Leviathan (7 page)

There is the strange story of Catherine Weldon, the middle-class woman from Brooklyn who goes out west to become one of Sitting Bull’s wives. There is a farcical account of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis’s tour of the United States—hunting buffalo with Bill Cody, traveling down the Mississippi with General and Mrs. George Armstrong Custer. There is General Sherman, whose middle name gives homage to an Indian warrior, receiving an appointment in 1876 (just one month after Custer’s last stand) “to assume military control of all reservations in the Sioux country and to treat the Indians there as prisoners of war,” and then, one year later, receiving another appointment from the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty “to decide whether the statue should be located on Governor’s or Bedloe’s Island.” There is Emma Lazarus dying from cancer at age
thirty-seven, attended by her friend Rose Hawthorne—who is so transformed by the experience that she converts to Catholicism, enters the order of St. Dominic as Sister Alphonsa, and devotes the last thirty years of her life to caring for the terminally ill. There are dozens of such episodes in the book. All of them are true, each is grounded in the real, and yet Sachs fits them together in such a way that they become steadily more fantastic, almost as if he were delineating a nightmare or a hallucination. As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character—filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone—until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing begin to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.

There are definite flaws, however. Although Sachs works hard to mask them, there are times when the novel feels too constructed, too mechanical in its orchestration of events, and only rarely do any of the characters come fully to life. Midway through my first reading of it, I remember telling myself that Sachs was more of a thinker than an artist, and his heavy-handedness often disturbed me—the way he kept hammering home his points, manipulating his characters to underscore his ideas rather than letting them create the action themselves. Still, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t writing about himself, I understood how deeply personal the book must have been for him. The dominant emotion was anger, a full-blown, lacerating anger that surged up on nearly every page: anger against America, anger against political hypocrisy, anger as a weapon to destroy national myths. But given that the war in Vietnam was still being fought then, and given that Sachs had gone to jail because of that war, it wasn’t hard to understand where his anger had come from. It gave
the book a strident, polemical tone, but I also believe it was the secret of its power, the engine that pushed the book forward and made you want to go on reading it. Sachs was only twenty-three when he started
The New Colossus
, and he stuck with the project for five years, writing seven or eight drafts in the process. The published version came to four hundred and thirty-six pages, and I had read them all by the time I went to sleep on Tuesday night. Whatever reservations I might have had were dwarfed by my admiration for what he had accomplished. When I came home from work on Wednesday afternoon, I immediately sat down and wrote him a letter. I told him that he had written a great novel. Any time he wanted to share another bottle of bourbon with me, I would be honored to match him glass for glass.

We started seeing each other regularly after that. Sachs had no job, and that made him more available than most of the people I knew, more flexible in his routines. Social life in New York tends to be quite rigid. A simple dinner can take weeks of advance planning, and the best of friends can sometimes go months without any contact at all. With Sachs, however, impromptu meetings were the norm. He worked when the spirit moved him (most often late at night), and the rest of the time he roamed free, prowling the streets of the city like some nineteenth-century
flâneur
, following his nose wherever it happened to take him. He walked, he went to museums and art galleries, he saw movies in the middle of the day, he read books on park benches. He wasn’t beholden to the clock in the way other people are, and as a consequence he never felt as if he were wasting his time. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t productive, but the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there. This helped him as a writer, I
think, since his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t on the job.

My days weren’t nearly as open as his were. I had returned from Paris the previous summer with nine dollars in my pocket, and rather than ask my father for a loan (which he probably wouldn’t have given me anyway), I had snatched at the first job I was offered. By the time I met Sachs, I was working for a rare-book dealer on the Upper East Side, mostly sitting in the back room of the shop writing catalogues and answering letters. I went in every morning at nine and left at one. In the afternoons, I translated at home, working on a history of modern China by a French journalist who had once been stationed in Peking—a slapdash, poorly written book that demanded more effort than it deserved. My hope was to quit the job with the book dealer and start earning my living as a translator, but it still wasn’t clear that my plan would work. In the meantime, I was also writing stories and doing occasional book reviews, and what with one thing and another, I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. Still, I saw Sachs more often than seems possible now, considering the circumstances. One advantage was that we had turned out to live in the same neighborhood, and our apartments were within easy walking distance of each other. This led to quite a few late-night meetings in bars along Broadway, and then, after we discovered a mutual passion for sports, weekend afternoons as well, since the ballgames were always on in those places and neither one of us owned a television set. Almost at once, I began seeing Sachs on the average of twice a week, far more than I saw anyone else.

