In any case, there was no way anybody could suspect the true intentions of the teacher of artistic activities.
Because what she’s really interested in—what she planned to emphasize and expand upon in her version of the play—is the matrimonial conflict between Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, in perpetual discussion about the fate of a child.
What she wants to do is appropriate the timeless Shakespeare to portray a dawning era: The Age of Divorce.
The present day of the first separated parents and how it’s affecting their children, picked up by the one or the other or by some relatively neutral relative, in the afternoon, at the exit to the school. She sees them every day: young people who’ve broken with their own parents’ model and, at the same time, are breaking their connection with their own children. They’re like those drivers who don’t know how to park and, when they attempt to, run into the car behind them and the car in front of them. Destruction in both directions. A new and confused race that, nevertheless, descends from warriors (a good part of them emigrants/immigrants; come to this country fleeing distant continental calamities) and they’ll end up creating a new crop of resistant and unbreakable children, weathered in their errors and lunacies, ready to endure whatever may come (over the years, many of their children will depart this ever-shifting land in search of more stable places).
The artistic activities teacher has planned and outlined the whole thing and her only hesitation/temptation is whether or not to accept the offer from that one couple of parents to participate in the production. A couple of parents who’re not (presently) separated, though they don’t seem to be exactly together either. Parents who at times resemble a body with two heads and other times two headless bodies. They’re parents of that boy who’s always looking at her (a look that’s starting to stop being one of so-called “childish curiosity” and beginning to be a look with a different kind of eyes) and always announcing to her that he’s going to be a writer, that he already is. And the truth is he doesn’t bother her at all, though his writing is far worse than that of the other student who he battles over and over in “composition duels” (her idea) and who, a few months before, had been electrocuted and killed, among the ruins that surrounded the school.
The parents of the little writer who survived and who’s on a mission to tell the tale are famous.
They are models.
They appear on TV and at the movies, in spots where they’re always traveling. And they seem too happy to be real, a happiness that seems more a pose than something they live. And she’s afraid they’ll endanger her project. And yet, she tells herself, she could consider them the exception that proves the rule. And, besides, they’ve offered to provide wardrobe and even to film the thing. And their only request (by no means a small request for her) is to play Oberon and Titania. And that’s where she is. Thinking about what to do. Wondering if it was just her—one of those shoots of her provincial upbringing she never managed to trim back entirely—or did that glowing couple get too close and touch her too much when they spoke to her at parent-teacher conferences? And the truth is they’re always inviting her to come out with them some night to one of those “gatherings where there are definitely people who might interest you.” But she tries not to think too much about that and, after all, she came to the city to have experiences, right? And to move with confidence and make an impression.
There are nights, alone, in the apartment where she rents a room, where she feels like a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. A guardian and a guide. A present observer but, also, a key figure. The one who opens the door for the children to go out and play, to get away, to reach for the future.
And she likes to imagine that one of those boys, one of her students (maybe the son of those parents, why not), will become a writer and write one of those novels where she won’t be present in body but, absent, will survive and live on—better than ever, with a brighter glow and intensity, her brilliance that of a lighthouse—in the minds of everyone. One of those novels that always wear a name—hers—on the cover.
The only thing she regrets—so that the effect would be ethnically and geographically and stylistically perfect—is not having been born elsewhere, far away, and not having a Jewish surname and not being one of those tormenting and tormented Chicago girls, in one of those novels she is reading now, because she (her faith in culture as the territory of justice is unshakable) always reads the winners of the Nobel, and now she is reading one of the latest to win the prize, there, in her little bed that she barely fits in, because she feels herself expanding, bigger all the time, as if she doesn’t fit anywhere, but has such great desire to fill everything up, while at the same time it’s all just too much for her.
The artistic activities teacher wonders if that’s happiness or anguish and tells herself that it’s best, just in case, to keep on reading.
† Over the years, all the profound and torrential novels of Saul Bellow end up swimming in the same river and getting all mixed together (the same thing happens with Iris Murdoch, another exceedingly digressive novelist of ideas, of so many ideas, and also one who feeds vampirically off friends and enemies to create her creatures). Of all of them, parts are remembered, moments, thoughts where it doesn’t matter if it’s Moses Herzog or Charlie Citrine thinking them. Either way, it’s the same: they all end up with the same brain.
But there are a handful of pages—definitely not the most transcendent that Bellow wrote—that for him are unforgettable.
One short story—really the aborted beginning and rewrite of an early novel that never came into being or that Bellow opted not to publish—with the title “Zetland: By a Character Witness.”
