This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  His cameras were not in evidence on a day when Frank and I called on him and his wife, Eli, in their apartment on the Rue de Lisbonne, in June of l956. I remember their warmth and charm but nothing else about the day except for a heavy, exotic-looking dagger with a curvy double edge that lay on top of a sideboard, its elaborately chased blade catching gleams of sunlight. When I approached for a closer look, Cartier-Bresson and his wife said, in one voice, “Be careful!”

  Seeing my surprise, he explained that the knife was a Malayan kris, and that the dark sheen along its blade was probably poison. “I don’t want it to cut you,” he said.

  “I wasn’t going to touch it,” I said. I felt like a reprimanded child.

  “He means it will cut you if it wants to,” Eli said. She herself was Balinese, strikingly so, and again I stopped in my tracks. She spread her hands in distress and said to her husband, “Can we tell Roger why it’s out on the table like this?”

  “Yes,” Cartier-Bresson said gravely. “Normally, in the everyday, the kris rests in this drawer, here below, but now and then it asks to get out.”

  “It asks?” I asked.

  “It knocks,” he said, rapping a double rap with his knuckles on the sideboard. “And when it asks again we take it out and put it just here for a few days.”

  I don’t think I laughed. I said nothing, and Cartier-Bresson, anxious to put me at my ease again, gestured apologetically and remarked that belief or superstition, call it what you wish, was everywhere. “After all,” he murmured, “there are thousands or millions of Frenchmen walking around with a bit of butcher’s string tied around their waist to ward off the mal au foie, the liver disease that we French keep as an obsession.”

  A suspicion occurred. “Henri,” I said. “Forgive me, but do you have a piece of string tied around your waist?”

  Smiling and shrugging, exuding an interested excitement that was close to pride, he unbuttoned the bottom two buttons of his shirt and revealed a snowy ficelle just inside his waistband, neatly double-tied. He looked like a rolled roast, a genius ready for the broiler.

  “So far,” he said carefully, “it has done its work.”

  Talk, November, 1996

  THE LATE SHOW

  An hour after sunset on a Dallas-to-LaGuardia flight last week, a mottled, blocky mass of gray slowly presented itself off the portside windows of our plane—a steeply vertical theatre of cloud rising at its top almost to our announced cruising level of thirty-three thousand feet and illuminating itself garishly from within with all the promise of a major out-of-town opening. “Overdramatic” was the first thought that came to me at my west-facing window, but as the plane moved closer I began to see that this was no ordinary midland midsummer night’s thunderstorm. Most of the sunset’s traces had drained from the sky by now, but this monster had brought its own light system. Nearly continuous flares and bloomings and fadings from inside its lumpy body suggested a north–south mass of perhaps forty miles, and the closer bolts—blinding-white tree trunks of lightning that threw out limbs and root systems and jagged tendrils and stemlike afterthoughts—revealed an almost sheer wall of storm facing us and falling precipitously away into the darkness. The front, still some miles to the west and mostly below us, was not an immediate concern, but its dimensions and statements did not permit us the customary half-lidded, sidelong glances of the airborne. “For those of you who missed the Fourth of July, there’s quite a show down there, off to our left,” the pilot told us, and when some people across the aisle got up and leaned closer for a look, the next crazed shot of light gave them the faces of night riders and clowns.

  Our flight came four days and thousands of airline flights after the T.W.A. disaster at Moriches Bay, but I don’t think that a single person on our smaller plane failed to connect that unimaginably stopped journey with our own trip and its unscheduled present sideshow. Now this, I thought, and I reminded myself how many other airliners were headed for New York or Chicago or Sioux Falls or Ottawa just then, and how long the odds were that anything amiss would happen to ours. I wanted safety in numbers and anonymity; I wanted this storm not to notice us. Then, still staring out of my plastic oblong, I saw that this phenomenal airspace had come with lesser mesas and peninsulas of storm stretching away up ahead, still parallel to our path but closer now, and putting out their own spritzes and fistfuls of lightning, and this time a line came to me from that old Broadway biblical play “The Green Pastures”: “Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!” Under the foot of our cloud I glimpsed the faint yellow gleams of some Tennessee or Kentucky hamlet below, and I could almost feel the air suddenly becoming cooler down there, and the leaves beginning to stir, and some householders, peering up at the approaching familiar melodrama, getting up to move a flowerpot off the porch railing and to call in the cat or the kids.

