. I would have liked to have been there.
—The plangent name, both biblical and Shakespearean, the Plains of Abraham. It was simply Farmer Abraham’s cow pasture.
—Is it, now? Well, Bannockburn’s a trout stream and Hastings a quiet village.
—And Lepanto the empty sea.
Horrocks permitted himself a brightened eye and sly smile. He was serving quality, after all.
—English mustard is one of the delights of your pleasant country. My friends the Russells would be appalled to know that one of my early discoveries here was cold meat pie with mustard and beer. I like to think that Chaucer and Ben Jonson wrote with them at their elbow.
—There’s a half-batty Colonel Herbert-Kenny, in Madras I believe, who writes cookbooks under the name Wyvern. These address themselves to supplying a British mess with local vegetables, condiments and meat. Simplicity is his word. All the world’s problems come from a lack of simplicity in anything you might think of, food, dress, manners. The bee in his bonnet is that food is character and that to eat Indian is to whore after strange gods. That’s scripture, isn’t it?
—He’s right. Spinoza and Epicurus were spartan eaters.
—I thought Epicurus was a gourmet, or gourmand, banquets and puking?
—He has that reputation, a traditional misunderstanding. He ate simply. He did insist on exquisite taste, but the fare was basic and elementary.
—Herbert-Kenny must have read his books.
—Cheese and bread, olives and cold water. He and Thoreau would have got along.
—Not familiar with this Thoreau, a Frenchman?
—A New Englander, hermit and mystic. Americans run to originality.
—Examined his soul, did he? I heard a lot of that in America.
Horrocks poked up the fire, removed plates, replenished Santayana’s glass, silently, almost invisibly.
The dormitory and the barracks had shaped his world. He was probably far more ignorant of sensual skills than an Italian ten-year-old, a virgin who would be awkward with his country wife, and would become a domestic tyrant and brute, but a good father to daughters and a just but not affecionate one to sons.
Their friendship was a sweet mystery. The British explain nothing, and do not like to have things explained. The captain had doubtless told his friends that he’d met this American who was dashedly friendly when he was in Boston, had even given him a book about Harvard College, where he was a professor wallah. Followed sports, the kind of rugger they call football in America. Keen on wrestling and track. Speaks real French and German to waiters, and once remarked, as a curiosity, that he always dreams in Spanish. Says we English are the Romans of our time, but Romans crossbred with Protestantism and an inch from being fanatics except that good Roman horse sense, which we take from the classics, and a native decency and a love of animals keep us from being Germans. Talks like a book, but no airs about him at all.
—I like this room, Santayana said. It is England. The butler, fireplace and mantel out of Cruikshank, the walnut chairs, the sporting prints, the polished brass candlesticks. You yourself, if a foreigner who reads may make the observation, are someone to be encountered in Thackeray or Kipling.
—Oh, I say! That’s altogether too fanciful. No butlers in America?
—Only Irish girls who drop the soup.
—Back to your being a materialist, Captain Stewart said. I’m interested.
—Your Samuel Butler was a materialist, the Englishman of Englishmen in our time. He was a sane Voltaire who was wholly disillusioned intellectually while being in bondage to his comfort and his heart, a character Dickens might have invented if he hadn’t his readers to consider. The nonconformist is an English type, a paradox the English themselves fail to appreciate, for they have long forgotten that exceptions might be a threat to the commun
ity. An American Butler, even if he sounded like Emerson, would find himself too often in hot water.
—Don’t know this Butler. Is materialist a technical term?
—The world is evident. Begin there.
The captain laughed.
—The substantiality and even the presence of the world has been called into doubt by serious minds, by Hindus, by Chinese poets, by Bishop Berkeley and German idealists.
—Extraordinary! Hindus! I daresay. And your being a materialist is your firm belief that the world is, as you put it, evident? Does all this have anything to do with anything?
Santayana laughed.
—No. What interests me is that all thought and therefore all action stands on a quicksand of tacit assumptions. What we believe is what we are and what we expect of others, and of fate.
