Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he lay dying

in a foreign land, “The descent to hell is the same from every place.”

THE

TUNNEL

What I have to tell you is as long as life,

but I shall run as swiftly, so before you know it,

we shall both be over.

It was my intention, when I began, to write an introduction to my work on the Germans. Though its thick folders lie beside me now, I know I cannot. Endings, instead, possess me . . . all ways out.

Embarrassed, I’m compelled to smile. I was going to extend my sympathy to my opponents. Here, in my introduction, raised above me like an arch of triumph, I meant to place a wreath upon myself. But each time I turned my pen to the task, it turned aside to strike me. As I look at the pages of my manuscript, or stare at the hooks which wall my study, I realize I must again attempt to put this prison of my life in language. It should have been a simple ceremony: a wreath to honor death and my success— the defense of my hypothesis concerning Germany. And when I wrote my book, to whom was I writing if not the world? . . . the world! . . . the world . . . the world is William welshing on a bet; it is Olive sewing up the gut of a goose; it is Reynolds raping Rosie on the frat-house stair; it is a low blow, a dreary afternoon, an exclamation of disgust. And when I wrote was I writing to win renown, as it’s customarily claimed? or to gain revenge after a long bide of time and tight rein of temper? to earn promotion, to rise above the rest like a loosed balloon? or was it from weak self-esteem? from pure funk, out of a distant childhood fear or recent shame? . . the world . . . the world, alas. It is Alice committing her Tampax to the trash.

I began, I remember, because I felt I had to. I’d reached that modest height in my career, that gentle rise, from which I could coast out of gear to a soft stop. Now I wonder why not. Why not? But then duty drove me forward like a soldier. I said it was time for “the Big Book,” the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to have: a pyramid, a column tall enough to satisfy the sky. Duty drove me the way it drives men into marriage. Begetting is expected of us, and in those days of heavy men in helmets the seed was certain, and wanted only the wind for a womb, or any slit; yet what sprang up out of those foxholes we fucked with our fists but our own frightened selves? with a shout of pure terror, too. That too—that too was expected; it was expected even of flabby maleless men like me. And now here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving, and unfeeling eye? . . . my eye. So sentences circle me like a toy train. What could I have said about the Boche, about bigotry, barbarism, butchery, Bach, that hasn’t been said as repeatedly as I dreamed my dream of glory, unless it was what I’ve said What could I have explained where no reason exists and no cause is adequate; what body burned to a crisp could I have rebelieved was bacon, if I had not taken the tack I took?

And last night, with my lids pulled over me, I went on seeing as if I were an open window. Full of wind. I wasn’t lying in peaceful darkness, that darkness I desired, that peace I needed. My whole head was lit with noises, yet no Sunday park could have been more lonely: thoughts tossed away, left like litter to be blown about and lost. There were long avenues of footfall, leaf flutter lacking leaf or tree, barks unreturned to their dogs.

My hypothesis . . . My word . . . My world . . . My Germany . . .

