The Little Book (3 page)

“I didn’t think I’d actually hit anything,” he stammered again, still amazed at what he had accomplished.

“Well, now you know,” she said, her way of pointing out what she hoped would be a life lesson for Wheeler, that such tiny and thoughtless acts of violence were exactly what eventually caused the huge consequences of global war. She never forced him to promise anything. She had complete faith in her son’s rational powers, and saw no reason to explain or ask for an explanation. “Well, now you know” was for her all that was necessary. She had the utmost confidence that he would hear it, absorb it, and make the necessary attitude changes.

The sparrow hawk collected itself one last time, flapped its wings, then rose haltingly and flew to a nearby stand of cottonwood trees. Wheeler watched silently and recalled again the sensation in his right arm as the stone had left his hand. His fingers seemed to follow the trajectory of the stone to the fluttering target in one beautifully unified motion. Wheeler looked down at his hand, opening and closing it. He looked up at the position in the sky where the hawk had been hovering; then he looked back at his hand, then up to the cottonwood where the bird was regrouping. It was hard to explain, but something began to dawn on the boy in that moment. He had felt for just an instant the connectedness of all things.

It was, you would have to say, a life-altering moment. Wheeler’s was going to be no ordinary journey.

3

The Venerable Haze

When asked the most important influences in his life in the now-classic 1969 interview in
Rolling Stone
magazine, just after the disastrous Altamont concert when he was nearly killed by a pool-cue-wielding Hell’s Angel, Wheeler Burden gave three: Victor Hugo, whose seven novels he had read for the first time by age thirteen; Buddy Holly, whose music he first heard in the Sacramento Valley when he was fifteen; and his Boston private school history teacher and mentor, Arnauld Esterhazy, indeed a most central player in my son’s remarkable story, whom three generations of boys had called the Venerable Haze. Esterhazy, the Haze, had taught history to the boys at St. Gregory’s School, Boston, for more than forty years before Wheeler’s arrival, naïve and impressionable, at age sixteen in 1957 for his high school junior year, what St. Greg’s called the second class.

Esterhazy had grown up and spent his early adulthood in Vienna at the turn of the century, and while recovering from shattered nerves and injuries in the Great War had settled at St. Greg’s, where he became a legend. The two unlikely characters, the undisciplined boy from the California provinces and the old Viennese aristocrat, met in 1957 and formed a cohesive bond when family peculiarities brought them together. The relationship became a most formative one, even for the old man. Somehow, almost magically, the two—old master and young student—had liked each other from the start. “We have much to learn from you, Herr Burden, ” the old man had said in their first meeting, then pausing for effect, “as we begin writing on your tabula rasa.” In his first week in the strange environment of his new school, the sixteen-year-old boy had written home about the eighty-year-old man, “Mr. Esterhazy and I seem to have known each other all our lives.”

The Haze had taught and been close to Wheeler’s war-hero father Dilly Burden in the 1930s, the reason why, everyone assumed, the old man had fixed such fierce attention on the boy from the moment he arrived. The old man did indeed begin a two-year process of filling the blank slate. It was the Haze, then nearly eighty, who so affected Wheeler’s psyche that all other influences paled in comparison. That period from 1957 to 1959 was—Wheeler said later in that famous
Rolling Stone
interview—when two of his most important influences, Esterhazy and Holly, coincided, although the two never met nor for that matter knew each other existed.

Holly, himself a mid-twentieth-century American music icon, had spent his boyhood in Texas with no connection to Vienna. The Haze, a St. Gregory’s icon, had never been to Texas, but had spent his boyhood in Vienna, witness to a most extraordinary pinnacle of culture and, simultaneously, the decline and fall of just about all the essentials necessary to preserve it.

The Haze was tall, thin, and indelibly cultured. His eyes burned with a blue intensity that when fixed on his young impressionable male audience lent the kind of urgency to his classroom observations about history that stuck in the minds of his students. He spoke with an accent more civilized and theatrical than Germanic. His dress was elegant and simple, all his clothes tailored wool and the finest cottons, having taken on that worn comfortable look of a prep school master, with a scent of a rich old talcum. “He smells like old Europe,” an old boy told Wheeler.

