A Fan's Notes (30 page)

Though I know very little of him during this time, over the years I have come across two people, a nurse and an X-ray technician, who did. I didn
’
t, as I yearned to do, earnestly implore,
“
Did he die well?
”
There was no need to do so. On learning who I was, both of them voluntarily remarked their proximity to my father at the end, both smiled warmly, both had a bright ness come into their eyes, and both wagged their heads in fond reminiscence. That fond head-wagging endures in a way no game by which a community buries a favorite son can ever endure.

Though the television droned all day, and though by day
’
s end, to save my head from decapitation, I could not have related to my tormentors a smidgen of anything I had seen, now I remember the shows clearly. I saw the quiz shows in which contestants stood as tremulous as condemned men in outhouse-like glass prisons, the flanks of their skulls encased in great Buck Rogers-like earphones. Watching them strain, look abstracted, purse, wet their lips, and roll their eyes while searching so zealously for an answer, I laughed heartily and knew that the show was either rigged—the contestants were such abominable actors—or—watching them, all phony sighs of relief, give their farcically esoteric answers—that the contestants were mental freaks unworthy of the homage a boy-minded country was paying them. I watched the jolly come dies that induced no laughter save on that Orwellian laugh track. Implying, as in its sinister intimidation it did imply, that there was a green and salutary land just off the wings where pink-cheeked, wittily precious people were grasping things be yond my brutal sense of humor, that laughter soured me utterly. The louder the belly laughs grew, the more puritanically severe became my distaste until I began to feel like an obtuse Presbyterian perusing Rabelais.

I watched—but there is no need to enumerate. Not once during those months did there emanate from the screen a genuine idea or emotion, and I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television under mines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality. But it is a tender, loving medium; and when it has done its savage job completely and reduced one to a prattling, salivating infant, like a buxom mother it stands always poised to take one back to the shelter of its brown-nippled bosom. Save for football I no longer watch the tube, and yet my set is always on. In the way one puts a ticking clock in a six-week-old puppy
’
s pillowed box to assure him that Mom is always there, I come in from having one too many beers, flick on the switch, and settle comfortably on the daven port. The drone reassures me that life is there, life is simple, life is unending. Starting up abruptly at 3 a.m., I am at first chagrined and terrified by the darkness; then suddenly I am conscious of the hot hum of the voiceless tube and turn to receive the benediction from the square of brilliant light shining directly upon me from out of the darkness. How I envy those
people who live in areas where all-night movies are shown.

To say that I took no pleasure from television is untrue. The endearing world of the soap operas captivated me completely. I don
’
t remember the names of any of them; nor do I remember anything of the plots save that the action moved along with underwater creepiness. I do remember the picture of America they apostrophized was truer than either the tongue-in-cheek writer or the lumbering actors imagined (the latter all walked left-handedly through their parts, letting us know they were between roles in The Legitimate Theater).

The world of the soap opera is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose but creating mischief. All these women had harsh crow
’
s-feet about the eyes, a certain fullness of mouth that easily and frequently distended into a childish poutiness, and a bosomless and glacial sexuality which, taken all together, brought to their faces a witchy, self-indulgent suffering that seemed compounded in equal parts of unremitting menstrual periods, chronic constipation, and acute sexual frustration. Though I do not remember the plots, I remember there was a recurring scene in which these females, like the witches about the cauldron in
Macbeth
, gathered together in shiny kitchens with checkered muslin curtains and ovens built into beige bricks; that there, seated over snowy porcelain tables adorned with exquisite china coffee cups and artificial flowers, they planned for, plotted against, and passed judgment upon all the shadowy and insubstantial characters who made their flickering entrances and exits through the kitchen. They produced plans and plots and judgments which the writer, for all his cynicism, his two thousand dollars a week, and the corny lines he gave them to speak, never questioned as being any less than their right to make. If Kit
’
s stepson Larry was so ungratefully and willfully contumacious as to want to buy a hot-dog stand instead of accepting his engineering scholarship to Yale, a means was devised to dissuade him. If Pamela
’
s husband Peter was drinking (and how the women lingered on and gave pregnancy to words like
drinking,
rolling them lovingly around on the palate like hot pecan pie), it was determined, not that Peter might be buck ling under too much responsibility but that he did not have enough and that
“
Pammy ought to have children.
”
Woe unto that philanderer Judson, now having a fling with his new secretary from out of town (as with the Southern mind, all the evil influences in the soap operas came from
“
out of town
”
); within days he was certain to meet his horrifying death in the holocaust of his overturned Jaguar.

Wondering constantly how accurate a portrait of America it was, I saw this world as one in which these witches were without motive save that of keeping everyone about them locked and imprisoned within the illiterate and banal orbit of their days, a world to which the passionate and the singular aspiration were forbidden. If these women seemed drawn with an alarming accuracy, in their nonexistent way the men were even more to the target and were not unlike the ball-less men one sees every day on Madison Avenue. All wore button-down shirts and seemed excellent providers, all deferred to the women
’
s judgments and seemed unburdened with anything like thoughts, and all possessed a Gregory-Peckish gentleness best reflected in their adamant refusal ever to raise their voices. Like most men they had somehow got the notion that the voice under control is the voice of civilization. A restraint admirable to the point of being miraculous, it seemed to say, let the Tower of Pisa complete its poised trajectory and fall, let the Taj Mahal ooze into the mire of Agra, let our madhouses overflow and India repopulate until its people elbow each other into the sacred Ganges, but in the interests of sanity and civilization let us still maintain our modulated
tones.

