Collected Stories

stupid book (it had an embossed monochrome brown binding) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I was refusing to hand over my soul to “actual conditions,” which are the conditions uncovered now by the FBI’s sting. (The disclosures of corruption won’t go very far; the worst of the bad guys have little to fear.)

Cousin Shana was on the wrong track. What she said is best interpreted as metaphysics. It wasn’t the head that was open. It was something else. We enter the world without prior notice, we are manifested before we can be aware of manifestation. An original self exists or, if you prefer, an original soul. It may be as Goethe suggested, that the soul is a theater in which Nature can show itself, the only such theater that it has. And this makes sense when you attempt to account for some kinds of passionate observation—the observation of cousins, for example. If it were just observation in the usual sense of the term, what would it be worth? But if it is expressed “As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers,” that is a different matter. When I ran into Tanky and his hoodlum colleague at O’Hare and thought what a disembodied William Blake eye above us might see, I was invoking my own fundamental perspective, that of a person who takes into reckoning distortion in the ordinary way of seeing but has never given up the habit of referring all truly important observations to that original self or soul.

I believed that Motty in his silence was consulting the “original person.” The distorted one could die without regrets, perhaps was already dead.

The seams open, the bonds dissolve, and the untenability of existence releases you back again to the original self. Then you are free to look for real being under the debris of modern ideas, and in a magical trance, if you like, or with a lucidity altogether different from the lucidity of approvedtypes of knowledge.

It was at about this moment that Cousin Motty beckoned me with his head. He had something to say. It was very little. Almost nothing. Certainly he said nothing that I was prepared to hear. I didn’t expect him to ask to be unbuckled. As I bent toward him I put one hand on his shoulder, sensing that he would want me to. I’m sure he did. And perhaps it would have been appropriate to speak to him in his native language, as Seckel in the bayous had spoken to his Indian, the last of his people. The word Motty now spoke couldn’t have been “Shalom.” Why should he give such a conventional greeting? Seeing how he had puzzled me, he turned his eyes earnestly on me—they were very large. He tried again.

So I asked Riva why he was saying this, and she explained, “Oh, he’s saying ‘Scholem.’ Over and over he reminds me that we’ve been receiving mail for you from Scholem Stavis….”

“From Cousin Scholem?… Not Shalom.”

“He must not have an address for you.”

“I’m unlisted. And we haven’t seen each other in thirty years. You could have told him where to reach me.”

“My dear, I had my hands full. I wish you would take all this stuff away. It fills a whole drawer in my pantry, and it’s been on Motty’s mind as unfinished business. He’ll feel much better. When you take it.”

As she said “take all this stuff away” she glanced toward Eunice. It was a heavy glance. “Take this cross from me” was her message. Sighing, she led me to the kitchen.

Scholem Stavis, a Brodsky on his mother’s side, was one of the blue-eyed breed of cousins, like Shimon and Seckel. When Tanky in that memorable moment at O’Hare Airport had spoken of geniuses in the family—“We had a couple or three”—he was referring also to Scholem, holding the pair of us up to ridicule. “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” was the category his remark fell into, together with “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Old-style immigrant families had looked eagerly for prodigies. Certain of the children had tried to gratify their hopes. You couldn’t blame Tanky for grinning at the failure of such expectations.

Scholem and I, growing up on neighboring streets, attending the same schools, had traded books, and since Scholem had no trivial interests, it was Kant and Schelling all the way, it was Darwin and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and in our senior year in high school it was Oswald Spengler. A whole year was invested in The Decline of the West. In his letters (Riva gave me a Treasure Island shopping bag to carry them in) Scholem reminded me of these shared interests. He wrote with a dated dignity that I rather appreciated. He sounded just a little like the Constance Garnett translations of Dostoyevsky. He addressed me as “Brodsky.” I still prefer the Garnett translations to all later ones. It isn’t real Dostoyevsky if it doesn’t say, “Just so, Porfiry Petrovitch,” or “I worshipped Tanya, as it were.” I take a more slam-bang approach to things myself. I have a weakness for modern speed and even a touch of blasphemy. I offer as an example Auden’s remark about Rilke, “The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho.” Just to emphasize that we can’t afford to forget the dissolution of the bonds (announced at Jena, 1806). But of course I didn’t dispute the superiority of Dostoyevsky or Beethoven, whom Scholem always mentioned as the Titans. Scholem had been and remained a Titanist. The documents I brought home from Rivas pantry kept me up until four in the morning. I didn’t sleep at all.

