by Helen Dewitt
The regular association of ideas naturally led K at this point to walk down to Blockbuster to borrow the DVD of Kiss Me Deadly. Only to find — O tempora, o mores! — that his trusty Blockbuster was no more. (It had been one of the good ones.) Enquiries at his hotel elicited the suggestion that he watch the thing on his laptop by streaming it off Amazon. Pfui!
Gerald discovered, somewhat late in the day, that this would have been the most terrific coup. He had once read a novel by Iris Murdoch and had not enjoyed it; for the most part the word ‘contemporary’ sufficed to put him off a work of fiction. He had never heard of K. He happened to mention the incident in a moment of fretfulness to one of the younger Canons and was told that K was in the running for a Nobel Prize. Oh my ears and whiskers! The man’s name, mercifully, had never happened to come up in water-testings with the Bishop.
K had gone back to England for a few months to do research and organise documentation for his wedding.
K, as he had often expatiated, had nothing against marriage provided it was sufficiently ritualised. It seemed a modest requirement, but when he did in fact engage to marry people kept trying to clutter up the ritual with effusions of sincerity. K simply wanted the Hebrew text in the programme and if people wanted to feel something that was entirely their own affair. (K’s views on the Kaddish of Mr Leon Wieseltier, in which the Aramaic text is conspicuous by its absence, may readily be imagined.) He had thought that in New York, of all places, this would be simple enough to arrange, but as it turned out none of the printers they approached had anything remotely suitable. He was left to try to drum up something passable in Golders Green. A strategic sortie to Glyndebourne, where they were putting on a delectable Rosenkavalier, palliated the anguish. (Printers! Gaaaa!)
K returned to New York at the end of the summer and was chagrined to discover that Der Freischütz was on at the Met on Erev Yom Kippur. Damn and Blast! He worked out that he could snatch a last meal, just, before the curtain went up and begin his fast during the first act.
An excellent plan in its way, it meant that he was hors de combat when social arrangements were made during a longueur in Kol Nidrei. K’s fiancée, Rachael, invited a friend to join them in breaking their fast.
(Thanks to the mixed seating so popular in America, K could easily have put the kaboosh on the plan had he not succumbed to the superior charms of Der Freischütz.)
The meal could be said to have had its uses. There’s something to be said for allowing a fiancée to learn, early in the relationship, the sort of occasion one goes out of one’s way to avoid.
The friend, Eloise, had started life as a Presbyterian. She had converted in England; she had undergone ritual immersion at Henley, where it had been necessary to dodge rowers warming up for the regatta. She had in fact broken up with the boyfriend for whose sake, or rather, for whose mother’s sake, the conversion had been embarked upon, but Simon had said it would be rude to the rabbi to drop out. Permission to work in the UK, which would have accompanied marriage to Simon, was now out of reach, so she had returned without enthusiasm to New York. She had attended services on Yom Kippur because it seemed obscurely rude to the rabbi not to bother. It had seemed obscurely rude to the rabbi to skimp. Hence Kol Nidrei. (All this, naturally, part of what passed for conversation at dinner.)
The girl’s Hebrew was not at all good. (Her personal best for the Amidah was a shamemaking 25 minutes.) With the result, unsurprisingly, that she had whiled away the forcefasted hours reading the English pages facing the impenetrable Hebrew of her shabby Machzor.
720 pages into Birnbaum the child had come upon Isaiah 57:14–58:14. (Quotation from which cannot help but seem long to the sort of person for whom an hour is a reasonable length for a service. What is to be done? Pah!)
There is no peace for the wicked, says my God.
Cry out, spare not, raise your voice like a trumpet;
Tell my people their guilt, tell Jacob’s house their sins,
Daily indeed they seek me, desiring to know my ways;
As an upright nation that has not forsaken the laws of its God,
They keep asking me about righteous ordinances;
[footnote from Birnbaum: ולס ולס, the prophetic portion recited as the haftarah, refers to the fasts. The people have complained that their fasts have produced no change in their material welfare. The prophet replies that their fasting was a hollow pretence. [!!!] Instead of giving their workmen a holiday, they worked them all the harder. If they would but feed the hungry and nurture the destitute, God would lift them out of their miserable conditions. [!!!!!!!!]]
