The typical hero of a Lonoff story—the hero who came to mean so much to bookish Americans in the mid-fifties, the hero who, some ten years after Hitler, seemed to say something new and wrenching to Gentiles about Jews, and to Jews about themselves, and to readers and writers of that recuperative decade generally about the ambiguities of prudence and the anxieties of disorder, about life-hunger, life-bargains, and life-terror in their most elementary manifestations—Lonoff’s hero is more often than not a nobody from nowhere, away from a home where he is not missed, yet to which he must return without delay. His celebrated blend of sympathy and pitilessness (monumentalized as “Lonovian” by
Time
—after decades of ignoring him completely) is nowhere more stunning than in the stories where the bemused isolate steels himself to be carried away, only to discover that his meticulous thoughtfulness has caused him to wait a little too long to do anyone any good, or that acting with bold and uncharacteristic impetuosity, he has totally misjudged what had somehow managed to entice him out of his manageable existence, and as a result has made everything worse.
The grimmest, funniest, and most unsettling stories of all, where the pitiless author seems to me to teeter just at the edge of self-impalement, were written during the brief period of his literary glory (for he died in 1961 of a bone-marrow disease; and when Oswald shot Kennedy and the straitlaced bulwark gave way to the Gargantuan banana republic, his fiction, and the authority it granted to all that is prohibitive in life, began rapidly losing “relevance” for a new generation of readers). Rather than cheering him up, Lonoff’s eminence seemed to strengthen his dourest imaginings, confirming for him visions of terminal restraint that might have seemed insufficiently supported by personal experience had the world denied ,him its rewards right down to the end. Only when a little of the coveted bounty was finally his for the asking—only when it became altogether clear just how stupefyingly unsuited he was to have and to hold anything other than his art—was he inspired to write that brilliant cycle of comic parables (the stories “Revenge,” “Lice,” “Indiana,” “Eppes Essen,” and “Adman”) in which the tantalized hero does not move to act
at all
—the tiniest impulse toward amplitude or self-surrender, let alone intrigue or adventure, peremptorily extinguished by the ruling triumvirate of Sanity, Responsibility, and Self-Respect, assisted handily by their devoted underlings: the timetable, the rainstorm, the headache, the busy signal, the traffic jam, and, most loyal of all, the last-minute doubt.
Did I sell any magazines other than
Photoplay
and
Silver
Screen
! Did I use the same line at every door or adapt my sales pitch to the customer? How did I account for my success as a salesman? What did I think people were after who subscribed to these insipid magazines? Was the work boring? Did anything unusual ever happen while I was prowling neighborhoods I knew nothing about? How many crews like Mr. McElroy’s were there in New Jersey? How could the company afford to pay me three dollars for each subscription I sold? Had I ever been to Hackensack? What was it like?
It was difficult to believe that what I was doing merely to support myself until I might begin to live as he did could possibly be of interest to E. I. Lonoff. He was a courteous man, obviously, and he was trying his best to put me at ease, but I was thinking, even as I gave my all to his cross-examination, that it wasn’t going to be long before he came up with a way of getting rid of me before dinner.
“I wish I knew that much about selling magazines,” he said.
To indicate that it was all right with me if I was being con descended to and that I would understand if I was soon asked to leave, I went red.
“I wish,” he said, “I knew that much about anything. I’ve written fantasy for thirty years. Nothing happens to me.”
It was here that the striking girl-woman appeared before me—just as he had aired, in faintly discernible tones of self-disgust, this incredible lament and I was trying to grasp it. Nothing happened to him? Why, genius had happened to him, art had happened to him, the man was a visionary!
