The Ghost Writer (5 page)

“I’ve just finished reading Isaac Babel,” I told him.

He considered this, impassively.

“I was thinking, for sport more or less, that he is the missing link; those stories are what connect you, if you don’t mind my mentioning your work—” He crossed his hands on his belly and rested them there, movement enough to make me say, “I’m sorry.”

“Go ahead. Connected to Babel. How?”

“Well, ‘connected’ of course isn’t the right word. Neither is ‘influence.’ It’s family resemblance that I’m talking about. It’s as though, as I see it, you are Babel’s American cousin—and Felix Abravanel is the other. You through “The Sin of Jesus’ and something in
Red Cavalry
, through the ironical dreaming and the blunt reporting, and, of course, through the writing itself. Do you see what I mean? There’s a sentence in one of his war stories: ‘Voroshilov combed his horse’s mane with his Mauser.’ Well, mat’s just the kind of thing that you do, a stunning little picture in every line. Babel said that if he ever wrote his auto biography he’d call it
The Story of an Adjective.
Well, if it were possible to imagine you writing your autobiography—-if such a think were even imaginable—you might come up with that title too. No?”

“And Abravaneir?”

“Oh, with Abravanel it’s Benya Krik and the Odessa mob: the gloating, the gangsters, all those gigantic types. It isn’t that he throws in his sympathy with the brutes—it isn’t that in Babel, either. It’s their awe of them. Even when they’re appalled, they’re in awe. Deep reflective Jews a little lovesick at the sound of all that un-Talmudic bone crunching. Sensitive Jewish sages, as Babel says, dying to climb trees.”

“’In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees.’”

“Yes, that’s the line,” said I, expecting no less but still impressed. On I went. “Look at Abravanel’s
Properly Scalded
. Movie moguls, union moguls, racketeer moguls, women who are moguls just with their breasts—even the down and out bums who used to be moguls, talking like moguls of the down and out. It’s Babel’s fascination with big-time Jews, with conscience less Cossacks, with everybody who has it his own way. The Will as the Big Idea. Except Babel doesn’t come off so lovable and enormous himself. That’s not how he sees things. He is a sort of Abravanel with the self-absorption drained away. And if you drain away enough, well, in the end you arrive at Lonoff.”

“And what about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes. You haven’t finished. Aren’t you a New World cousin in the Babel clan, too? What is Zuckerman in all of this?”

“Why—nothing. I’ve only published the four stories that I sent you. My relationship is nonexistent. I think I’m still at the point where my relationship to my own work is practically nonexistent.”

So I said, and quickly reached for my glass so as to duck my disingenuous face and take a bitter drop of brandy on my tongue. But Lonoff had read my designing mind, all right; for when I came upon Babel’s description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, “and blood in his penis,” and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite
my
soul’s smithy.

“What else?” Lonoff asked. “Come on, don’t get bashful. This is enjoyable. Talk, please.”

“About—?”

“All these books you read.”

“Your books included or excluded?” I asked him.

“Suit yourself.”

I said, “I think of you as the Jew who got away.”

“And does that help?”

“There’s some truth in it, isn’t there? You got away from Russia and the pogroms. You got away from the purges—and Babel didn’t You got away from Palestine and the homeland. You got away from Brookline and the relatives. You got away from New York—”

“And all of this is recorded where? Hedda Hopper?”

“Some there. The rest I pieced together myself.”

To what end?”

“When you admire a writer you become curious. You look for his secret. The clues to his puzzle.”

“But New York—I was there for three months over twenty years ago. Who told you I got away from New York?”

“Some of the Jews down there you got away from.”

‘ “I was there for three months and I think I got a word in only once. What word I don’t remember, but suddenly I belonged to a faction.”

“That’s why you left?”

“Also, there was the girl I’d fallen in love with and married. She wasn’t happy.”

“Why not?”

“Same as me. Those were terrifying intellectual personalities even back then. Real ideological Benya Kriks, even in their diapers. I didn’t have enough strong opinions to last me down there through a year. My Hope had even fewer.”

