He should have known that from the first, but as usual was slow to apprehend; it had taken him all of Volume I to perceive it. What had happened to the author of that anomalous classic of Lower East Side childhood, as certain critics referred to it? That was the meaning surely of the frequent requests he received from journalists and others, freelance writers, for interviews. They reflected a degree of public curiosity regarding the extraordinary hiatus of production that was the dominant feature of his literary career. They sought information from him and about him on which to base hypotheses as to the cause. He wasn’t prepared to advance any, since he was the last person in the world equipped with the necessary intellectual, philosophic, social apparatus to do so.
And not to forget, though he would be better off if he did, the letter he had received yesterday from David S of the Washington Post, a very sincere letter, requesting an interview; and his own decision not to grant it. Interviews preyed on his mind in anticipation, for fear that he would reveal the extent of his unfamiliarity with modern literature, his absence of profundity, the skimpiness of his critical faculties. Interviews took more out of him than they should, or were worth. Besides, he had already been done, well done, and as he would like to say, though he would probably veto the inclination, overdone. Most likely, though, his most compelling motive in denying the request for the interview was his desire to preserve the integrity of the unexpected turn his writing had taken, or was about to take, unexpected acknowledgment of the individual he had been, and still had to abide with.
“No, I’ll conduct my own interview, Ecclesias,” Ira muttered as he proceeded to SAVE the working copy he had already typed on the screen. Some faint but promising notion had crossed his mind as he did so; faint and remote, but at his age (and before), the faint, rare notions had to be retrieved at once, hermetically enclosed, or they volatilized. . Had the elusive, the evanescent thought been simply that he would soon be dust? He didn’t know; it wasn’t able to get him back on track anyway. But how he plodded, how he shuffled as he walked the length of the mobile-home hall to the kitchen. There M, her piano practice over, stood with bent head in faded pink variegated apron over blue shirt, paring vegetables to go into the Belgian cast-iron orange enamel stew pot — how beautiful her lofty brow under gray hair. He plodded, shuffled, he who had once been just like — how repelled he was by quoting that snobbish, evasive Jew-tweaker — TSE-TSE. No, Ira thought: old Bert Whitehouse in Norridgewock, Maine, a scad of years ago while he was writing his novel in 1933, had said it just as graphically in his way as Eliot had in his: “Once I could scale a four-rail fence one-handed; now I stumble over an inch-thick board on the ground.”
And why should the public at large be interested in the inventions he might have to offer now? They represented anything but contemporary configurations; they were those of a half-century ago. This was a different age, and demanded — and needed — new interpretations and new judgments made from the vantage of a fifty-year gradient. It would take another century or more to disclose the proximity, the near-contemporaneity, of the seeming gap.
From his fifteenth year to his nineteenth, from his expulsion from Stuyvesant to — and perhaps beyond — his freshman year at CCNY. The facts here were very good. He knew he could recall with fair accuracy many facets of that period, some charged with dreadful meaning, some no more than diverting reminiscence. He was Mr. Editor. He was boss. He’d get on the linear choo-choo, and bowl along to the provisional terminal, no, the provisional hub, a junction point, in railroad parlance. How could he — that was it — delete, shorten, condense? What did he have here?
“It is as difficult to set down,” he had written, “as difficult to set down as it is to recall the proper sequence of the farrago of events in the months succeeding my expulsion from high school. I returned to P.S. 24—”
And here Ira paused, paused and shook his head. These half-truths, half-truths he was forced to labor under, forced himself to labor under.
— Well, then, who are you? Editor or contributor?
Both and neither, Ecclesias. I know this is the time of my deepest un-doing; I grow drowsy with the numbing dolor of it. This is the time. This is the time. All things apart from this are like so many streamers, mere fringes, fronds—
— Not quite, not quite. Among them are also life-determining episodes.
Yes. But the main thing is that it was during those years that I tore apart the ligatures, my psychic ligatures, sundered them irreversibly. The spring was pulled beyond its intrinsic elasticity, its constant, never to resume its original form. God, how one can ruin oneself, be ruined; it’s inconceivable.
— Alors, mon ami.
VI
So back to P.S. 24 Ira returned. One of his aims, he was quite sure, was to obtain a transcript of his record in grammar school, and especially of his year in junior high school, since he would have to present this as credit toward continuation of high school. Ira Stigman had been expelled from Stuyvesant for fighting (that became his standard explanation, and strangely, no one questioned it), and his records had been destroyed. He needed them to enroll in another high school. Secondly, he appealed to crippled, mock-bellicose Mr. Sullivan, because he had once had such a high opinion of him in his English class (and such a low one in bookkeeping), for help in finding a job. He met Ira’s appeal, or better said, his prevarication, with charity, and even with some indignation at what he regarded as summary punishment for so commonplace an offense. He wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of a small law firm whose books he kept. And on the strength of it, Ira applied for the position of office boy, either that day or the next — and he was hired.
Mr. Phillips, his new employer, gave the impression of being a reasonable man, even-tempered and deliberate, with a trait of smoothing the sides of his long straight nose between thumb and forefinger. He invited Ira to sit down at a desk and write a letter of application for the position. He found the letter satisfactory, except for one flaw: Ira had spelled his name with only one “1” instead of two. He would have to be much more careful in the future to note such details as this if he expected to satisfy the exacting requirements of a law firm, Mr. Phillips stressed.
But he was a washout as a law-firm office boy. Without more ado: a lamentable washout. A ludicrous failure. He could not even get a message straight over the telephone; in his anxiety and apprehension he couldn’t even hear straight; he couldn’t distinguish spoken words. Also, it was a rare occasion when he found his way to the right courtroom, the right session, the right hearing at the right time. Rare as rare could be. Shlimazl! Pop was right. And if by some stroke of luck he did follow instructions correctly, did get to the right courtroom at the right time, then he mooned past the announcement of the case for which he had been sent there for the express purpose of asking for postponement or deferral. Mr. Phillips smoothed the sides of his long nose a fortnight or two; his junior partner fumed, tutted, growled something about a chump. And Mr. Phillips’s secretary was wracked by puzzling hysterias. .