Martin Bauman Page 2

  This became more and more obvious as the semester proceeded. The third week, for instance, he arrived in class red-faced and winded, wearing black boots and a Heathcliffish cape. “Children,” he said, limping to the table and opening his briefcase, “I have a special treat for you tonight,” then went on to explain that he had just received some pages from the novel on which Leonard Trask—the great writer he had discovered a decade ago, when Trask was still a mineworker in Montana—had been at work for the past ten years. And these pages, for our delight as well as our edification, he was now going to read aloud to us, a rare privilege, as even Trask’s publisher had not yet seen them.

  I remember wondering, that night, at Flint’s cape. Certainly it contributed to the element of theatricality that underlay his performance, a quality of spectacle with which Flint invested all his readings, but particularly those of the writers he had discovered, or whose work he revered. Diction precise, voice rapturous, he offered us Trask’s finely timed sentences as if each were a delicacy, a slice of white truffle, or a toast point spread with caviar. Indeed, so sumptuous was his delivery that today I recall nothing of the reading itself. Instead it is only the voice of the caped orator that resonates, a voice so charismatic that it seemed to eclipse everything around it: our faces, the snow outside the window, even the novel-forever-in-progress that had occasioned it.

  Another recollection: one particularly cold, blizzardy night, Flint brought in a copy of some literary quarterly—I forget which one—and thrust it in front of our faces. “Do you know this magazine?” he asked, pointing at the matte white cover, which was already smudged with fingerprint-shaped patches of New York Times ink.

  We did not.

  “I’m going to read you a story I’ve had occasion to see here recently,” Flint went on, “because I want to know, honestly, what you think of it.” And he began to read. One sentence, two sentences. He stopped. “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “All wrong. No life. Take this as a lesson, children. The language is being mangled, not caressed. And this sort of thing appears all the time in our better literary journals.”

  We stayed silent. Clearing his throat, he read another sentence—and stopped again. “You see?” he said. “It is in your eyes. The story has failed to captivate. It has failed to seduce. I wrote this,” he added casually, slipping the magazine back into his briefcase as a rattle of surprise passed through the room. For up until that moment, we had not known that Flint himself was a writer.

  The next morning, I looked up his name in the periodicals index at the library. It turned out that he had published a dozen stories over the past decade, all of them in obscure journals with tiny print runs, none in the great organs of culture in which the work of his disciples regularly appeared. Of the stories themselves—all of which I dug out and read—I remember few details. Most of them were not even stories so much as brief bits of language torture, congested, constipated even, and redolent of some long and futile labor—as if the sentences had been subjected to such anguished revision, worked over so many times, that they had finally expired from the effort. Then, for the first time, I felt that I understood Stanley Flint. Far from some disinterested nurturer, he was a literary Tantalus, from whose dry and reaching lips that flow of eloquence, a single taste of which would have satiated him, forever bent away. Yes, his was the cruel position of the high priest who finds himself envying the very God it is his sacred duty to cultivate; and yet who can say whether this envy is not itself intended to be the ultimate test of his faith?

  Although in memory those hours I spent under Flint’s tutelage have now bloated to the point that they seem to obliterate everything else I did and thought that semester, the truth is that every day except Wednesday (when the seminar met) I was leading the typically desultory life of the undergraduate, in which Flint played no part; that is to say, I went to class, I studied, I brooded over futile crushes, I ate my dinners and breakfasts in the dining hall, I had friends. Never in my life have I had so many friends. Lately I’ve come to believe that the process of growing older is essentially one of ruthless and continual editing, so that the novel of one’s experience—at nineteen a huge and undisciplined mess, heavily annotated, the pages out of sequence—will by forty have resolved itself into a fairly conventional tale of provincial life, and by sixty be reduced to one of those incisive, “minimalist” works in which irony and wordplay displace “plot” (a word I put in quotation marks because Flint loathed it). Thus at thirty-eight I travel in a comparatively restricted circle. At nineteen, on the other hand, I had dozens of friends, and more than that, I looked upon every one of them as a potential intimate.

  Occasionally, during those abundant days, I would run into my classmates from Flint’s seminar. Mittman was one of the servers in my dining hall—she’d barely nod at me as she spooned eggs Florentine (hard-boiled eggs with spinach, and not Florentine at all) onto my plate. Baylor and I were taking the same big lecture course on the art of the Italian Renaissance. We used to encounter each other in the dimly lit gallery wherein were hung reproductions of the paintings and sculptures the titles and locations of which we were supposed to memorize for our midterm. In the gloomy silence she’d sometimes cast me a conspiratorial glance, as if we were members of one of the secret societies that flourished on the campus.

  Once, at an informational meeting about an internship at a New York publishing house for which I wanted to apply, I even ran into Lopez. Legs crossed, dressed as before in a sleek cowl-neck sweater, she sat across the table from me and took notes, her face a study of elegant composure. Yet when I smiled at her, she turned away, refusing so much as to meet my glance.