It was Scholem’s belief that he had made a discovery in biology that did with Darwin what Newton had done with Copernicus, and what Einstein had done with Newton, and the development and application of Scholem’s discovery made possible a breakthrough in philosophy, the first major breakthrough since the Critique of Pure Reason. I might have predicted from my early recollections of him that Scholem wouldn’t do anything by halves. He was made of durable stuff. Wear out? Well, in the course of nature we all wore out, but life would never crack him. In the old days we would walk all over Ravenswood. He could pack more words into a single breath than any talker I ever knew, and in fact he resisted breathing altogether, as an interruption. White-faced, thin, queerly elastic in his gait, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants, he was always ahead of me, in a pale fever. His breath had an odor like boiled milk. As he lectured, a white paste formed in the corners of his mouth. In his visionary state he hardly heard what you were saying, but ran galactic rings around you in a voice stifled with urgency. I thought of him later when I came to read Rimbaud, especially the “Bateau Ivre”—a similar intoxication and storming of the cosmos, only Scholem’s way was abstruse, not sensuous. On our walks he would pursue some subject like Kant’s death categories, and the walk-pursuit would take us west on Foster Avenue, then south to the great Bohemian Cemetery, then around and around North Park College and back and forth over the bridges of the drainage canal. Continuing our discussion in front of automobile showrooms on Lawrence Avenue, we were not likely to notice our gestures distorted in the plate-glass windows.

He looked altogether different in the color photo that accompanied the many documents he had mailed. His eyebrows were now thick and heavy, color dark, aspect grim, eyes narrowed, mouth compressed and set in deep folds. Scholem hadn’t cracked, but you could see how much pressure he had had to withstand. It had driven hard into his face, flattened the hair to his skull. In one of the Holy Sepulchre corners of my apartment, I studied the picture closely. Here was a man really worth examining, an admirable cousin, a fighter made of stern stuff.

By contrast, I seemed to myself a slighter man. I could understand why I had tried my hand at the entertainment business instead, a seriocomic MC on Channel Seven—Second City cabaret stuff, dinner among the hoods and near-hoods at Fritzel’s, even cutting a caper on Kupcinet’s inane talk show before self-respect counseled me to knock it off. I now took a more balanced view of myself. Still, I recognized that in matters of the intellect I had yielded first honors to Cousin Scholem Stavis. Even now the unwavering intensity of his face, the dilation of his nose breathing fire earthward, tell you what sort of man this is. Since the snapshot was taken near his apartment house, you can see the scope of his challenge, for behind him is residential Chicago, a street of Chicago six-flats, a good address sixty years ago, with all the middle-class graces available to builders in the twenties—a terrifying setting for a man like Scholem. Was this a street to write philosophy in? It’s because of places like this that I hate the evolutionism that tells us we must die in stages of boredom for the eventual perfection of our species.

But in these streets Cousin Scholem actually did write philosophy. Before he was twenty-five years old he had already broken new ground. He told me that he had made the first real advance since the eighteenth century. But before he could finish his masterpiece the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the logic of his revolutionary discoveries in biology, philosophy, and world history made it necessary for him to enter the armed forces—as a volunteer, of course. I worked hard over the pages he had sent, trying to understand the biological and world- historical grounds of all this. The evolution of gametes and zygotes; the splitting of plants in monocotyledons and dicotyledons, of the animals into annelids and vertebrates—these were familiar to me. When he moved from these into a discussion of the biological foundations of modern politics, it was only my goodwill that he took with him, not my understanding. The great landmasses were held by passive, receptive nations. Smaller states were the aggressive impregnating forces. No resume would help; I’d have to read the full text, he wrote. But Right and Left, he wished to tell me now, were epiphenomena. The main current would turn finally into a broad, centrist, free evolutionary continuum which was just beginning to reveal its promise in the Western democracies. From this it is