Of course there is nothing genuinely German about me, though my name suggests that some distant ancestor doubtless came from that direction, for I have at least three generations of Americans safely beneath me. My wife, a richly scutcheoned Muhlenberg and far more devoted to armorial lines and ties of blood—all such blazonry—than I could ever bring myself to be, has already tunneled through five layers of her own to find, to her unrelenting triumph and delight, the deepest layer lying on American soil still, and under the line of the nineteenth century, if only by a spade’s length. So my name, and the fact that I speak the German language fluently, having spent a good many years in that exemplary country (though there is nothing genuinely German about me), help make the German nation a natural inference. I was there first as a student in the middle of the thirties, and I must confess I was caught up in the partisan frenzy of those stirred and stirring times; yet when I returned it was ironically as a soldier behind the guns of the First Army, and almost immediately afterward I began my term as a consultant on “dirty Fascist things” at the Nuremberg Trials. Finally, on the fore-edge of the fifties, with my fourteen hundred francs of fame, to alter the French reviewer’s expression in my favor, I purchased my release from the paws of the military and was permitted to become a tourist and teacher and scholar again. Yes, by that time I had a certain dismal renown as the author of the Kohler thesis concerning Nazi crimes and German guilt, and this preceded me and lit my path, so that I had to suffer a certain sort of welcome too, a welcome which made me profoundly uneasy, for I was met and greeted as an equal; as, that is, a German, a German all along, and hence a refugee: I was William Frederick Kohler, wasn’t I? wasn’t I fat and fair, with a dazzling blond wife and a troop of stalwart children fond of—heaven help them—hiking about with bare knees? and so why not? . . no, there was no mistake, I had the name and knew the language, looked the part, had been wisely away through the war, and, of course (though no one said it, it was this which pinned that wretched label to my coat like a star), had written that remarkably sane, peace-seeking book, so close on the event, too; a book which was severe— tight, it was severe, perhaps severe—yet patient, fair and calm, a Christian book really; its commentators, my hostesses, their guests, all my new friends, smiling pleasantly to pump my hand, declared (as though history had a fever); yes, so calm and peace-seeking (came Herr Kohler’s cool and soothing palm), so patient and perceptive, so serene (while he lay bitterly becalmed himself)— with a quotation from Heinrich Heine just beneath the title like a tombstone with a grave—that the French reviewer (and there was only one at first) spat on his page (he had a nose Like a dirk and spectacles enlarged his eyes): It will be fourteen hundred francs spent on infamy, he said, and you will get your money’s worth. Of peace-seeking, peace-making, peace-loving Buch. A good buy.

A friend of mine did the French version, but it was I, quite unaccompliced, who betrayed my English to the German. At twelve marks it continues to have a brisk sale. I redid my study with a recent check.

I had intended to introduce

This is to introduce a work on death by one who’s spent his life in a chair.

I could not hold my father in much love, my mother either. Indeed, I learned to love far later, as it proved, than they had time for. So perished they without’ It. None of us grieves. I’ve played a few sly tricks upon insanity since then, and now life holds me as it once held them—in a dry fist. Hearts held that way wad up eventually . . . trees did. Once—once only—my heart burst bloodily in that grip. But what has this to do with me now, or with Germany?

*     *     *

Life in a chair

Yes, I’ve sat too long, no wonder it’s painful, though this is the great Tabor’s own chair, which I had shipped from Germany. It swivels smoothly, tips without a sound. In the mornings he lectured at the university. Scholars, statesmen, writers, filled his afternoons. My day commences, he said to me once, his fingers grazing on a slope of papers, when I come to rest in here at the end of an evening and begin making Greek and Roman history up out of German words, French wit, and English observation. He scrawled his famous smile across his face, hastily, like an autograph; but he was old, already ill, and his hand trembled. German words, he said, not German feeling. Tabor spoke ironically, of course, yet what he said was true: he woke because his neighbors slumbered; he spied upon their dreams; he even entered their dreams eventually, and brandished a knife in the nightmares of Europe. Magus Tabor. Mad Meg, they called him. One day they’d say he wore the decade like a diadem. His baldness glistened like a forest pool. There’ve been times when this chair’s been my only haven, he said, and his lids closed over his protruding eyes. Night had fallen behind them—in Mad Meg’s head. You see how obedient it is; how swiftly it turns, like fortune in history? He spun the chair hard, his eyes still in lids. So I find it easy to reverse my position. He laughed with the stutter of an angry bird and I managed a low social chuckle. It really was a dream for him, all this: our conversation, the lecture of the morning, the interrupting applause and tumult of shouts at the end, the famous and powerful who waited for him while he spoke with an unimportant, young, and dazzled American. Those deeply curtained eyes reminded me that we were drifting through the middle of his sleep, and that I was just a wraith who would evaporate the instant he sank into his circuiting chair sank into the past into death into history.