There, the typical Bellowian narrator/witness evokes the figure of a dead young man, Zetland, inspired like so many of that author’s characters, by a real person: the brilliant and prodigious Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s childhood friend and accomplice and literary rival in the Chicago of his youth (studying anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, they seek each other out and recompose à deux and in Yiddish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot as “Der shir hashirim fun Mendl Pumshtok”), and deceased in 1956 at thirty-eight. Rosenfeld—a bit crazy as a result of a brutal Reichian therapy “seeking the full orgasm”—working and dying at his desk, alone and without anybody, in a one-room rented apartment.
“I had been thrown millions of light years by Isaac Rosenfeld’s death. He died while writing something and it’s something of a comfort to feel that writing something perhaps matters. Perhaps it does,” Bellow wrote in a letter a few days after the funeral. “I loved him, but we were rivals,” he admitted in another. “It should have been Isaac,” Bellow confessed to another friend, several decades later when he received the Nobel. Rosenfeld himself—in days when another brilliant young writer, Truman Capote, was all the rage, the name on everyone’s lips and the apple of everyone’s eye—agreed and stated and wrote in a magazine that “No matter, someday Saul or I will win the Nobel Prize.”
Which doesn’t prevent that, reading the story/fragment, you can detect differences between the narrator (Bellow) and his beloved ghost that, no doubt, would have distanced them through the books and successes of one or the other.
The “witness” of Zetland is shown to be a worldly and figurative vitalist; while Zetland (the story bids him farewell in the beginning of all things, with a splendid future, after having been blown away by reading Moby-Dick) is evoked as a kind of abstract spiritual power and already not-of-this-world even while alive. The reading of one and the other, from outside and with perspective, confirms what he suspected: the survivor was much better than the survived and, probably, the few phantasmal pages that the dead man inspired were the best of his life, though minor within the body of work of the other man who lived to tell the tale.
And Bellow—whose habitual modus operandi was that of medium-ventriloquist; MO/style also suffered/enjoyed by Delmore Schwartz and Alan Bloom and numerous re
latives and ex-wives, among others—lived a long time to tell a whole lot more and many more deaths.
And he wrote almost to the very end when, already ninety, he said that, for him, the world had turned into a cemetery. All of his historical acquaintances were underground, beneath his feet, he had strange dreams (that he encountered Tolstoy driving a beat-up white van on the expressway, his flapping door denting Bellow’s paint job; that he discovered he had the secret remedy for curing a deadly disease inscribed on his penis and as a result he’s being pursued by agents of a pharmaceutical company; that he discovered a library with unknown works by Henry James and Joseph Conrad). He got himself entangled in awkward boutades as a conference speaker, where he asked aloud and to the shock of the auditorium, who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus (when, as someone said, it was more than obvious that the Tolstoy of the Zulus was none other than Tolstoy). And in one of his last interviews, on the BBC, with his disciple Martin Amis, Bellow explained that, “There are moments in the day when I feel as if I’m looking back at life from the beyond; I’ve reckoned with death for so long that I look at the world with the eyes of someone who’s died …” When Amis asked about the existence of an afterlife, he explained: “Well, it’s impossible to believe in it because there’s no rational ground. But I have a persistent intuition, and it’s not so much a hope—call it love impulses. What I think is how agreeable it would be to see my mother and my father and my brothers again—to see again my dead. But then again I think, ‘How long would these moments last?’ You still have to think of eternity as a conscious soul. So the only thing I can think of is that in death we might become God’s apprentices and have the real secrets of the universe revealed to us.”
† Does Zetland = Pertusato, Nicolasito? No, tricky. Beyond the intensity of the relationship, they don’t spend that much time together and don’t come to know (like Bellow and Rosenfeld) strong emotions together, like the discovery of sex and love and the authentic intellectual battles of early adulthood. But it doesn’t matter. Even still, exploring this possibility when it comes to making up an elegy and exaggerating his virtues. Almost turning Pertusato, Nicolasito into one of Salinger’s genius Glass boys. Definitive revenge: to defeat someone who’s been your rival by giving him the prize of looking far more talented than he was, in a prose and style not his but your own. To absorb him, yes. To think of him with apparent generosity, on the threshold of your own death, but, actually, to avail yourself of his mortal remains to undergird your own possible immortality (everyone has a plan to be immortal and, in general, it only really works until they die) while, more and more, you think you have less and less time until you’ll put your last words in writing. To apply to Pertusato, Nicolasito the same treatment Sigmund Freud applies in that dream of his where his dead friends file by and he doesn’t understand them, because they now inhabit a non vixit, a “never lived” when really (successful failure!) what Freud wanted to say was a non vivit, a “no longer living.”
Adding a quote from one of the novels of Iris Murdoch (like Bellow, another reformulator of Shakespeare and serial fabricator of Falstaffs and Prosperos) to the mix. This one: “Death … How is it done? … It can’t be difficult, anyone can do it. It could be more like a little movement, a sort of quick turning away. I shall make that movement one day. How shall I know how? When the times comes I shall know, my body will tell me, will teach me, urge me, push me at last over the edge. It is an achievement, or is it like falling asleep which happens but you don’t know when? Perhaps at the very last moment it is easy, the point where all deaths are alike. But that must be true by definition too.”
