“If you want my candid opinion,” one detective told a reporter off the record, “from the look on his face he knew what was going on. Last thoughts sort of get frozen there, ya know. You see all kinds, some gasping for breath, some surprise, real bad pain, some horror and terror. But you don’t see too many like this guy. For what he had just been through, this guy was real peaceful.”
What they figured out was that as Wheeler turned around before opening his front door he was surprised, startled even, by the face of a man whom he had last seen as he was walking from the pitcher’s mound at Harvard University in 1961 dressed only in a jockstrap. For all this time, apparently, through Woodstock and Altamont and the Rolling Stone articles and the famous last song in Berkeley and now—the final blow—the publication of a successful book about Vienna, the man had developed what researchers called a preoccupying and disabling obsession with the celebrity of Wheeler Burden. Now, the man was completely deranged, and from the fatal alcove he walked to Golden Gate Park, and in the center of the Japanese Garden he put the gun in his mouth and blew out the back of his own head.
The man was Wheeler Burden’s Harvard freshman philosophy professor named Fielding Shomsky.
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Esterhazy’s Book
Fin de Siècle was entirely Arnauld Esterhazy’s book, the work of his lifetime, collected and edited by one of his most appreciative students. That is what Wheeler said over and over at his book signings. “This is Mr. Esterhazy’s book,” Wheeler kept saying. “I just pulled it together into a reasonable whole.” It was the Haze’s “Random Notes,” he told the St. Greg’s alumni who showed up at the small bookstores and coffeehouses around the country where he made his appearances. And those who remembered the Haze and his charismatic style smiled and knew it was so. But it wasn’t quite that simple, and in the beginning the task of coming up with a “reasonable whole” was for Wheeler a bit daunting. Daunting enough to make the task a ten-year one.
Mr. Esterhazy’s “Random Notes” was a loose-leaf binder of about 250 or so pages, but it did not remain static and unchanged over the half century of his reading from it. He was constantly fussing with it. If you actually took the book in hand, which few people ever had the privilege of doing, you saw immediately from the color and condition of the pages that they represented different and interchangeable versions of his thinking, some very old, some very new, some spliced together from both. Over time he would edit and crop and scissor and glue and move ideas around as different aspects of turn-of-the-century Vienna became clear and then outmoded in his view. The version that Wheeler inherited in 1965, at the death of his great mentor, was only the version most recently revised by its author. “Had he lived a few more years—or months,” Wheeler would say, holding up the actual binder, “I am sure we would have a different ‘final version.’ ” Any material that was excised from the sacred binder found its way into one of the innumerable cardboard boxes in his closet. Nothing got thrown away. Much of the material in the boxes ended up in the binder, at one time or another, and then back in the boxes. Much of the material was in German and would be translated before being brought forward. Some was in Czech, Hungarian, and the other languages of the empire. It turned out, Wheeler discovered, as soon as he began editing in earnest, that the “Random Notes” was a living document with a huge waiting list.
So as Wheeler began pulling together the version that would come into print and become the lasting memorial to the great mind who had been his and his father’s most indelible teacher, he used as his resources all of the “papers,” always trying to express each point and offer each illustration as the Haze would have wanted it. And that was no easy task. “Another editor would come up with an entirely different book,” he said. At times, confronted with a superfluity of embellishments, Wheeler simply had to write the idea in his own words, always trying to capture that very special way of expression that was Arnauld Esterhazy.
An example of this editor’s creative license was the issue of the grand unifying theory that Arnauld struggled with for sixty years. Just what was it all about? Arnauld had been aware that the world of his father’s generation had been one of extraordinary growth in Vienna. The aristocracy and the wealthy citizenry, made rich by the industrial revolution, knowing that Vienna’s fate was not going to be military victory, had settled for cultural greatness. They had worked together in the second half of the nineteenth century, like in no other European capitol, and built the fabulous city of the Ringstrasse. But at the end of the century everything had changed and the sons of those civic-minded fathers rebelled. The Secessionists in art and architecture, Mahler and Schoenberg in music, Egon Wickstein in philosophy, Lueger in politics, and of course Sigmund Freud in psychology, all led a movement that was more intensely personal, and it overturned the old world.
The world of the fathers had been rule bound, rigid, fixed, and hierarchical. The world of their highly cultured sons, raised in their aesthetics-centered homes, was more interconnected and warmly personal—“more a web of interconnectedness than a ladder of order,” the Haze said famously—even sensual and erotic at times. Over the decades, Arnauld struggled with trying to express what he had experienced and seen, and one could see in poring over these papers how he worked at coming up with the unified theory. He read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams when it came out in 1899. Newly in America in 1909, he attended the conference at Clark University that brought Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to world consciousness. He attended New York Philharmonic concerts in 1910 when Gustav Mahler was conductor. He attended the museums before and after the Great War when the Viennese painters Klimt, Kokoshka, and Sciele were featured. He read the works of Arthur Schnitzler. He watched as the “modern” movement spread through Europe and America in the prewar 1930s. All the time he worked on his theory, his “Random Notes,” all the time trying to summarize what magical change had taken place in 1897, the year of great change in his life, the year he fell in love with the American Weezie Putnam.
