Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  But one day after (I confess it was on many days) I awoke feeling that in my pilgrim’s progress I had strolled too far from my first writing-innocence. The air was like that, Bunyan-clear. I felt printsick. Inside me, it was all paper news. How could I get back? Once, on a peace march, I had felt the same.

  On that wistful, fashionable day (is it five years, seven, since a whole world of city thinkers with peace raging in them gathered to stand like angels on the daffodil pins of Central Park?) at precisely 2:28 in the afternoon, as our horde, every one of us an individual and finally on the move, oozed inch by proud inch from the field onto the open land of Fifty-Ninth Street, a bride and groom came out of the Plaza Hotel—it was thought to be from there—and briefly walked with us. Had they floated down to us from those reception rooms just over the canopy, which are so neuter-bleak to the morning walker, but at dusk such a champagne shadowplay? Nobody around us strictly saw. Each of us could see only the pilot cerebellum in front of him, or laterally the member profiles from whatever unit somebody had soul-attached to us by phone the night before. No, we couldn’t say from where or how those two added themselves to our number, (in itself a count never to be settled in the newspapers) and walked with us, beckoning from a romantic distance, a personal one, against which we for the day had absented ourselves. Who invited them, where did they go to, when did they disappear? Nobody quite said; we’d been standing since 7:00—most of us—or even the laziest liberal among us since 9:00. Who else saw them too, that Houdini couple? Have they gone?

  We live two blocks from there, the two of us, ten flights up, or is it twenty, impaled on the stakes of the city, beleaguered, but we’re city thinkers, we’ll last. Hopefully, each as long as the other will. Our bedroom is a helicopter garage or nearly, but the mood between us is like any couple who have lived and loved gently lapped on the breakwater of city acquaintanceship: which one of us will go first, leaving the other to last? We can’t hope for the Titanic, so we never say.

  But we know the cold-hot sea of city thinking the way you know that book you lost as a child of ten on the subway, and can pick up any day. We are companions in observances whose bond will never end. We’re that modern pastoral couple you know so well if you marched with us, or are marching presently. I could keep our genital particulars dark; as companions in this we could be anybody. But why deny that we two are a woman and a man? Consorts. Married maybe, now and before. Not much interested in weddings, never were. (Last one we went to was our butcher’s, our family butcher, if you please. In that Catholic church somewhere in the Fifties off Ninth Avenue—the baby’s now two. That day in the park, their love affair wasn’t even born yet. And Ronnie’s a hawk, even now. A Jersey-living Daily Newser, who gets up at 6:00 to cross the river for the wholesaler—and for us. We are the city. You always get a special greeting, coffee in the back and a special cut—for us. They come from Alsace or the Piedmont, or somewhere. A real family place). … Since I have to march today, I went there yesterday. They want Ronnie to marry. We had their boudin for breakfast just a few minutes ago, that’s blood-pudding; we’re international. We’re the city, that couple. And we are standing just inside the park entrance, on this corner that the journalism of life has brought us to—at about 8:00 A.M. Of a wistful, fashionable day. The day you two got married, you brilliant Houdini pair.

  The park looks like a vulnerable pastel. Not overcast, but no sun, and the day unlikely to go any further either way—though if you two came to the Plaza from Houston, or Connecticut, you mightn’t know that. Or even from Roslyn, or Rahway. Muted day, blended, ready for its promenade. Where our morning walk usually takes us is now a multitude far as the eye can see—or to Central Park West and the Mall. There’s a constant whirlpool eddying at one meeting-point, between the steady current of those who feel they must be a-moving, a-moving because that’s what it is to be serious, and the slow strollers—heads up, lids lowered as at intermission—who are waiting to see who they are here with. We’re not daunted though, any of us; we’re inside what a parade does for you. We’re not doing it for ourselves. What did it do for you two, when you came from wherever?

  Did you feel that the wedding notice in the paper later—you were the kind of couple who would have had one—made you as you were and would be—or that you made it? To wherever you are. What did you make of it, and yourselves, later? Did you do it for yourselves?

