by Mark Merlis
One day, after the first stroke and before the second, I came home from the grocery to find Jonathan in his office. The room torn apart as one imagines a room the secret police have searched, one filing cabinet overturned, books and papers scattered everywhere, Jonathan on his knees, weeping. He turned his empty hands palms upward, imploring. Of course he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he couldn’t read.
It occurs to me now: if he was looking for something he couldn’t read, maybe he was looking for it so that he could destroy it.
I suppose I had better try to find out what it was.
The library at the School for Liberal Studies is a relic of that architectural movement of the sixties called Brutalism. Great slabs, deliberately left bearing the imprint of the wooden molds into which the concrete was poured, here and there a slit of a window, suitable for shooting an arrow through but admitting no light. People despise these buildings now, but I think they had a rather endearing honesty about them. Better than what they build today, still concrete slabs, but gussied up with a laser-cut veneer of granite. As if to say civilization is wafer-thin; under it the brute.
The library has no books in it. Well, that isn’t so, but no more than adorn a living room in the home design magazines—just a scattering of coffee table books strewn here and there on the blond wood tables that hold a phalanx of computer terminals. I cross the industrial carpeting to the main desk. Above it is a gray canvas about the size of my living room, with a faint red line running vertically an inch or so from the left edge.
Behind the desk is a boy with a shaved skull and five earrings in his left ear. Why not four, or six? I say, “Good morning,” and he looks at me expressionlessly: not hostile, just without any opinion at all, as if I were a television show he hasn’t watched before. “I’m here to look at the papers of Jonathan Ascher.”
He looks away from me, into space, and says, “Papers?”
“Yes.” I say slowly, “His papers are stored here.”
He turns back to me and repeats, with patient incredulity, “Papers.”
I realize that he has no concept of what papers are. Am I looking for Jonathan Ascher’s term papers? For Jonathan Ascher’s bundle of last week’s Times, ready to be recycled? “Professor Ascher’s notebooks and letters and manuscripts were given to the library, and they’re kept somewhere here.”
He gets up, with no show of enlightenment, and walks away, presumably to fetch an intergenerational interpreter. While I wait, I study the painting over the desk. It doesn’t reward scrutiny, but I am uncomfortably aware that it is by someone who was famous thirty years ago. This school came and went without my ever learning the artists’ names. I don’t feel old when I fail to recognize the latest rock group; I feel old when I go to the Modern and realize that I can’t identify a painter more recent than Jasper Johns without looking at the label.
A woman of about fifty, wearing a drab librarian suit but also tennis shoes, approaches me. She murmurs, in the way of librarians, so as not to disturb the scholars playing games at the computer terminals, “You were interested in the Ascher papers.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, but access to those papers is restricted.”
“I’m Mrs. Ascher.”
“Mrs. Jonathan Ascher?”
“Yes. Do you need some identification?” I open my bag.
“No, I … They’re not here.”
“What?”
“Mr. Ascher’s papers aren’t kept in this building.”
“Oh. Where …?”
“They’re in storage. In Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth. In—what, a warehouse?”
“Not exactly. It’s—we call it the Annex, it’s humidity-controlled and …” She cringes a little, then draws herself up. “We have very limited space here, we need it for material that is in active use by researchers. And, since you won’t give anyone access to the papers …”
“I understand,” I say. And I do, of course; it isn’t their fault if I’ve been imagining, all these years, Jonathan’s random jottings enshrined in some coffered room like a chapel.
“We can … you don’t have to go to Elizabeth,” she says. Saving me the trouble of admitting the obvious: that a woman of my age, a white woman, is afraid to go to Elizabeth. I have reached the age at which, or I live in a country in which, there are entire cities I am afraid to visit in broad daylight. “If you know what you want to see, we can bring it here.”
“I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t know what’s there.”
“Oh. I believe there’s a list.”