They seemingly delight to draw near to God.
‘Why seest thou not,’ they ask, ‘when we fast?’
‘Why heedest thou not when we afflict ourselves?’
Behold, on your fast day you find business,
And you drive on all who toil for you.
Your fasting is amidst contention and strife,
While you are striking with a godless fist;
You do not fast today to make your voice heard on high.
Can such be my chosen fast, the day of man’s self-denial? [!!!!!]
To bow down his head like a bulrush, to sit in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call fasting, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Behold, this is the fast that I esteem precious:
Loosen the chains of wickedness, undo the bonds of oppression,
Let the crushed go free, break all yokes of tyranny!
Share your food with the hungry, take the poor to your home, [!!!!!!!]
Clothe the naked when you see them, never turn from your fellow,
Then shall your light dawn, your healing shall come soon;
Your triumph shall go before you, the Lord’s glory backing you.
[footnote from Birnbaum: . . . פתח חרצבו that is, God favors the fast that includes ת the self-denial shown in the exercise of justice and kindness; for example, setting the people free and distributing food and clothing. [!!!!!]]
The synagogue was very full, for it was a day of competitive fasting. The girl thought: But perhaps at this very moment there are Jews manning soup kitchens, having taken this passage of Isaiah to heart . . . So they would naturally not be in synagogue. Perhaps the sort of person who goes to synagogue fasting is not the sort of person who would take Isaiah to heart. So perhaps it was not odd that EVERYONE did not stand up and walk out and give a homeless person a place to stay. But was it not odd that not one person did so? (This too, naturally, part of what passed for conversation at dinner.)
Ah, said K, but you’re taking it out of context. The interpretation of the text is determined by the oral tradition. You can’t cherrypick. If you’re going to reject the oral tradition, it’s not clear what you’re doing there in the first place. Why are you willing to accord special status to this text on the basis of its presence on an occasion whose importance is determined by tradition?
It would have been possible for Eloise to say something about Agamben at this point, but she felt awkward, now, meeting K.
K was an Abstract Situationist. His sentences had their cold beauty.
He stated in interviews that art should concern itself with the operation of the machine.
The operation of the social machinery, he would add for clarity, though he disliked the phrase.
K was very grand, so grand that he could refer to himself as K in his work without a murmur of editorial dissent. Eloise was very young and not at all grand. She had known K’s work for years and had imagined that it was open to anyone to follow his example, or rather that it was open not only to K but to anyone to follow the example of the usual suspects. If K had this licence only in virtue of his position he would, as an avowed Situationist, have embedded a statement to this effect in the work — so she had thought, being a mere Naïve Situationist at the time.
>
She had been wrong about this as about so many other things.
Eloise had written a book and been made to have discussions in which the phrase ‘flesh out’ was used of characters. She was just out of college. She had been reading Robbe-Grillet. She had recently seen Dogville. In a moment of weakness she had attached to four characters the sort of name that is affixed to a little primate at birth. Each was also provided with hair, eye, and skin colour, a wardrobe, some sort of plausible history. A favourite TV show. What with all these plausible names and histories, the characters went plausibly about their business like impostors in a witness protection programme. It was, of course, awkward to be known to K as the person whose name appeared on the cover of the thing.
(She was, as it happened, safe enough: the word ‘contemporary’ was enough to put K off a work of fiction.)
K, meanwhile, talked on.