  We weren’t feeling much. We had been here before. One of us had been to a war directly; the other hadn’t. But we don’t know anybody who hasn’t been to a manufactured event. Once, during a war, one of us had even had a wedding reception right here in the Park, in the Tavern on the Green so never wanted to stop by there for a drink. What is a manufactured event? What is this journalism they say is eating the real ones, eating couples, eating the hook I left on the subway, eating my life? Eating yours? Does it? Now? (The butcher’s had his baby—it’s been five, seven years. He doesn’t read much, but even so, the wolf of newsprint is at his door.) And you looked like the kind of alert, aware, liberal young pair—Ted & Molly? Mark Smithers and Janie Grosbard? Oleg Peters and Ava-Lou Jones? Hedda Goldberg and Abel Cohen? Sweet Caporal, Idaho, Lattingtown, L.I., Berkeley, California, Bruckner Boulevard? … John and Mary Doe, temporarily of the Plaza Hotel. I don’t want to know your names, please. Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Houdini, marching became you! And us?

  In all they say is happening to us, the books dying like the robins, the grass withering like the books, they can club my psyche with the hard facts like they do the baby seal, but I’ll still hunt my private Cyclades. When I saw the two of you, I thought “This is the day that pair go public. Even though, standing here by the thousands, we’re just newsprint to them. This is the day for them, maybe. After this, will they just wait for the manufactured facts?” I still can’t believe that people only do. I see them standing lone and aside, trees that will not be a wood. I see them looping the mist from the monument around a finger, and spinning it into a hair thin enough to string an insoluble equation on, or to service a guitar.

  (Strikes me you two might be too young to know who Houdini was. He was a magician, who got out of trunks. His hands being manacled first, by experts. “Life’s not all fact,” he said, and slipped out.)

  At precisely 9:10 then, for those who must have it so, or after we’d been for an hour or more in the tepid cage of the crowd—always warmer there—we came to our first familiar face, a man called Bob Brustein, then or about to be dean of the drama school at Yale. I mention names because this is journalism; there’s to be no clouding-it-over from Olympus, that old pattern-studio. Also because, since his was the first known face I saw on my first peace march, whenever I think of that day, I think of him. And because the expression on his embarrassed face was the same as on ours, on mine. … At one time, on those morning paths which stand so still and waiting even while the press of us wanders, we collect a whole group of such faces; for the record there was Ann and Christopher, Philip and Anne, Ann and Alfred, Judy and Jules, and John and Anne. And maybe Ann and Bernie, though not for sure; the fact remains that facts are always a little interchangeable … Our crowd, it must have seemed like to others—and even warmer there. But in truth we only meet for a minute, stand for a minim in the pool of stasis a park meeting makes, and skitter on, pleached by what we cannot bear to think is politics, squinting, with what we hope is allegiance to all. At noon, or perhaps 12:35, I share food with whichever of the group is near—some who, to appear feckless of spirit, came without, and some who like us, have brought a campaign lunch. And some who, having been seen, leave early. “British biscuits,” one who stayed says, taking one. “Too chic.” And chocolate is for soldiers. Would it have been better to have been embarrassed in private? After automated war, an automated peace always follows. But we are the pen-pushers of our own lives, the storytellers of other peoples’; we can’t believe that the real events are artifices. We’re too smart to be caught in context.

  My companion, who has been to war,
whispers, “Be better when we march.”

  But maybe it’s you, Houdini pair, that we’re waiting for. There is a time, maybe, when all the facts chiming together make a creation beyond themselves. To be sung in part-songs later, in all the places where life hides from the record. Behind the veils of old brides. In the ink-music at the bottom of a brain. In the marching fountains that once were literature.

  So here we are, at 2:28 precisely, in front of the Plaza, waiting for the word to move, massed at the border of the park in our shimmering thousands—which is the way a crowd looks from above. Well dressed, this one. Told to. Though such as it is: deans and writers, social workers and students, CPAs and scholars, actors and teachers and their children—we are unlikely to impress a President. Some people are city litter, admit it, but there’s none of that, there’s not a submerged face here. College people. Not rich enough, not poor enough. But up there, at the punchbowl of marriage, we impressed you. What did you say to the parents who paid for the Plaza: We want to march?

  Suddenly, skimming from the plush steps, or maybe floated down in a Chagall balloon from that window just over where the evening hustlers check in—you two are here. Oh Houdinis, you got out of the trunk the wedding pictures were going to put you in! The snapshot of you among us, smiling, beckoning, bidding us begin our parade—somebody must have taken one—is different.