School for Liberal Studies
Houck Library
Manuscript Collection
Collected Papers of Jonathan Ascher (1912-1973)
(by item numbers)
Manuscripts
Novels (1-3)
JD (4)
Articles and occasional writings (5-141)
Poems (142-261)
Letters
To JA (262-385)
From JA to individuals (386-418)
From JA to newspapers/periodicals (419-1511)
Journals: 1964, 1966, 197O, 1972, 1973 (1512-1516)
Articles about JA
Obituaries (1517-1522)
Reviews (1523-1609)
Miscellaneous or unclassified documents (1610-1743)
I’m afraid Jonathan’s life is pretty well summed up by the fact that half the collection consists of letters to the editor. But: journals. There are journals!
I had wondered sometimes. There were just a few spells—stretches of a month or two, scattered across the last years of our marriage—when I thought he might be writing about what was going on. He would head to his office after lunch and close the door. After a minute or two, the clacking of the typewriter. He didn’t say what he was doing, I just surmised it: the stutter of his keystrokes was so continuous, he was clearly not enduring any throes of composition, just spewing forth his feelings about the day.
What were they for, these journals? He could as easily have sat in the office, lit his Pall Mall, and—if we’d had sharp words at lunch—simply mumbled all he had to say. Just as I, doing the dishes at the sink, ran through everything I should have said. But no: he would rush into the office and hurry to preserve for eternity the last word. That’s what the journals must contain: the last word, with no comeback from me.
Did he mean to read them himself, later? Would he have liked—those last weeks, when he couldn’t read—would he have liked me to sit and read aloud from the journals? Or did he really mean them for Philip Marks?
“I think I’d like to see the journals.” Feeling, even as I say this, that they are what I do not want to see.
“Items 1512 through 1516?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, but we’ve just missed today’s last pickup from the Annex, and we don’t do them weekends. Would Monday afternoon be soon enough, perhaps after two?”
“Yes. Or—no, can I call you when I’m ready to set up a time?”
“Of course.” As she writes the number for me I wonder if there are not books, full of dark spells, that you aren’t meant to open.
FIVE
I am sitting in a cubicle at the SLS library, next to a sealed window that looks down on Ninth Street. On the table, four loose-leaf binders—the old kind, in light blue cloth, that kids used to carry to school. The labels on them—1964, 1966, 1970, 1972—are not in Jonathan’s writing. Willis, the one who was supposed to write the biography, must have stuck them on while he was still at work. Maybe the labels were as far as he got. For some reason the people in the Annex didn’t send over the fifth volume, 1973. I say there’s no rush. After all, I waited thirty years.
The first page I turn to, in the 1964 volume, is so faint it could be a century old. I thought they were keeping it under some ideal archival conditions in—where was it?—Elizabeth. Then I remember: Jonathan always used Eaton’s Corrasable Bond. If you made a mistake when you were typing, you could er
ase it with just an ordinary pencil eraser. Corrasable Bond was expensive, but Jonathan insisted on it, even for rough drafts, even—I learn now—for journals, because he couldn’t stand to leave behind uncorrected mistakes. Not in writing, anyway.
Corrasable Bond was so easily erasable because the ink of the letters you typed didn’t soak into the paper; it floated on some kind of coating and could be rubbed right off. Unfortunately, over time, half the ink floated away into the ether, all on its own.
I shift to the other side of the table, so that the notebook bathes in the bar of light from the slit of a window.
June 20, 1964
I typed the date an hour ago. It is still there, I haven’t erased it yet. So it has already survived longer than anything else I’ve typed in the last few weeks. Maybe because it’s the first thing I’ve gotten down on paper that wasn’t a lie.
Well, of course I’ve always lied, mine is the liar’s craft. As Martha once said, perhaps not unaffectionately, she lives with a man who spends his days concocting scurrilous stories about people who never existed.
But lately I’ve been writing a different kind of untruth. Pallid, overdetermined: my characters doing things just because I tell them to, not because they need to. My dialogue about as natural as the radio soap operas Martha used to listen to when she thought I was absorbed here in my study.