The study of history, gentlemen

the study of history

The hall was full. There were hundreds—crowds in the doorways, everyone still. The heads of the great grew like blossoms from the pillars lining the walls: in a rise along one side—Lessing, Herder, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling; in a fall along the other—Möser, Dilthey, Ranke, Troeltsch, Treitschke. My first time in that room I had sat by the bust of Treitschke and read the inscription plagued beneath it on the column:

ONLY A STOUT HEART WHICH FEELS THE JOYS AND

SORROWS OF THE FATHERLAND AS ITS OWN CAN

GIVE VERACITY TO AN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE.

It was longer than I care to admit before I realized that for Mad Meg, too, truth was the historian’s gift to history.

no

That’s not nearly strong enough. And my—my what?—my naiveté? my admiration? my vanity?—something—prevented me from understanding what he wrote—he preached—so many times so plainly. The window of the car would not roll up and Lou’s face looked warm from the cold wind as if freshly slapped or shamed or elsewhere loved. My hand fell to hers, too, somewhat like a discarded glove, and she took it with a squeeze, so that the chilled soon lay within the chilled, I thought, like a bottle of champagne. Cold hand, moist part, I said. Hers slipped away.

Drafts lapped my neck. I cobble history, Tabor shouted when he saw me again, placing his huge, rough-knuckled fists against my chest. We met at a large impersonal affair, a reception held at a chancellery, and I had finally burrowed to the stair to scan the crowd, perhaps to find a friend or two, when I observed him in the middle of the room, over his head in hair and shoulders, burning quietly, the only thing alive among the potted ferns and suits of armor. The icy marble floor was flopped with Oriental rugs and steadily enlarging spills of people. He was alone, ill. I was astonished to see him in such a place. I cobble history the way a cobbler cobbles shoes, he said. Wretched fellow, I thought: in the midst of this crush, you’re composing a lecture. If it were not for me the Roman Empire— here he made a hard white ball of his hands—would not, an instant—I heard his harsh laugh bubble from the crowd—stay together—and his hands flew apart with startling violence, fingers fanned. There was a terrible energy in that gesture, although he was, by this time, a sick old man, so weak he tottered. His ears seemed unnaturally fastened to his head, and his arms emerged from the holes of his sleeves as if the flesh had remained as a lining. I swaddled my neck in my arms and would have turned my collar if I’d dared. Light spewed from the chandeliers. Countless pairs of glistening boots re-echoed from the marble squares. Then an angry woman in a powdered bosom passed between us, and I was glad to be carried away. Poor Tabor. His lips were still moving when he disappeared behind a heavily forested Prussian chest. Wise eyes slid sneakily down the stairs. Voices were impeccably coifed. A moist mouth relieved a sausage of its stick. Long gowns whispered like breezes together, and I saw several backs begging to be amorously bitten. Bellies were in belly bras. Consequently postures were perfect. Since coming to Germany and manhood at the commencement of the thirties, I had known few such opulent days. There were so many bits of brilliant metal, so much jewelry, so many cummerbunds and ribbons, a gently undulating sea of silk-tossed light, that the gilded ceiling drew away like heat and seemed a sky. Thus I beheld him for the first time (or anyway eyed him out); and I felt the smile I’d penciled in above my chin fade like the line beneath the last rub of an eraser. Never mind. There was no need then for fidelity, only for entertainment. Elaborate and lie. Describe the scene to your quam diu friends: Link, Hintze, and Krauske—friends who faded, whom heat cannot bring back even in the palest outline like lemon juice on paper. Describe—and make it rich, make it fun, full of rhetoric and episode—Mad Meg in the Maelstrom.

I faced the four corners, cupped the bowl of my glass like a breast, began the construction of my anecdote, and let the wine die.

Is writing to yourself a healthier insanity than talking to yourself? Would Amid say so? Gide or Pepys?

Night, joked Mallet too much; wrong. ‘Tis below you. ‘Tis bad habit. No more of it.

Or is making love to yourself, elaborately, with ritual remorse, better? worse?

Yet I should take notes. I’ve inherited a poor memory from my mum, yes, the way some inherit weak eyes, and everything goes by me as remembered—as observed—as the poop of public birds.