K drew attention to the difference between a cliché and a formula. (He preferred the fixed formulae of the Homeric poems to the polished phrases of Vergil.) K had once read an essay by Harold Bloom in which the great man found fault with J. K. Rowling for using the phrase ‘he stretched his legs’ whenever a character went for a walk. K had immediately lost all respect for Harold Bloom, who appeared not only to be unfamiliar with Milman Parry’s The Making of Homeric Verse but also to be wholly innocent of the Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle and Argonautica except, perhaps, in some sort of translation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the argument would compel one to prefer the Argonautica to the Iliad. Madness! (K had tried to do a search in the Perseus project for ton d’apameibomenos prosephe (that old Homeric wordhorse), was balked by an uncooperative search engine, left Bloom with a shrug unenlightened.) The problem with J.K.R. was not that she was repetitive, nor even that she was not repetitive enough, but rather that she was insufficiently formulaic. Judging by the 3 pages K had been able to bring himself to read before remembering that we are creatures of a day.
All this time Eloise was working up her courage. K loved to say of the Greeks that they experienced their subjectivity as a trajectory through a nexus of social interstices, linguistic artifacts cast in or broken by the machinery of legal systems. To hear K discourse on the character of Odysseus in Sophocles’ Ajax was to have a memory to save up for one’s grandchildren. Surely K, then, would not be blind to the predicament of one required to engage with the modern machinery of the law?
Eloise’s situation was that she had written a new book, one which required the legal muscle enjoyed by K if its characters were not to find themselves in a witness protection programme. K was so grand that his contracts were negotiated by someone very grand indeed. Eloise’s lawyer, who was not at all grand, claimed that the boilerplate was non-negotiable. Eloise had the true hacker’s love of economy of effort; K had a perfectly good contract negotiated by a master of the art, on which her unloved lawyer was unlikely to improve; why could this unimprovable document not be redeployed? When they were all very drunk (they had fasted, after all, for a night and a day) Eloise put this ingenious suggestion to K, who said he was not comfortable mixing business with friendship.
The formulaic reply made it clear that K was not new to ingenious suggestions.
K had more serious matters to contend with. He was in the midst of protracted negotiations of a delicate nature. The mother of his bride would not brook kosher catering for the wedding. His sister, who had joined the Lubavitch after a turbulent youth, would not permit her seven children to eat cake if it were not kosher. It would be cruel and inhumane to invite children to a party at which they could not eat cake; K’s soft heart melted. The points at issue were whether, on the one hand, a kosher cake from an approved purveyor might pass muster with his sister, provided the cake were kept strictly segregated from all other comestibles, and whether, on the other hand, such cake might be acceptable to a non-religious fanatic.
One charming Night
Brings more delight
Than a hundred, than a hundred, than a hundred lucky Days —
Eloise’s editor left for another job. The new editor was unenthusiastic with the legacy. No contract had been signed. The characters were given an unexpected reprieve from the witness protection programme.
Eloise was introduced to an agent who sold her book in a week. The book had been in a mixture of first, second and third persons; the editor thought it would work much better if it were all in first.
K and his bride found an apartment on Central Park West, easy walking distance to Lincoln Center and a shul with an intelligent rabbi.
K published to acclaim a book which alternated between first, second and third persons.
K was not at all sporting about the thing with the Cathedral. He shared it genially with his friends at shul, mischievously at dinner parties. Americans naturally like to hear that the British are stuck in the mud; the story was passed round to the point where Nigel, an ambitious young Canon at Bath and Wells, heard it three times in a single day on a trip to New York.
Eloise’s new editor left for another job. The replacement examined the legacy and saw at once that the book would work better in third person.
K won a prize for the new book, thus becoming much grander.
Nigel had been keeping his ear to the ground. He saw at once that the thing, used properly, might just do for his Bishop, who was quietly pining for a shot at Canterbury. It would be the most terrific coup if Bath and Wells could persuade the now indisputably distinguished K to accept carte blanche.
By the most extraordinary piece of luck, Boulez agreed to come to London to revive his production of Moses und Aron.
Nigel whispered in the ear of a very dear friend at Covent Garden: it would be quite wonderful if Boulez and K were to appear in conversation before the great event. Boulez was, in fact, an admirer of K; K agreed to the treat (with the promise of accommodation at Claridge’s and a box for opening night).