Lonoff ‘s wife, the white-haired woman who had instantly removed herself after letting me into the house, had pushed open the door of the study across the foyer from the living room, and there she was, hair dark and profuse, eyes pale—gray or green—and with a high prominent oval forehead that looked like Shakespeare’s. She was seated on the carpet amid a pile of papers and folders, swathed in a “New Look” tweed skirt—by now a very old, outmoded look in Manhattan—and a large, loose-fitting, white wool sweater; her legs were drawn demurely up beneath the expanse of skirt and her gaze was fixed on something that was clearly elsewhere. Where had I seen that severe dark beauty before? Where but in a portrait by Velázquez? I remembered the 1927 photograph of Lonoff—”Spanish” too in its way—and immediately I assumed that she was his daughter. Immediately I assumed more than that. Mrs. Lonoff had not even set the tray down on the carpet beside her before I saw myself married to the
infanta
and living in a little farmhouse of our own not that far away. Only how old was she if Mama was feeding her cookies while she finished her homework on Daddy’s floor? With that face; whose strong bones looked to me to have been worked into alignment by a less guileless sculptor than nature—with that face she must be more than twelve. Though if not, I could wait That idea appealed to me even more than the prospect of a marriage here in the living room in spring. Showed strength of character, I thought. But what would the famous father think? He of course wouldn’t need to be reminded of the solid Old Testament precedent for waiting seven years before making Miss Lonoff my bride; on the other hand, how would he take it when he saw me hanging around outside her high school in my car?
Meanwhile, he was saying to me, “I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and men I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste. Sundays I have breakfast late and read the papers with Hope. Then we go for a walk in the hills, and I’m haunted by the loss of all that good time. I wake up Sunday mornings and I’m nearly crazy at the prospect of all those unusable hours. I’m restless, I’m bad-tempered, but she’s a human being too, you see, so I go. To avoid trouble she makes me leave my watch at home. The result is that I look at my wrist instead. We’re walking, she’s talking, then I look at my wrist—and that generally does it, if my foul mood hasn’t already. She throws in the sponge and we come home. And at home what is there to distinguish Sunday from Thursday? I sit back down at my little Olivetti and start looking at sentences and turning them around. And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?”
By now Hope Lonoff had closed the study door and returned to her chores. Together Lonoff and I listened to her Mixmaster whirling in the kitchen. 1 didn’t know what to say. The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature. I wondered if perhaps I was supposed to be laughing, despite the deadpan delivery, at his description of his day, if it wasn’t intended as mordant Lonovian comedy; though then again, if he meant it and was as depressed as he sounded, oughtn’t I to remind him just who he was and how much he mattered to literate mankind? But how could he not know that?
The Mixmaster whirled and the fire popped and the wind blew and the trees groaned while I tried, at twenty-three, to think of how to dispel his gloom. His openness about himself, so at odds with his formal attire and his pedantic manner, had me as unnerved as anything else; it was hardly what I was accustomed to getting from people more than twice my age, even if what he said about himself was tinged with self-satire. Especially if it was tinged with self-satire.
“I wouldn’t even try to write after my tea any more if I knew what to do with myself for the rest of the afternoon.” He explained to me that by three o’clock he no longer had the strength or the determination or even the desire to go on. But what else was there? If he played the violin or the piano, then he might have had some serious activity other than reading to occupy him when he was not writing. The problem with just listening to music was that if he sat alone with a record in the afternoon, he soon found himself turning the sentences around in his head and eventually wound up back at his desk again, skeptically looking at his day’s work. Of course, to his great good fortune, there was Athene College. He spoke with devotion of the students in the two classes that he taught there. The little Stockbridge school had made a place for him on the faculty some twenty years before the rest of the academic world suddenly became interested, and for that he would always-be grateful. But in truth, after so many years of teaching these bright and lively young women, both he and they, he found, had begun to repeat themselves a little.
“Why not take a sabbatical?” I was not a little thrilled, after all I had been through in my first fifteen minutes, to hear myself telling E. I. Lonoff how to live.
“I took a sabbatical. It was worse. We rented a flat in London for a year. Then I had every day to write. Plus Hope being miserable because I wouldn’t stop to go around with her to look at the buildings. No—no more sabbaticals. This way, at least two afternoons a week I have to stop, no questions asked. Be sides, going to the college is the high point of my week. I carry a briefcase. I wear a hat. I nod hello to people on the stairway. I use a public toilet. Ask Hope. I come home reeling from the pandemonium.”
“Are there no children—of your own?”
The phone began ringing in the kitchen. Ignoring it, he informed me that the youngest of their three children had graduated from Wellesley several years before; he and his wife had been alone together now for more than six years.