Not long after these get-togethers began, he introduced me to
his wife. Fanny was a graduate student in the art history department at Columbia then, teaching courses at General Studies and finishing up her dissertation on nineteenth-century American landscape painting. She and Sachs had met at the University of Wisconsin ten years before, literally bumping into each other at a peace rally that had been organized on campus. By the time Sachs was arrested in the spring of 1967, they had already been married for close to a year. They lived at Ben’s parents’ house in New Canaan during the period of the trial, and once the sentence was handed down and Ben went off to prison (early in 1968), Fanny moved back to her own parents’ apartment in Brooklyn. At some point during all this, she applied to the graduate program at Columbia and was accepted with a faculty fellowship—which included free tuition, a living stipend of several thousand dollars, and responsibility for teaching a couple of courses. She spent the rest of that summer working as an office temp in Manhattan, found a small apartment on West 112th Street in late August, and then started classes in September, all the while commuting up to Danbury every Sunday on the train to visit Ben. I mention these things now because I happened to see her a number of times during that year—without having the slightest idea who she was. I was still an undergraduate at Columbia then, and my apartment was only five blocks away from hers, on West 107th Street. As chance would have it, two of my closest friends lived in her building, and on several of my visits I actually ran into her in the elevator or the downstairs lobby. Beyond that, there were the times when I saw her walking along Broadway, the times when I found her standing ahead of me at the counter of the discount cigarette store, the times when I caught a glimpse of her entering a building on campus. In the spring, we were even in a class together, a large lecture course on the history of aesthetics given by a professor in the philosophy department. I noticed her in all these places because I
found her attractive, but I could never quite muster the courage to talk to her. There was something intimidating about her elegance, a walled-off quality that seemed to discourage strangers from approaching her. The wedding ring on her left hand was partly responsible, I suppose, but even if she hadn’t been married, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. Still, I made a conscious effort to sit behind her in that philosophy class, just so I could spend an hour every week watching her out of the corner of my eye. We smiled at each other once or twice as we were leaving the lecture hall, but I was too timid to push it any farther than that. When Sachs finally introduced me to her in 1975, we recognized each other immediately. It was an unsettling experience, and it took me several minutes to regain my composure. A mystery from the past had suddenly been solved. Sachs was the missing husband of the woman I had watched so attentively six or seven years before. If I had stayed in the neighborhood, it’s almost certain that I would have seen him after he was released from prison. But I graduated from college in June, and Sachs didn’t come to New York until August. By then, I had already moved out of my apartment and was on my way to Europe.

There’s no question that it was a strange match. In almost every way that I can think of, Ben and Fanny seemed to exist in mutually exclusive realms. Ben was all arms and legs, an erector set of sharp angles and bony protrusions, whereas Fanny was short and round, with a smooth face and olive skin. Ben was ruddy by comparison, with frizzy, unkempt hair, and skin that burned easily in the sun. He took up a lot of room, seemed to be constantly in motion, changed facial expressions every five or six seconds, whereas Fanny was poised, sedentary, catlike in the way she inhabited her body. She wasn’t beautiful to me so much as exotic, although that might be too strong a word for what I’m trying to express. An ability to fascinate is
probably closer to what I’m looking for, a certain air of self-sufficiency that made you want to watch her, even when she just sat there and did nothing. She wasn’t funny in the way Ben could be, she wasn’t quick, she never ran off at the mouth. And yet I always felt that she was the more articulate of the two, the more intelligent, the one with greater analytical powers. Ben’s mind was all intuition. It was bold but not especially subtle, a mind that loved to take risks, to leap into the dark, to make improbable connections. Fanny, on the other hand, was thorough and dispassionate, unremitting in her patience, not prone to quick judgments or ungrounded remarks. She was a scholar, and he was a wise guy; she was a sphinx, and he was an open wound; she was an aristocrat, and he was the people. To be with them was like watching a marriage between a panther and a kangaroo. Fanny, always superbly dressed, stylish, walking alongside a man nearly a foot taller than she was, an oversize kid in black Converse All-Stars, blue jeans, and a gray hooded sweatshirt. On the surface, it seemed to make no sense. You saw them together, and your first response was to think they were strangers.

But that was only on the surface. Underneath his apparent clumsiness, Sachs had a remarkable understanding of women. Not just of Fanny, but of nearly all the women he met, and again and again I was surprised by how naturally they were drawn to him. Growing up with three sisters might have had something to do with it, as if the intimacies learned in childhood had impregnated him with some occult knowledge, a way into feminine secrets that other men spend their whole lives trying to discover. Fanny had her difficult moments, and I don’t imagine she was ever an easy person to live with. Her outward calm was often a mask for inner turbulence, and on several occasions I saw for myself how quickly she could fall into dark, depressive moods, overcome by some indefinable anguish that would suddenly push her to the point of tears. Sachs protected her
at those times, handling her with a tenderness and discretion that could be very moving, and I think Fanny learned to depend on him for that, to realize that no one was capable of understanding her as deeply as he did. More often than not, this compassion was expressed indirectly, in a language that outsiders couldn’t penetrate. The first time I went to their apartment, for example, the dinner conversation came around to the subject of children—whether or not to have them, when was the best time if you did, how many changes they caused, and so on. I remember talking strongly in favor of having them. Sachs, on the other hand, went into a long song and dance about why he disagreed. The arguments he used were fairly conventional (the world is too terrible a place, the population is too big, too much freedom would be lost), but he delivered them with such vehemence and conviction that I assumed he was speaking for Fanny as well and that both of them were dead-set against becoming parents. Years later, I discovered that just the opposite was true. They had desperately wanted to have children, but Fanny was unable to conceive. After numerous attempts to get her pregnant, they had consulted doctors, had tried fertility drugs, had gone through any number of herbal remedies, but nothing had helped. Just days before that dinner in 1975, they had been given definitive word that nothing they did would ever help. It was a crushing blow to Fanny. As she later confessed to me, it was her worst sorrow, a loss she would go on mourning for the rest of her life. Rather than make her talk about it in front of me that evening, Sachs had boiled up a concoction of spontaneous lies, a kettle of steam and hot air to obscure the issue on the table. I heard only a fragment of what he actually said, but that was because I thought he was addressing his remarks to me. As I later understood, he had been talking to Fanny all along. He was telling her that she didn’t have to give him a child to make him go on loving her.