The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  In the morning all the philosophers, still scarfed and mittened, met in a latticed gazebo. Heaters had been set up in the middle of a ring of benches; icicle spears hung down from the eaves. The shorter icicles were bunched like bundles of clear fat chandeliers. The sunlight on the snow cut blind streaks across Puttermesser’s sight. It was too brilliant, and far too cold, despite the wafting heaters, to sit still. The philosophers from Emil’s college—the ones who were at home here, the natives—grouped themselves all together on one side of the gazebo, apart from the philosophers who had come on the bus. “The city mice and the country mice,” Emil objected, and made everyone stand up and change places. As for the cold, he said, the clarity of the air would clarify thought. “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” he said. “That’s Kierkegaard,” muttered yesterday’s skier.

  Then Emil lectured. His thesis was religion and art. At the beginning of all civilizations, art and religion were ineluctably fused: a god was a statue or a painting. The gods spoke through their physical representations. Ra, for instance, the supreme Egyptian deity, expressed himself through a golden disk atop a falcon’s head; “my skin is of pure gold,” sang the sun-priests of Ra.

  “You see?” Emil said, pacing around the heaters. The sun illumined the pale disks of his eyes; he had turned himself into Ra. How beautiful he was! In the dazzling morning light the skin of his face was of pure gold. “Once the God of the Jews forbade art in religion, then art was released—released forever—to follow its own spoor. Once art was exempted from idol-making, from religious duty, it could see what it wished, it could record what it liked, it could play and cavort and distort—whatever it pleased! And all without obligation to sanctity. Pious obeisance was dismissed—unwanted! Excluded! Art was free to be free! The Second Commandment had kicked it out of religion! You see?” Emil said again, looking all around; he had a princely pleasure in his own wit.

  But was it wit in praise or dispraise? Puttermesser, bewilderment contracting her throat (unless she was starting to catch cold?), could not be sure. Was he mocking the Second Commandment, or lauding it? Was he an atheist or a believer?

  “So if art can thrive best in the absence of religion,” Emil concluded, “if in fact there must not be any religious connection in order to have a truly autonomous art, then the same applies to morality, doesn’t it? Art didn’t really become art until it shucked off God. And morality won’t really be morality until it too gets rid of God.”

  A jumble of city voices protested. “That doesn’t follow!” “You haven’t proved it about art anyhow!” “Sophistry!”

  But all the country philosophers applauded.

  Puttermesser was silent. She knew what she thought: she thought Emil was shocking. He was certainly a novelty, but he was more arrogant than novel. He was spontaneously eloquent, but he was too self-aware: he was an egotist. She thought all these things, and felt her own shame, because she had nothing to say, she could invent nothing so startling; she was empty. But how beautiful he was, how vehement, how extraordinary were his mind-passions! He was against God with all the fervor of a mystic; he was a purist; he found even the idea of God to be perfectly useless. And he was a visionary in search of converts against God.

  Puttermesser understood she was being shaken with a violent infatuation.

  By now all the philosophers had spoken, one by one, each in turn. The gazebo was serious and orderly. Icicles, warmed by the sun, were leaking idle drops from their tips. The dripping sounds fell in a syncopated pattern. Puttermesser sat, a pariah in her muteness; a simpleton.

  Emil was standing right in front of her. “You didn’t come all this way just to be obstinate? In which case you could at least disclose which view your obstinacy intends to serve,” he said.

  Puttermesser could not answer.

  “You’re obstructing the movement of the meeting. Say something.”

  She offered miserably, “It’s God who makes us good.”

  “That’s how children think,” Emil said.

  The city and the country philosophers sent out their morning smiles. What contempt they had for her!

  Emil bent and said quietly into her ear, “You’re not being very effective here, are you?”

  And this whispered judgment—you’re not being very effective here—infiltrated Puttermesser’s brain with a deadly permanence. It stung; it endured; she remembered it always. He had cut her down, he had belittled her.

