Frolic of His Own

by William Gaddis

  —Well at least be glad it’s not your money, is it? I mean isn’t that what her trust is for?

  —It’s the wear and tear Teen, the wear and tear. Jerry’s tried to talk to this trust officer her fool of a father named in his will because they played baseball together at Princeton who wants her to invade the trust and set up a scholarship there in her father’s name to get black people on the baseball team and he’s frightfully sticky about anything like this that faintly resembles real life, I mean that’s what I mean about leaving the children to the money, will you pour me a little more wine while you’re standing there Oscar? You can open the other bottle can’t you, I just thank God for Jerry, he’s so quick isn’t he, I mean life is so filled with coincidences. It’s such fun that you two boys had already met over this marvelous lawsuit of yours and you have so much to talk about don’t you.

  —I’m not sure Oscar would call it fun Trish, he’d probably rather talk about something else because . . .

  —No but listen Christina, he just told me the appeal’s been filed, Harry’s come through after all putting pressure on Sam or somebody, there are oral arguments the next day or two and they’ve put on a new man to handle it I’ve got to thank him, to thank Harry for . . .

  —Poor Harry. It’s the wear and tear isn’t it, the terrible pressure he’s been under it’s really no wonder, have you talked to him Teen?

  —No he’s, whenever I’ve called they say he’s in court but this case of Oscar’s, I don’t think you quite understand the . . .

  —For God’s sake don’t burden me with the grim details, I know Jerry will win and then we can all have a marvelous party, where is he, he’s not out in the kitchen with her is he? I asked her to whip up some heavy cream earlier for these delicious chestnut tart meringues, I mean for forty dollars you’d think they could add a dab of whipped cream but oh Jerry, here you are what on earth are you carrying?

  —Oysters.

  —I’m sure she could have brought them in herself. Is that what you’ve been up to all this time?

  —Been thinking. I’ve been thinking about our Major there old boy, bit of a stick as you said and that’s as he should be, all the pompous platitudes of wealth and privilege based on land and chattels where the body of English law came from in the first place, same things that are tearing your main character to pieces out there howling for justice but now what about Kane, this character Mister Kane. A little bit stuffy himself isn’t he?

  —Well he’s, no he’s not supposed to be, he’s . . .

  —Not talking about his ideas or his dialogue, hardly need to change a word of it no, no I mean his persona, this fellow in philosophy and all the rest of it? Just thinking maybe you want a little more contrast there, make him something else, something entirely contradictory, how about one of those itinerant peddlers who covered the countryside in those days. Pots and pans, scissors, handsaws, nostrums, a roll of calico for the ladies, plantations like your Quantness there were miles from anything, little worlds to themselves and he was the outside world, he was a real institution because his real stock in trade was news and gossip, welcomed with opened arms wherever he showed up with what they really hungered for.

  —But that’s not what I . . .

  —You follow me? Who’s just been shot over a card game or killed in a duel over some drunken insult, who shot his overseer caught sleeping with his wife, the price of cotton on the docks at Beaufort, prices at a horse auction, a slave auction and whose slaves have run off like you’ve set up John Israel right there in your prologue? He had his finger right on the pulse of the land in those dark days, wars and rumours of war he could show up anywhere with an ear to the ground, at a place like Quantness and nobody suspecting a thing, whetting their appetites for scandal where no household’s secrets were safe, even theirs. Make him a bit more believable wouldn’t it? a little bit more entertaining too up against your pompous Major, even works nicely when he walks in unannounced up north there in the second act peddling cigars and runs into Bixby.

  —Bagby! If you want entertainment, if that’s all you want Bagby’s supposed to be a . . .

  —Bagby of course yes, sorry old sport, a marvelous character, sort of your Greek chorus isn’t he. The spoiler, the new man, the spirit of unbridled capitalism with his use versus own in the old Major’s lexicon, the triumphant absence of integrity up against Kane who’s the lonely heart and soul of it jangling across that desolate landscape with his pots and pans, the rootless wandering Jew who . . .

  —Now wait, wait what makes you think he’s Jewish!

  —Because they were, most of them, weren’t they? The Jewish peddler, a regular institution, make him a Jew and you’ve got half your Broadway audience right in the palm of your hand, you might even pick up a Pulitzer Prize.