  You’re a slight girl in a Juliet cap; you carry your token train over one arm and lean on the groom with the other; is there an easy suggestion that you are a little urging him? No, he’s a slight boy too but taller, you’re a matched pair; his hangdog look at what you’ve got him into is only what all grooms of his kind have, nothing to do with politics. As the two of you walk toward us, among us, he gains jauntiness; your private, almost shamefaced smile is for each of us, but he can’t be as public as you. (In the Ninth Avenue church, last wedding I was to, the totem bride entered with two great pompoms of veil hiding her votive face, and the groom strutted twice-as-alive in his black-and-white, like a guinea-hen—thirty-two of whose heads he had chopped off for the wedding-feast that morning—but over there the facts are different.)

  You stand very still, Houdinis, in our votive light. In the place where the horse-cabbies usually are. The bride’s cheeks shine like small peach-halves. The crowd holds that silence one can hear. Her bodice is a heart. She raises a fist, her lace train dropped, sliding maybe into manure, and there it is—the peace sign, the V—the victory!

  We knew it! You are Americans.

  Suddenly everybody bursts out cheering. … Not singing … suddenly everybody burst out singing, that’s a line from Sassoon, and from that book, Poems Children Love, that I left on the subway. And from the first World War. But what difference can it make? Above my head, my own arm is up, and back of me, back, back, on and on behind me the V’s are spreading, waving over Central Park, all the way to the Mall. Near me, an Anne whispers, “It’s May-Day, to the life!” Oh everybody’s waving, Scott Fitzgerald too, and why not, it’s everybody’s war. And at last we’re moving. Off cobble and grass, and the old park design of L’Enfant, onto a street where once were the steel lines of the Fifty-Ninth—a trolley-line, not a regiment—then onto manure, and rounding the corner of Bergdorf’s, to where Fifth Avenue still leads to the spire of St. Pat’s, Childe Hassam even in this gray light. Our lines—we’re in lines now—are destined for the U.N. of course. The Hassam series, Fifth Avenue in Wartime, are all a striped, waving red-and-blue, the flags hanging to a point, in the solemn, seventh-seal way flags used to do. I have his lithograph of Armistice Day, in it this very bit of park we’re leaving. Signed. And if the ticker-tape falling now on my face from above is all from paintings and from what the ads call the world of books, what does it matter—we’re marching. My companion, whose hand I hold shy and tight, whispers “Better now?” It is precisely 2:59.

  The Houdinis are gone.

  Forever?

  Worlds shudder and join. Streets go jagged, girls get knocked up, and are healed over with a sealing flag. Slowly, in the Cyclades, in the butchershop, the dynasties push on. It’s time again to drop a name.

  Ronnie’s next will be christened for a saint, like the first one. On the march—at half-past four, on Forty-Ninth Street, we ran into a man named Anthony West, who for some minutes marched abreast with us, his face the only clear, unabashed one of us I saw that day, but he’s an Englishman. (Ronnie’s family never march civilian, but last week two members of their family flew over from Italy to see the Muhammed Ali—Frazier fight; they’re an entirely different readership.) On the march, it began to rain, I had an umbrella, but at 5:51 we copped out for our dinner-date, when just in sight of the side-street leading to the U.N., solid with motionless people under their parapluies and bumbershoots; that’s the way it shone back to us, international. In the subway, there are like breadlines for tokens, but my companion has two in his pocket, and in twelve minutes we’re home—which is just over the BMT—and out of our marching clothes into evening ones. Catch a cab, and in two shakes, or eighteen minutes more, we are on the top floor of a townhouse in East Eighty-First Street, sitting on a sofa, bathed but foot-soldier-sore, next to the ninety-year-old man the party’s for, Rudolph Hempel by name—he has always regretted that his parents, who knew Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, wouldn’t let him go to “their” university—who says, when he hears where we’ve been, “Oh—you young people.” Suddenly, we burst out laughing. At approximately seven o’clock.

  On the march—I remind my companion—we whispered. I ask him why. He says nobody’s forgetting the war, nobody’s forgotten it—but your experiences are your own. My name is Hortense. His is Curt.