Then in 1955, he came upon a book, one with no overt connection to Vienna or the turn of the century, that “opened his eyes,” he said, to the union of thoughts he was looking for. That book took him into the world of classical mythology, a world frequented by all the major voices of his time, and opened up for him the world of the goddess. That book, which had begun by the author’s recording the ideas of her eccentric free-thinking ten-year-old son, was titled Persephone Rising, by Florence Standish.
It is interesting to note that one section of “Esterhazy’s book” Fin de Siècle has been singled out over and over again by critics, at the time of its publication in 1988 and over the years since. A close reader can see that that chapter is the one in which the editor took the most creative license, expressing the ideas as if they were a marvelous dialogue between a brilliantly cultured observer of Vienna’s turn of the century and his most eccentric and compulsively conversationalist student. It is that chapter that probably best summarizes the Haze’s elusive unified theory and that best answers that nagging St. Gregory’s question: Why did the Haze leave his “Random Notes” to that strange kid from California?
The title of the chapter was “The Rise of the Feminine.”
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Feather River, 1988
For Flora Burden the story began, not when Wheeler ar-rived in Vienna, or even when Dilly arrived, but on a spring morning almost one month to the day after the tragic death of her son at the hands of a deranged assassin. For her, the story began with a packet that arrived by one of those overnight couriers for which she had to sign personally. Inside the colorful cardboard envelope of the courier service was a parcel wrapped in an ancient manila envelope with the inscription: “Please deliver to Mrs. Flora Burden, Feather River Ranch, Feather River, California on June 10, 1988.” Attached to the envelope was a note from a vice president of the Boston Five Cent Savings Bank.
“Dear Mrs. Burden,” it said. “Please pardon the method of delivering this package. It has been
sitting in a vault in our bank for a long time, a longer time in fact than anyone currently in the bank’s employment can remember. We are following the instructions of the original depositor, who appears to be your late mother-in-law, Mrs. Frank Standish Burden, although there is some confusion as to when exactly she issued those instructions. If you have any concerns or suggestions about the contents of this package, or if the contents raise any specific issues to which our bank can be of administrative service, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. We are completely at your service.”
The envelope was old and did indeed look as if it had been recently dusted off after many years of storage. True to the letter of the instructions, the packet had been mailed on the assigned day and arrived at Flora’s door a day later, on June 11. “Who can you trust,” Dilly used to say, “if you can’t trust a Boston bank?”
She was curious but somewhat detached as she slit open the envelope with the paper cutter on the desk in her study. Inside she found a fine linen handkerchief alongside a novel-sized book, a well-worn journal, bound in fine red leather. Protruding from it was a rather thick letter in longhand, dated June 1959. At first, she thumbed through the journal, but could make little sense of it, so she extracted the letter and began to read.
My dearest Flora,
You will understand as you read this letter and absorb its contents that I am in a quandary as to how to begin this story. I know full well how powerful an effect it will have upon you. No matter how I begin, these contents will be difficult to absorb and will have lasting effect.
I write this not knowing if you will ever read it. You will soon realize that your reading of it is just one more confirmation of the extraordinary nature of the leather-bound book you have just received with this mailing. Let me begin.
From the book, you will understand, I received a precise description of the timing of much over which I had no control, so my plan was to have this letter arrive exactly one month after your great tragedy, the loss of your son. My desire is to have some healing effect on your great grief and to transfer to you at the end of your time some of the hope that fills my soul at the end of mine. In short, my dear daughter, if you are reading this, it means that you will soon understand how all of our lives weave together in a fatal and continuous and repeating loop, one not easy to comprehend. This diary should give you the detailed information you need to piece together this complicated intertwining of lives. In the beginning, I fear, the details will be perplexing and unbelievable to you, but have faith, dear girl. When you begin to realize the full import of it, you will be heartened beyond belief.
Until you have familiarized yourself thoroughly with the enclosed journal, the details I include here will have little meaning, but over time I am sure you will find them essential in understanding how events ended for us in Vienna.
My role, as it turned out, was to orchestrate that grim ending in Vienna. As you may know, it was in my nature to serve quietly behind the scenes, to make very little public display of decisiveness; however, in this case I was quite forceful, and all turned out for the better. Whether it was actually my role or whether I intruded and irreparably changed the course of history, I did not know for many years, until the birth of my son, your arrival on the scene, and the birth of our magnificent Stan Burden, called Wheeler. I long ago stopped questioning what I should do and started doing what felt right at the time. Here is a rough summary of what happened.
