by Mark Merlis
In the nineties, no more letters.
While my thinking will undoubtedly evolve as my research continues, I envision the core of my project as involving a demonstration of how Dr. Ascher, by conflating anarchism and sexual liberation, constructs a new imaginary in which sexual and political deviance function as homologous threats to narratives that valorize other-directed or anaclitic libidinal flow by offering in their place a narcissistically—in the best sense—eroticized polity.
I want to giggle: here is poor Jonathan, a fly caught in some postmodern web, spun of that tortuous jargon I have read so much about. Not read: I haven’t actually read criticism since college, when Mr. Rountree had us all struggle through The Well Wrought Urn. Read about, in one of those latest-ideas-for-the-hurried pages of the Times. I want to giggle, not because this stuff is funny, though I suppose it is, but because I am embarrassed not to understand it. However hermetic and pretentious it all is, there is something there, something these people have seen about the world that I have not.
And won’t now: I’m no more likely to delve into these mysteries at my age than into hieroglyphics or nuclear physics. There comes a day when you admit that there isn’t time left to read every book you meant to read, learn everything you really ought to know more about. I am content not to be able to tell a quasar from a quark. I’m sure I am being bombarded by—or am I emitting?—these elusive creatures every day, but I don’t give a fig for them or they for me. Why should I give a fig about an anaclitic libidinal flow, unless I were about to drown in it? I suppose because I drowned in something, and I imagine, or wish, that this Philip Marks could tell me what it was.
I am an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware at Bairdsville and am the author of John Horne Burns and the Transgressive Gesture. I have already had a preliminary expression of interest from the University Press of the Mid-Atlantic States. Your cooperation in this important project would be invaluable. I would be happy to visit New York at your earliest convenience to discuss it with you.
Sincerely,
Philip Marks
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, I … We didn’t need to—I mean, it’s lovely to see you, but we didn’t need to meet over this.”
“Martha, maybe it’s time to think about it.”
“I—” It wasn’t that we wouldn’t open up the papers. Laurence probably never cared one way or the other, he has merely been deferring to me. I am the one who has stood in the way of all the little publishing scoundrels.
It is at least time to think about why I won’t think about it. “Would he …” Would he talk about me? Instead I stammer, “Would he pay? I mean, would the estate have some share, a percentage?”
“You mean of the profits? From a sizzling blockbuster issued by the University Press of the Mid-Atlantic States?”
“Well, why … why couldn’t Aurora do it?”
Laurence looks pained. “There’s just no market for literary biographies.”
“I see them in the stores all the time. Big heavy books.”
“Yes, but they’re about …” His voice trails off, as if I could finish his sentence for him. They’re about big heavy writers. He looks down at the table for a moment and then blurts out: “Jonathan is forgotten.”
We are both startled. Laurence backtracks. “I don’t mean forgotten, exactly, but …”
“No, that’s what he is.”
Jonathan is forgotten. That’s the usual expression, as if there had been a time everybody knew about him and then one day, through some sort of pandemic amnesia, everybody forgot. But I suppose it is more like this: people are remembered until everybody who remembers them is gone. It doesn’t happen all at once. Jonathan will not be entirely dead until I am gone and Laurence has Alzheimer’s, or vice versa. He will not be altogether forgotten until his brother Bernie’s son Alan forgets him, or until the day comes when there is not one volume of Ascher to be found in the deepest bowels of the Strand. But that day will come.
He wanted—I suspect every writer wants—to be one of the Immortals. The French kindly confer that title on writers while they are still alive. The poet or belletrist can close his eyes, murmur “Immortal!” and picture the golden nimbus ringing his crown. So long as he is careful not to look ahead to the day when someone comes across his name in the endless roster of the Academy and says, “Here’s a funny name. I wonder what he did.”
