Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [34]
Isaac had given Saul The Well Wrought Urn, by Cleanth Brooks, a collection of essays on wide-ranging subjects like romanticism, irony, and great neglected poets, and Saul was rereading all the original texts to refresh his memory. At the rate he was going it would have taken him a year to write the review, a review of one thousand words.
At first when he got sick Saul thought he had the flu, because it was going around. When the symptoms persisted, he suspected mononucleosis. He was tired all the time and we had to give up our late-afternoon walks, when we would stroll through the Village like a couple of peripatetic philosophers.
He disappeared for a while. There was no answer when I called him at home—I didn’t have his number at work—and I couldn’t imagine where he was. I thought of his invisible female companion and wondered whether he might, after all, be spending his evenings with her.
Then he phoned me from his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn. He felt exhausted, he said, and needed someone to look after him. I offered to go and see him, but he put me off. I found out later that he was having tests in the hospital.
A couple of days after that, he called again and asked me to come to Brooklyn. His illness, he said, was serious.
Serious? I said. How do you mean, serious?
He laughed. Then he said, High serious.
Saul’s mother was a widow, a small, neat woman with a bony face like his and anxious eyes. She had a painful smile, as if she had been musing on the fact that she belonged to the first generation of Jewish mothers to be categorically discredited by their sons. In the current issue of Partisan Review there was a story about a Jewish mother, another widow, who had thrown herself across the door of her apartment, defying her son to return to his tenement in Manhattan without the bag of food she had prepared for him. In his desperation, driven wild by love and rage, the son had beaten her about the head and shoulders with a rolled copy of The New York Times. Everybody in the Village was talking about the story, which was by a writer we had never heard of. What a stroke! they were saying—to beat his mother with the Times.
Of course Saul’s illness, whose exact nature was still unknown to me, put a great strain on his mother. She had taken a position toward it and developed a defensive strategy. Saul would be all right, she said, if he would only let himself relax. She believed that his illness was caused by tension, or even by attention, because, like those Jewish boys in P.S. 44, Saul always paid attention. He never relaxes, she said to me. He thinks too much; he takes the world on his shoulders. She watched him constantly to see whether he was thinking. She had a plan to keep him from thinking, and it was clear that she regarded me as a threat to that plan.
I had blundered into an old debate and it was a relief when Saul suggested that we go for a walk. We hadn’t taken a walk together in what was for us a long time. His mother immediately objected that it would tire him but then she saw in his face that she tired him more. Still, as we put on our coats there was an appeal in her eyes. She was asking me not to take him on an intellectual bender, not to make him think. “You can go to Prospect Park,” she said, grasping at the straw that there was less incentive to think in a park.
The day was sunny and cold, as if Brooklyn had been preserved in a refrigerator for us. Saul was silent for the first few minutes, digesting his mother’s absence, adjusting his breathing. He wore a navy blue knitted cap she had insisted on and a heavy, dark, timeless-looking overcoat, like a chesterfield. I had never seen the coat before—it must have been his father’s. It was too big for him and muffled his gestures.
Poor thing, he said, still going back to his mother, it’s hard on her. She’s an intelligent person, yet all her impulses are maternal and stereotypical. She feels the falseness of her position, but she can’t help it. She struggles against the stereotype like a woman in labor, but nothing new comes forth.
At the entrance