Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  INTERVIEWER: And your efforts on this first book? Where are they? In a drawer somewhere?

  EZRA BLAZER: Gone. Long gone. I wrote fifty terrible pages full of rage. I was twenty-one. She was nineteen. Lovely girl. That’s the story.

  INTERVIEWER: Record number four.

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, I wanted to see more of Europe after my service, so I took my discharge there, and I stayed. I had a big duffel bag, my army duffel, and my army overcoat, and my separation pay, which amounted to about three hundred bucks, and I took a train to Paris and moved into a shabby little hotel in the Sixth. One of those hotels where you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and go out to the hallway and you can’t find the light, or if you do blindly find the switch you turn it on and go six steps and the light goes off again. And if you ever do find the bathroom, you’re in worse trouble, because the toilet paper in those postwar years—May I speak about toilet paper on a family program?

  INTERVIEWER: You may.

  EZRA BLAZER: The toilet paper was like emery board. Not sandpaper: emery board.

  INTERVIEWER: So you lived in Paris for a year—

  EZRA BLAZER: A year and a half.

  INTERVIEWER:—after your service in the army.

  EZRA BLAZER: Yes. I lived near the Odéon Métro station and I used to go to the Café Odéon and of course I met a girl. Geneviève. And Geneviève had a sputtering little black motorbike—they were all over Paris then—and she would roll up to the Odéon at night and meet me there, and somehow, this girl, who was not . . . Well, she was pretty, certainly, but she was kind of a street girl, and yet she too had musical taste, like my army pal, and it was she who introduced me to the chamber music of Fauré. And that’s also when I learned about the beauty of the cello, which of course I have Marina Makovsky play in The Running Gag. For months that was the only instrument I wanted to hear. The sound of it thrilled me. There are beautiful piano passages in Fauré, but it’s the cello, that wonderful [growls like a cello]—Those sounds whose depths only the cello can reach. That got me. It has this lilt, this freshness, just gorgeous. I’d never heard music like it before—a long way from “Mam’selle,” you see, though we’re in the right city. It’s crazy how everything comes at you. Everything is an accident. Life is one big accident. I didn’t love this girl the way I loved the German girl, by the way. Maybe because there wasn’t so much sturm und drang.

  INTERVIEWER: That was Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata no. 1 in D minor, performed by Thomas Igloi with Clifford Benson on the piano. Now remind me, Ezra Blazer, wasn’t it around this time The Paris Review started up?

  EZRA BLAZER: Oh, yes. I think those fellows got there in fifty-three, fifty-four. So this was just a year or two later. And sure, I knew everybody. George, Peter, Tom. Blair. Bill. Doc. Wonderful guys. Charming, adventurous, serious about literature, and, blessedly, wholly unacademic. Paris then still had that aura of the American expatriate adventure: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Transition, Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach, Joyce. And the Paris Review crew, they were romantic about what they were doing. You know that E. E. Cummings poem? “let’s start a magazine / to hell with literature . . . something fearlessly obscene . . .” They were romantic but they were hard-nosed, too, and they were doing something brand-new. Though in the end, like me, they were in Paris because it was fun. And plenty of fun there was.

  INTERVIEWER: Were you writing by this time?

  EZRA BLAZER: Trying to. I wrote some delightfully poetic little short stories, very sensitive short stories, about . . . Oh, I don’t know. World peace. Pink sunlight on the Seine. That was one problem: the rampant sentimentality of youth. Another was that I was constantly trying to shoehorn characters into each other’s lives, planting them on street corners or in cafés together so that they could talk. So that they could explain things to each other, from across the great human divide. But it was all so contrived. Contrived and meddlesome, really, because sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist. If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. If they don’t, well, that’s interesting, too. Or, if it isn’t interesting, then maybe you need to back up and start again. But at least you haven’t betrayed the reality of things. In my twenties, I was always fighting this, always trying to force meaningful convergence with my ravishing prose. And the result was these airless little short stories that could not be faulted on the sentence level but that had no resonance, no reason for being, no spontaneity. Nothing happened. I showed one to George once and he sent me a note that began, “You plainly have gifts, dear Ez, but you need a subject. This is like Babar written by E. M. Forster.”

  INTERVIEWER: Next record.

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, at one of the clubs we used to go to we heard Chet Baker play, with Bobby Jaspar, I think, and Maurice Vander, a wonderful pianist, he was around a lot, too. I remember one night listening to them play “How About You?” and feeling just overcome by where I was and what I still had in front of me. All of it! When you’re young you can’t wait for the main event to begin. I couldn’t wait for anything back then. No thinking, just charging—always charging ahead! Do you remember that feeling?

