Mickelsson''s Ghosts by John Gardner
Abruptly he cleared his throat, put his pipe in his pocket, dusted off his hands—he could not remember now what he’d been thinking—and started back toward the house.
Back in the room he’d chosen as his study he returned to the dusty but interesting business of unpacking his books and old papers. He came across the notecards for a piece he’d started some years ago, and then for some reason dropped, on Dada and modern political recklessness. The cards were yellow, the ink, from a ballpoint pen, blurred and fading. He’d written the notes when he was teaching in California. He remembered the sharp thrill of the discovery: that the Dadaists, as early as 1915—the final “apes of Zarathustra,” one of his notes proclaimed—were expressing exactly the same disgust and despair one found in the graffiti on university walls in 1965: “Stop everything!” Nineteen fifteen, when his father was eight years old, his grandfather still brooding by medieval reasoning on problems already a century defunct; 1915, when his father was perhaps already inclining, subtly, non-rationally, toward the unmeditated, neither theistic nor anti-theistic love of life—love of cows, pigs, chickens, horses, ducks, goats—that would shape his character and perhaps, for a time at least, Peter Mickelsson’s own: a time when farming was sweet, no sound but the gentle creak of harness-leather, the occasional hiss of steam, and the horizons of consciousness were walnut groves, hedgerows and hills.
The movement known as Dada came into being in Zurich in 1915 and eventually exported its people, “art,” and outbursts to wherever an audience could be attacked. The name Dada is French babytalk for anything to do with horses, including horses’ fecal matter, and like the movement, the name had no direct positive significance. Dada was in its outward form a nihilistic protest against everything. According to a Dada manifesto, its “position” was:
No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.
Another note:
Dadaist Arthur Craven, invited to lecture at the Exhibition of Independent Painters in New York in 1917, appeared drunk and proceeded to belch and swear at his audience. The address was concluded by police when Craven began to strip. (Cf. lecture from inside diving bell.)
He had intended to argue that Dada had won, more terribly than the Dadaists—lovers of suicide though they were—had dreamed they might. Another note:
No social emotion is more vital in America today than a sense of personal helplessness, uselessness, and impotence. Everyone more or less has the sense of existing in the shadow of vast uncontrollable structures, impervious to human desire or need. (To elaborate: computers, I.R.S., Pentagon, etc.)
Under the notecards he found, ironically, a sheaf of his grandfather’s sermons: “The Responsibility of the Lilies of the Field,” “A Father’s Harsh Love,” et cetera. He got a vivid image of the old man pacing in his study in the manse, his right hand making furtive little gestures that, strange to say, would expand only slightly, if at all, when he rose behind the pulpit on Sunday morning to attack his congregation. (He was a small man, doll-like. It was odd that he should have conceived large sons.)
Under the sermons, and under his own ream of notes on Martin Luther, then notes on Nietzsche, near the bottom of the cardboard box he was unpacking, he found a photograph he couldn’t remember having seen before. It was a color snapshot of his wife, Ellen, lying on a sofa, in a black dress, their one-year-old son sitting beside her, smiling at the camera, dressed in red trousers and a striped blue and white shirt. Ellen’s hair was straw-yellow, and she was thin, surprisingly pretty. He had not remembered for a long time how pretty she’d been in those days. He felt his throat constrict, as if the bright irretrievable past were a poison in the air. It was not grief he felt. That would come, perhaps, but it was not there yet. The pretty young woman and the equally pretty child might almost have been strangers—touching, interesting: the lines of the woman’s face soft and intelligent, the child’s smile serene. In a sense, of course, Mickelsson remembered a great deal that instant, remembered that the setting was an apartment they’d had at the time in California, and that when he—or someone—had taken the picture (it was in some respects more a deduction than a memory), an uncle, his father’s brother, who had died just a few months later, had been visiting, seemingly hale and hearty. But what he felt, it seemed to him—felt like a physical sensation, a jolt—was that favorite old puzzler of philosophers, the perishability of time. Days, months, years, whatever their vitality, could be swallowed into nothingness. The endless, green Wisconsin summers of his childhood, the joyful, anxious years of graduate school (he remembered the print, the texture of the paper in the Kant he’d pored over in his library carrel), then twenty years of teaching—and more important, more shameful, the vast plain of time he’d had with Ellen—all that charged, sunlit span could shrink up and vanish leaving nothing but a few sharp-edged boulders, frozen images drained of emotion, or of all but the bloodless, child-faced spectre of emotion. … He pressed his thumb and first finger to his forehead, pushing hard, as if seeing if his flesh still had feeling—squatting among shambles, books and papers and the long-forgotten snapshot—straining to get his mind around the fact that such vitality could vanish from the earth. “So this is death,” he thought. Not that it was a useful, philosophical thought. He felt grief edging nearer, still unreal, mere potential, like some hazard ahead of him on a path through woods after dark.
That night—after he’d finished his weight-lifting, push-ups, and exercises, the athlete’s regimen he’d followed for years, cowardly plea against mortality—lying heavily on his back under the covers, alone in the darkness of the big, quiet house, staring up at where the ceiling would be if he could see it (still wearing his glasses, as if imagining he might turn on the light again and return to the book on the bedside table), Mickelsson at last felt the sorrow, or rather self-pity, that he’d known would come. Tears welled up, and he reached up under his glasses to wipe them away with two fingers. He remembered his father and mother dressed up for church, young and handsome, with lively eyes. Now his father was dead, his mother an old woman, pale, wrinkled, bent like a foetus, hardly a visible trace of what she’d been in her prime. (Not that she wasn’t happy, he reminded himself. Too bad the gift was one she’d been unable to pass on.) He remembered fishing on a lake somewhere with Ellen and the children—California or Nevada; they’d travelled a good deal, in those days—mountains above them like huge chunks of coal, throwing a long shadow. Then he remembered Ellen at some party, holding forth, glittering, everyone watching. Her neckline plunged; no one could fail to notice. Yet her face was what they watched.