Maybe Jonathan imagined people would go on reading JD until the earth plunged into the sun. That is a long time from now; it is not forever. But I suppose Jonathan would want Philip Marks to expose his ideas to a new generation. Keep his name alive for just one more bite of eternity. Who am I to consign him to premature oblivion?
I say, “Do you even know anything about this … Marks person?”
“Just a little. I Googled him.”
“You did what?”
“I looked him up on the web.”
“Ah, you use the web.” This sounds creaky even to me. You’ve been up in a flying machine?
“I stumble around. They sort of made me learn. Other people surf; I dog-paddle.” He smiles, so I do, though I don’t know what he means. “Anyway, he got his degree at Brown, and he teaches modern American literature, and … uh, a seminar, something called ‘Queering the Quatrain.’”
“What?”
He retrieves a sheet from his pocket and reads: “‘Queering the Quatrain: Homotextuality and Formalism in Modern American Poetry.’ This seminar explores—”
“Oh, no,” I interrupt. “He’s one of those …”
“Gender studies, I think they call it, or …”
“Fairies,” I finish.
“I …” Laurence looks a little perplexed. He is thinking: could she possibly not know about her husband? “I assume he’s gay,” he corrects.
“Gay. He’s going to try to turn Jonathan into some kind of gay hero.”
“Do you think?”
“Some pioneer of gay liberation.”
“Oh,” Laurence says. “Well, I guess he was, in a way.”
“Jonathan hated all of that. He hated fairies.” Laurence waves his hand a little, as if to make the word go away. I thrust the letter at him. “Laurence, he’s supposed to be an English professor, and his prose reads like it’s been translated from Urdu. And look, he’s already getting things wrong, he calls Jonathan ‘doctor’ when he never got a degree. And …”
I wind down. Why am I getting so worked up about some harmless loser who has been exiled to Delaware?
Laurence studies me: he, too, wonders what I am getting so worked up about. He gently takes the letter from my hand, returns it to his coat pocket. “All right. But you know … if nobody else …”
“If nobody else wants Jonathan, I should let the—what’s your word?—’gender studies’ people have him? And twist him any way they like?”
“I don’t know, Martha, there’s a difference between a man and a literary property. If I held the rights to … oh, say, The Magic Mountain, and Disney came along and wanted to make a musical with singing and dancing lungs, I’d say: how much?”
I am the widow of a property. This concept seems very Jane Austenish to me. “But you said this wouldn’t pay anything.”
“No, but if this guy could rouse a little interest in Jonathan, even if it was for all the wrong reasons, we might, I don’t know, reissue a couple of the paperbacks.”
“Which wouldn’t make any money either.”
“No, but maybe a few people would read him. They might buy him hoping for … some kind of gay patriarch or whatever this guy is going to make of him. But a few of them might just go on reading and find out what Jonathan was like.”
I have it, for a while longer, in my power to decide what Jonathan was like, how he will be remembered. So I possess him as I never did in life. Or maybe I possess him the way I did after the stroke, when he couldn’t read anymore and only I could tell him what was happening in the world.
Why do I care if they call
him gay? Statistically, perhaps he really was more DC than AC—or do I have those backwards? But numbers aren’t a life; you can’t pin Jonathan down that way. Not even if you showed that he wrote 1,157 bad lines of verse about men and only 41 about me.
He wasn’t gay, he was just lawless. I think sometimes he wasn’t an anarchist so much as an anarch, a priest of disorder.
In the fifties everyone we knew got analyzed. No, that isn’t so. Most of the men we knew got analyzed—I remember our friend Josh once saying of someone, “He hasn’t been analyzed,” as one might say, “He needs a haircut”—but thinking back I don’t recall many women who did. Not that we all somehow invented the feminist critique of Freud twenty years early, but analysis was just a game for the boys, like stickball. The shrinks had nothing to tell us. Except when Miriam ran out of cigarettes in the middle of a session and asked her shrink for one, he lectured her about how she had intentionally come to the session with too few cigarettes, in the hope of making him give her something, and a cigarette at that, blah, blah … She walked out, proving that analysis was, too, terminable.