  —The Pu, good God talk about being famous for five minutes the Pulitzer Prize is a gimcrack out of journalism school you wrap the fish in tomorrow, talk about the great unwashed it’s got nothing to do with literature or great drama it’s the hallmark of mediocrity and you’ll never live it down, what makes you think I want to get some wheezing Broadway matinee audience in the palm of my hand with a comic Irishman and a Jewish peddler telling dirty stories who . . .

  —I wish they wouldn’t fight, can you reach that wine Teen since they’re too busy to notice? And for God’s sake let me do something with this revolting mess they’ve made of this oyster aspic, put it on the floor where we won’t even have to look at it, if she’s still whipping that cream out there she’ll turn it to butter, shouldn’t you call her?

  —Not it at all old boy, try to be patient with me for a minute, not suggesting a character who parades around up there muttering oy gewalt and picking his nose am I? No reason he can’t be just as intelligent, just as shrewd and cultivated as your character is right now, just as well read without this stiff sort of academic veneer, a free spirit rattling along down those country roads all day behind his mule in his cart pots and pans jangling while he reads the Aeneid and oh, incidentally, running through your deposition again you ascribe the Iliad to some Greek nobody ever heard of, can’t imagine why I didn’t trip you up on it.

  —Some Greek? I never mentioned the Iliad, you think I’d make a mistake like . . .

  —Talking about characters beneath contempt like Bagby?

  —Nicochares, the Diliad not the Iliad, the Diliad, characters beneath our level of goodness in the Diliad.

  —Your point old sport, tripped me up that time, stenographers you get these days you’ve got to be grateful they’ve even heard of the Iliad. Comes a bit closer to your Socrates parallel too doesn’t he? Informal, deceptively humble, a little unkempt, touch up his dialogue a bit here and there and there’s your wry argumentative Jew with his own fierce hunger for intelligent talk, for this relentless doomed pursuit of ideas out there peddling his pots and pans in this intellectual wasteland, five cents, ten cents, the counting gene again, the second half of your equation, you follow me?

  —No.

  —Of course you do. The whole thing’s your creation isn’t it? the forces struggling against each other in this terrible equation that’s still there at the heart of the matter today, obviously you’ve read your Tocqueville? You lay out the left side of it at the start with the apparition of this black runaway slave, he doesn’t even appear, we don’t see him we don’t have to, the invisible man somebody called him haunting the whole play, haunting your main character with that flimsy pretext from the Social Contract of compelling men to be free to be hunted down somewhere and killed with no bands of angels waiting out there wails the dried old husk of a woman who’s taught him to read in the Bible, about what it amounts to isn’t it?

  —But you can’t say a flimsy pretext no, that whole noble idea of Rousseau’s that for life to be good at all it had to be good for all men, and . . .

  —Noble idea! About all it was, that pragmatic notion of ideas as instruments for guides to action never mind, I withdraw it, he’s instrumental isn
’t he? Get on to the right side of your deadly equation where Kane’s hounding him with his merciless logic about justice, manipulating all his hollow high sounding claims to moral rectitude leading him deeper into his dilemma, your cunning old Jewish peddler blackmailing him with four thousand years of Christian guilt, he isn’t simply embattled, your main character. He is the battlefield, and there’s your deadly equation, the black on one side and the Jew on the other fighting it out today wherever we look, you follow me?

  Backed into a corner now silhouetted against the glass giving down on the pale light glistening on the pond, hands digging distracted in the pockets at his side for whatever they might come up with, a packet of obsolete design in one of them, coming out with —no . . . tearing it open with the other, —no it’s going too far, a play about the Civil War I don’t see how we got into all this, it’s not about these quarrels between black people and Jews that burst out on the front page is it? It’s . . .

  —Not about these crude street fights that bring out the worst in both of them no, it’s not about Hollywood Jews backing movies to show blacks as beasts in a jungle, Jewish doctors dispensing disease to black babies, it’s not even about Jewish storekeepers in Harlem using the counting gene to exploit blacks who don’t have it no, that’s how they’d like it isn’t it, your clean white Christian middle class watching it explode on the evening news worried to death about property values when the Jews move in, then the blacks and the whole harlequin spawn of the Caribbean and there goes the neighborhood as you say. Drugs, gunfire, let them fight it out, turn off the news and go in to dinner, not our fight is it? like your wounded pheasant burrowing for refuge in the stone wall, trying to flee from what was happening? the hollow essence of this Christian hypocrisy? And the burnished silk of Sulka’s tailoring leapt up against that fine old worsted gripping a wrist there, —sorry . . .