  Still, despite all this activity, Wednesday nights remained the epicenter of my life that semester, the black hole into which all the other days and nights collapsed. In part this was due to anxiety. The term was nearly half over, and I still hadn’t managed to get past the first sentence with Flint. “Bauman, Bauman, Bauman,” he’d wail whenever I started to read, and cover his head with his hands. It seemed I was making the same mistake over and over: I kept trying to write about my mother, who was at that time undergoing radiation therapy treatments for cancer, and I couldn’t get it right. Every sentence had to do with lumps: “‘Feel my lumps,’ my mother says to my father” is one example.

  “You’re playing for sympathy,” Flint would tell me whenever I read these sentences. “You want us to feel sorry for you. See? We don’t.

  Finally I decided to change my tactics. I’d recently read an article about a couple called Bo and Peep, who would later become the founders of the notorious Heaven’s Gate cult. At the time, however, they were just another pair of late-seventies lunatics, wandering through the Midwest and soliciting disciples to go with them to some spot in the desert where a spaceship was supposed to pick them up. In their rather pathetic (and surprisingly successful) efforts to enlist followers, I sensed the possibility of a story, the heroine of which would be my oldest aunt, Lily, who shocks her family by deciding to run off with Bo and Peep, whom I renamed FeeFi and FoFum. Lily, already in her eighties by this time, and living in a Florida retirement community, I called Bessie, and repatriated to the Brooklyn of her youth.

  That Wednesday I hoped Flint wouldn’t call on me. I didn’t think I was ready yet. Also, I had a good feeling about the story and wanted to wait until it was finished before I shared it. As it turned out, however, I had nothing to worry about, for when Flint stormed into class—late, for the first time all semester, and clutching a mass of documents in his fist—it was obvious that something momentous (and probably terrible) had occurred. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said, throwing off his coat. “I don’t know if you’ve heard what’s happened...”

  We said nothing. Clearly no one had.

  “Children, I arrived this evening on the campus of your great university, full of beans, eager to see every one of you,” he continued. “Little did I imagine that upon stepping into my office I would be conf
ronted with this”—he indicated the documents—“a situation the likes of which, in my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined. I’m deeply bereaved. I’m also outraged. Especially after last week, when Baylor delighted us so much with her marvelous story...”

  Again, silence. Sitting down, he thrust a heavy hand through his dark hair. “And to think that just a few hours ago ... And now this horror, this sickening slander...”

  “What happened?” Mittman asked meekly.

  It turned out that Lopez—the same Lopez whose work he had so efficiently decimated the first night of class, and whom I had only a few days ago encountered at the internship meeting—had lodged a formal complaint against him, of which he had been apprised only that evening. Her affidavit, phrased in the acid, impersonal language of lawsuits, he now read aloud, holding it away from his face as if it were literally noxious. My impression was that more than anything else, the writing itself wounded him, for what was this affidavit but that story that most offended his delicate sensibilities, the story that lied, that put itself in a position of moral superiority to its characters, that failed to recognize the commonality of the human condition: in short, the very story Lopez had handed him our first evening, and that he was now finding himself obliged—bullied, even—to read through to the end?

  Alas, the bullying worked. For the moment, at least, Lopez triumphed. According to her affidavit, Flint had glanced first at Mittman, then at Acosta, then at her, and said, “You wetbacks all look alike to me.”

  “A gross libel!” he shouted now, throwing down the pages. “I never said such a thing!” Mittman affirmed that he had not. Acosta seconded. “How can literature survive in such an atmosphere? Ah, children, how numerous are the enemies of the imagination—and in what guises of piety they clothe themselves! The literal is never the truth. Take this down. The literal blinds us. The facts do not speak.”

  He wiped his eyes. He looked—this man who craved only the purest water—as if he had just been forced to swallow a gallon of bile. “To make such an accusation against me—me, of all people,” he went on, “I, who have always been the greatest advocate of tolerance, who has suffered himself bigotry the likes of which, children, I pray you shall never know! Anyone could tell you that. I was in Selma, for God’s sake. I was arrested in Selma. The record proves it. I published the first story by a black woman ever to appear in Broadway, and it was a hell of a struggle to get it through. And that woman was Nancy Coleridge. She was on welfare. In Cincinnati, on welfare. And now look at her—they say she may get the Nobel Prize, for Christ’s sake! This complaint of Miss Lopez’s, this is not a crime against me personally, this is not about me personally, this is a crime against art. For what has she done but use language—our most precious asset—to level a blow at freedom?”

  Someone lit a cigarette. The boy with the spectacles offered to fetch Flint a cocktail from his room. He refused.

  Needless to say, no one read that night. Instead Flint talked. He talked and talked. First he said he was going to resign. Then he swore he would never again set foot on the campus of our university. We pleaded with him to reconsider. We offered to write letters, to start a petition. He kept shaking his head. I think he rather enjoyed being the object of our entreaties. Finally he thanked and dismissed us, promising to mull the situation over before making a final decision. For the first and last time all term, the seminar let out early.

  The process by which all of this was resolved—of which I learned the details only several months later—was as follows: after class that evening, Mittman and Acosta paid an unannounced visit to Lopez in her dormitory, dismissing her roommate peremptorily. Behind locked doors, the three of them then spoke heatedly for several hours, emerging, according to a witness, only around sunrise, arm in arm, tears in their eyes: a photo op for sisterhood. That morning, accompanied by her new friends, Lopez officially withdrew her complaint against Stanley Flint.