And there was little doubt that it was the old man’s kindly gentility that made Wheeler’s otherwise disastrous transition to St. Gregory’s bearable. As the young man from a farm in California sat in his totally unfamiliar blazer and tie among sophisticated boys in their totally familiar blazers and ties, he focused on his fascinating teacher instead of on his feeling of displacement. As Wheeler listened to the elegant descriptions of historic Europe, he focused on their compelling charm rather than his own deplorable lack of sophistication and classical education. And the daunting task of initiating the young man from the California farmlands was one with which the old man seemed strangely comfortable.

As a young man himself, Arnauld Esterhazy, descendant of one of the Hapsburg Empire’s most prominent and aristocratic families, had received a superb education, had been part of the rich intellectual life of the Viennese coffeehouses, and had himself published a few
feuilletons
, the tight little highly personal essays in Vienna’s famous liberal newspaper, the
Neue Freie Presse
. He had considered careers in both journalism and academia before being lured to America in the early 1900s, recruited by an anonymous admirer and St. Gregory’s patron, to teach European history and academic German to prep school boys, which he did—at least according to legend—with immediate flamboyance and eventual popularity. Actually, his initiation had not been easy, his refined Viennese manner being perceived as haughty and arrogant, and it was not until he returned to Vienna at the start of the Great War and then came back in 1920, humbled by injury and nearly wrecked by the harrowing experience, that he began to work his way into school legend.

Then, in 1957, the old man’s history lessons, those rich historical vignettes—“Hazings” the St. Greg’s boys called them, “the world according to the Haze”—had an unexplainable appeal and did indeed begin filling the young Herr Burden’s blank slate.

More than a teacher, the Haze was like an evangelist in his prime, delivering the good news. He was a one-man cultural force in St. Greg’s boys’ educational lives, three generations of them, who knew their European history cold, especially his proprietary corner of that history. Essays in his classes were called
feuilletons
, and the group of the most talented students who gathered about him perpetually he called, with a flourish,
Jung Wien
, after the artists and intellectuals who gathered in the cafés of his beloved city. Those talented young protégés went on to Harvard mostly, and then to distinguished lives of business and service. St. Greg’s boys knew their European history, for sure, but most of all they knew about Vienna. Too many eminent Bostonians to number credited those Hazings as the primary inspiration for their luminous careers: one former governor of Massachusetts, a former U.S. senator, a museum director, a former Massachusetts attorney general and state supreme court justice, a novelist, countless Boston financiers, and many university scholars, to mention a few. The relationship with this charismatic old man accounted for the beginnings of Wheeler’s knowledge of Vienna and, one might say, for his yearning to travel there, his desire—matched by hundreds of St. Greg’s boys—to see for himself. “It was a time of delusive splendor,” the Haze would say alluringly, “a whole glorious way of life teetering on the edge of the abyss, totally oblivious to its own nearness to extinction. But what splendor!”

Every St. Gregory’s boy knew cold the gospel according to the Haze. And Wheeler was no exception. In his early days in 1897 Vienna, we know from his journal entries, Wheeler felt strangely well prepared for this bizarre experience, the lectures echoing in his mind as if his beloved mentor walked the Ringstrasse alongside him, narrating. He found himself so able to identify dress styles, buildings, parks, and landmarks that he knew exactly where he was, and exactly when, well before actually stopping at a kiosk in front of the opera house to read the title
Neue Freie Presse
and the day’s date on one of the myriad newspapers.

The Haze’s version went like this. In the 1850s, in a burst of civic liberalism, the Viennese, under the leadership of Emperor Franz Joseph, had decided to tear down the fortifying walls that had totally encircled the inner city since the early Middle Ages. And in place of the ancient barriers they constructed a broad and majestic boulevard, giving the city the burst of vitality and life that defined the end of the century. The resplendent Ringstrasse, one of the wonders of Europe, a monument to science, industrial superiority, and rational order, opened officially in 1865. The magnificent surrounding buildings, unmatched anywhere in the world, were begun and completed by the 1880s.

