Saul—I began, and he said, Shh. He pushed my voice back into my body, like somebody stuffing a pillow into a pillowcase. I threw my head up, like those boys in P.S. 44, and tried to gasp out an answer—but he wouldn’t let me. He raised his hand, and there was a terrific authority in the gesture—he had acquired so much authority.
We stared, or glared, at each other. Wait a minute, I said. Hold on. Can’t I have a little outburst?
He dropped his hand. He put it into his pocket to immobilize it. No, he said. No, you can’t.
We lapsed into a tender silence in which I went on silently arguing with him. He had talked himself into believing he had leukemia. He had overresearched the subject, like the review. Of course I was arguing with myself as much as with him.
All right, Saul, I said. I won’t quarrel with you, because neither of us knows what we’re talking about. But just remember this—no diagnosis is final or exhaustive. Whatever you have, there’s a treatment for it. This is not the Middle Ages. The tragic sense of life is all well and good, but your mother’s right—you think too much. Thinking is a form of hypochondria.
He laughed. Yes, he said, you and my mother. He gazed out over the lake as if he expected to see her rowing there. My mother thinks that literature is killing me, that Kafka, Lawrence, and Céline have undermined my resistance. She thinks I have brain fever, like Kirillov or Raskolnikov. Whatever happened to brain fever?
It really is absurd, he said—that old chestnut, the absurd. Look at me—he slapped his arms and legs—why, I’ve hardly used this body. It’s the shoddy manufacture of the times—I’m practically new and obsolete already. My mother keeps turning to me, waiting for me to explain this absurdity away. I’m such a good explainer. He frowned; he shook his head at his mother. Her will, he said, is a terrible force.
I opened my mouth without knowing what I was going to say and he put his fingers over my lips. It was an astonishingly intimate thing for him to do, like a kiss. You know, he said, I feel so smart. All at once, I understand everything. For example, I see now that the world is a more beautiful place than I had supposed. Look at this park—I’ve never noticed it. If I had my life to live over again, I’d read more Wordsworth.
He hooked his arms over the back of the bench and crossed his legs. He was settling down into himself. It was clear that he wanted to do the talking, so I sat back and listened. The facts could wait; I could argue with him later. He seemed comfortable now, in full flood, like his old self. I was already thinking in terms of his old self.
Another thing I’ve realized, he said, is that it’s harder for a Jew to die. Forgive me for falling back on the chosen, but there’s a certain truth in the old boast. It’s harder for us because we expect more; we need more. How irresponsible, how careless it is to die so soon. It’s such an unintelligent thing to do. We become doctors to prevent death, lawyers to outlaw it, writers to rage against it. But if you’re not Jewish, it’s different. It may not be quite so bad, so costly. You can die gracefully, athletically, with a thin-lipped smile and a straight nose. A blond death, a swan dive, a cool immersion. You can die without an accent, without dentalizing.
He paused, listening to the echo of this little speech. He seemed pleased with himself. Words, words, words, he said, that’s the only medicine. With an abrupt gesture, he pulled on the knitted cap. My thinking cap, he said. I’ve got to get back and work on the review. Deadlines!
We got up and walked out of the park. We hadn’t gone very far. He slapped me on the back. You’re a starcher, he said, skinny but strong. You can fight them off, the Kafkas. Hit them in the kishkas. And remember to read the nature poets—a pastoral a day keeps the doctor away. Don’t be so proud of your anxiety.
I was going to walk him home, but he insisted on taking me to the subway. We stood at the top of the stairs and our eyes met for the last time. His were filled with an immense kindness. I apologize, he said, for bossing you around. You see how it is. I can’t tell this particular story—I can only edit it.
Saul, I said, I’m confused. I can’t think.
Me neither, he said. As Tolstoy remarked when he was dying, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.
Listen, I said, I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll try to sort it out.
He didn’t answer. He was looking down the subway steps, which he would never descend again. We stood there without moving while life hummed around us, while traffic rushed by and the sun glinted off the store windows.