  —No I’ll get it he blurted, excused for breaking away to recover the torn cigarette packet from what little of the floor remained between them, digging one out as he straightened up if for no more than to occupy his unsteady hand only to find himself abruptly caught by a lapel backed up against the window itself.

  —John Israel and Kane out there, both sides of your equation manipulating your hero’s profoundly hypocritical capacity for guilt, the black and the Jew parading their very real grievances they’re not appealing to his conscience, they’re not even fighting each other to seize hold of his conscience Oscar they’re fighting for which one will fill this yawning sentimental churchgoing flagwaving vacant remnant of the founding fathers, which one will finally be the conscience of this exhausted morally bankrupt corpse of the white Protestant establishment and that! with an emphatic stab straight to the heaving chest —that’s the heart of it, the heart of the American dilemma. Sorry, didn’t mean to, didn’t hurt you old sport did I? Here, need a light? What’s that you’re smoking, never seen them.

  —Stop it Pookie, get down, he’s not going to hurt you they’re just playing, Jerry’s simply so brilliant that sometimes he gets carried away Teen and people don’t quite know how to deal with it, this mousse is too salty I don’t think I can eat it can you? If you could have seen him in court with those three living corpses of lawyers sent down there by the Cardinal himself with that kind of money involved when they didn’t really understand their own case until he had to get up and explain it to them before he destroyed it, do you think we . . .

  —Just a minute Trish. Oscar what are you doing, you’re not smoking one of those things are you? as the gold lighter flared up in his face.

  —They’re Picayunes he said, dropping the free hand pressed against his chest to steady himself against the sill, —an old brand probably don’t make them anymore . . . breaking off with a cough. They both coughed.

  —Can’t smoke those old boy, here, try one of these? digging behind the gold monogram, —made for me by an old Cuban in Tampa for getting him a green card once.

  —Well not in here! If you’re both going to smoke go outside.

  —Get a breath of air, shall we? like the old county host leading off up the hall, —rather painful confession to make old boy, do you mind? stepping ahead to rattle the doors opening on the veranda, —really embarrassing at this point you know, but your play there? Never read the last act. Nothing germane to the issue in your amended complaint when we called for the bill of particulars and all your people would surrender were the first two acts and the prologue, could have pursued it of course for another delay to keep running up your costs but I managed to convince my people to take mercy, always wondered how it came out. Here, don’t stumble, get this fixed up out here or you’ll have a fat liability suit on your . . .

  —You mean you never finished reading it?

  —Probably changed the denouement around for the movie anyway, not surprised are you? proffering the cigar, —got through the epitasis, that what they call it? proffering a light, —that’s what matters isn’t it?

  —But the way you’ve been talking I thought, you never finished it? Then how could you stand there just now and dissect the whole, take the whole thing apart like that when you hadn’t even, we talked about the Crito in that deposition didn’t we? in the last act and you didn’t even ask how it . . .

  —No, no, can’t blame you for being impatient but we got to the heart of it in there didn’t we? The last act’s always just tying things up and . . .

  —How do you think it came out then! How do you think it ended!

  —But we’ve always known the answer to that one haven’t we, in death and madness old sport. Madness and death.

  Blue smoke trailing behind them on the still air followed their steps down the veranda overlooking the lawn stretched below down to the unruffled surface of the pond and the leafless detail of the oaks on the opposite bank against the dark of the tall pines betraying their presence, recalling, Blake was it? Where man is not, nature is barren, —referring to King Lear?

  —If you like. Based on a true story from Holinshed? like your grandfather there you tried to take out a patent on?

  —That’s ridiculous. It’s just like the rest of this twisting things around to ruin my father’s chances for the appeals court with talk about madness in the family and burning him in effigy he doesn’t give a damn for all that but impeachment, this talk about impeachment if that happened it would kill him.