And—again, of course, fearing his jealousy and spite—Vladimir Nabokov (who considered Bellow “a miserable mediocrity”; his assessment of Murdoch is unknown, but there are some who, based on that silence, have found coincidences and coded mutual references that could only suggest certain complicity or sympathy).
And remembering, again, that fragment from a little while ago, from a few hours ago, from an eternity ago, from the project that, in a letter to Edmund Wilson (with whom he would end up fighting an epistolary duel, in private and public, about a translation from Russian to English of a poem with duelists), Nabokov postulated as “a new type of autobiography—a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality—and the provisional title is The Person in Question.” A project he ended up carrying out first as Conclusive Evidence (Other Shores in Russian, Другие берега), and then as Speak, Memory. And for him, it’s the title that’s the correct answer to that persistent and improper question posed in cultural supplements to fill their summertime pages, regarding what book you would take to a desert-but-apparently-oft-frequented island, where you’ll never be able to go; because Nabokov’s selective autobiography includes almost all traditions and genres and even a good number of languages.
And Nabokov’s dead were always, like his own dead, in the past. There, that “Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”
Yes, yes, and yes: to dream eternally of the dead (those dead who become so real again during insomnia) while you’re dying, until death comes and, perhaps, you awaken on the Other Side (heaven, purgatory, hell?, limbo!) to discover that, now, there, your charge is to write about the living. That that’s what ghosts are up to when they appear here: not trying to inspire fear but to find inspiration among those who’re still on This Side. The other result of the Lazarus Equation that that stranger revealed to him in Montreux and that launched him into the void of that hadron collider with the accelerated and particular ambition of bringing it all back home, of standing up his fallen comrades, of rewriting his own story, elevating it to universal myth, and imposing on all mere mortals the unforgettable memory of his dead. Dead who, once returned, would no longer be depressed but happy and out strolling through the streets.
All of that—arranged, expanded, carefully manipulated at his convenience—to end up telling how, after successfully putting on the performance of the flying founding father, following the technical instructions and diagrams of the first staging of Peter Pan; after composing and having the children sing a “protest” song in which they opposed the arrival of the bulldozers to demolish everything; after lovingly and passionately planning “my Shakespeare”; his beloved teacher of artistic activities was summarily fired from Gervasio Vicario Cabrera, colegio n.°1 del Distrito Escolar Primero. They accused her of something. Of having an “inappropriate relationship” with a father or a mother or both.
And—out of spite or curiosity, to get into something outside the law—the teacher of artistic activities ended up joining you-know-who’s fashion cell.
And she was captured in the attack by the armed forces in that department store taken over by the chic-guerrillas on that nightmarish Christmas Eve of 1977.
And she died a week or two later, after being thrown out of an airplane flying over a river that flowed out into the sea in front of a city and, as she fell, she felt for a few seconds that she was flying over the enemy lines, like Gervasio Vicario Cabrera. Victorious but forever misunderstood. Telling herself that History—or, at least, the story that student of hers would write—would do right by her, would give her a raison d’être, a reason that now, in the air, is lost never to be found. Because there, falling, she feels as if
she were dreaming that dream everyone dreams where they’re falling. That dream where, eyes squeezed tightly shut, one wakes up just before crashing into the ground or into the water or into the fire or into the story.
† Notes for a story never to be written entitled “The Man Who Hated Mobile Phones” / Opening with a long diatribe against the small devices that people use for everything besides communicating. Set up as a succession of questions in an auditorium, like “Isn’t it true that it was so nice to go on a walk and know that nobody could call you on the phone?” Questions that don’t expect an answer from the audience (because everyone in the audience is busy checking the screens on their devices) and that condemn the incessant hyperkinesia and the attention deficit disorder caused by the new phones compared to the concentrated elegance and restraint of old telephones, only ringing every so often, when we needed them and not when they needed us. The flimsy plastic versus the forceful Bakelite. Smooth rectangles versus strong curves. Those old telephones that began in themselves and that were so alien to referential and polyvalent mania of the new and increasingly everywhere-at-once models. Telephones with a single mission: to transmit good or bad news, and only used to communicate something practical and urgent. You talked on the telephone when there was something to talk about, something to say, information that someone needed. Back then, he remembers, people who talked on the telephone all the time were people “with issues,” because, back then, nobody liked talking on the telephone more than what was necessary and unavoidable. You talked on the telephone to be done talking on the telephone. You called looking for someone and often didn’t find them. You dialed to distance yourself. You picked up the phone to hang it back up. You hung up and didn’t go on.
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