  A second meeting in the gazebo was called for the afternoon. Emil had supplied everyone with a printed schedule. The philosophers ignored it; instead they went out to the hill to slide and flirt. The two camps were willing enough, by now, to mix freely, and in the sharp light of the horizonless snow Puttermesser could no longer tell who was city and who was country: all those reddened frozen faces, and the smell of damp wool, and teasing spite spiraling into laughter. God and morality were left unresolved. The laughter rolled up and down the hill. Puttermesser lashed her scarf over her nose and mouth, butted her head into the wind, and trekked out to the gazebo.

  Only Emil was there.

  “Nobody came,” he said.

  But she had come; was she nobody?

  “The magnet of youth appears to be stronger than magnitudes of thought,” Emil said. “They’d rather kiss in the snow.”

  “So would I,” Puttermesser said. How reckless she was, to speak in such a way!

  “As long as you could be sure that God lurks behind every kiss?”

  Puttermesser said soberly, “I think we’re indebted to a sublime force at all times, whether or not we acknowledge it.”

  “You need to read Bertrand Russell. You need to be disabused of myth. You ought to look into Kant. Kant said that if God exists, and if we act out of love or awe of God, or out of confidence in a divine reward, then our conduct isn’t morality, it’s prudent self-interest. Listen,” he finished, “one of these days when I’m in the city I’ll give you a call.”

  “Why?” Puttermesser asked; she was in full earnest.

  “To teach you how to seek virtue in a Godless universe,” Emil said.

  They met at the information booth in Grand Central Station.

  Puttermesser arrived half an hour late, and condemned herself. She had been afraid to set out. She was afraid of Emil Hauchvogel; she was afraid of her own inferiority. At twenty-two he had absorbed all of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; he read George Meredith and Ronald Firbank; he could recite whole speeches from Timon of Athens and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and knew a dozen arias by heart. He could say the names of French and Italian film directors, and tell you which were their most nuanced scenes, and what kind of lens the cameraman used to control the lighting. He was capable of certain striking ruminations on Turing and Gödel. And of course he was at home in German.

  It was a warm April evening. Puttermesser had never expected to see Emil Hauchvogel again, and here he was; they were heading for a concert at Carnegie Hall. She recognized that her fear of him had flattered him; it was the pleasure of her awe he must be after. He was not above enjoying such a thing; he knew he deserved it. His brown hair sprang abundantly and ardently upward, as if it had a different rule, or route, for spring. Puttermesser wore her only dress-up things: a bright green angora sweater and a tan corduroy skirt in the new style, nearly all the way down to her ankles, like an illustration in a Victorian novel. She saw he was not pleased with her clothes; she guessed that he had a low opinion of angora and corduroy in the concert hall. She was an experiment that was already failing.

  After the concert she declined his offer of a cigarette (she never smoked); she hung back when he proposed a nearby bar, and drew him instead into Howard Johnson’s. He watched her drink her ice-cream soda to the lees and tapped his cigarette ash into his empty coffee cup. “You should learn something about music,” he announced, but he did not say he would teach her. He did not speak of a Godless universe or of an ethics viable in the absence of divine power; she had prepared herself, and had searched out
Bertrand Russell and The Critique of Pure Reason in the college library. But now it was something else: it was Ives and Milhaud, Copland and Thomson, Schoenberg and Bloch. It left her all at sea.

  They rode the subway to the Bronx. He returned her to her door with his cigarette locked between his lips. And then, with a thieving and frightened motion she would suffer over for the rest of her life—it was bold, almost savage—she put her hand to his mouth and snatched away the cigarette and dropped it on the corridor floor. Her little finger grazed his upper lip; she had touched his flesh. His look was darker than surprise. Instantly she was thrown down into humiliation. She had lost him; she had lost him. She held out her hand for goodnight, but he was already fixed on the elevator across the hall.

