The Little Book (54 page)

The man was Wheeler Burden’s Harvard freshman philosophy professor named Fielding Shomsky.

58

Esterhazy’s Book

Fin de Siècle
was entirely Arnauld Esterhazy’s book, the work of his lifetime, collected and edited by one of his most appreciative students. That is what Wheeler said over and over at his book signings. “This is Mr. Esterhazy’s book,” Wheeler kept saying. “I just pulled it together into a reasonable whole.” It was the Haze’s “Random Notes,” he told the St. Greg’s alumni who showed up at the small bookstores and coffeehouses around the country where he made his appearances. And those who remembered the Haze and his charismatic style smiled and knew it was so. But it wasn’t quite that simple, and in the beginning the task of coming up with a “reasonable whole” was for Wheeler a bit daunting. Daunting enough to make the task a ten-year one.

Mr. Esterhazy’s “Random Notes” was a loose-leaf binder of about 250 or so pages, but it did not remain static and unchanged over the half century of his reading from it. He was constantly fussing with it. If you actually took the book in hand, which few people ever had the privilege of doing, you saw immediately from the color and condition of the pages that they represented different and interchangeable versions of his thinking, some very old, some very new, some spliced together from both. Over time he would edit and crop and scissor and glue and move ideas around as different aspects of turn-of-the-century Vienna became clear and then outmoded in his view. The version that Wheeler inherited in 1965, at the death of his great mentor, was only the version most recently revised by its author. “Had he lived a few more years—or months,” Wheeler would say, holding up the actual binder, “I am sure we would have a different ‘final version.’ ” Any material that was excised from the sacred binder found its way into one of the innumerable cardboard boxes in his closet. Nothing got thrown away. Much of the material in the boxes ended up in the binder, at one time or another, and then back in the boxes. Much of the material was in German and would be translated before being brought forward. Some was in Czech, Hungarian, and the other languages of the empire. It turned out, Wheeler discovered, as soon as he began editing in earnest, that the “Random Notes” was a living document with a huge waiting list.

So as Wheeler began pulling together the version that would come into print and become the lasting memorial to the great mind who had been his and his father’s most indelible teacher, he used as his resources all of the “papers,” always trying to express each point and offer each illustration as the Haze would have wanted it. And that was no easy task. “Another editor would come up with an entirely different book,” he said. At times, confronted with a superfluity of embellishments, Wheeler simply had to write the idea in his own words, always trying to capture that very special way of expression that was Arnauld Esterhazy.

An example of this editor’s creative license was the issue of the grand unifying theory that Arnauld struggled with for sixty years. Just what was it all about? Arnauld had been aware that the world of his father’s generation had been one of extraordinary growth in Vienna. The aristocracy and the wealthy citizenry, made rich by the industrial revolution, knowing that Vienna’s fate was not going to be military victory, had settled for cultural greatness. They had worked together in the second half of the nineteenth century, like in no other European capitol, and built the fabulous city of the Ringstrasse. But at the end of the century everything had changed and the sons of those civic-minded fathers rebelled. The Secessionists in art and architecture, Mahler and Schoenberg in music, Egon Wickstein in philosophy, Lueger in politics, and of course Sigmund Freud in psychology, all led a movement that was more intensely personal, and it overturned the old world.

The world of the fathers had been rule bound, rigid, fixed, and hierarchical. The world of their highly cultured sons, raised in their aesthetics-centered homes, was more interconnected and warmly personal—“more a web of interconnectedness than a ladder of order,” the Haze said famously—even sensual and erotic at times. Over the decades, Arnauld struggled with trying to express what he had experienced and seen, and one could see in poring over these papers how he worked at coming up with the unified theory. He read Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
when it came out in 1899. Newly in America in 1909, he attended the conference at Clark University that brought Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to world consciousness. He attended New York Philharmonic concerts in 1910 when Gustav Mahler was conductor. He attended the museums before and after the Great War when the Viennese painters Klimt, Kokoshka, and Sciele were featured. He read the works of Arthur Schnitzler. He watched as the “modern” movement spread through Europe and America in the prewar 1930s. All the time he worked on his theory, his “Random Notes,” all the time trying to summarize what magical change had taken place in 1897, the year of great change in his life, the year he fell in love with the American Weezie Putnam.

Then in 1955, he came upon a book, one with no overt connection to Vienna or the turn of the century, that “opened his eyes,” he said, to the union of thoughts he was looking for. That book took him into the world of classical mythology, a world frequented by all the major voices of his time, and opened up for him the world of the goddess. That book, which had begun by the author’s recording the ideas of her eccentric free-thinking ten-year-old son, was titled
Persephone Rising
, by Florence Standish.

It is interesting to note that one section of “Esterhazy’s book”
Fin de Siècle
has been singled out over and over again by critics, at the time of its publication in 1988 and over the years since. A close reader can see that that chapter is the one in which the editor took the most creative license, expressing the ideas as if they were a marvelous dialogue between a brilliantly cultured observer of Vienna’s turn of the century and his most eccentric and compulsively conversationalist student. It is that chapter that probably best summarizes the Haze’s elusive unified theory and that best answers that nagging St. Gregory’s question: Why did the Haze leave his “Random Notes” to that strange kid from California?

The title of the chapter was “The Rise of the Feminine.”

59

Feather River, 1988

For Flora Burden the story began, not when Wheeler ar-rived in Vienna, or even when Dilly arrived, but on a spring morning almost one month to the day after the tragic death of her son at the hands of a deranged assassin. For her, the story began with a packet that arrived by one of those overnight couriers for which she had to sign personally. Inside the colorful cardboard envelope of the courier service was a parcel wrapped in an ancient manila envelope with the inscription: “Please deliver to Mrs. Flora Burden, Feather River Ranch, Feather River, California on June 10, 1988.” Attached to the envelope was a note from a vice president of the Boston Five Cent Savings Bank.

“Dear Mrs. Burden,” it said. “Please pardon the method of delivering this package. It has been sitting in a vault in our bank for a long time, a longer time in fact than anyone currently in the bank’s employment can remember. We are following the instructions of the original depositor, who appears to be your late mother-in-law, Mrs. Frank Standish Burden, although there is some confusion as to when exactly she issued those instructions. If you have any concerns or suggestions about the contents of this package, or if the contents raise any specific issues to which our bank can be of administrative service, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. We are completely at your service.”

The envelope was old and did indeed look as if it had been recently dusted off after many years of storage. True to the letter of the instructions, the packet had been mailed on the assigned day and arrived at Flora’s door a day later, on June 11. “Who can you trust,” Dilly used to say, “if you can’t trust a Boston bank?”

She was curious but somewhat detached as she slit open the envelope with the paper cutter on the desk in her study. Inside she found a fine linen handkerchief alongside a novel-sized book, a well-worn journal, bound in fine red leather. Protruding from it was a rather thick letter in longhand, dated June 1959. At first, she thumbed through the journal, but could make little sense of it, so she extracted the letter and began to read.