No, he said at last. I’d rather you didn’t come back. You were terrific today, and so was I—but tomorrow we’d be terrible.
Terrible? I said. I don’t know—maybe. Would it be so terrible to be terrible?
He thought about this. He turned it over in his mind, the levels of terribleness. You have no idea how busy I am, he said. They tell me there isn’t much time, and I want to finish the review. I’d like to be published.
I knew that wasn’t the real reason. He wouldn’t let me come back because he couldn’t bear the simplicity of being sick, the ordinariness of it. He didn’t know how to be ordinary; he had been taught that he was special. To be ordinary might lead to sentimentality, and he was more afraid of sentimentality than he was of being alone. Sentimental was the cruelest word in literary criticism. It was a goyish trait, like getting drunk. At that moment, Saul reminded me of a man who is asked on his deathbed to embrace a religion and refuses. There was to be no relenting. For the first time, I saw, with a kind of horror, that books had been everything to him.
He had invited me to stand outside the event with him, as a fellow critic—but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t that intellectual. His situation brought out all the homeliness in me, the sloppiness. My feelings had no style. To Saul, my sympathy would have seemed almost bestial, the disorderly impulse of a more primitive civilization. He had always been lofty and distant—why should he change now? It was typical of him to give a new meaning to the expression critically ill. If I thought he was escaping into literature, I had to remind myself that literature had been our only intimacy.
We shook hands. We did it like Europeans, our hands held high and our wrists bent. When I went down the stairs, my eyes misted up and I had to hold on to the rail.
The station was empty, yet it seemed to be full of thundering trains. I paced along the platform and asked myself whether I had done everything I could. He had rushed me—there hadn’t been time to feel, to think. I wanted to run back up the stairs and go after him, but I was afraid of displeasing him. Though I was young and self-centered and thought I would never die, though I secretly felt it was perverse of Saul to get sick, I loved and admired him. Whether he wanted to hear them or hot, there were things I wanted to say to him. How could I go away like this without saying them?
I felt cheated—not only of Saul, my friend, my companion, but of something else, something more. I think it was reality itself I felt cheated of, ordinary reality. It was as if he didn’t trust me with it. He was disappearing into the difference between us, into his history. He was saying, You can’t understand how I feel, what I am. My tragedy is older and darker than your tragedy. You can’t come into my ghetto. But even if this had been true—and I don’t know that it was—there were other possibilities open to us. He had always behaved as if understanding was everything.
I rehearsed these things all the way home, fussing and muttering, one of those people who talks to himself on the subway. At Canal Street, I got up and stood by the door. I could see my face in the glass. But where’s the catharsis? I said. Where’s the catharsis?
He went into the hospital a couple of days after that. When I telephoned him, his mother was always beside the bed. Then one day someone else answered and said that Saul was no longer there. When I called his mother, she said, He’s dead. That’s the word she used. She pronounced both d’s.
14
One night in the San Remo Bar Delmore Schwartz invited me to sit in a booth with him. He was with Dwight Macdonald and Clem Greenberg.
I was flattered. I knew Delmore because he had accepted for Partisan Review a piece I’d written called “Portrait of the Hipster.”
They were talking about the primitive: Picasso, D. H. Lawrence, and Hemingway; bullfighting and boxing. I was a bit uneasy, because my piece was about jazz and the attitudes surrounding it, and I didn’t want to be typecast as an aficionado of the primitive. I wanted to be a literary man, like them. I felt too primitive myself to be comfortable talking about the primitive.
Yet I couldn’t help showing off a little. I had noticed in taking strolls with Delmore that he was surprised and even impressed by what I thought of as ordinary observations. He seemed to see American life only in the abstract, as a Platonic essence. Sometimes he saw it as vaudeville, but always he saw it through something else. He imposed a form, intellectual or esthetic, on it, as if he couldn’t bear to look at it directly.
