I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyrical Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in the sagebrush zone and on the North Russian fragrances so faithfully reproduced above timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between the snowbank and the orchid. And yet—was that all? What form of mysterious pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to stare every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored mote passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of having come empty-handed—without what? A gun? A wand? This I dared not probe lest I wound the raw fell under my thin identity.
Skipping the academic year, in a kind of premature «sabbatical leave» that left the Trustees of Quirn University speechless, I wintered in Arizona where I tried to write The Invisible Lath, a book rather similar to that in the reader’s hands. No doubt I was not ready for it and perhaps foiled too much over inexpressible shades of emotion; anyway I smothered it under too many layers of sense as a Russian peasant woman, in her stuffy log house, might overlay (zaspat’) her baby in heavy oblivion after making hay or being thrashed by her drunken husband.
I pushed on to Los Angeles—and was sorry to learn that the cinema company I had counted upon was about to fold after Ivor Black’s death. On my way back, in early spring, I rediscovered the dear phantasmata of my childhood in the tender green of aspen groves at high altitudes here and there, on conifer-clothed ridges. For almost six months I roamed again from motel to motel, several times having my car scratched and cracked by cretinous rival drivers and finally trading it in for a sedate Bellargus sedan of a celestial blue that Bel was to compare with that of a Morpho.
Another odd thing: with prophetic care I took down in my diary all my stops, all my motels (Mes Moteaux as Verlaine might have said!), the Lakeviews, the Valley Views, the Mountain Views, the Plumed Serpent Court in New Mexico, the Lolita Lodge in Texas, Lone Poplars, that if recruited might have patrolled a whole river, and enough sunsets to keep all the bats of the world—and one dying genius—happy. LATH, LATH, Look At The Harlequins! Look at that strange fever rash of viatic tabulation in which I persevered as if I knew that those motor courts prefigured the stages of my future travels with my darling daughter.
In late August, 1947, suntanned, and more edgy than ever, I returned to Quirn and transferred my belongings from storage to the new dwelling (1 Larchdell Road) found for me by efficient and cute Miss Soloway. This was a charming two-storied gray-stone house, with a picture window and a white grand in the long drawing-room, three virginal bedrooms upstairs and a library in the basement. It had belonged to the late Alden Landover, the greatest American belle-lettrist of the half-century. With the help of the beaming Trustees—and rather taking advantage of their joy at welcoming me back to Quirn—I resolved to buy that house. I loved its scholarly odor, a treat seldom granted to my exquisitely sensitive Brunn’s membrane, and I also loved its picturesque isolation amidst a tremendous unkempt garden above a larched and golden-rodded steep slope.
To keep Quirn grateful, I also decided to reorganize completely my contribution to its fame. I scrapped my Joyce seminar which in 1945 had attracted (if that is the word) only six students—five grim graduates and one not quite normal sophomore. In compensation I added a third lecture in Masterpieces (now including Ulysses) to my weekly quota. The chief innovation, however, lay in my bold presentation of knowledge. During my first years at Quirn I had accumulated two thousand pages of literary comments typed out by my assistant (I nonce I have not introduced him yet: Waldemar Exkul, a brilliant young Balt, incomparably more learned than I; dixi, Ex!). These I had the Photostat people multiply to accommodate at least three hundred students. At the end of every week each received a batch of the forty pages that I had recited to them, with certain addenda, in the lecture hall. The «certain addenda» were a concession to the Trustees who reasonably remarked that without this catch nobody would need to attend my classes. The three hundred copies of the two thousand typed pages were to be signed by the readers and returned to me before the final examination. There were flaws at first in the system (for example, only 153 incomplete sets, many unsigned, were returned in 1948) but on the whole it worked, or should have worked.
Another decision I took was to make myself more available to faculty members than I had been before. The red needle of my dial scale now quiver-stopped at a very conservative figure, when, stark naked, arms hanging like those of a clumsy troglodyte, I stood on the fatal platform and with the help of my new housemaid, an enchanting black girl with an Egyptian profile, managed to make out what lay midway in the blur between my reading glasses and my long-distance ones: a great triumph, which I marked by acquiring several new «costumes,» as my Dr. Olga Repnin says in the novel of that name—«I don’t know (all o's' as indon’ and `anon’) why your horseband wears such not modern costumes.» I visited quite frequently the Pub, a college tavern, where I tried to mix with white-shoed young males, but somehow ended up by getting involved with professional barmaids. And I entered in my pocket diary the addresses of some twenty fellow professors.
Most treasured among my new friends was a frail-looking, sad-looking, somewhat monkey-faced man with a shock of black hair, gray-streaked at fifty-five, the enchantingly talented poet Audace whose paternal ancestor was the eloquent and ill-fated Girondist of that name («Bourreau, fais ton devoir envers la Libertи!») but who did not know a word of French and spoke American with a flat Midwestern accent. Another interesting glimpse of descent was provided by Louise Adamson, the young wife of our Chairman of English: her grandmother, Sybil Lanier, had won the Women’s National Golf Championship in 1896 at Philadelphia!
Gиrard Adamson’s literary reputation was immensely superior to that of the immensely more important, bitter, and modest Audace. Gerry was a big flabby hulk of a man who must have been nearing sixty when after a life of aesthetic asceticism he surprised his special coterie by marrying that porcelain-pretty and very fast girl. His famous essays—on Donne, on Villon, on Eliot—his philosophic poetry, his recent Laic Litanies and so forth meant nothing to me, but he was an appealing old drunk, whose humor and erudition could break the resistance of the most unsociable outsider. I caught myself enjoying the frequent parties at which good old Noteboke and his sister Phoneme, the delightful Kings, the Adamsons, my favorite poet, and a dozen other people did all they could to entertain and comfort me.
Louise, who had an inquisitive aunt at Honeywell, kept me informed, at tactful intervals, of Bel’s well-being. One spring day in 1949 or 1950 I happened to stop at the Plaza Liquor Store in Rosedale after a business meeting with Horace Peppermill and was about to back out of the parking lot when I saw Annette bending over a baby carriage in front of a grocery store at the other end of the shopping area. Something about her inclined neck, her melancholy concentration, the ghost of a smile directed at the child in the stroller, sent such a pang of pity through my nervous system that I could not resist accosting her. She turned toward me and even before I uttered some wild words—of regret, of despair, of tenderness—there she was shaking her head, forbidding me to come near. «Nikogda,» she murmured, «never,» and I could not bear to decipher the expression on her pale drawn face. A woman came out of the shop and thanked her for tending the little stranger—a pale and thin infant, looking almost as ill as Annette. I hurried back to the parking lot, scolding myself for not realizing at once that Bel must be a girl of seven or eight by this time. Her mother’s moist starry stare kept pursuing me for several nights; I even felt too ill to attend an Easter party at one of the friendly Quirn houses.
During this or some other period of despondency, I heard one day the hall bell tinkle, and my Negro maid, little Nefertitty as I had dubbed her, hasten to open the front door. Slipping out of bed I pressed my bare flesh to the cool window ledge but was not in time to glimpse the entrant or entrants, no matter how far I leant out into a noisy spring downpour. A freshness of flowers, clusters and clouds of flowers, reminded me of some other time, some other
