Fame & Folly (29 page)

And still there is hope’s dim pulse:

Mercy is what Tamkin brings, even if only briefly, fitfully, almost unrecognizably; he sports “a narrow smile, friendly, calming, shrewd, and wizardlike, patronizing, secret, potent.” He spins out sensational stories, difficult to credit, speaks of “love,” “spiritual compensation,” “the here-and-now,” brags of reading Aristotle in Greek (“A friend of mine taught me when I was in Cairo”); he declares himself to be “a psychological poet.” His topic is the nature of souls:

Tamkin carries on, catching and catching Wilhelm’s heart: “The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can’t be loved. Because the pretender is a lie. The true soul loves the truth.” Garble and gobbledygook, but with a magnetism that can seduce: love, truth, tragedy, the importance of one’s own depths. “As a matter of fact,” Tamkin winds up, “you’re a profound personality, with very profound creative capacities but also disturbances.” Wilhelm falls for all this and at the same time doubts. Tamkin soothes, procrastinates, plunges into tangential narratives, distracts, eats, philosophizes, and finally hands Wilhelm four stanzas of semiliterate self-help verse studded with greatness, joy, beauty, ecstasy, glory, power, serenity, eternity. “What kind of mishmash, claptrap is this!” Wilhelm shouts in his thoughts. Yet Tamkin continues to lure him; at the brokerage office, where the doctor, an operator, hurries from stocks to commodities and back again, Wilhelm’s breast swarms with speculations about the speculator: “Was he giving advice, gathering information, or giving it, or practicing—whatever mysterious profession he practiced? Hypnotism? Perhaps he could put people in a trance while he talked to them.”

In the large and clumsy Wilhelm there is a large and clumsy
shard of good will, a privately spoken, half-broken unwillingness to be driven solely by suspicion: Tamkin is right to count two disparate souls—only, for Wilhelm, which is the pretender, which the true? Is hopeful trust the true soul, and suspicious doubt the pretender? Or the other way around? For a time it hardly matters: Tamkin is a doctor to Wilhelm’s sorrow, a teacher of limitlessness, a snake-oil charlatan whose questionable bottles turn out to contain an ancient and legitimate cure for mortality’s anxieties: seize the day. And he is the elfish light that dances over the blackened field, the ignis fatuus of wish and illusion, the healer of self-castigation. The effectively fatherless Wilhelm finds in Tamkin a fairy godfather—but, as might be expected in the land of wishes, one whose chariot melts to pumpkin at the end of the day. Yet again and again, swept away by one fantastic proposition or another, Wilhelm, moved, is led to respond, “This time the faker knows what he’s talking about.” Or: “How does he know these things? How can he be such a jerk, and even perhaps an operator, a swindler, and understand so well what gives?”

Wilhelm is absurd; sometimes he is childish, and even then, longing for pity and condemning himself for it, he muses: “It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.” In spite of a depth of self-recognition, he will burst out in infantile yells and preposterous gestures. Complaining to his father how his wife’s conduct and her attitudes suffocate him, he grabs his own throat and begins to choke himself. A metaphor turns into a boy’s antics. And after an argument with his wife on a public telephone—during which she accuses him of thinking “like a youngster”—he attempts to rip the telephone box off its wall. There is something of the Marx Brothers in these shenanigans, and also of low domestic farce. “I won’t stand to be howled at,” cries his wife, hanging up on him. But a man’s howl, of anguish or rage, belongs to the Furies, and is not a joke.

Nor is the timing of these incidents. It is the day before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, comprising the most solemn hours of the Jewish liturgical calendar. Old Mr. Rappoport, half-blind, whom Wilhelm encounters at the broker’s, reminds him of his synagogue obligations. Wilhelm replies that he never goes; but
he reflects on his mother’s death, and remembers the ruined bench next to her grave. Dr. Adler, preoccupied with dying as his near destination, has no interest in religion. Wilhelm, though, is fixed on his own destiny, with or without God; and Tamkin is a fixer—a repairer—of destiny and of despair. Yet who is more farcical than Tamkin? Bellow once noted—commenting on the tone of traditional Jewish story-telling—how “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two. At times the laughter seems simply to restore the equilibrium of sanity; at times the figures of the story, or parable, appear to invite or encourage trembling with the secret aim of overcoming it by means of laughter.”

Seize the Day
is such a parable; or, on second thought, perhaps not. The interplay of the comic and the melancholic is certainly there—but a parable, after all, is that manner of fable which means to point a moral, or, at the least, to invoke an instructive purpose. The “secret aim,” as Bellow has it, is generally more significant than the telling or the dramatis personae. Bellow’s fiction hardly counts as “moral” or instructive (though there are plenty of zealous instructors wandering through). His stories look for something else altogether: call it wisdom, call it ontology, or choose it from what Tamkin in free and streaming flight lets loose: “Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this.” A tornado of made-up maxims and twisted tales, Tamkin is among the great comic characters (comedy being a corridor to wisdom, though not the only one): that he flaunts his multiple astonishments in the modest compass of a short novel is a Bellovian marvel. And he is, besides, Bellow’s sentry in reverse, standing watch over an idea of fiction that refuses borders.