  It was the beginning of her education. She went back to the library and found a textbook called The Enjoyment of Music and sat down with it grimly, like a zealot. She studied the elements of the orchestra—strings, woodwinds, brasses, percussion instruments; she read up on style, from Gregorian chant all the way through to the post-Romantics; she learned about key and scale, about transposition, modulation, chromaticism, harmony, dissonance, counterpoint; she allowed herself to be swept away by the idea of fugue, oratorio, chamber music, opera, a cappella, symphony, concerto, chorale. She accumulated names: Scarlatti, Berlioz, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn; she fell into the lives of Mozart and Mussorgsky.

  She neglected her courses and toiled for a week. And all the while she never heard a note. She could not recall any part of the concert in Carnegie Hall: she had been preoccupied with listening to Emil’s listening, how he took a breath, how he tilted his face, how he surrendered to the sounds, whatever they were. He understood the sounds; she could not. Behind his shut eyes they rushed riverlike, ravishing; she saw him flooded with their peculiar code and tattoo and swell. But she was ignorant and deprived. There was no music in her head. Her head was a chamberless nautilus, incapable of echo.

  She memorized a whole stanza of Bach’s Cantata Number 80, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, and copied out into her notebook: chorale fugue, D major, 4/4, 3 trumpets, timpani, 2 oboes, first and second violins, violas, and continuo (cello, basses, organ). It was all mind-stuff. It never occurred to her to get hold of a recording, and anyhow she was impatient. She was studying in order to write to Emil. She thought he could not turn away from a letter about music; she would tell him she was catching up; the next concert wouldn’t be Greek to her; and besides, she intended to write him in the language of Bach and of Emil’s own childhood in Frankfurt-am-Main.

  So Puttermesser wrote Emil Hauchvogel a letter in her college German. She was certain there must be mistakes in it. She hoped he would overlook them and be charmed; or, if he declined to be charmed, he would at least see how seriously she was attending to his instruction: You should learn something about music.

  She wrote, “Truly there would be reason to go mad if it were not for music.” It was Tchaikovsky translated into German. And next to it she wrote: “Das ist doch Du!”

  There was no reply. She supposed he was ignoring her; she had offended him with that lunatic gesture of the cigarette. It was torn from his mouth, his lip had felt her little finger—when she had meant only to free him to say his goodnight as she shook his hand. But oh, the clumsiness of it, the frightened aggressive stupidity of her clumsiness! He imagined she was soliciting a kiss. A kiss! Never! They were formal and tentative friends—he was her teacher—in a formal and tentative friendship that decayed at the touch of her little finger.

  After three weeks his answer came. He wrote fluently, in his ready familial German, and said nothing about her mistakes. At first she thought: aha, so there weren’t any: how meticulous she had been, how she had labored to winnow them out! But that was only her vanity, her ambition, her desire; she quickly recognized that he was indifferent. He had meant the hiatus to speak for itself. He told her that it was a fine thing, this opening of her life to the glories of music; she would be enriched forever. As for dem nächsten Konzert, what bad luck, he was overburdened with term papers and course work and couldn’t possibly leave his desk. Mein Tisch, he called it, as if it were an ordinary table and not a desk at all, and that made her think of the sticky soda-glass rings on the table at Howard Johnson’s, and how he had doused his cigarette butt in his cup, how she had refused to go to a bar (what was the matter with her, she was nineteen!), how unpolished she must seem to him, how she had knocked his cigarette right out of his mouth, how stupid she was! (Though now she was capable of defining a fugue.)

  Mein Tisch: she envisioned him at a vast seminar table, the youngest of the great philosophers, a polymath, a genius, an atheist.

  When in after years she learned of Emil Hauchvogel’s wedding, the pang that struck her chest vibrated like some wild interior gong. His wife, she heard, was a cellist; his little daughters were precociously, ferociously, musical.

  In Paradise she married him.

  She had long ago given up the idea of an ethics indebted to some hypothesis of divinity. She didn’t care any more about God. She was obsessed with organ music, its heavy majestic ascent, its heavy molasses fall.

  In Paradise Emil was invited to sit at Kant’s Tisch. Sometimes Wittgenstein and Quine were there; once—what an occasion that was!—Plato turned up.

  “What does he look like?” Puttermesser asked. She touched her little finger to Emil’s mouth and let him kiss it.