—Here’s my corporal again.
—Sir, Collins is taken care of, sir.
—Carry on, corporal.
—Sir! Yes, sir!
—Spirit lives in matter, which gives rise to it. We are integral with matter. We eat, we breathe, we generate, we ache. Existence is painful.
—Do try the walnuts. They’re excellent. Do you think we live in good times or bad? I mean, do you want us all to be materialists?
—I am content to let every man and woman be themselves. I am not them. When man is at last defeated and his mind bound with ungiving chains, it will be through a cooperation of science and what now passes for liberalism. That is, through his intellect and his concept of the good, just and useful life. This is, of course, a cruel paradox, but it is real and inevitable. Science is interested only in cause and effect, in naked demonstrable truth. It will eventually tell us that consciousness is chemical and the self a congeries of responses to stimuli. Liberalism is on a course of analyzing culture into a system of political allegiances that can be explained by science, and controlled by sanctions, all with the best of intentions. All of life’s surprises will be prevented, all spontaneity strangled by proscriptions, all variety canceled. White light conceals all its colors, which appear only through refractions, that is, through irregularity and pervasive differences. Liberalism in its triumphant maturity will be its opposite, an opaque tyranny and a repression through benevolence that no tyrant however violent has ever achieved.
—Here here! You’re talking for effect, as at the Union.
—There is no fanaticism like sweet reason. You are as yet free, being wonderfully young, and having the advantage of the liberty of the army.
—Liberty, you say?
—The most freedom anyone can enjoy is in constraint that looks the other way from time to time. You know that from childhood and from school.
—The army is school right on. And one does and doesn’t long to be out. I can’t see myself as a major in India, parboiled by the climate and becoming more conservative and apoplectic by the hour.
—Youth does not have as much of childhood in it as early maturity has youth. There is an abrupt demarcation between child and adolescent, a true metamorphosis.
—Something like, yes.
—The English fireside is as congenial an institution as your culture has to offer. We Americans find your bedrooms arctic and your rain a trial, but the saloon of the King’s Arms in Oxford, after freezing in the Bodleian or walking in the meadows, is my idea of comfort. As is this room, as well. And as a philosopher who speaks his mind, I delight in your receiving and feeding me in your picturesque undress, those terrible uncomfortable-looking galluses, do you call them? over your plain Spartan undyed shirt. I might be the guest of a young Viking in his house clothes.
—You should hear the major on the subject of gravy on a tunic. And you decline to convert me to materialism. What, then, to believe? Horrocks and I ought to have something to benefit us from a Harvard professor’s coming to dine.
—We seem to need belief, don’t we? Skepticism is more than likely unintelligent. It is certainly uncomfortable and lonely. Well, let’s see. Believe that everything, including spirit and mind, is composed of earth, air, fire and water.
—That is probably what I have always believed. But, look here, my dear fellow, it’s coming up eleven, when I must be on parade in the dead of night, with drums and fifes. All civilians must be home in their beds. Look, Horrocks will give you to the corporal, who will give you to the bobby outside, and you’re on your own. This has been awfully jolly.
—It has, indeed, said Santayana, shaking hands.
—Good night, sir, Horrocks offered.
—Good night, and thank you, Santayana said, tendering him a shilling.
The rain had let up. He would walk to Jermyn Street, keeping the image of Captain Stewart in his martial undress lively in his imagination, as Socrates must have mused on Lysis’s perfect body, or on Alcibiades whose face Plutarch wrote was the handsomest in all of Greece. The world is a spectacle, and a gift.
The perfect body is itself the soul.
If he was a guest at the Bank of England, he was equally a guest at his boardinghouse on Jermyn Street, the world his host. Emerson said that the joy of an occasion was in the beholder not in the occasion. He is wrong. Geoffrey Stewart is real, his beauty real, his spirit real. I have not imagined him, or his fireside, or his butler, or his wide shoulders or the tuft of ginger hair showing where the top button was left unbuttoned on his clean Spartan undervest.