  —Not a chance old sport, don’t worry about it. The process is so complicated they’ve only managed to throw one Federal judge off the bench in the last fifty years for cheating on his taxes, finally tried an end run around Article I to impeach two more, one being tried for bribery and the other already in Federal prison for perjury but these pygmies in your congress haven’t got the appetite for it, can’t even stand up to this sleazy gun lobby can they?

  —But that’s not the . . .

  —Can’t expect to have a national policy on anything can you? Every national goal you set up there’s some particular region or lobby or private interest out there to thwart it, that’s what American politics are all about. It’s not a country it’s a continent, eight or ten million Italians, Swedes, Poles, fifteen or twenty million Irish, thirty million English descent, twenty five million Germans and the same for blacks, six million Jews, Mexicans, Hungarians, Norwegians and this horde of Hispanics pouring in it’s a melting pot where nothing’s melted, what can you expect.

  —I’m not talking about six million Norwegians! I’m talking about forty or fifty million Bible thumping illiterates and this Neanderthal in the Senate calling for my father’s impeachment down there burning him in effigy talking about madness that’s where it comes from, the Lord is a man of war says Exodus, two thousand years of slaughter since he came bringing not peace but a sword from the Crusades right down to your courtroom with the little black roach and his foetal personhood to the boy with the catsup bottle, the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount soaked with the blood of Muslims and Jews and your mosque up there in Uttar Pradesh with Muslims and Hin
dus drenched with blood wherever you find them, the true believers, revealed religion that’s where it all comes from, those riots in Bombay with the Hindu mobs dragging Muslims out the front door and killing them? making men drop their pants in the street to see if they were circumcised and burning them alive, dancing and singing around their blazing bodies if that’s not madness? if that’s not madness!

  —Of course it is old fellow, of course it is, the whole pantheon of . . .

  —And those stories I heard about the Juggernaut when I was a child, that tremendous wagon they pulled in religious processions where people threw themselves under the wheels to be crushed?

  —All nonsense old man, typical British bloody bedtime story. Juggernaut’s a good fellow, ninth avatar of Vishnu, he lives in a temple on the east coast a town called Puri where he gets sick every summer, recovers, goes on vacation and these pilgrims show up in the hundreds of thousands to celebrate, build a huge chariot with him perched on top of it playing a flute and drag it to his aunt’s temple a mile down the road to make a few Brownie points with the trinity all yelling and shouting, all the caste barriers broken down some of them trampled and run down in the melee, no worse than the carnage after a soccer game is it? Along comes the British raj and sees their little brown brothers having a good time, a few of them crushed under the chariot’s wheels and they take it for a frenzy of human sacrifice to this bloodthirsty deity, give a dog a bad name and all the rest of it? one man’s religion another man’s madness?

  —And you don’t call that madness?

  —Of course I do, let me finish. Of course it’s madness, but the madness comes first. It’s an essential of the human condition, the worse the human condition the greater the madness and your revealed religion simply comes along to channel the madness, give some shape to it. For these unlettered hordes mired in poverty the only things that are free are sex and religion, and the poorer and more illiterate they are the more they procreate and the more ornate these religious pantheons and rituals become. Some Filipino crucifies himself at Easter because Jesus drove him to it? No, no he’s mad from the start and religion gives it an outlet, gets it organized, penitents flagellating themselves with scourges till the blood pours out in those streams of madness throbbing away skindeep all over Mexico, Sikhs, Iraqis, Afghanis they’re all raving maniacs to begin with looking for some grand design that they can fit into, some system of absolutes where they can find refuge, that’s what the true believer is isn’t he? And the more chaotic the times, the greater the demand for these absolutes, it’s what drove Dostoevski’s heroes over the brink wasn’t it? this panic at living in a meaningless universe? Take the deep bedrock madness of the Germans from Peter the Hermit and Thomas Münster right down to the death camps they try to masquerade as nationalism, like that exquisite distillation of total madness that’s peculiarly Japanese. The Italians channel theirs through the Vatican in a wholesale mayhem of crime and opera, the Russians drown theirs in a sea of vodka and the English cross dressing theirs under the skirts of the Anglican Church or they’d be as frankly mad as their neighbors across the Irish sea.