“So you came back here, you got away for good.”

“From Jews? Not altogether. The game warden tells me there are some more up in these woods besides me. But you’re more or less right. It’s the deer in their fields that drive the farmers crazy, not the few of us they see around here in caftans. But Where’s the secret, Nathan? What’s the puzzle?”

“Away from all the Jews, and a story by you without a Jew in it is unthinkable. The deer, the farmers, the game war den—”

“And don’t forget Hope. And my fair-haired children.”

“And still all you write about are Jews.”

“Proving what?”

That,” I said, cautiously, “is what I’d like to ask you.”

He thought about it for a moment. “It proves why the young rabbi in Pittsfield can’t live with the idea that I won’t be ‘active.’”

I waited for more, but in vain.

“Do you know Abravanel?” I asked.

“Nathan, surely by now you get the picture.”

“What picture?”

“I don’t know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that’s it. Why would Abravanel want to know me? I put him to sleep. He spoke at Amherst last spring. An invitation arrived so we drove over to hear him. But that’s the only time we’ve ever met. Before the lecture he came down the aisle to where I was sitting and introduced himself. He was very flattering. My respectful younger colleague. Afterward we had a drink with him and his actress. A very polished fellow. The satirist you don’t really see till you catch the
commedia dell’arte
profile. There’s where the derision lives. Head-on he’s something of a heartthrob. Bombay black eyes, and so on. And the young Israeli wife is like lava. The Gentile dream of the melon-breasted Jewess. And the black head of coarse, curly hair—the long female version of his. You could polish a pot with it. They tell me that when she played in the big movie of the Bible she stole the show from the Creation. So there were those two, and there was I with Hope. And with this,” he said, once more lightly laying his hands on his belly. “I understand he does a humorous imitation of me for his friends. No harm intended. One of my former students ran into him in Paris. He’d just addressed a full house at the Sorbonne. I’m told that upon hearing my name he referred to me as ‘the complete man—as unimpressive as he is unimpressed.’”

“You don’t like him much.”

“I’m not in the business. ‘Liking people’ is often just another racket. But you’re right to think well of his books. Not up my alley maybe, all that vanity face to face, but when he writes he’s not just a little Houyhnhnm tapping out his superiority with his hooves. More like a Dr. Johnson eating opium—the disease of his life makes Abravanel fly. I admire the man, actually. I admire what he puts his nervous system through. I admire his passion for the front-row seat. Beautiful wives, beautiful mistresses, alimony the size of the national debt, polar expeditions, war-front reportage, famous friends, famous enemies, breakdowns, public lectures, five-hundred-page novels every third year, and still, as you said before, time and energy left over for all that self-absorption. The gigantic types in the books have to be that big to give him something ‘to think about to rival himself. Like him? No. But impressed, oh yes. Absolutely. It’s no picnic up there in the egosphere. I don’t know when the man sleeps, or if he has ever slept, aside from those few minutes when he had that drink with me.”

Outside, it was like a silent-film studio, where they made snowstorms by hurling mattress wadding into a wind machine. Large, ragged snowclots raced across the window, and when I heard their icy edges nicking at the glass—and the sounds of someone puttering in the kitchen—I remembered Lonoffs wife begging to be discarded, and wondered if the plea would have been quite so thoroughgoing on a sunny spring day. “I think I better get the taxi,” I said, pointing to my watch, “so as to catch the last bus back.”

Of course, I wanted never to leave. True, while Hope was railing apart at the dinner table I had momentarily found myself wishing for my cabin at Quahsay; now, however, the way the crisis seemed magically to have resolved itself served only to intensify my awe of Lonoff, particularly for what he unblushingly had called my own kind of bravery. If only I had thought to take his approach when Betsy had gone wild; if only I had kept my mouth shut until she finished berating me, then swept up the broken crockery and settled into my chair to read another book! Now, why didn’t I? Because I was twenty-three and he was fifty-six? Or because I was guilty and he was innocent? Yes, his authority, and the rapid restoration of household sanity and order, might well owe something to that. Take her! It’s the only thing that makes sense!” cried Hope, and Lonoff’s easy victory seemed to reside in never even having wanted to.