Suppose that in a Spanish town I came upon an apparently blind old beggar sitting against a wall, thrumming his feeble guitar, and uttering an occasional hoarse wail by way of singing. It is a sight which I have passed a hundred times unnoticed; but now suddenly I am arrested and seized with a voluminous and unreasoning sentiment—call it pity for want of a better name. An analytical psychologist (I myself, perhaps in that capacity) might regard my absurd feeling as a compound of the sordid aspect of this beggar and of some obscure bodily sensation in myself, due to lassitude or bile, to a disturbing letter received in the morning, or to the general habit of expecting too little and remembering too much.
Issue 139, 1996
Mona Simpson
on
Norman Rush’s Lying Presences
“Jack liked his office and it was all right to like your office.”
This is the first line of “Lying Presences.” I worked at The Paris Review, when the manuscript arrived (atavistically, in a yellow manila envelope, by mail.) The then-managing editor uncharacteristically decided we should publish it after having read only this one opening sentence.
Editors, like curators, develop refined intuition.
“I know,” she said, handing it to me to read.
Of course she was right.
There was something about the character’s attitude, caught in the verb/object repetition—an obdurate defensiveness—that set in motion a conflict within the narrative voice itself.
Norman Rush was raised by a socialist and an amateur opera singer. His work bristles with zealous theory, political sophistication, and all the barbed sorts of knowledge that boys used to make girls feel bad about not having, the stories populated with cranks, rebels, ideologues, inventors, and their sarcastic cowed sons and lovers who have had enough of high-mindedness.
Everyone is always intelligent.
But that doesn’t help them much.
Consider this rant in “Lying Presences,” a story about two brothers.
“Everything about their grim father was coming back. It was okay to drink Benedictine because the Benedictines were okay, but no Chartreuse, ever, because there was something bad about the Carthusians. You were supposed to shun anyone who bought a Volkswagen, because of slave labor, and this was as late as the sixties. People who visited Spain before Casals went back were lepers. Their father had been a basement inventor. He had invented a dispenser cap, called Metercap, for toothpaste that would measure out a generous average dose and thus cut down waste. The company that bought it suppressed the invention. Waste was the enemy of mankind. The company was criminal. Property
was theft and so on into the night. Roy was against waste.”
That final sentence aligns Roy with their “grim” father.
Jack “liked one thing at his desk at a time.… The walls were not just a color but a “naïve yellow.” “At eight floors up, he was the right distance from sounds of the street.”
In other words, the writer whispers, a complete control freak. “He might concede [italics mine] disappointment in the way his custom desk had worked out.”
What is the product created in this carefully appointed office?
Commissions.
Jack is an agent, for illustrators of children’s books. A logical consequence of growing up with a man who believed that “Everyone should buy dented cans.”
Because Rush is essentially a comic writer, we know that something will disturb this fussy, modestly ambitious order.
The something turns out to be a brother.
“Perfect. Just what he needed at this point. He felt indescribable. It was unfair.” The breathless third person narration manages to convey Jack’s sensibility, without sympathizing with it. He blames his secretary, for leaving the door open when she went to lunch. “She was going to suffer.”
While Jack is the epitome of modest ambition, modest success, a controlled scope of challenge, his brother Roy gave his entire twenty-nine thousand dollar inheritance from his father to a cult of UFO believers, which he joined wholehearted only to find himself embroiled in a theoretical battle. He came to believe that the enemy population that sent out space ships lived on human fear.
“This struck me about the same time it struck other people and it’s an actual school by now, this part of it. But I do go beyond it. I do go beyond it. And I’m the only one,” he explains to his brother, who replies “Anytime you want my reaction, say the word.”
Neither character is wholly sympathetic. But with Rush’s typical perversity, we find ourselves most empathic with the gullible, paranoid, fanatical Roy, who believes in UFOs, because in the action of the story, he’s asking for the most simple favor; he wants room and board with his brother for a while, to get his life together.