  O posterity who will not know us, this is all the names we were.

  Or almost.

  There is a pair to whom some have given the name Houdini. From another legend, farther back. They reside in another area now, beyond the city limits. (Once, not long after I met them, Ronnie’s father, the old boss, says to me “Couple my customers, they say they know you. Newlyweds.” and my heart shot up like the cardinal just now at my window, against the thermapane of its own fear. I don’t want to know the trunk they’re in now. “College couple,” the old boss said. It wasn’t them of course; it can never be.) So if you are some college couple reading this, and think you fit the facts, please do not write in. Fall in each other’s arms, gather your children into that circle, tell them. The Houdinis are another pair now, entirely. The record will do them justice. I am making my peace with it. I can’t let in any fact that wasn’t there then. But I must let in all the facts that were. I’m not making my peace with the kind of history they say is eating us. I want to march on.

  For the record:

  You stand there. We stand there. In the Childe Hassam light of former flags. At 2:28. Always somewhere, standing on the manure from the horsecabs, a yard from the lamp where the hustlers meet—you give the signal. The V’d hands fly up, a bird-cloud wavering back, and back, and back. The leaders have let us wait too long, but suddenly because of you we’re cheering. The air looks grainy, as if, through its dirty, pointillist specks, a first cause is trying to say something. Under the asphalt of that street, a trolley-rail strikes through. The broken pavements of Fifty-Ninth Street, I stand and weep for them. Maybe only the blood-pudding is real. But we march.

  And it was a famous victory. You are never lost, Houdinis, even on the subway. This is how we bring the news from Ghent to Aix, to all the butchershops. In the poems children love. Stand there in the sawdust, Houdinis, in the pure, fictional light. Bloom forever, from the dust of literature.

  Worlds shudder and join. Why do I whisper, even now?

  PART IV:

  PUSHING AROUND THE PANTHEON

  EVERY ART IS a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

  We’re hierarchical animals; none of this is new. Why though is th
e artist as a person as well as a creator, endlessly anatomized, while the psychological make-up of a critic is let go hang? Who has investigated the oedipal pulsings of a Sainte-Beuve? Or the possible anal indelicacies of a Saintsbury? Or the Gestalt of all our critics who wrote a novel once? Nobody hangs their laundry out. Or sees them as men and women for a’ that, outside the hall of fame like everybody else, beating their little welfare fists against the big bank door.

  When the Reform Bill goes through on Olympus, all critics and certainly all biographers, will carry their non-academic vita with them at all times, to be checked as freely as the tag on a decanter, before it pours forth. We shan’t want to see their medals. What we’ll want to know is the state of their beds, their dreamgoals and psychic pocketbooks, before we listen to them freudenize Twain and stack-sullivanize Keats. What is home to Harold Rosenberg, we’ll ask, that Barnett Newman is this to him? Where were you, Edmund Gosse, Maurice Bowra, Brander Matthews, when the lights went out? And who has collated Arnold Toynbee’s “analysis”—a Jungian one, I was told—with his version of history?

  Oh, I can see all the arts then, a proper Disneyland, with all the worms turning animatedly to say to the spades “Kindly present a psychiatric background of your prejudices. And in print please!” Before you dig me up.

  Trouble is, would we read it?

  Perhaps all artists have to settle for the fact that they don’t get justice, but treatment. Sitting men will always see themselves as Jovian. The artist’s concept of himself tends to be cruciform—as befits a hanging one. Both will be even further shaped by their situations. The critic spreads bottomwise, into scholarship. An artist’s best mobility is above the neck. Often when he has enough work behind him, he grows a second head on it.

  I begin to remember how many artists of the past have had two of them. My prejudice is that we should always carry our critic head a little negligently under the arm, like a collapsible top-hat. In the nineteenth century, the writer-artist sported his less self-consciously; the poets wrote the best literary criticism of the age, and even in the letters of George Eliot (who all her life, according to Gordon S. Haight in his preface to her Letters, suffered from “a morbid lack of self-confidence” in her work), we see nevertheless how widely and naturally she expects any writer to range. Europe expected it. There are periods that tolerate this, just as the gardener is allowably the authority on roses, the vintner on wine. Ours is not one of them.