It was at this point that I began talking to my set. Like those lonely shut-ins who write chummy notes to the Arthurs Godfrey and Linkletter (whom in my own days on the davenport I regally dubbed Arty the Fartys I and II) and greet them daily with a familiar
“
Hi, Arthur!,
”
I began remonstrating with the men in the soap operas. If I had learned nothing else in Chicago, I had learned that one assumes impotence only at the risk of impotence; and, sotto voce, I spent a lot of time unctuously urging the men to take a stand and tell the witches to blow it out their asses. Indeed, so difficult was it to imagine an enormous penis rising up and bursting forth from behind that curtain of gray flannel, I began to wonder how those apple-cheeked children who contributed so many crow
’
s-feet to the women
’
s eyes were conceived unless by an incubus. Straining mightily, I often did imagine it. At that moment when the heroine
’
s misery was most acute, when her eyes were shockingly luminous little beads of self-pity, when her mouth was distended to the very essence of pouting witchiness, I
’
d picture John Gentle rising suddenly up out of the perpetual lethargy of his saintlike patience and smacking her right on her nose. I saw him hovering over her, so suddenly and inexplicably leonine that her aspect was one of unadulterated in comprehension, then quickly horrified with the thought of what was taking place. By now I was directing the scene. With a maniacal glee on my face, I watched her retreat in somnambulant, terrified, and scarcely concealed ecstasy to her floral-patterned davenport, saw him violently topple her there, smiled as his tremulously voracious hands cupped her flabby thighs and began to spread them. My cruelty knew no bounds! I ordered my cameras dollied in slowly for a loving close-up, closer, closer, closer. On my face now there was something quite obscene as I envisioned my audience of homemakers beginning to flail their bosoms, pull their hair, and swoon in terror, a whole distaff segment of the American body politic rendered loony by a sexual confrontation and passing out over their ironing boards. The white panties were torn off, my cam eras were on it now, closer, closer still, closer until the entire screen was one great, throbbing vulva opening slowly to ex pose a clitoris as big as a crab apple. By now I was giggling hideously. Was anyone, I wondered, still conscious? For them I had a
coup de grace
. My pantless actor was standing just off camera. From the glassed-in director
’
s booth I gave the sign, shoving my right arm furiously forward and catching it at the elbow with my left hand.
“
Bury it!
”
I shrieked hysterically. He obliged me with a vengeance. No fade-out was necessary, my audience having long since faded out. It was a memorable vision, the thought of them spread askew on their wine-colored carpets; lying across their kitchen tables, their faces sunk up to their ears in cottage-cheese salads; one caught in mid-sentence on the telephone, lying now on the floor, the receiver still in her hand, her mouth yet formed and frozen into the banal piece of witchery she was about to impart to a neighbor.

It was only infrequently that I was able to bring my imagination to such improbable heights. Most of the time I watched the shows in a state very near fainting myself. I shoveled one Oreo Sandwich after another into my mouth, holding onto my tired penis for dear life. During that two-hour daily orgy of soap operas I ate so many cookies that even Christie III, whose tummy had a more natural check on its abuses than mine, would after the first hour or so decline his share and sit watching my nervous eating with something very like in credulity on his sad face.

The books on the coffee table were those of Edmund Wilson. Coming inadvertently across an autobiographical sketch of his, I was at first astonished, then pleased, to learn that but a few miles south of me, at Talcottville, the legendary critic inhabited for part of the year a limestone farmhouse of his own, an heirloom from his mother
’
s side of the family. This was a remote and flimsy parallel upon which to build a literary romance, but I had little to cling to in those days; and the knowledge that we were in a way neighbors sent me to all his books, which I read chronologically, beginning with / Thought of Daisy. At those few moments—and, as with the telephone conversations, most of the time I thought I wasn
’
t absorbing a word he said—when I seemed to be conscious of his words, I imagined Wilson and I were having a literary duologue. But this was absurd. Owning neither the mental equipment nor the gnostical insights to take issue with him, I was a fuzzy-cheeked, impressionable, and adoring pupil sitting at the feet of a strong-minded and hirsute professor: Wilson spoke and, pursing my lips in a suggestion of wisdom, I nodded a vigorous assent. Oddly, though, in the next few years I discovered I had read him more sedulously and had under stood him more precisely than I would have dared claim.

Prior to this I hadn
’
t read a great deal; from then on I would read rangingly but sporadically, and time after time, on arriving home and settling comfortably onto the davenport, I would discover that the volume seemingly so randomly plucked from the library shelf, say Chapman
’
s
Emerson and Other Essays
, had been selected directly on the
“
boss
’
s orders,
”
and that I wouldn
’
t be ten pages into it before I was murmuring,
“
I know all about this guy.
”

In the decade since then I have also manifested a singularly pilgrimatic habit. Whenever I depart this glacial haven for Utica, and thence for the rest of the world, I make it a point to take the
“
high road
”
out of Lowville, rising up through Turin where they ski and where there are brightly red-trimmed chalets and shiny ski lifts and where everything looks like a children
’
s village enigmatically set out in the cow country, and down into Talcottville, where in passing I am able to get a hurried glimpse of his limestone retreat. The glimpse reassures me. In another, later piece Wilson had expressed his astonishment that he had endured where so many of his contemporaries from the twenties had failed to do so, gone to madness, to alcohol, to causes betrayed, and it gave me a very real warmth to know that a man could live with truth so long and survive. He was, he knew, an anachronism. He did not drive, he could not
“
abide
”
the radio, and leafing through the weekly picture magazines, he could not recognize their contents as reflecting a single aspect of the America he knew; so that, in his own word, he felt himself
“
stranded
”
from his country. Often, when driving by, I repressed an overpowering urge to slam on the brakes, to disembark, to proceed blithely to the door, to knock boldly, and, on his opening to my knock, to shout,
“
Eddie, baby! I too am stranded!
”
Because Wilson elsewhere had said that literary idolaters fell somewhere between blubbering ninnies and acutely frustrated maidens, I never did stop.