Nigel was then able quite naturally to reply to K’s benevolent thanks for his efforts.
The Bishop and Mrs Bishop trusted him implicitly; if an invitation to the Glyndebourne Arabella would lure the Nobel laureate in posse, to Glyndebourne they would go. Mrs Bishop handsomely undertook to lay on hampers from Fortnum’s, strictly kosher in case of need — one could always count on Mrs B.
K was all amiability in agreeing to join the episcopal party. He was not, in fact, at all particular in matters of kashrut, but he very much liked to be asked.
At supper he displayed his broadmindedness by consuming lobster patties with evident enjoyment.
Nigel was assiduous in filling his glass with champagne.
At the second interval K agreed affably to contribute to a service apiece at Bath and at Wells. He knew printers at Golders Green who could sort out the Hebrew. Mrs B. (bless her) made all the right noises.
Gerald’s Bishop remained thankfully unapprised.
Climbers
“The thing you have to understand is that I really don’t understand people.”
Gil sat on a squashy old sofa, legs akimbo, forearms on thighs. He was wearing a dark green polo shirt with a small red turtle in the place where a more fashionable polo shirt sports a crocodile. It had the trusting incomprehension of a Presidential dog.
“I mean for instance. Peter Dijkstra. There are these people, they totally say Dude, Peter Dijkstra, I love Peter Dijkstra, what a genius, but then they say, Oh, but he’s impossible, we met him for drinks in Amsterdam and he spent the whole night talking to the bartender’s dog! And then he walked off with Jason’s brand new Moleskine!!!!”
It is not new information that he wore a dark green polo shirt with a turtle on the left breast, but sometimes we can’t be rational. If a garment quietly clothes its owner while he speaks, this cannot be uncomplaining loyalty, it cannot be touching, because this is what garments do. (What else would it do? Walk off in a huff?) And yet there was a to
uching loyalty in the quiet uncomplaining persistence of the turtle on the dark green breast. It had been there and it was still there.
“But see, this is what I don’t understand. Because see. Say Peter Dijkstra comes to New York and needs a place to stay, he can come to my place and stay as long as he wants and I’ll just go off and couch surf with friends to get out of his way.”
The friendly crowd let him talk uninterruptedly on. They filled the loft that would be placed so gladhandedly at the disposal of Peter Dijkstra.
“Okay, now let’s say I’m off the premises and Peter Dijkstra rents a van and loads it up with everything I own. I go back and everything is gone. Books, CDs, DVDs, TV, computer, baseball cards. Gone. And it’s not just the stuff, Peter Dijkstra went through my papers, my personal papers, and he took my diaries, and my notebooks, and my photo albums, all this incredibly personal, irreplaceable paraphernalia, he just took it. The place is empty. All I’ve got is the clothes I’m standing in, my laptop, and my iPhone. So I’m standing in this empty apartment, and I’m looking around, and the point is, I’m happy. I’m ecstatic. Peter Dijkstra — Peter Dijkstra!!!! — has appropriated this stuff, in some mysterious way my stuff is going to contribute to a book by Peter Dijkstra! I feel honored. I mean, the stuff is not contributing to a work of genius just sitting there in my apartment.”
What could anyone do but smile and feel shamefaced, crass? It was as if he was the only one in the room unconscious of the reviews, the prizes, the sales. With a little luck someone might compete for the reviews, the prizes, the sales, but who could compete for the absence of consciousness?
(The unpretentiousness of the humble turtle — it’s hard to explain how this contributed to making people feel shamefaced and crass, but it did.)
“So the thing of it is, is that Peter Dijkstra does not have it in his power to betray me, if he thinks something of mine can help with his new book he can just have it. Not only is he not letting me down, this has been a fantasy ever since I was a kid. I don’t care about the things, it just makes me happy to be part of this. So when I say a writer is a genius, what I mean is, there is nothing I won’t do for him. It’s really simple. Same thing with friends. When I use the word ‘friend’ what I mean is, ‘What’s mine is yours.’ It’s really really really really simple.”