Life is interruption, a series of interruptions. In fact, The Interrupted Life could be my memoir’s title. I jot that down in my notebook and reach for the Gypsy book once more. But I am disquieted. I have to act, to take action. I know what I have to do. In a sense and inwardly, I have made my decision. I have just not yet moved. But I know I must and that I must persevere; I must not perseverate. Agitated, I call out to Yannis, Please come here and bring the heavy bond paper and envelopes and the party list; I’m disinviting everyone. The party was supposed to have been held in two days. I had vacillated long enough, primarily about whether to cancel it and risk offending Gwen, in whose honor it was being thrown, or to go ahead with it and delay my search for Helen. Somehow, all along, I knew I would put it off. It is a funny thing, human nature. One knows and yet pretends one doesn’t. But why?
Resolved to act, I also hoped to make Gwen understand my decision. Also, I thought petulantly, as I was handed the writing paraphernalia by a sulky Yannis, I had had enough conversation last night to last me a lifetime.
I write what I hope are gracious disinvitations, each calibrated to charm its intended, the recipient, but I can’t help recalling, even recapturing, those incendiary conversations, and how, first, Roger slid up to Gwen and me, barging into our fragile dialogue without so much as a by-your-leave.
My word! I exclaimed, my word! Roger, you’ve taken me by surprise again, sidling up to us like one of those poisonous snakes in Texas. Three converge there, I believe. Roger sat down, though he hadn’t been invited, and I reminded myself that we were three, too, and I hoped Roger wouldn’t take that up. Thankfully he replied, Six or seven of the deadliest snakes in the world are found in Australia. Do you like snakes, Gwen? He faced Gwen and studied her expectantly, as if he were about to test her in some way. But Gwen — too smart to fall for Roger’s impetuous nonsense — swallowed her wine and wiped her thin lips with the back of her hand. It seemed a rude gesture, almost a Neapolitan insult. It was in any case oddly severe, which Gwen can be, oddly severe. Finally, she answered with two words: Some snakes.
I don’t know why, foolishness or inebriation, but I started to tell Gwen, in front of Roger, some curious material about the Gypsies. I had dipped further into the book, and what had immediately caught my attention was etymological — the word “Gypsy” first appeared in English in 1537; also, there was no word for Gypsy in their own language, Romany. But more, I went on, and this related to my absorption in the subject of death, I explained that Gypsies believe they were Christ’s bodyguards. The myth was that two Gypsy bodyguards had become drunk, had left him unprotected, and this is how he came to be crucified. Roger looked smug. I disliked him intensely in that moment.
Gwen knew someone of Gypsy origin, of course. She had spent time with Django Reinhardt’s nephew, who was, like Django, a musician. He was blond and fair, and given to wearing black leather from head to foot. It was a story about feet or boots — his boots — which Gwen narrated for me, though Roger sat near us listening; for in a sense she spoke only to me and subtly ignored him. He did not care; he stayed, as if an observer at our table. I will never forget the story.
Gwen had traveled to London some years back — I hadn’t known she’d been there then — and resided in a squat, a house taken over by hippies, I gather, to which the Reinhardt boy had come. There was no romance, but she loved to listen to him play the violin. She said he had talent, which for Gwen was a rare compliment. But then she was partial to musicians, and may have been in London precisely because her musician was there, but I didn’t ask. One of the house dwellers took an intense dislike to the Gypsy violinist. And for some reason or other, one afternoon Reinhardt disappeared. Later, as the house dwellers or squatters were having tea in the kitchen, they heard the strains of a melancholy tune. It was Reinhardt, playing the violin. He had gone to the roof of the house, as if to play for the world, Gwen thought then. The roof was in disrepair. Gwen recalled vividly the moment the violin music stopped. She heard a series of squawks. Then one black leather boot descended through the ceiling of the kitchen, which was at the top of the house. The English fellow, a poet, the one who disliked the Gypsy violinist, yelled, “That’s the Gypsy. He ruins everything he touches.”
A marvelous story. I could easily have imagined and placed Helen in a seat of honor at that tea party, as if the poet were the Mad Hatter. Roger harrumphed but eventually smiled. I didn’t trust any of his reactions that night, and I think I was right not to have done so. Roger was about to say something to Gwen, but just at that moment, by which time we’d all had a great deal to drink, and Yannis had shown up, the South African Poet, Wallace, and his amour, the Dutchwoman with the guttural name, arrived at our table from out of nowhere. This was Gwen’s first meeting with them, and after it, my memory grows weak.
Wallace was entertaining. Yes, he was. I’ll admit that, and even I found myself rapt as he told a story about — now, who was it? H.D.? No, it was Djuna Barnes. Wallace insists of course that he slept with her. It all comes back. No, he didn’t sleep with her. It was another poet who had, a homosexual, Wallace declared, a surrealist, Charles Henri Ford, in fact, and it was his story.
Djuna Barnes wanted to interview Hitler, and as she was friends with a man named Putzi Hofstingel who was close to Hitler, was his art adviser, something like that, she thought she had an inside chance. Barnes went to Munich to see him. I don’t know what year it was, Wallace left that out. Putzi was in love with Djuna, and, Djuna told Ford, Wallace says, that while she never made love with Putzi, he once hugged her so tightly, he burst a vein in his penis. At the time of the burst vein, Putzi and she were in New York; his family’s business was art, they ran a large art emporium. According to Djuna, according to Ford, Putzi was a marvelous piano player who often played for Hitler. Djuna never did interview Hitler.
This anecdote was the prelude to, the means to, the most persistent and abiding of Wallace’s impassioned literary concerns. He added something about T.S. Eliot, the old possum, having written the introduction to Nightwood, which appeared in 1936, and went on about Barnes’ discussions of race and religion in that difficult novel. What about the Jew as he appeared in Nightwood? Wallace challenged. What of the Jew? Roger demanded. A heated and drunken discussion about art and politics ensued, and Roger, who sides with the formalists, and Wallace, who does not, went at each other like cat and dog. In this case it is hard for me not to think of Roger as the dog; I prefer cars. For my part I can see both sides, and as long as the work has quality, which is indifferent to politics, I can appreciate it.
Wallace returned us to life before World War II and enumerated a list of great and not-so-great literature that was anti-semitic-book after book. D.H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy, for one. To set a different tone, usually unsuccessful, I brought up Jane Bowles’ novel Two Serious Ladies and ventured that nowadays few would notice that one of the two serious ladies was a Miss Goering. Surely that had relevance — the novel was written when Hitler was in power, published in 1943, and Jane Bowles was Jewish. One didn’t, I reminded all assembled, easily admit to being Jewish then. I glanced at Roger, as it was for his benefit that I remarked upon hidden Jewishness. Roger didn’t wince, blanch or even wiggle in his chair. Roger ought to be a CIA operative.
Thinking about it now, it could have been many kinds of hiddenness I was referring to, even kinds of hiddenness that were predominantly hidden from me. The significance of Gwen’s race to her, of Roger’s and my homosexuality, of Wallace’s time in mental hospitals for having opposed apartheid. We were a ragtag band of inhibited outsiders, each a secret and keeping secrets from the others. And ourselves, I suspect. In our own idiosyncratic, careful ways.