Farewell to fiction, then! It is incontrovertibly June 20. More irrefutables:
1. Martha and Mickey are off at my brother’s place on the Cape for the summer, so I have the apartment to myself. I look forward to this all year, like a kid waiting for the last day of school. And, like a kid, by the end of June I’m ready for normal life to resume.
2. The Senate passed the Civil Rights Act yesterday, after breaking a long filibuster. Now people of every hue can sit knee-to-knee at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s and eat tuna fish sandwiches. I’m sure I would care more if I had spent my life unable to buy a goddamn sandwich. But of course the law does nothing about the suffocating fact of Woolworth’s.
3. I’m already running out of underwear and I have no idea how to operate the devices at the laundromat. So I’ll have to take my stuff to those robbers next to St. Anselm’s. I could swear the Mob has stopped running numbers and dope and has started running cleaners.
Is this how it’s done, a journal or diary or whatever that neon date at the top of the page portends? Just write down whatever comes into my head? Recount my dreams, describe my breakfast? I suppose I will find out what I am doing after I’ve done it for a while.
There: maybe it isn’t just fiction I need to free myself from. It is, for a time at least, intention.
There is a lot more of this journal, and four more to come. I assume all these blue binders aren’t filled with plaints about his dirty laundry or wisecracks about the headlines in the Times. Someone keeping a diary out of some sense of duty might fill the pages with stuff like that, but Jonathan wasn’t a dutiful man. He must eventually have figured out what he was doing.
I catch myself thinking that I would rather he just wrote about laundry, year after year. Then I could be sure I wouldn’t learn anything I don’t want to know. Not to mention that I am rather beguiled by the idea of this Philip Marks person spending months of his life reading about Jonathan’s underwear.
June 24, 1964
This summer I’m teaching a couple of evening classes at SLS. I tell people it’s just for a little extra money, and of course the money is nice. Martha has been intimating that, as she embarks on middle age, perhaps she could at last have a sofa that isn’t propped up on a couple of volumes of Huxley at the corner where the leg is missing. Or that she would like, just once, to go to a party dressed as someone other than Martha the Match Girl. Or that maybe she could get to Paris while her gams might still turn heads.
So yes, money. But I am doing it, too, to fill in the time. I think I must have known, even before the summer started, that I wasn’t going to make much headway on Untitled Novel, the catchy name assigned to it in the last contract. God, for years I waited for classes to end because I was hot to write during the summer break. Now I volunteer for extra classes because I am broken.
No, I didn’t set out just to fill the time. I must have had some notion that it would be revivifying, taking on these evening Adult Enrichment classes for grown-ups. I was thinking back to the old days, in the thirties, when I taught the night classes in the basement at the pattern cutters’ union, up in the Garment District. Jews and Italians who dragged in after ten or twelve hours of piecework, and at the end of those grim days coming to me! Starving for a little culture, puzzling their way through a few lines of the simplest poetry I could find, Sandburg or Blake.
Maybe once or twice every class--every single night!--I would see comprehension steal across one of those tired faces. And a sort of rapture, the primal experience of poetry that my undergraduates today will never know, all the rapture beaten out of them in high school Advanced Placement courses. I can picture, after thirty years, one sharp-faced yid, youngish but already bent over from his work. Scowling down at his text and then looking up, startled, electrified, as he read those words of Blake, the paradox at the heart of all revolutionary fervor: One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.
That’s what I was hoping for, moments like that. But it’s different now. I sound even to myself like a crotchety old man, but it is different. The students now aren’t tailors crawling out of the sweatshops and trying to catch a glimpse of the empyrean. They are advertising copywriters and tax accountants and spinsters who work the cosmetic floor at Bonwit Teller, and they want to be enriched, as the catalogue promised.