Very mild and warm. About 6 glow-worms shining faintly. We went up as far as the grove. When we came home the fire was out. We ate our supper in the dark, and went to bed immediately. William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming into his room, for it was a very rainy night. The ash leaves lay across the road.

There’s death in every diary. I’ve found it there the way I’ve found so many words, lying silent and forgotten like old shoes stiffening in a closet, or moving at the approach of my eye like a spider in a toolbox, as though some small piece of metal were alive. Wasn’t there a day in infancy when such a startle would have made my limbs splash open?

I pick up my dropped life in this calamitous century’s sixty-seventh year; a year windy with unreason, noisy with nonsense and meaningless milling; a year like the last, just right for a decade as mired in morality as a circus in mud, as infested with fakes as a fair. Perhaps it’s only a trampled package in the street—this life I pick up—and maybe my writing is its furtive unwrapping.

In a diary you may go to greet death in the most slovenly state of undress and disease, your language out of reach of any public reading, your own eye kind, accustomed to your own wastes and malodorous ailments, almost incapable of offense, incurably forgiving. You may write without anyone’s whining that the day was not only “mild” but “warm” as well; you can pointlessly infer that if the rain came pelting into Wm’s room, it must have been a rainy night indeed; and you can inadvertently say something beautiful containing ash leaves, and never register what you saw of the storm, or felt about love in your unbrothered bed, or say that you wept along your sleeping arm, or signify how well you grasped the sense of what you said.

So I wonder why I’ve lived so much of my life in a chair the way I wonder at the daily disappearance of my chin—without surprise—without question or answer—because loneliness is unendurable elsewhere. Here it may be sat through, if not stood. Here it may be occasionally relieved, like a crowded bowel. Here it may be handled like a laboratory mouse, so tenderly it squeaks only from the pressures of its own inner fears. And here that loneliness may be shaped the way the first dumb lump of clay was slapped to speech in the divine grip. We were late among the living, and by the time God got to us ice was already slipping from the poles as if from an imperfectly decorated cake. The stars and planets were out of sync. Uncured, the serpent was swaying on its tail like an enraptured rope. Haven’t I always maintained that our several ribs were the incriminating print of a bedeviled and embittered fist?

February 29. My room. A table covered entirely by a heap of magazines and books: they look like the seven dresses of La Tula . . . They look like a man with a cane. They look like a careless bazaar on a market day.

A small night table is littered with drugs, an half apothecary shop.

A bureau whose drawers never close well (like a man whose slant teeth forbid his mouth to shut well) carries the two brushes I have and my phonograph records.

The mirror is cockeyed.

How shall it save me? to say: went out to say: saw squirrels chasing one another through the sycamores (the sky as dry as Wordsworth’s road was wet); to write: watched the loosened leaves kite slowly down. Another day. Another dolor. Nothing retained but a pun. Of Culp’s contrivance. What the hell. Another day. Broke out. Encountered my wife shouldering aside cloud. You’d look a lot better with a belt, she said; that roll around your middle makes your pants spread. I reply with a sad clown’s grin that I suffer from a surfeit of imaginary pies. In the house, read death lists. Poked about the basement. Ducked my memories of my children. Groused.

I’ve no mirror, cockeyed or otherwise. One wrinkled window. Above: a worn lace curtain like a rusted screen. My thoughts seem pulled from my head like the poetry of Rilke. The journal of my other self, he once thought to call his book. The journal of my other book. How’s that for this? Went out. Saw: hospitals. Saw self. And if I cried, as I am crying now, would Rilke heed me, or any of his angels? I once worked hard on him, and out of love, too, the way I still work in the garden now and then, or order canceled checks. Remember to buy milk. On my desk is a lamp whose base is a brass image of young hectoring Jesus. Stolen from Germany. Swaddled in underwear. Transported by trunk.

What will you do, God, when I croak?

I am your jug (when I am broke?)

I am your ale (when I’ve gone flat?)

Your daily stint, your feathered hat . . .

You won’t mean nuthin after that.

Jesus is showing us a text from the Good Book, but the inscription is so worn can’t make it out. No doubt it the usual. Faint inscriptions are always that.