  Nothing happened on our flight. The storm, by now presenting a pinkish sheared-off anvil shape at its top, was pulled slowly offstage behind us; reading lights were snapped out; and our plane, now a tunnel of sleeping strangers, slid along on its homeward slot, comforting us now and then with a soft little jiggle. Because none of us could know what it is like to fall from the sky or be blown out of it, or to come apart into fragments, we could squirm lower in our seats, punch the dinky pillow and fold our arms, and, just before sleep, remind ourselves not to forget, not quite yet, the imperial beauty of that thunderstorm and the boring but generally ongoing solipsism of pure luck.

  Unpublished, July, 1995

  PAST MASTERS: DONALD BARTHELME

  DON B.

  Donald Barthelme died the other day, at the age of fifty-eight. His departure came much too soon for his readers and stricken friends to attach to him that sense of satisfaction and gratitude one extends almost reflexively to an author who has achieved a longer span, but the brilliance and the dimensions of his work would have honored several lifetimes. He was the author of four novels (one to be published next year), nine collections of stories, and a celebrated book for children. His contributions to this magazine extended across twenty-six years, and included dozens of unsigned Notes and Comment pieces, some film criticism, and a hundred and twenty-eight stories—these last of such a dazzling, special nature that each one was invariably spoken of, here and elsewhere, as “a Barthelme.” The tag was almost essential, because a typical Barthelme story was simultaneously rich and elusive, evanescent and nutritious, profound and hilarious, brief and long-term, trifling and heartbreaking, daunting to some readers and to others a snap, a breeze, a draught of life. During his lifetime Donald Barthelme was variously summarized as an avant-gardist, a collagist, a minimalist, a Dadaist, an existentialist, and a postmodernist, but even a cursory rereading of his work leaves one with the certainty that none of these narrowings are of much use. Categories seemed to accumulate around him of their own accord (the phenomenon must have pleased him, for he loved lists), but a brief rundown of some common ingredients in his fiction only brings back his unique swirl of colors and contexts: songs, museums, headlines, orchestras, bishops and other clerics, jungles, babies, commercials, savants and philosophers, animals (gerbils, bears, porcupines, falling dogs), anomie, whiskey, fathers and grandfathers, explorers, passionate love, ghosts (zombies and others), musicians, filmmakers, recipes, painters, princes, affectations, engravings, domesticity, balloons, battalions, nothingness, politicians, Indians, grief, places (Paraguay, Korea, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Thailand), dreams, young women, architects, angels, and a panoply of names (Goethe, Edward Lear, Klee, Bluebeard, Cortés and Montezuma, Sindbad, Kierkegaard, President Eisenhower, Eugénie Grandet, Snow White, Captain Blood, the Holy Ghost, Perpetua, Daumier, the Phantom of the Opera, St. Augustine, St. Anthony, and Hokie Mokie the King of Jazz).

  This explosion of reference, this bottomless etcetera, may account for his brevity—short stories and short novels—and for the beauty of his prose. His names and nouns were set down in a manner that magically carried memories and meanings and overtones, bringing them intact to th
e page, where they let loose (in the reader) a responding instinctive flood of recognition, irony, and sadness—too many emotions, in fact, to work very well within the formal chambers of a full novel. The Barthelme sentences, which seemed to employ references or omissions in the place of adjectives or metaphors, were sky blue—clear and fresh, and free of all previous weathers of writing. It was this instrument that allowed him to be offhand and complex and lighthearted and poignant all at the same time—often within the space of a line or two. In an early story, “Philadelphia,” a man named Mr. Flax describes an imaginary tribe and culture in this fashion:

  The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree…. They have a Fifth Avenue…. They have a Chock Full o’ Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each…. They have everything that we have, but only one of each thing…. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.