So the girl isn’t his daughter. Who is she then, being served snacks by his wife on the floor of his study? His concubine? Ridiculous, the word, the very idea, but there it was obscuring all other reasonable and worthy thoughts. Among the rewards you got for being a great artist was the concubinage of Velázquez princesses and the awe of young men like me. I felt at a loss again, having such ignoble expectations in the presence of my literary conscience—though weren’t they just the kind of ignoble expectations that troubled the masters of renunciation in so many of Lonoff’s short stories? Really, who knew better than E. I. Lonoff that it is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings? Nonetheless, it seemed to me a good idea to keep my humble needs and cravings to myself.
The kitchen door opened a few inches and his wife said softly, “For you.”
“Who is it? Not the genius again.”
“Would I have said you were here?”
“You have to learn to tell people no. People like that make fifty calls a day. Inspiration strikes and they go for the phone.”
“It’s not him.”
“He has the right wrong opinion on everything. A head full
of ideas, every one of them stupid. Why does he hit me when he talks? Why must he understand everything? Stop fixing me; up with intellectuals. I don’t think fast enough.”
“I’ve said I was sorry. And it’s not him.”
“Who is it?”
“Willis.”
“Hope, I’m talking to Nathan here.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll tell him you’re working.”
“Don’t use work as an excuse. I don’t buy that.”
“I can tell him you have a guest.”
“Please,” I said, meaning I was no one, not even a guest.
“All that wonder,” said Lonoff to his wife. “Always so greatly
moved. Always on the brink of tears. What is he so compassionate about all the time?”
“You,” she said.
“AH that sensitivity. Why does anybody want to be so sensitive?”
“He admires you,” she said. Buttoning his jacket, Lonoff rose to take the unwanted call.
“Either it’s the professional innocents,” he explained to me, “or the deep thinkers.”
I extended my sympathy with a shrug, wondering, of course, if my letter hadn’t qualified me in-both categories. Then I wondered again about the girl behind the study door. Does she live at the college or is she here with the Lonoffs on a visit from Spain? Would she ever be coming out of that study? If not, how do I go in? If not, how can I arrange to see her again by myself?
I
must see you again.
I opened a magazine, the better to dispel my insidious day dreams and wait there like a thoughtful man of letters. Leafing through the pages, I came across an article about the Algerian political situation and another about the television industry, both of which had been underlined throughout. Read in sequence, the underlinings formed a perfect
precis
of each piece and would have served a schoolchild as excellent preparation for a report to his current-events class. .
When Lonoff emerged—in under a minute—from the kitchen, he immediately undertook to explain about the Harper’s in my hand. “My mind strays,” he told me, rather as though I were a physician who had stopped by to ask about his strange and troubling new symptoms. “At the end of the page I try to summarize to myself what I’ve read and my mind is a blank—I’ve been sitting in my chair doing nothing. Of course, I have always read books with pen in hand, but now I find that if I don’t, even while reading magazines, my attention is not on what’s in front of me.”
Here she appeared again. But what had seemed from a distance like beauty, pure and severe and simple, was more of a puzzle up close. When she crossed the foyer into the living room—entering just as Lonoff had ended his fastidious description of the disquieting affliction that came over him when he read magazines—I saw that the striking head had been conceived on a much grander and more ambitious scale than the torso. The bulky sweater and the pounds and pounds of tweed skirt did much, of course, to obscure the little of her there was, but mostly it was the drama of that face, combined with the softness and intelligence in her large pale eyes, that rendered all other physical attributes (excluding the heavy, curling hair) blurry and incon sequential. Admittedly, the rich calm of those eyes would have been enough to make me wilt with shyness, but that I couldn’t return her gaze directly had also to do with this unharmonious relation between body and skull, and its implication, to me, of some early misfortune, of something vital lost or beaten down, and, by way of compensation, something vastly overdone. I thought of a trapped chick that could not get more than its beaked skull out of the encircling shell. I thought of those macrocephalic boulders the Easter Island heads. I thought of febrile patients on the verandas of Swiss sanatoria imbibing the magic-mountain air. But let me not exaggerate the pathos and originality of my impressions, especially as they, were subsumed soon enough in my unoriginal and irrepressible preoccupation: mostly I thought of the triumph it would be to kiss that face, and the excitement of her kissing me back.