The other night we were supposed to talk about Kafka’s Trial. I tried to be interesting, get them to draw parallels to HUAC and Hoover and …
Not a breeze from the open classroom windows, just the summer traffic noise with its undertones of chafing incipient violence, over our heads a vagrant moth beating against the fluorescent light. The students just stared at me, when I called on Mr. Glover by name he shrugged and, embarrassed, unscrewed his ballpoint pen, screwed it, unscrewed it. Of course he was the last guy I should have called on, it just happened his was the only name I had bothered to learn. Which had nothing to do with the cleft chin or the earnest bow tie or the intricate flexions of his massive forearms as he twisted, twisted the little pen.
I turned to his neighbor, the girl with the pencil skirt so tight she couldn’t cross her legs. “Miss … uh.” She was flustered--she had been focusing on Mr. Glover, not Mr. Kafka--but managed to stammer out what I suppose I had been asking for, simple pieties about unjust accusations and the apparatus of the state crushing individual conscience. Everyone in the room dutifully nodded. They hadn’t come to the School for Liberal Studies without being good little liberals.
I felt like a charlatan. I had only meant to get someone to say something, so I wouldn’t have to keep listening to myself, yammering away like some loony on the IND. But I had betrayed Kafka and myself and these yearning kids, too. I didn’t want to be interesting, I wanted to tell the truth.
“Yes, very good,” I said. Miss Uh preened a little, the way my female students always do after praise, trying to hold in place an expression of modest, somber attentive-ness. The effect undercut, alas, by her unhappy choice of periwinkle eyeliner and false eyelashes as big as hairbrushes. She didn’t look thoughtful, she looked as though she’d been scared by a rat. Which would not be, at the SLS, unprecedented.
“Very good,” I repeated. “Except I think … just possibly …” I have been trying to remember to do this, play at being tentative so they won’t feel as though I’m shoving ideas into their skulls. “Just possibly Kafka’s real point is that, if we are scrutinized, examined, we know ourselves to be guilty. When a McCarthy or a Hoover investigates you, he might nail you for the wrong crime--he is sure to, you are incomprehensible to him--and then you can whine about the injustice, meetings will be held, editorials written, you might ev
en be vindicated. Except you’ll know, always, you were guilty. And they know, too, they just charged you with the wrong violation.”
Miss Uh knew she had been … what is that new phrase of Mickey’s?--“put down” somehow. Mr. Glover cast her a sympathetic look, a few of the other students shifted uneasily. There was an air of indolent sedition in the room. What crime was I talking about, is that really all this weird book is trying to say, if Kafka really meant anything he could goddamn well have just spilled it.
Somehow I finished the hour, made my way to the tearoom at the West Fourth Street station. No one there but a guy I had done before: my age at least and stocky, modestly hung, a broken face masking some unutterable injury. I had done him before and I did him again, quickly, spitting out his sour aggrieved come and then hightailing it home, shamed but exhilarated.
Exhilarated because I was ashamed. Because I pictured Glover stumbling into the john and catching Professor Ascher on his knees. He would learn more from that than from anything I could say in a year of classes on Twentieth Century Fiction. This is what I have to teach, I think--teach not Glover and Miss Uh but the world. This is, somehow, the way to the revolution.
I am the one who has stumbled into the john and caught Professor Ascher on his knees.
Of course I’ve always known that, as he put it the night he proposed, he had been with a lot of people. And, if I had ever chosen to think about it, I might have recognized that being with people required him to select from a limited catalogue of achievable postures. But I never did choose to think about it. If anything, I envisioned Jonathan and his latest paramour lying stiffly side-by-side, like the tomb effigies of a knight and his dame.
I’m sure I could have gotten through the rest of my days quite happily without ever learning whether Jonathan swallowed or spat. But it isn’t what I learn that counts, is it? Will Mr. Philip Marks, eager to expose Jonathan to a new generation of young readers, choose to expose him in the tearoom? And if he doesn’t, would he be protecting Jonathan or betraying him?