  Many readers had difficulty at first cottoning to writing like this. They were put off by Barthelme’s crosscutting and by his terrifying absence of explanation, and those who resisted him to the end may have been people who were by nature unable to put their full trust in humor. Barthelme was erudite and culturally rigorous, but he was always terrifically funny as well, and when his despairing characters and jagged scenes and sudden stops and starts had you tumbling wildly, free-falling through a story, it was laughter that kept you afloat and made you feel there would probably be a safe landing. It was all right to laugh: sometimes (he seemed to be saying) that was the only thing we should count on.

  All this took some getting used to—readers who encountered his long and ironically twisted “Snow White” in this magazine in 1967 wrote us in great numbers to ask what had happened to these people—but if you could give yourself to the tale (there was no code, no set of symbols, no key) you were all right. One writer here said last week, “Somehow, he taught us how to read him—it’s almost the most surprising thing about him—and what had felt strange or surreal in his work came to seem absolutely natural and inevitable. And there were times, particularly in the Nixon years, when his stuff seemed more real—saner and much more coherent—than anything else going on in the world.”

  Donald Barthelme was tall and quiet, with an air of natural gravity to him—a light gravity, if that is possible. He had an Ahab beard and wore Strindbergian eyeglasses; some people thought he looked more postmodernist than he wrote. He was entertaining and sad, and without pretension. He took himself seriously but presented himself quietly. (Anyone who happened to see it must still remember a television interview, years ago, in which Barthelme responded to a question about another contemporary literary figure with a brief sigh and then said, “Yes, I know him. His big books are always leaning against my little books on the shelf.”) He was a great teacher, unfailingly generous and hopeful in his estimation of beginning writers. He was busy in intellectual and literary circles, here and in Europe. He was a romantic and a family man (as anyone who reads him can see), and an exceptionally gentle and affectionate father. Many people, of all ages, seemed to find a father in him, in fact, and they are missing him now in a painful and personal fashion. One woman on our staff, a writer, said, “When he was writing a lot, you had this sense that there was someone else sort of like you, living in your city, and saying things that meant something about your life. It was like having a companion in the world.” And an older man, also a writer and contributor, said almost the same thing: “He always seemed to be writing about my trashiest thoughts and my night fears and my darkest secrets, but he understood them better than I did, and he seemed to find them sweeter and classier than I ever could. For a long time, I felt I was going to be all right as long as he was around and writing. Having him for a friend was the greatest compliment of my life.”

  Comment, August, 1989

  LONG GONE

  DIAL AGAIN

  Verizon has applied the branding iron, and starting this week everybody in Manhattan must punch in a 1 and then a 212 (or a 646 or 917) in front of the old local number before talking to his or her office or bookie or life companion or dog-walker or newspaper-delivery service (where was our Post yesterday?). It’s not such a big deal—I already knew I was a 212—but eleven numbers instead of seven are now required to bring about a conversation, which means a further lowering of the gray digit cloud that hangs over each of us, Pig Pen–like, from the moment we get up in the morning to the time we brush our teeth at night. The added numbers also signal the end of my hopes that the phone company might someday see the error of its integer infatuation and turn back to the exchange letters and (before that) the sprightly full exchange names that once identified us. I’ve lived at the same Manhattan address for thirty years and in that span have gone from a LEhigh 4 prefix to LE 4 to 534 and now to 1-212-534, which is the wrong direction. Yes, there are zillions more number variations now available than what can be wrung out of those puny alphabet groups jammed onto your Touch-Tone, but let’s try harder. Why not some fresh exchanges instead? Why not WEevil 3? What about OSiris 4? What’s wrong with LUst 7, BOwwow 9, or LInoleum 6? The number I know best, next to my own, belongs to our friends Allan and Marie, who have converted their drab, Upper West Side 496–5844 into the mnemonic GYM LUGG.