The wealthy industrial middle class came to power and established a constitutional regime identified with capitalism, industrialists, and Jews, who streamed into the city, finding release from the oppression they had endured elsewhere, as well as equality, opportunity, and aesthetic stimulation. The wealthy bourgeois city fathers shared their power gracefully with the aristocracy and the imperial bureaucracy.

The expansive magnificence, lined with plane trees, glorious in all directions, was too broad to be plagued by the crowded bustling of other European cities. “The Ringstrasse,” the Haze would exclaim. “Here paraded indeed a most astounding variety of elegant humanity. Riding in carriages, bustling or strolling casually, brightly dressed military officers in an endless variety of colorful uniforms, handsome men in silk top hats, and women, the beauty of whom legend had not exaggerated.” And St. Greg’s boys had no trouble imagining such a scene. All because of their Venerable Haze.

No one in the St. Gregory’s academic community could explain the usefulness of knowing so many details about just one of the European cities, especially a second-tier one for those who favored Paris and London, but St. Greg’s boys knew them nonetheless. “The best-dressed army in history,” Wheeler remembered the Haze saying with a touch of irony, “poised on the edge of ignominious defeat. One could go nowhere in Vienna—a café, a restaurant, a table in the Prater, the city’s expansive public park—without being surrounded by military uniforms. In colorful dress and puffery they led the world, with the emperor himself dressed most grandly of all.”

Now, dislocated in time, Wheeler Burden stared in amazement as he walked past the spacious greens and the grandeur of the enormous public buildings and the new magnificent apartments, the whole area burst with life, the intended ideal. Now, in the Haze’s Vienna, descriptions and musings from the master’s precious “Random Notes” seemed to leap into Wheeler’s brain, not as abstract curiosities for understanding modern history, but as details for survival. To this visitor from another time, the city whose splendor and vitality had existed only in fantastic stories and the perorations of his eccentric old prep school teacher spread out before him in vivid reality. Here before him stood the massive and ornate marble-façaded buildings, nearly all constructed in the last thirty years and representing that burst of confidence and cultural energy unparalleled in the rest of Europe. The very air of imperial magnificence and bourgeois grandeur that the Haze had described so many times now appeared before Wheeler without irony, with absolutely no sign of anything gone awry, provided one stayed out of the city’s depressing and grimy poorer quarters.

During his forty-plus years at St. Gregory’s, the old Austrian eccentric had kept a loose-leaf binder of reflections about Viennese life in the waning years of the Hapsburg Empire that he called his “Random Notes”—a collection of
feuilletons
, you might say—that he was constantly refining and reading to his students. “If you understand fin-de-siècle Vienna,” he drummed into three generations, “you understand modern history.” His eyes would then dart around the room to make certain that every boy’s attention was fixed where it ought to be. “It was the
grandeur
that was important, ” the Haze would intone, imbedding that word in his audience’s collective psyche. “It was the
grandeur
.”

In moments of special poignancy and drama, the Haze would produce his prized source, the “Little Book,” he called it, a slim and aged black volume from which he would read with great reverence. “This is from the fin de siècle,” he would say admiringly, and then read a passage that to his mind perfectly captured the flavor of turn-of-the-century Vienna, every student hanging on every elegant phrase. “Writing gets no better than this,” he would say in concluding and closing the book, often with tears in his eyes. The formal title of the sacred slim volume was
City of Music
, by a Mr. Jonathan Trumpp, but no one ever remembered the title; it was simply the Haze’s revered “Little Book.” And how every St. Greg’s boy knew, loved, and quoted from that book. He would hold the volume in his slender artistic fingers and open to a predetermined page. “Let us see what our eloquent Mr. Trumpp has for us,” he would say, or, “Let us enjoy the magic of the ‘Little Book,’ ” and then he would read some perfectly delicious description of the cultural life of turn-of-the-century Vienna. “Isn’t that writing absolutely exquisite?” And over the years his
Jung Wien
, sophisticated private school boys who could be cynical about so much in their lives, rarely directed any of their derision at the “Little Book.”