Like many other New York writers and intellectuals of his generation, Delmore seemed to me to have read himself right out of American culture. He was a citizen only of literature. His Greenwich Village was part Dostoyevski’s Saint Petersburg and part Kafka’s Amerika.
I admired his high abstraction, his ability to think in noninclusive generalizations, but I pitied him too. I thought his was as much a lost generation as Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s—in fact, more lost. While the writers of the twenties had lost only their illusions, Delmore, the typical New York intellectual of the forties, seemed to have lost the world itself It was as if these men had been blinded by reading. Their heads were so filled with books, fictional characters, and symbols that there was no room for the raw data of actuality. They couldn’t see the small, only the large. They still thought of ordinary people as the proletariat, or the masses.
I wanted to be an intellectual, too, to see life from a great height, yet I didn’t want to give up my sense of connection, my intimacy with things. When I read a book, I always kept one eye on the world, like someone watching the clock.
Anyway, on this particular evening, I started showing off. I did it partly because it was expected of me and partly because I wanted to. I talked about Spanish Harlem. I had been taken there several times by Vincent Livelli, and old friend of mine from Brooklyn College. He was Italian, but he could speak Spanish and he sometimes taught Latin dancing. There was a Latin dance craze in those days. People went to rumba matinees on Saturday afternoons at midtown clubs and Carmen Miranda sambaed her way through New York City in Hollywood musicals.
I told Delmore, Dwight, and Clem that I’d seen a man killed in Spanish Harlem. It was at a dance given by a young man’s club called Los Happy Boys. The victim was a stranger who had tried to enter the dance hall without a ticket. When the ticket taker, a club member called Pablito, tried to stop him, the stranger pulled out a switchblade.
The cry went up that he had killed Pablito, and the whole club descended on the stranger. I saw the whole thing—in fact, I saw it from above, like a box seat—as I was going to the men’s room. The dance hall was on the second floor and the men’s room was down below. I was going down the stairs where Pablito was taking tickets when the stranger came in.
I watched from above as they knocked him down and began to kick and stomp him. It went on for quite a while and I could hear the wet sound as they kicked him. When it was all over, they pulled out handkerchiefs and wiped the blood off their trousers and shoes. By the time the police arrived there was nothing left of the stranger but a suit of clothes and a shapeless mass. The police were philosophical and no charges were pressed.
Then Pablito reappeared. He had a Band-Aid on his forehead, at the hairline. ¡Cómo, he said, que le han matadol! Wow, they killed him! When the club members, the Happy Boys, saw Pablito, they all started to laugh. They rushed at him as if they were going to kill him too, but they were kissing him. They raised him up on their shoulders. Everyone had to see him with their own eyes. Pablito himself was amazed and flattered and a little frightened too that his friends had killed the man. After a while, everyone started laughing. They laughed uncontrollably, pointing to Pablito. He laughed too. Then they went upstairs and started dancing again.
The thing about that scene, I told them, was the economy of it. A man who stabs another man over a seventy-five-cent ticket isn’t worth even a shudder of compassion, not even a spasm of revulsion. I didn’t feel any pity at all for him. I didn’t even think of him as a man. Of course, those were days when violence was uncommon, when it could still be seen as dramatic or moral. What I had seen was an act of tribal solidarity, and it was satisfying in its way to see how much the Happy Boys cared—how they laughed and kissed Pablito, how impressed he was by their anger and grief—and then their fastidiousness as they wiped off their trousers and shoes. As an expression of passion, the incident impressed me, for I was a stranger, too, like the man they killed.
It was the sort of thing Hemingway would write about, I said, or Mailer—yet I didn’t trust them with such scenes. They’d make it both more and less than it was. Hemingway would harp on the handkerchiefs. Mailer would reach for philosophy.