  The next week he was back, as volatile and jubilant as ever. No allusion was made to the black events of the previous Wednesday. For several sessions he oscillated in his usual way between approbation and decimation, while I, uncalled upon, labored privately at my story about Aunt Lily. Progress was slow; by spring break I still hadn’t finished. Instead of going home to California I decided to stay on campus, where every afternoon I holed up in the rear smoking section of the undergraduate library. Most of my companions there were lesbians, some with rings in their noses, all followers of one or another of the fashionable theorists of the moment, and at work on long essays or theses. To my left Gretchen, a deconstructionist, wrote about Jane Austen; to my right Schuyler, a Lacanian feminist, toiled away on Melanie Klein. I ground out my story.

  Spring break ended. Classmates I didn’t like returned, bronzed and fit after vacations in Florida, while the lesbians, their skin library-pallid, smoked and wrote and ignored them. I finished my story, then stayed up most of Tuesday night typing, so that I could bring it to class the next evening.

  It was now April—the sort of April we see less and less these days, during which winter, like an obstinate old tenant, refuses to leave, even as spring tries over and over again to evict her. No sooner would tiny buds have appeared on the trees than a biting wind would have whipped up, shriveling these nubs of life before they could flower. Or I’d be sunning one day with my friends on the lawn in front of the library, when suddenly rain would start to fall, and within a few hours a blizzard would blanket the fresh grass with snow. A perpetual sludge of muddy ice made the flagstones treacherous. The night I read aloud for the seminar, because I had on the wrong shoes, I slipped on the way, tearing a hole in the knee of my jeans. My eastern classmates, all of whom owned more appropriate footwear, laughed at me when I entered the seminar room. Every sign for success seemed inauspicious.

  Then Flint limped into class with his briefcase, his smell of subways. “Good to see you all again,” he said gruffly, unwinding his long cashmere scarf in a way that meant business. No preludes, no reading from newly received galleys. “Well, who are we going to hear from tonight?”

  I raised my hand.

  “All right, Bauman. Wow us.”

  He sat back. Baylor crossed her arms and stared at me.

  “Aunt Bessie was thirty when my father was born,” I read, “the first son at last after nine daughters.”

  I paused, taking it for granted, after so many failed efforts, that Flint would now interrupt me, shake his head, mutter, “Bauman, Bauman, Bauman.”

  Instead he said, “Go on.”

  I looked up. My heart began to race.

  “His birth was a relief to my grandparents,” I read, “who could finally stop conceiving.”

  He smiled. “Go on.”

  I went on. I read the entire story—all thirty-five pages. It took almost an hour. By the time I’d finished rain had started outside, and Flint was still smiling.

  “Who’d have ever thought,” he said, “that something like this would come from Bauman?”

  I think I almost fainted. It was as if, with a single gesture, Flint had swept away winter. Suddenly I danced in a spring glade. His words flowed around and over and through me. I caught nothing of their meaning. Instead (as I am told is the case with dogs) it was the cadences of his approval, the intonations of his praise, that warmed and restored me.

  From that evening on, I was his favorite; and not merely a favorite, but the favorite among favorites. Like the snow itself, my anxiety melted and was gone. It was as if, having written such a story, I’d been absolved (at least by myself) of that necessity to win Flint over that had driven me since the beginning of the term. Freed from pressure, I came to class laughing, and always took the seat directly to his left.

  Now, I think, is the moment to make certain confessions regarding my character, then and now. For all my awkwardness as a young man, my timidity, that tendency to feel ill at ease among strangers which had made me so shy the first night of Flint’s seminar, I was (and am) both ambitious and c
ompetitive. What I craved, more than anything else, was success, a word that in my mind I took to be synonymous with “approval.” The origins of this misapprehension I shall explore in greater detail later on. Suffice it to say, for now, that as early as my freshman year, I had a reputation among my peers for being both arrogant and opportunistic: a reputation, moreover, which, though the natural result of my loud and occasionally obnoxious comportment, could not have been more at odds with the image that I cultivated of myself, as sincere, generous, and above all guileless. I didn’t recognize, in other words, the degree to which my desire to please dictated not only my conduct, but the very approach I took to writing, which even then I considered my métier. Thus you may recall that earlier, when describing the process by which I came to write the story with which I eventually won Stanley Flint’s heart, I said, without even being conscious of it, that at a certain point I decided to “change my tactics.” Tactics, more than I care to admit today, dictated my decision to write that particular story. Above all else, I wanted to please my teacher. I was a revolting example of the “teacher’s pet.”

  I must have been unbearable. For instance, a few weeks after my triumph with Flint, I was reading aloud from a new story, a slapdash thing that I considered to be extremely funny—so funny that halfway through I broke into a fit of debilitating laughter. “I’m sorry,” I spluttered, putting down my pages.

  No one else was laughing. “It’s all right,” Flint said coolly. “I always enjoy the spectacle of a writer amusing himself.” (It is a testament to my denseness that I took this remark as a compliment.)