It was dinnertime and I still could not get this man to stop touring the by now completely terminal cleaning-up efforts. When I whined a little he murmured something about seeing Tsau as an organism showing it could repair itself. Self-repair was important. It was the opposite of social decadence. And did I know the moment that Ignazio Silone had decided he was no longer a statist type of socialist? There was an essay on the exact moment, a classic, in fact. A flood had occurred in the mezzogiorno, and the local village people, who had always in the past undertaken to do their own disaster relief and reconstruction, instead this time — owing to the growth of the welfare state — sat down in folding chairs and watched in droves while the carabinieri did all the cleanup.
Do you know who I’m talking about? he asked me point-blank. I was straining to get the neuron to fire that would tell me who this guy was. I almost knew, I thought. It didn’t come.
Then he looked intently at me and said Don’t be in pain if you don’t know.
Then he explained who this man was, what pleasure I had facing me when I read a novel of his, Fontamara, which he even thought he had around somewhere. By now we were at last back in the octagon.
Supper was ready by the time he’d established he was unable to find Fontamara anywhere. I didn’t mind cooking while he searched. I love someone who takes a serious tutelary attitude toward me, so long as he’s not doing it just to turn out another member of his cult. It has to be ecumenical. The idea of having someone want to improve me and fill me up with new ideas rather than punish me for my lacunae is tonic. I see myself as quite perfectible. It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I’m so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything.
As we were eating, my face got hot when I realized that I had come within an ace of saying Yes, Silone, the fascist or profascist. I had been thinking of Céline. I thanked god my mind had failed to provide. Silone was an icon of humanist socialism.
Just to illustrate the depths women live at emotiono-intellectually: it occurred to me briefly that I ought to confess my near miss over Céline. Can This Marriage Be Saved? I thought, to josh myself out of my cravenness. I had been saying that to myself all day, as a matter of fact, when I realized I had things to do other than roam around with Denoon sampling civic joy but that he seemed to be in his element. Can This Marriage Be Saved? was a column in a women’s magazine my mother occasionally shoplifted from our local supermarket, which she would study fixedly, every page, as though this was the manual that was going to teach her how to become a normal person.
There was more about socialism, free associatively, as we ate and washed up. It was mostly against socialism as an orientation or aesthetic or feeling instead of socialism as being about concrete institutional propositions that could be shown to work or not work. A form of Stimmung, I said, which he liked. There was a socialist magazine whose charter issue had the epigraph Socialism is the name of my desire, from Tolstoy, over its manifesto. They had no idea what they were revealing about themselves, Denoon said. Socialism was becoming a bibelot. Student socialism was essentially an art school phenomenon. He shuddered to think of how few socialists there were who could define marginal utility. And so on.
That this man loved to talk was obvious. Also, I was appropriate for him, as a listener if not exactly as a discussant, although that evolved pretty quickly. He had been an isolated limb of the West for long stretches. I was a denizen of the same academic subculture he was from. When I got up in the middle of that night to go out to the latrine I inadvertently woke him. As I got back in with him he asked if I felt like talking, being quick to say that it was all right if I didn’t and wanted to get back to sleep. I think this was prefaced with his saying I was stimulating. Of course it was fine, how not?
It was just that he wanted me to not misunderstand him when it came to socialism: he could be considered a socialist in the noumenal sense of being for a society where human self-realization and liberation were a general outcome and not an outcome only for the most talented or driven or unscrupulous in any given generation, and their heirs. He wasn’t going to bore me with all his specifications for the devices you had to put together to give you such a consummation devoutly to be wished. But also I mustn’t be confused about him and unadulterated capitalism or think he thought anything but that the limited liability corporation was a virus that was devouring the world. Underneath everything in America he sometimes imagined there was a subliminal sound like an orange crate cracking when you stand on it, except that this sound never stopped. When Nelson really got rolling and interested in what he was saying at night he liked there to be a light on, just a touch, one candle, I now discovered. We need socialism, correctly specified, he said, or rather we need the soul of it or its noumen. But then nervously he said When I say we I don’t mean to be incorporating you into my construct in some subtle way, by the way. It’s all right, I said: I’m not not a socialist, if that’s any way to describe yourself politically. You could call me a nihilo-liberal. He laughed. I meant it, though.
It turns out that being in a symposium lying down in the small hours when all you want is to be asleep is a little akin to being asked to bleed to death. I ultimately developed a slight capacity to intersperse dozing with a murmur here and there before I dropped off that was satisfactory, and a murmur when I came back to consciousness again briefly. I was fading. The problem was that calling yourself a socialist put you in the same pew as people who had a purely reflexive concept of what socialism would be: it would be whatever came after capitalism was undone, and it would be beautiful. The mind the new left had been the most at the feet of took the position that all you needed to know about the oncoming free society was that it would be like the feeling you get from great art, beautiful music. This was decadence. Undergraduates had supposedly been going to be the midwives of the new society. Marx was the original offender with his attacks on the people who had the temerity to physically try out a particular concrete stab at the common life. He started naming them. Here I drifted off, only to come back to a more musing stream, particularly about me. I had gone to sleep with his arm around my shoulders, and he was patting me now to make a point. He was so happy we were both nonreligious and empiriocritical, because it was no good for a person to go along with a partner’s strong convictions against something like socialism or religion as an act of will when in fact there were private residues to the contrary, residues of credulism. I assumed this was a meander fed by his parents’ terrible mismatch or possibly Grace retaining Episcopalian feelings underneath it all. She looked Episcopalian to me, despite the fact that undoubtedly she had presented herself to him as his own tabula rasa. And the last of it was about purification, somehow, and was there a general human need for something called that, and wasn’t that the element religion stuck its taproot down into, once it got started otherwise? Here was when I learned in passing that he had been an altar boy. I remember asking if by purification he really meant atonement, something I could understand better, a need to expel guilt over the thousands of transgressions you discover you’ve committed as you get older and more ethically acute. That wasn’t what he meant. People could have done nothing and still have this other need. I was out of stamina. I fell deep asleep. There was something interesting afoot in the underbrush here but I missed it. In the morning I woke up being kissed on the leg.