The other reason women didn’t get analyzed was that it cost too much. Jonathan’s adventure, while it lasted, cost thirty dollars a session—in 1956. If we’d both gone, we would have been sleeping under a bridge. So it was as if a couple went on a skiing trip and could only afford one lift ticket. Guess who stayed at the bottom of the mountain. Anyway, Jonathan rejoined me there pretty quickly. One day he came home and said, “We’ve decided to end my analysis.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah.” He added, casually, as he headed into the kitchen: “Turns out I don’t have a superego.”
He cackled, and I was so relieved that we no longer had an extra, Viennese mouth to feed that I didn’t think much about it. It was just another funny analyst story, like the one about the cigarette. Here he’d been spending all this money when there was nothing to analyze—as if he’d gone for heart surgery and, when they opened him up, turned out not to have one.
It was a while before I realized that it was literally so. Superego, conscience, inner parent, whatever they’re calling the damn thing now: Jonathan didn’t have one.
He followed rules. When he went down to the vestibule in the morning to get his Times, he put a robe on; someone had taught him that you don’t go out in just your underwear. Other people have scary dreams of being caught naked in a crowd. Yet if Jonathan had forgotten one morning and stepped out in the altogether, he wouldn’t have been mortified, merely a little abashed at his absentmindedness.
Just so, he never saw the slightest reason he shouldn’t assume any feasible position with any complaisant partner. He knew he shouldn’t talk about it, there was a rule. Then the sixties came, and there wasn’t a rule. But that didn’t mean he was g—
Of course it’s not about a three-letter word. It’s about me. It’s about being Felicia Bernstein or Constance Wilde. A famous cuckoo, famous only for being a cuckoo. Too stupid to see what was going on or, worse, aware but too pathetic and needy to leave. And if I were to protest? No, I wasn’t just waiting for Jonathan to come home, I was living all that time. I had a life! To which Philip Marks might quite reasonably reply: I’m sure you did, but it’s not your life I’m writing.
I get the killer comeback: you ain’t writing Jonathan’s life either, buster. I get to say this line as long as I am able to say it. But the time will come, the seal will be broken when I am dead or in 2023. (I am pretty sure where I’d place my bet in this particular race.) I may forestall Philip Marks, but someone will come along. No matter how obscure Jonathan is by 2023: the ever-growing ratio of the living to the dead means that some half-witted graduate student, casting about for a subject, will have to light on Jonathan. And I will have no control at all over the Jonathan he constructs. At least with Philip Marks, I will have some chance to educate, explain, correct. Or just to say Me. Don’t forget Me.
So I too wish to be Immortal. To show up in the index:
Ascher, Martha Axelrod (1929- )
Marriage to JA, 49-51
Birth of Michael Ascher, 57
Attends funeral of Michael Ascher, 341
Attends funeral of JA, 369
I have gone on thirty years past page 369. Except when things like this come up, I do not spend my days thinking of myself as the custodian of Jonathan Ascher, or of Jonathan’s papers, or of his grave. I am not a career widow, I have made a life of my own. But it will end on the same page as Jonathan’s.
Laurence lives in the East 60s. I assure him I can take a taxi back downtown all by myself.
“Of course,” he says, slipping in ahead of me. He must be practically the only man left who remembers that the gentleman gets in a cab first, so the lady won’t have to slide all the way across. Jonathan never figured that out; if I was wearing a sheath he would stand gallantly aside while I spent five minutes shimmying to the far end of the seat.
This hasn’t been a date, God knows, but as we near my street I feel as though I can’t just say thanks and get out. So I produce, as if it were a date, the classic, “I’d ask you up, but it’s been a very long day.”
He looks startled. Of course the idea of coming up has never crossed his mind, I’m not a woman to him. Not just because I’m old, but because I only exist for him as an adjunct of Jonathan, the mourning statuary on Jonathan’s tomb. He recovers. “I’m pretty bushed myself. But I had a lovely time.”