The sad fact is that Frank Burden confronted Wheeler in a wild rage and shot him dead. I was convinced then and remain so today that Frank became overcome with rage and took leave of his senses. He too looked horrified. Shocked as I was, I had enough presence of mind to secure the journal from Wheeler’s bag before the police arrived. The Vienna police were known for their severity, and there was much confusion in the wake of the shooting, but no connection was ever made to Frank Burden or the other death in a small hotel room nearby. There were only two people who knew the whole story: Sigmund Freud and I. Connected to the case through Frau Bauer, Dr. Freud, it became apparent, intended to restrict his police testimony to his patient with a severe case of amnesia, whose true identity he had never discerned. After a month of what was awful despondency and grief for me, I was allowed to return home. One of the ways I kept my sanity during that month and on the journey back to Boston was to complete my extensive manuscript on Viennese music and Gustav Mahler.
Frank and I both returned to Boston, and we were indeed married in 1903. We never mentioned Vienna or the events that took place there. I brought with me the journal you have in your hands. Frank made a terrible mistake, that is unquestioned. He went on to become very successful and responsible as a Boston banker. A bit stiff and removed as a father, he nonetheless loved his son’s achievements, which sadly confirmed some of his misguided notions, as had the writings of Lothrop Stoddard and others. He and I rarely discussed ideas, and I suppose we tolerated the other’s views because we had to, giving each other quite separate lives. Frank was devastated by the death of his son in the war and never really recovered from it.
I can tell you that in the first decade of the century, a young Viennese scholar named Arnauld Esterhazy, in his late twenties, was appointed to the faculty of St. Gregory’s School for Boys outside Boston. It is no secret that the appointment was made through my arrangements, and the young teacher was a frequent guest in our home. Within this journal you will read of how Arnauld left his teaching position in 1914 and returned to Austria to perform his patriotic duty as a soldier, a disastrous and near-fatal experience for him. Again, I was instrumental in arranging his return to teaching at St. Gregory’s School in 1920, where he taught for another forty years, becoming something of a legend and a significant influence on both of our sons. I have added to this journal over the years a few details in my own hand that help round out the story, including the circumstances surrounding my son’s birth that have remained a secret all this time.
And by the way, you may know that Sigmund Freud never mentioned anywhere in his writing that in 1897 he had had a strange visitor from America. He never came forward at the time or revealed that he had been witness to a shooting or anytime later that he had been warned of the repercussions of child abuse in Lambach. He remained silent.
As for me, my job done in Vienna, I had my own enormous grief to settle, but of course, knowing what I know, my perspective on the whole matter was markedly different from the rest. I did, in fact, return to America, having lost the love of my life. There was a part of me that never recovered and a part of me that grew and flourished enormously, part realist and part hopeless romantic living in a state of wondrous hope. Such is the gift of love. Jonathan Trumpp never wrote again and his true identity has remained a secret. His volume was published in 1899, and that circulated well through the music world. At the time it was singled out as the principal influence in introducing New Yorkers to Gustav Mahler, who ended his career as director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
I have led a happy life. I have tried to stay out of the way and to have as little public impact as possible. I always played my hand behind the scenes. But you do know that the investments of Hyperion Fund monies were extraordinarily successful. Why exactly you will discover from the journal you now have in your possession. The fund was begun by the very successful investment of monies derived from the sale of an immensely valuable object of jewelry: a ring authenticated by the auction house as having belonged to the crown prince of Austria. It came to me in the handkerchief enclosed here. I chose my stocks and investments according to a simple plan, from one simple page in this remarkable volume. And in the buying frenzy of 1929 I withdrew from the stock market entirely and remained out for a few years, thus avoiding entirely the Great Crash in October of that year.
Shortly after my return to Boston, Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams, and I gave a copy, in German of course, to William James, who had been a dear friend of my mother. With the help of Dr. James, the
Hyperion Fund made a large gift to Clark University, near Boston, and the conference of 1909 was created, bringing both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to this country. I do not need to tell you the significance of that event. Also during that same time, a large Hyperion gift to the New York Philharmonic allowed the appointment of Herr Mahler. Shortly thereafter, the Athenaeum Press arranged for the first translation of Dr. Freud’s book into English. You may recall that this same press discovered your magnificent book in 1955 and your son’s book in 1975. I do not need to tell you that these and other well-placed projects and investments were made possible by what happened to me in Vienna and the book which I carried away from there.
Where it will go from here, my dear Flora, I do not know. What I do know is how deeply I feel for you and how greatly heartened I am to know that for all of us life will be an endless cycle. We dream and touch each other in those dreams. As my son, Standish, known as Dilly, would say, we remain eagles.
With the deepest love,
Eleanor, known as Weezie
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The Little Book: A Novel Page 42