  “Short fellow. Big head, big nose, translucent ears, the usual poetic brow,” Emil said. “Frequently meets with Maimonides. Tells me he’s starting on Talmud, though he finds it a bit disorganized. Compared with his own stuff.”

  “What color eyes?” Puttermesser pressed.

  “That’s a funny thing to want to know.”

  “But what color are they?”

  “White,” Emil said. “All white.”

  “You don’t mean he’s blind?” The moment she said this she knew it was preposterous. In Paradise sight and insight are equally acute. Nowhere is it easier to thread a needle or grasp a point.

  “It snows inside his eyes. You look in and it’s always snowing there, like a pure-white field.”

  In Paradise Puttermesser gave birth at last. The child’s skin was silken gold. They circumcised him and planted the tiny gold foreskin under an olive tree, and every olive on every branch began to take on the color of gold. And when all the olives had turned gold, the snow in Plato’s eyes stopped, and his eyes were as gold as the olives on their branches.

  In Paradise Puttermesser was happy—in her brain and in her heart, in her womb and in all her sexual parts.

  But there is a flaw in Eden. The flaw is not what the stories tell us: there is no serpent. All the fruit trees are safe to eat from. There is no expulsion; there is no angel with a flaming sword. All those are children’s tales. Timeless Eden is as sweet as Puttermesser and a million million others before her have imagined. In Paradise all yearnings become fact. All desires come to pass; in every instance the fulfillment exceeds the dream.

  In Paradise Puttermesser is happy, oh happy!—in her sexual parts, in the golden beauty of her child, in the gold of Plato’s eyes, and in the newest heat of her mind, which is everything it had not been at nineteen. In Paradise Emil whispers to her about her mind: how impressive, how effective, her thinking is. He kisses her little finger and calls her a Satrap of Thought. He calls Maimonides the Sovereign of Thought. He calls Kant the Emperor of Thought. He calls Beethoven the God of Thought. (In Paradise, even for Emil, God is admissible.)

  Flaw? No, there is no flaw in Paradise. That is a vestige of Puttermesser’s obsolete terrestrial notions. Paradise surely has no flaw; but it has its Secret. (PRDS, you will recall, ends in sod.) Sod: the secret meaning of Paradise! And alas for Puttermesser that she will now uncover it. It is integral to, coextensive with, the very grain of Eden, which is timelessness. Timelessness does not promise the permanence of any experience. Where there is no time, there is no endurance.
Without the measure of clocks, what is lastingness?

  If Puttermesser had married Emil Hauchvogel in ordinary life—if he had kissed her at her door, if a courtship had followed, and so on and so on—then it would be possible to calculate that the marriage “lasted” a certain number of years. But in the everlastingness of Paradise, what does it signify to say how long anything lasts?

  In Paradise, where sight and insight, inner and outer, sweet and salt, logic and illogic, are shuffled in the manner of a kaleidoscope, nothing is permanent. Nothing will stay. All is ephemeral. There is no long and no short; there is only immeasurable isness. Isness alone is forever; or name it essence, or soul. But the images within the soul shift, drift, wander. Paradise is a dream bearing the inscription on Solomon’s seal: this too will pass.

  And that is the secret meaning of Paradise: Solomon’s truth. It is the other reason for the notorious cold-heartedness of Paradise; it is why everyone who is supernally happy in Paradise, happier than ever before, will soon become preternaturally unhappy, unhappier than ever before. A dream that flowers only to be undone will bring more misery than a dream that has never come true at all.

  The secret meaning of Paradise is that it too is hell.

  So it is with Puttermesser in Paradise. Emil and her little son evaporate; in sorrow she watches them pale like ink under water. Inconsolably, in her old familiar solitude, she walks through neighborhoods of illusion and phantasmagoria, witnessing loss and tragedy and joyous victory.

  She sees Henry James, the Master, growing rich on the triumph of a play, the very play that once failed humiliatingly on the London boards; but she already knows (as the Master himself will soon know) that paradisal success will end in jeers and feebleness.