“Me, too,” I say. Surprised to find I mean it. A lousy meal, a business conversation, but I got to dress up and go north of 23rd Street.
“We should do it again,” he says.
“I’d like that.” We both know what he means: we really ought to get together every twenty years or so. “Oh, by the way,” I say. “Could I borrow that letter?”
THREE
In the sixties, Jonathan took to reading the sports pages every morning. While I fried his eggs, over easy, and toasted two slices of rye bread, he set aside the front section of the Times and plunged with grim concentration into the gray columns of stolen bases and draft picks.
His lips moved, as if he were a deli clerk on the subway puzzling through the very same stories, except the deli clerk would have read them in the News. Jonathan’s lips moved only when he was reading something weighty: he became a boy again, sitting in his bar mitzvah class, murmuring the syllables as his fingers traced the lines.
When I set his breakfast before him, he chucked the sports section aside with evident relief, a nasty chore done with, and grabbed the front page. He read aloud to me while I made my own breakfast, just toast usually. Regaled me with the latest perfidy of McNamara or Rusk, the antics of Congress, the killing fatuities emitted by the educators and the city planners and all the other technocrats. He didn’t comment, just read aloud, sometimes allowing himself a little editorial snort or cackle. Or, if he had finished eating and lit his Pall Mall, he would let out a little puff of smoke, like an exhalation of steam from the angry engine inside. He didn’t need to explain to me, confident that I would understand just how each little snippet could arouse his indignation or his helpless, surrendering laughter.
He would stub out his cigarette in a puddle of egg yolk, drop the paper on the floor for me to pick up, and stride off—still in his underwear—to his study. In a minute, the furious clacking of his Olivetti, as he dashed off a letter to whatever official or eminence required this morning a little unsolicited instruction from Jonathan Ascher. While I cleaned up after him, I would sometimes ponder the first act of his unvarying routine, those minutes when he buried himself in the sterile intricacies of the sports pages.
He never took Mickey to a game. He never watched one on the ancient television we kept just for the news and the Sunday morning interview shows. He never talked sports with our friends, and I don’t guess people gathered around the water cooler at the School for Liberal Studies to jaw about the Knicks. So it was a puzzle: did he actually care about all the earned run averages and lifet
ime assists? Did this morning ritual make him feel more like a man? It was not the largest mystery in our lives, but it nagged at me for years.
Now I read the Times alone in the morning.
WASHINGTON, March 20, 2003. President Bush ordered the start of a war against Iraq on Wednesday night, and American forces poised on the country’s southern border and at sea began strikes to disarm the country, including an apparently unsuccessful attempt to kill Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office at 10:15 p.m. Wednesday night, about 45 minutes after the first attacks were reported against an installation in Baghdad where American intelligence believed Mr. Hussein and his top leadership were meeting. “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war,” the president said.
I don’t know what to think anymore. I watch TV and I see their tyrant and our tyrant, their scared children hustled off to war and ours, and I don’t know what side I’m on. Most of my friends say this is crazy, Bush was just looking for a reason to invade because he wanted to be bigger than his daddy. But then some of my friends say that Hussein wants to blow up Israel, so he can go down in history. I guess everyone wants to go down in history.
I wonder what Jonathan would have thought. He was kind of a Zionist; like many apostate Jews of his age, he got a little misty about Israel. But that was the Israel of kibbutzim and folk songs, not ultraorthodox settlers and nuclear missiles, and it isn’t hard to imagine how he’d have felt about Cheney and his ugly little minions. I suppose on balance he’d have been against this war. Either way, though, Jonathan would have known what to think. Almost nonsense words: know what to think. But Jonathan always did, he was a man unfettered by ambivalence or second thoughts. Of course there are lots of men like that, fanatics, idiots, presidents.