  I’m an old New York guy, and can recall the day in 1930 when our ATwater 8435 took an extra digit and became ATwater 9-8435. Growing up, I began to apprehend that Manhattan telephone exchanges, which were geographically assigned, were a guide map and social register to my delightful city. West Side school friends of mine could be reached at the MOnument or CAthedral or RIverside exchange. My father worked at the WHitehall exchange, down near Wall Street, and my mother at the mid–West Forties’ BRyant 9. BUtterfield 8 was just south of us on the Upper East Side, with TRafalgar, REgent, and RHinelander not far away. When my parents were divorced and my mother moved to East Eighth Street, she became a SPring 7, and neighbors and stores and movie theatres in that neighborhood had lively ALgonquin, CHelsea, and WAtkins handles. If you called up one of the Times Square movie theatres, to find the next showtime for “Cimarron” or “Rasputin and the Empress,” the exchange was probably LOngacre. In my early teens, I was in love with a girl named Rosie, who lived a dozen blocks away, and we passed endless, almost wordless half hours together on the phone, ATwater and ENdicott breathing as one, until the inexorable “Oop, my dad—bye.”

  Folks all over New York (and all over the country) have similar names and allusions deep inside them, and once sensed the social significance of a nice exchange number. Bruce, a colleague of mine, grew up in the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx, with a home WEllington 5 exchange that wasn’t as tony, he says, as BAinbridge, over near Mosholu Parkway. My wife, a Queens girl, understood that her own HAvermeyer 8 exchange was better—“but only a little better”—than her grandmother’s NEwtown 9. It’s my theory that, back in the telephonic Eocene, New York Tel wanted to comfort its better patrons with exchange names that suggested brokerage firms or Waspy lawyers, and came up with WIckersham, VAnderbilt, BOgardus, BArclay, and BUtterfield. RHinelander looks snooty, too, but is ethno-geographical if you think about it, since most of its customers lived in the Germanic, East Eighty-sixth Street area of Yorkville. Later Manhattan exchanges like OXford and my own LEhigh, which were tacked on in the fifties, lacked the lime-flower-tea cachet. My friend Tad remembers moving into Manhattan from the suburbs a little after this and being issued a new YUkon number. “That’s when I knew I was an outsider in the big city,” he said. “I was hanging on by my fingernails.”

  Two old tunes about Manhattan telephone exchanges: 1. Glenn Miller’s “PEnnsylvania 6-5000,” which was the phone number of the Pennsylvania Hotel, where Miller (and Benny Goodman, too) often played the Madhattan Room. 2. Fleecie Moore’s “Caledonia”—a girl named for the exchange, as in “CaleDOHNNyah, whatmakesyourbigheadsohard?”

  Back in the time of John O’Hara’s 1935 novel “B
Utterfield 8”—which is to be called “1-212-288” in future editions—people never heard a recorded message when they made a call. If they needed help, they got to talk to an operator. On page 38, a man is trying to reach a New York girl he hasn’t seen in years. “Will you try that number again, please?” he says. “It’s Stuyvesant, operator. Are you dialling S,T,U?…Well, I thought perhaps you were dialling S,T,Y.” But nobody’s home.

  Talk, February, 2003

  THE CRIME OF OUR LIFE

  Burglaries and street robberies in New York City have declined by an astounding eighty per cent since 1990, and even lifelong Manhattanites like me have almost forgotten the mixture of anxiety and scary anecdote we all shared back in the seventies and eighties, whatever our address. Leaving a neighborhood bar or coming home from a late movie, you scanned the shadowy sidewalk up ahead and slipped out into the empty car lane if you saw anyone approaching. Street gutters glistened with smashed window glass, and, locking up your VW in a fresh parking space, you left a pleading note on the dashboard: “No drugs, no radio, no nothing.” Neighborhood mayhem back then terrified and shamed us all, and gave out-of-towners another reason to hate New York; if you were off visiting an aunt in Topeka or Missoula and told a neighbor where you came from, you’d get a two-beat pause and then the unvarying “Right in it?” Crime had become another garish New York inconvenience: something else to put up with and try to manage with a bit of cool.