I also hated calling a taxi because of Amy Bellette. I was hoping, a little crazily, that when she came back from dinner with the college librarian, she would offer to drive me through the storm to my bus. Earlier, while Lonoff was measuring out the brandy—concentrating like a bartender who’d trained at Los Alamos with fissionable fifths—I had asked where she went. I hadn’t the nerve to inquire about her status as a displaced person. But at the table, when he’d said that she had come to Athene as a refugee, I was reminded of “the children starving in Europe” whom we had heard so much about when we were children eating in New Jersey. If Amy had been one of them, perhaps that explained the something in her that seemed to me thwarted and underdeveloped, despite the dazzling maturity and severe good looks. I wondered if the dark refugee girl with the curious name Bellette could be Jewish, and in Europe had suffered from worse than starvation.

“Yes,” said Lonoff, “you’d better call the taxi.”

Reluctantly I stood to go.

“Or, if you like,” he said; “you can stay over and sleep in the study.”

“No, think I really have to be off” I said, and cursed the upbringing that had taught me never, to be greedy about second-helpings. How much better if I had been raised in the gutter! Only how would I have gotten from the gutter to here?

“Suit yourself,” Lonoff told me.

“I wouldn’t want to inconvenience your wife.”

“I think it will disturb her more if you leave than if you stay. She might hold herself responsible. I’m certain she would.”

I pretended I had taken my dinner on the moon. “But why?”

“Sit down. Stay for breakfast, Nathan.”

“I’d better not. I shouldn’t.”

“You know who Jimmy Durante is?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know the old Durante number ‘Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, still have the feeling that you wanted to stay’?”

“Yes.”

“Sit.” I sat—suiting myself, as the man said. “Besides,” he told me, “if you go now, you’ll leave most of your cognac.”

“If I go, so will you.”

“Well, the Jew who got away didn’t get away altogether.” He smiled at me. “You don’t have to finish it, just because you’re staying. That’s not part of the deal.”

“No, no, I want to,” I said, and took my biggest sip of the night. Saluting me with his glass, he followed suit.

“Hope will be pleased,” he said. “She misses people. She misses the children and their friends. She went to art school in Boston before I brought her back here, sixteen
versts
to the nearest railway station. Manhattan terrified her, but Boston’s her’ Moscow, she’d move there tomorrow. She thinks I would enjoy it in Cambridge. But all I need are those dinner parties. I’d rather talk to the horse.”

“You have a horse?”

“No.”

I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement; love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self; love for the artistic mulishness and the suspicion of nearly everything else; and love for the buried charm, of which he’d just given me a glimpse. Yes, all Lonoff had to say was that he did not even have the horse to talk to and somehow that did it, released in me a son’s girlish love for the man of splendid virtue and high achievement who understands life, and who understands the son, and who approves.

I should mention here that some three years earlier, after several hours in the presence of Felix Abravanel, I had been no less overcome. But if I did not fall at his feet straightaway, it was because even a college senior as writer-worshipping as myself could see that with Abravanel such boundless adoration—at least if offered up by a youthful male admirer—was doomed to go unrequited. The ardor of those books, composed in the sunny stillness of his California canyon and seething with unbuttoned and aggressive innocence, seemed to have little to do with the author himself when he came coolly out into the fallen world he’d been so ardent about down in the canyon. In fact, the writer who found irresistible all vital and dubious types, not excluding the swindlers of both sexes who trampled upon the large hearts of his optimistic, undone heroes; the writer who could locate the hypnotic core in the most devious American self-seeker and lead him to disclose, in spirited locutions all his own, the depths of his conniving soul; the writer whose absorption with “the grand human discord” made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling—well, in the flesh he gave the impression of being out to lunch.