I told them another story—about the night when the air was filled with flying chairs. A couple of men had gotten into a fight and the whole place divided into two groups. They were all friends and they really didn’t want to fight, so they took up positions at each end of the hall and threw chairs. They were light, cane-bottomed chairs that the audience would drum on, like a chorus, when they got carried away by the music.
The chairs arched through the air like birds flying the length of the hall, birds trapped in a room. There must have been forty or fifty of them, a flight of chairs. Some of them met in midair, as if they were mating on the wing. Then after a while it just stopped. No one seemed to be hurt.
As I told these stories I could see that I was making an impression, that these three literary men saw the Happy Boys as something like the Parisian apache dancers, where men threw women around in a violent acrobatic tango. For all their intellectual sophistication, Village writers were suckers. They were awed by action and passion. They saw Western movies as myths. You’d see them coming out of the Loew’s Sheridan with their eyes shining.
Was that true, Dwight said, that part about the handkerchiefs? They liked the story. I could have published it in Partisan Review. They wanted to see Spanish Harlem. They wanted to visit the primitive, see it in the flesh.
It was a Friday night and I knew that there was a gran baile every Friday, so we jumped into a taxi and went straight up Fifth Avenue, which was a two-way street at the time.
Though my father had played New Orleans jazz on our Stromberg-Carlson phonograph, it was Latin American music that I loved most. I don’t know why, because much of it was terrible. The arrangements were full of churning horn sections and awkward staccatoes and the singers, who were almost always male, sang through their noses in a high, pinched tenor.
Yet I loved it. As far back as I could remember I had listened to Xavier Cugat on the radio. I was so devoted to him that I was allowed to monopolize the radio when his regular weekly program came on. When I think about it now, I suppose it was the rhythm section, the drums, that appealed to me. I had always felt that life was a rhythmical process. When I was happy, my rhythms, my tuning, were good—everything danced—and when I was unhappy, I didn’t have any rhythm at all. It was my secret conviction that Delmore and the other writer-intellectuals had very little sense of rhythm. It wasn’t just that Delmore, for example, was clumsy—it went further than that. As Kenneth Burke said, the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude—and I thought there was something about the way New York intellectuals danced their attitudes. There was not much syncopation in their writing. They stayed too close to the bone and they had turned themselves into wallflowers.
I liked it better when writers danced. Even Hemingway, another clumsy man, knew how to dance, and I can imagine even Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dancing. Writers used to get more out of simply being. Even Edmund Wilson was always
dancing. I remember a scene in one of his journals in which he went dancing alone. He couldn’t find any of his friends, so he went to a dance hall on Fourteenth Street and danced with a hostess. And while there’s something odd about that, it seemed to me to show that it was necessary to him to keep going, to throw an arm around life and move with it.
The music came pouring out of the entrance to the Park Plaza. It had a kind of crippled syncopation, like a dancer who has one leg a bit shorter than the other. This was before mambo came in. They were still doing the Afro-Cuban rumba, a flinging emphatic version of the Cuban rumba, which I found to be a fussy, cramped, voyeuristic sort of dance, where you peered down at your own feet.
Everybody in the Park Plaza—and there must have been two hundred people there—knew how to dance, and this struck me as a remarkable feat in itself. All good popular dancing is a toying with rhythm, an attempt to respond to it and to transcend, to outdo, it, all at the same time. The bad dancer is a victim of the rhythm. He can respond only by being slavishly obedient, by accepting the rhythm as a drill, or an ordeal. In Afro-Cuban dancing, one dragged the beat, like postponing orgasm, withholding assent, resisting, buying time. Nobody danced on the beat—nothing was ever that simple. Here at the Park Plaza, everyone skillfully toyed with the rhythm, and it was exciting to see so many people triumphing over time, at least for the moment. They all seemed competent. It was like a society with no failures.
The Park Plaza was a large, high-ceilinged, rectangular hall with a balcony on one side over a bar and a bandstand at the far end. Tables and chairs lined the walls. We found a place to sit near the bandstand and I went to get a pitcher of beer.
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