  INTERVIEWER: That was “How About You?,” performed by Chet Baker, Bobby Jaspar, Maurice Vander, Benoit Quersin, and Jean-Louis Viale. And can you tell us, Ezra Blazer, why did you leave Paris?

  EZRA BLAZER: Why did I leave. A part of me has always wondered. A part of me—the audacious part—has always said to the sensible part: Why didn’t you just stay? If only for the women. Because the erotic life in Paris had nothing to do with what I’d known as a boy at Allegheny. But then, after about a year and a half of it, I really had to come home. My writing, if you can call it that—Well, I didn’t know what I was doing. As I said, it was all this lyrical sentimental crap about nothing. So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off,” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.

  INTERVIEWER: Where you discovered ballet.

  EZRA BLAZER: Ballet and ballerinas. These were Balanchine’s great days, after all. Spectacular stuff. All new. I discovered Stravinsky, I discovered Bartók, Shostakovich. That changed everything.

  INTERVIEWER: Your first wife was a dancer.

  EZRA BLAZER: My first two wives were dancers. Who didn’t like each other, as you can imagine. But that was another education. I married Erika—

  INTERVIEWER: Erika Seidl.

  EZRA BLAZER: Yes, Erika Seidl. Later she became famous, but when we married she was still a girl in the corps and I was enchanted. Everything was new. Everything! It just burst upon me. And the newness, the thrill of discovery, became embodied for me in this exquisitely beautiful young woman. Born in Vienna. Trained in the Vienna State Opera Ballet School and her family lived there until she was fourteen and then her parents divorced and her mother, who was American, took her to New York, and she just disappeared into Balanchine. It was about a year after we married that she soloed in The Seven Deadly Sins and that was it, I never saw her again. It was like being married to a boxer. She was always in training. When I went backstage to see her after a performance she stank like a boxer. All of the girls stank; it was like Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue. She had this little monkey face—not onstage; onstage it was a great skull, all eyes and ears, but backstage she looked like she’d gone fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. Anyway, I never saw her. I’d found what few men found in
that era, which was a woman wholly occupied by what she did, and wedded to it. So we parted. And I drifted to another dancer. Not smart. Dana.

  INTERVIEWER: Dana Pollock.

  EZRA BLAZER: Dana was never the dancer Erika was, but she was something. I don’t know why I did it again. I did the same thing again, and the same thing happened. So next I married a bartender. But she was out nights, too.

  INTERVIEWER: You never had children?

  EZRA BLAZER: After the fact, I consider my girlfriends my children.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you regret never having children?

  EZRA BLAZER: No. I love my friends’ children. I think about them and I call them and attend their birthday parties, but I had other fish to fry. And monogamy, insofar as it’s conducive to good parenting . . . Well, I’ve never been inordinately fond of monogamy. But ballet, and ballet music, that was the next education. And then came everything else. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, the Schubert piano pieces I love, the Beethoven quartets, the great Bach sonatas, the partitas, the Goldberg variations, Casals playing those growling cello pieces. Everyone loves those; by now they’re a little like “Mam’selle.”

  INTERVIEWER: Let’s hear about your sixth record then.

  EZRA BLAZER: A friend recently gave me a copy of Nijinsky’s diary, the first edition, which was put together by his widow, Romola, who I’m told suppressed what she didn’t like. Having to do with Diaghilev, I suppose. Because she was jealous of Diaghilev and his power over Nijinsky and she blamed Diaghilev for Nijinsky’s illness. Anyway, there’s a new edition out now, where the edited-out parts have been restored, but it’s the widow’s I read, and whatever may have been done to it it’s still marvelous. All of this sent me back to “Afternoon of a Faun,” another first love. [Laughs.] But now I can hear the rebellion in it—the perversity, the enslavement to imagined forces. Alas, we don’t have any footage of Nijinsky dancing the Faun, so we have to make do with what we do have, which is Debussy.

  INTERVIEWER: That was Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” performed by Emmanuel Pahud and the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado. Ezra Blazer, you’ve written that depression is “the inevitable crash after an untenable happiness.” How often has that been true for you?