If you are laughter, I am joke.

January 28. I shall not remember what happened on this day. It is a blank. At the end of my life I may want it, may long to have it. There was a new moon: that I remember. But who came or what I did—all is lost. It’s just a day missed, a day crossing the line.

A twinge today when I bit into a cookie. Watch it. Watch it. What? Thoughts pulled from my head and collected the way hair wads in my wife’s comb: milk, mirror, thievery, the youthful brass Jesus, translated Rilke. I’m glad I don’t have to live through the rest of your life, Lou said.

I had a tooth out the other day, curious and interesting like a little lifetime—first, the long drawn drag, then the twist of the hand and the crack of doom!

Women write them. They’ve nothing else to do but die into diaries . . . subside like unpillowed fluff.

Sunday, March 8th. I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’ sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency . . . I will go down with my colours flying . . . Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat I think it is tare that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

I intend no introspection. Mark that. Occupation is essential. When I had written what I had written; when I had reached the present the dead end of history—to find it empty as an empty pantry;

then I had fallen

into the finis of my book: into its calm (all right, cold) yet angry conclusion; because it ceased in a silence which had silence for its fanfare; the blank page beyond did not even say “blank,” any more than death itself says “death,” or “over,” or “finis,” or “done.”

I should not have liked to sup upon poor Virginia’s sup. Did she mark how her own sentences secretly sentenced her? did she observe how her watery grave was foretold by the very self she sheltered and lent her pen? her petticoats, perhaps, like wet flags, her pockets weighted with stones, and the March of her suicide with an 8 in it, like this entry? What did that other dame—Colette—command? Regarde! Conrad, Chekhov: see! they said. Sniff, pry, peek, peer. Look. Scrutinize. Ah, lovely, lovely, tender little . . . Look and love God and get lucky. Et tu auras la grâce des grandes choses. Well, I intend no in . . . Out is all of it. Out of the print and over the cover . . . to grandmother’s house we go. I study all other methods of desperate disappearance.

My office chair is not a bit like this old, throned, well-oiled wheel of my mad tongue’s master; yet I had her in it. Stiff, without style, and with a mousy little squeak. Lou. Like one of the dime-store trinkets she sold. Like a piece of freshly picked and bitten history. Fuck the facts, honey Fuck’em. And they will spend themselves like money. To leave you limp with afterlonging. Why are you so mean to me, she said, when all I want is my fair slice of your life, its sordid boons? “All I want,” we always begin, when we pretend we mean “just a little.” All I want: I want to lay the world waste like its moon. I do not understand why a body should be so appealing—so warm in winter, so cool through every heat, so calm beneath my lone excitement. Coy, she came after hours. Triste. Straight from the Woolworth where, improbably, she worked to pay her way into my class. Climb the stairs to my cloud-shrouded office. Drag a book bag. Straddle the arms of my varnish-yellow chair. Her loveliness awash my life, I went down gladly, colors flying. Chair means ‘flesh’ in French. La Verbe s’est faite chair. Thus and So the mind slips. There was not a single jingle from her, not the barest bracelet rattle, not a sigh. And when my book appears, will they award me a watch, a dazzled stare? bucks from the bank? kudos from the crowd? a laud from the Leathered Overlords? or even one moan of dispassionate pleasure? Will they distinguish me from the ruck in the chain stores—with a taller stack? In a Porky Pig’s eye. I, in my solitary self, am the fat chance. She knew she was A LASS WITHOUT A LACK. And I a groan. Put my small penis in her. Only the chair was moved. And I came like an ad in the mail. Yet beyond the bitterness now, I can still taste the sweet gift, the tater-sweet shiver of her inner thigh. Life in a chair. I found her mouth in a moue in the Five & Dime where she worked. Not in scarves, confections, stationery, housewares, toddlers, paints. In jewelry. In junk. One bracelet on her wrist like one of my mother’s rings of wire. In a purse. In a pout. In a pique. The yearn was immediate, like being struck by the sun. And I fell upon her arm like Irish light.