Bellow is sometimes said to be the most “European” of American writers—perhaps because of his familiarity with the century’s intellectual currents, his regard for history, the dense and forceful knit of his prose, the sense that nothing has been left out: that what is there is
complete
. That may be why one is compelled to think of the grand Russians when contemplating Bellow (hence Levin, hence Ivan Ilyich); even when his characters attend to the
trivial, metaphysics enters—as when old Mr. Perls observes that in New York if “you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and the earth.” Wilhelm himself, in the subway tunnel under Times Square, invents a “larger body”—all the unsavory and strange-looking underground people united with him in “a blaze of love.”

The larger body, so to speak, of
Seize the Day
is the union of Wilhelm with Bartleby: one can imagine that if Melville had allowed Bartleby a voice beyond those ineluctable, forlorn, perplexingly spare syllables, Wilhelm’s own torrent of yearning, his thwarted expression of the higher consciousness, are what would have emerged. The linking of Bellow with Europeanness, on the other hand, equates depth and scope with those castled and worn and battered lands, overlooking Melville of New York—Melville who is not nearly an ancestor or relative of Bellow’s, but not a stranger either. Bellow’s famous sentence is irrefragably American, a wise-guy (or wisdom-guy) contrivance soaked in learning and pathos and irony and inquisitiveness and knowhow—and exactly balanced, in
Seize the Day
, between the con artist’s lingo and God’s machinery of existence.

In the last one hundred and forty years Bartleby’s Wall Street has altered past recognition. After the flash-by of only forty years Wilhelm’s Broadway is scarcely different. You are not likely to catch sight of Bartleby sidling by the Exchange in the deserted dusk of the business district, but up there on roiling Broadway, not far from the Gloriana and the Ansonia, you might possibly hear Tamkin still working his clientele, promising a killing in rye. So they live on, these two New York stories—as queerly close, in the long view, as the Twin Towers; two heartstruck urban tales made to outlast much else.

RUSHDIE IN THE LOUVRE
 

A
WHILE AGO
—it was in Paris, in the Louvre—I saw Salman Rushdie plain. He was sitting in a high-backed chair at the foot of an incalculably long banquet table fitted out with two rows of skinny microphones, each poking upward like a knuckly finger. His hands lay docile, contained, disciplined, on a dark-red leather portfolio stamped with his name in gilt. A gargantuan crystal chandelier, intricately designed, with multiple glinting pendants, hung from a ceiling painted all over with rosy royal nymphs—a ceiling so remote that the climate up there seemed veiled in haze. Who could measure that princely chamber, whether in meters or in history? And all around, gold, gold gold.

The day before, in a flood of other visitors, I had penetrated an even more resplendent hall of the Louvre, the Galerie d’Apollon—a long, spooky corridor encrusted with kingly treasures: ewers and reliquaries of jasper and crystal, porphyry vases, scepters of coronations anciently repudiated, and, forlorn in their powerlessness, the Crown Jewels. All these hide in the gloom of their glass cases, repelling whatever gray granules of light drizzle
down from above, throwing a perpetual dusk over the march of regal portraits that once commanded awe, and now, in the half-dark, give out a bitter look of faint inner rot. Here, among its glorious leavings, one can feel the death of absolutism. “I can stand a great deal of gold,” Henry James once said; and so could the kings of France, and the Napoleons who succeeded them, all devoted to the caressings and lustings of gold—Midaslike objects of gold, soup bowls and spoons, fretwork and garnishings and pilasters of gold, gold as a kind of contagion or irresistible eruption.

James was enchanted; for him that rash of gold hinted at no disease, whether of self-assertion or force of terror. He equated the artist’s sovereign power with what he had “inhaled little by little” in the Gallery of Apollo—“an endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures,” a glory that signified for him “not only beauty and art and supreme design but history and fame and power.” On his deathbed, confused by a stroke, he imagined himself to be Napoleon in the midst of a project of renovating the Louvre: “I call your attention,” he dictated to his secretary, “to the precious enclosed transcripts of plans and designs for the decoration of certain apartments of the palaces here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who are to take them in hand.”

James’s Napoleonic hallucination of 1916 has been realized seven decades later. Artists and workmen
have
taken the Louvre and the Tuileries in hand. There are cranes and sandy excavations—a broad tract of these at the end of the gardens of the Tuileries abutting the Louvre—and then, suddenly, there is the great living anti-Ozymandian I. M. Pei Pyramid, swarming with visitors, a peaked postmodernist outcropping of glass and steel in the wide square courtyard of this brilliant old palace: a purposeful visual outrage conceived in amazing wit and admirable utility, flanked by a triplet of smaller pyramids like three echoing laughters. The apartments of the Louvre’s Richelieu wing, where Rushdie sat—balding, bearded, in sober coat and tie—was undergoing reconstruction: visitors’ shoes left plaster-powder footprints
on the red-carpeted grand stair. But visitors were few, anyhow, during the renovation, when the Richelieu was closed to the public. On the day Rushdie came, the entire Louvre was closed, and the Richelieu wing was effectively sealed off by a formidable phalanx of security men in black outfits, with black guns at their hips. Rushdie’s arrival was muted, unnoticed; out of the blue he was there, unobtrusive yet somehow enthroned—ennobled—by the ongoing crisis of terror that is his visible nimbus.