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, it’s true whenever depression hits, which fortunately for me has been only two or three times. Once when I was left by a woman I hugely loved. Twice when I was left by a woman I hugely loved. A third time when my brother died, and I was the only Blazer left. All right, maybe four times. But anyway, it’s true of any sort of depression—emotional, economic: it occurs only after you’ve been riding too high. We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. As I said: sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s economic, sometimes even a kind of political depression sets in. Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? Anyway, what good will it do, the willful and belated broadening of my imagination? A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this, in its way. About the extent to which we’re able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It’s a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté. [Laughs softly.] Incidentally, this friend, she was one of the—Well, no. I won’t say that. I won’t say her name. Never mind. There it is. What’s the line? War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

  INTERVIEWER: You don’t believe that.

  EZRA BLAZER: I think an impressive number of us cannot readily point to Mosul on a map. But I also think God is too busy arranging David Ortiz’s home runs to be much concerned with teaching us geography.

  INTERVIEWER: More music.

  EZRA BLAZER: How many do I have left?

  INTERVIEWER: Two.

  EZRA BLAZER: Two. And we’ve only gotten up to my thirties. We’ll be here forever. My next record is from Strauss’s Four Last Songs. I didn’t listen to them in Germany. I couldn’t listen to Wagner, either. Only later did I come to my senses. I love the Four Last Songs, with Kiri Te Kanawa singing. Who doesn’t?

  INTERVIEWER: That was Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing “Im Abendrot,” with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis. Ezra Blazer, you said earlier that you have no regrets about not having had children, but there have been rumors that you did in fact father a child, in Europe. Is there any truth to those rumors?

  EZRA BLAZER: I fathered two children.

  INTERVIEWER: You did?

  EZRA BLAZER: Twins. Since you asked. Impertinently, I must say. I told you about my friend? With the little black motorbike, who introduced me to Fauré? Well, she became pregnant, just as I was about to leave Paris, and I didn’t know it at the time, and I came back to America. I had to. I had nothing left to live on.

  INTERVIEWER: You didn’t keep in touch?

  EZRA BLAZER: We corresponded for a while, but then she disappeared. That was 1956. In 1977 I happened to be spending a week in Paris, promoting the French publication of one of my books. I was staying at the Montalembert, near my publishing house, and I was in the bar, talking to my editor, when a young woman came up to me, very pretty, and said, in French: Excuse me, sir, but I believe you’re my father. I thought, Fine, if that’s the way she wants to play it. So I said, Sit down, mademoiselle. And she told me her name, and of course the last name I recognized. My French lover, Geneviève, had been the same age as this girl when I knew her. So I said, Are you the daughter of Geneviève so-and-so? And she said, Oui. Je suis la fille de Geneviève et je suis votre fille. And I said, Can that be? How old are you? And she told me. And I said, But how can you be sure I’m your father? And she said, My mother told me. I said, Were you waiting for me here? Oui. You knew I was in Paris? Oui. Then she said: My brother’s on his way. Oh? said I. How old is he? The same age. That’s right, you have a daughter and a son. And at this point my editor stood up and said, “We can discuss the translation another time.”

  INTERVIEWER: You tell this story so calmly, but it must have been a shock.

  EZRA BLAZER: A colossal shock and a colossal delight. I hadn’t had to raise them, you see. I met them as adults, and the next night we had supper with their mother, and we had a wonderful time. And now they have children, my grandchildren, and I’m besotted by them. I like my children, but I’m besotted by my little French grandchildren.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you see this secret family?

  EZRA BLAZER: I go to Paris once a year. I see them in France, but rarely in America, to keep the gossip at bay. Maybe now I’ll see them in America. I help them out financially. I love them. I didn’t know there were rumors. How did you hear? How did you know?

  INTERVIEWER: A little bird told me.

  EZRA BLAZER: A little boid told you. That’s delicious, you know, in an English accent.

  INTERVIEWER: A Scottish accent.

  EZRA BLAZER: You’re Scottish. Everyone’s Scottish. You’ll be telling me next Obama is Scottish.

  INTERVIEWER: Anyway, E
zra Blazer, I thought you might appreciate an opportunity to set the record straight. In your own voice.

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, it’s certainly been a more significant Q & A on the radio than I was expecting. I’ve been outed as a father. There it is. It’s a wonderful thing, what happened to me. A miraculous thing. As I told you earlier, life is all accidents. Even what doesn’t appear to be an accident is an accident. Beginning with conception, of course. That sets the tone.

  INTERVIEWER: Has this particular accident affected your work?

  EZRA BLAZER: It would have, if I’d had to raise them. But I didn’t. And no, I’ve never written about them, not obviously. I’m amazed even to find myself talking about them now. I don’t know why I didn’t lie to you. You took me by surprise. And you’re just such a charming young woman yourself. And I’m a decrepit old man. It doesn’t matter any longer what biographical facts get added to or subtracted from my life.