As we were taking leave he asked if he could see us to our door. With pleasure, I said.
Walking down the street he stopped to give vent to an inspiration. May I suggest, he said, that if you have not yet fixed on a title for your book that you call it This Gentile World! It would be most appropriate even if it makes no sense. Use a nom de plume like Boguslavsky—that will confuse the reader still more.
I am not always so voluble, he added, but you, the two of you, are the Grenze type, and for a derelict from Transylvania that is like an aperitif. I always wanted to write novels, foolish ones, like Dickens. The Mr. Pickwick kind. Instead I became a playboy. Well, I will say goodnight now. Elfenbein is my pseudonym; the real name would astonish you. Look up Deuteronomy, Chapter i3. ‘If there arise among you a—. He was seized with a violent fit of sneezing. The Seltzer water! he exclaimed. Maybe I should go to a Turkish Bath. It’s time for another influenza epidemic. Good night now! Onward as to war! Don’t forget the lion of Judah! You can see him in the movies, when the music starts up. He imitated the growl. Thai, he said, is to show that he is still awake.
16
Why should we always go out of our way to describe the wretchedness and the imperfections of our life, and to unearth characters from wild and remote corners of our country?
Thus Gogol begins Part n of his unfinished novel.
I was now well into the novel—my own—but still I had no clear idea where it was leading me, nor did it matter, since Pop was pleased with all that had been shown him thus far, the money was always forthcoming, we ate and drank well, the birds were scarcer now but still they sang. Thanksgiving had come and gone, and my chess game had improved somewhat. Moreover, no one had discovered our whereabouts, none of our pestilential cronies, I mean. Thus I was able to explore the streets at will, which I did with a vengeance because the air was sharp and biting, the wind whistled, and my brain ever in a whirl drove me on face forward, forced me to ferret out streets, memories, buildings, odors (of rotting vegetables), abandoned ferry slips, storekeepers long dead, saloons converted into dime stores, cemeteries still redolent with the punk of mourners.
The wild and remote corners of the earth were all about me, only a stone’s throw from the boundary which marked off our aristocratic precinct. I had only to cross the line, the Grenze, and I was in the familiar world of childhood, the land of the poor and happily demented, the junk yard where all that was dilapidated, useless and germ ridden was salvaged by the rats who refused to desert the ship.
As I roamed about gazing into shop windows, peering into alleyways, and never anything but drear desolation, I thought of the Negroes whom we visited regularly and of how uncontaminated they appeared to be. The sickness of the Gentiles had not destroyed their laughter, their gift of speech, their easy-going ways. They had all our diseases to combat and our prejudices as well, yet they remained impervious.
The one who owned the collection of erotica had grown very fond of me; I had to be on guard lest he drive me into a corner and pinch my ass. Never did I dream that one day he would be seizing my books too and adding them to his astounding collection. He was a wonderful pianist, I should add. He had that dry pedal technique I relished so much in Count Basie and Fats Waller. They could all play some instrument, these lovable souls. And if there were no instrument they made music with fingers and palms—on table tops, barrels or anything to hand.
I had introduced no unearthed characters as yet in the novel. I was still timid. More in love with words than with psychopathic devaginations. I could spend hours at a stretch with Walter Pater, or even Henry James, in the hope of lifting a beautifully turned phrase. Or I might sit and gaze at a Japanese print, say The Fickle Type of Utamaro, in the effort to force a bridge between a vague, dreamy fugue of an image and a living colored wood-block. I was ever frantically climbing ladders to pluck a ripe fig from some exotic overhanging garden of the past. The illustrated pages of a magazine like the Geographic could hold me spell-bound for hours. How work in a cryptic reference to some remote region of Asia Minor, some little known site, for example, where a Hittite monster of a monarch had left colossal statues to commemorate his flea-blown ego? Or I might dig up an old history book—one of Mommsen’s, let us say—in order to fetch up with a brilliant analogy between the skyscrapered canyons of Wall Street and the congested districts of Rome under the Emperors. Or I might become interested in sewers, the great sewers of Paris, or some other metropolis, whereupon it would occur to me that Hugo or some other French writer had made use of such a theme, and I would take up the life of this novelist merely to find out what had impelled him to take such an interest in sewers.
Meanwhile, as I say, the wild and remote corners of our country were right to hand. I had only to stop and buy a bunch of radishes to unearth a weird character. Did an Italian funeral parlor look intriguing I would step inside and inquire the price of a coffin. Everything that was beyond the Grenze excited me. Some of my most cherished cosmococcic miscreants, I discovered, inhabited this land of desolation. Patrick Garstin, the Egyptologist, was one. (He had come to look more like a gold-digger than an archaelogist.) Donate lived here too. Donate, the Sicilian lad, who in taking an axe to his old man had luckily chopped off only one arm. What aspirations he had, this budding parricide! At seventeen he was dreaming of getting a job in the Vatican. In order, he said, to become better acquainted with St. Francis!
Making the rounds from one alkali bed to another, I brought my geography, ethnology, folk lore and gunnery up to date. The architecture teemed with atavistic anomalies. There were dwellings seemingly transplanted from the shores of the Caspian, huts out of Andersen’s fairy tales, shops from the cool labyrinths of Fez, spare cart wheels and sulkies without shafts, bird cages galore and always empty, chamber pots, often of majolica and decorated with pansies or sun flowers, corsets, crutches and the handles and ribs of umbrellas … an endless array of bric-a-brac all marked manufactured in Hagia Triada. And what midgets! One, who pretended to speak only Bulgarian—he was really a Moldavian—lived in a dog kennel in the rear of his shack. He ate with the dog—out of the same tin plate. When he smiled he showed only two teeth, huge ones, like a canine’s. He could bark too, or sniff and growl like a cur.
None of this did I dare to put into the novel. No, the novel I kept like a boudoir. No Dreck. Not that all the characters were respectable or impeccable. Ah no! Some whom I had dragged in for color were plain Schmucks. (Prepucelos.) The hero, who was also the narrator and to whom I bore a slight resemblance, had the air of a trapezoid cerebralist. It was his function to keep the merry-go-round turning. Now and then he treated himself to a free ride.
What element there was of the bizarre and the outlandish intrigued Pop no end. He had wondered—openly—how a young woman, the author, in other words, came by such thoughts, such images. It had never occurred to Mona to say: From another incarnation! Frankly, I would hardly have known what to say myself. Some of the goofiest images had been stolen from almanacs, others were born of wet dreams. What Pop truly enjoyed, it seemed, was the occasional introduction of a dog or a cat. (He couldn’t know, of course, that I was mortally afraid of dogs or that I loathed cats.) But I could make a dog talk. And it was doggy talk, no mistake about it. My true reason for inserting these creatures of a lower order was to show contempt for certain characters in the book who had gotten out of hand. A dog, properly inspired, can make an ass of a queen. Besides, if I wished to ridicule a current idea which was anathema to me all I had to do was to impersonate a mutt, lift my hind leg and piss on it.
Despite all the foolery, all the shenanigans, I nevertheless managed to create a sort of antique glaze. My purpose was to impart such a finish, such a patina, that every page would gleam like star dust. This was the business of authorship, as I then conceived it. Make mud puddles, if necessary, but see to it that they reflect the galactic varnish. When giving an idiot voice mix the jabberwocky with high-flown allusions to such subjects as paleontology, quadratics, hyperboreanism. A line from one of the mad Caesars was always pertinent. Or a curse from the lips of a scrofulous dwarf. Or just a sly Hamsun-esque quip, like—Going for a walk, Froken? The cowslips are dying of thirst. Sly, I say, because