The empty old house became more solid and stiff around him, more still. Though he couldn’t see the ceiling, he knew exactly where it was, heavy to his imagination as a slab of stone. His eyes were now overflowing, though the tears seemed to him, or to the part of his mind standing back, observing, not warranted. He heard a train passing, far below him, a sound that recalled to him his earliest childhood. (A railroad had cut through his father’s woods, a mile from the house. He would lie awake listening, in the middle of the night, when his mother and father were away visiting, or attending a meeting of the Grange. His grandmother would be down in the kitchen, reading her Bible. The house was of stone. Branches of fir trees scraped softly against the walls.) After the train passed—it took a long time—the silence seemed deeper than before. He could be afraid, he thought, if he let himself; could give way to fear as he’d done as a boy, walking down the pitchdark country road under a roof of creaking oak-beams, walking faster and faster, then running. But though the thought teased at his mind it did not reach him, quite. He watched it like a stranger, an alien spirit, curious and grieved but not tempted. One grew u
An image of old Pearson from higher on the mountain floated into his mind. For a moment, just before he dropped off to sleep, he imagined he heard someone walking, slowly, as if puzzled, from room to room downstairs in the dark. An unpleasant sensation came over him, as if he were suddenly someone else, full of physical discomforts and anger. When he concentrated, the sounds and the strange sensation stopped together; or rather, the whole thing evaporated, like meaning from a word in a dream.
5
Though he was eager to get down to fixing the house, he was prevented from it, temporarily, by the fall semester’s starting up—not to mention lack of funds. His situation was now so hopeless that he’d for the moment given up entering his checks. Bouncing was more or less inevitable. God damn the theater, he thought again and again, meaning his wife’s absurd “investments“—most of them gifts, it had turned out, to down-and-out actors too childish to make sensible use of them. But the fault had not been hers alone. It was Mickelsson himself who’d bought the big house in Providence, the thousands of books, the Peugeot. He would accept the necessity of writing whining letters, making wild promises, praying that something would turn up, though nothing would.
“How can it be that bad?” Tom Garret asked once in the mailroom, his smile pleasantly baffled. Garret had ten kids, and nowhere near Mickelsson’s salary. To his credit, he made no pretense of feeling pity. “You must make at least twelve hundred a month after taxes. And all those textbooks. Don’t they bring something in?”
“We lived high,” Mickelsson said, giving Garret one of his gloomy, significant looks. The look suggested yachts, gambling casinos.
Stubbornly Garret smiled on, like ole massa making light of his slaves’ complaints. He swept his hands out to the sides, palms up. He smiled harder, in fact, his round cheeks bunching up, and said with maddening Southern gentility, “Everybody’s got debts. But with the money you make … When’s the last time you sat down and really tried to figure it all out?”
“Tom,” Mickelsson said, half turning away, controlling anger, “believe me, you’ve got no idea.”
“If I were you,” Garret said, “I’d get a graduate assistant, and I’d have him or her lay everything out in black and red. …”
Whatever more he said, Mickelsson did not hear; he’d left the mail-room.
It was true, of course, that Mickelsson was not very clear on where he stood. Adding up his bills—those he could find (he had them stuffed everywhere, in part of his bookcase, all over his desk, in brown manila envelopes under his desk)—then looking at the month’s statement from the bank, he would get chest-pains, and his head would cloud with confusion. He should certainly work out some plan, some schedule; but one could see at a glance that it was hopeless. For years his accounts had been neat and exact. Then Ellen had taken over. The thought of now unsnarling it filled him with anger and despair: he simply couldn’t do it. Sometimes when it seemed to him that he hadn’t written a check in weeks, so that there must be a fair amount in the bank, he would write a great swatch of them and mail them away with a prayer. Mostly he’d just send a thousand to Ellen and, for the rest, would let Nature take its course; that is, he would wait for the sheriff. He’d known in advance all Garret had to tell him, and something more, that Garret had not dared imply: that in a way he was purposely burying himself in debt and financial confusion. It was part of his general anger at the world, or in Heidegger’s special sense die Welt—the Establishment, conventional values and expectations. Whether or not he approved of the feeling, he felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. He had deigned to behave like an ordinary man, buying what the TV told him to buy, giving what his wife in her position as lady-in-the-world demanded, and now here he was, a giant entangled in strings. Rather than snip all those strings one by one, with the patience of an ant, he would die and rot on the hill where he was tied, let his sweet death-stench drive the Lilliputians from their island.
Rhetoric. It was his joy and salvation, not that it paid the bills. It was his cynosure in the rift between Welt and Erde, the inviolable domain of the mad superman, the L-13 balance between words and things. It was indeed a kind of madness, of course. If one posed the problem in George Steiner’s way (recalling Thomas Mann’s), as one between a classicism harmonically “housed” in language and a modernism in which the particular no longer chimes within an overarching universe, Mickelsson’s rhetoric was his noisy pox on both the many-mansioned house and the sticks-and-stones exile shanty. As Luther had hated the long dark shadow of the Pope, and as Nietzsche had hated Luther, Mickelsson hated everything, everybody, every remotest possibility. He hated works, he hated grace, he hated the retreat to love in all its permutations, from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Court of Love to the darkling plain of Matthew Arnold. He therefore despised his bills, was made angry and frightened by the very idea of debt. He would not think about it.
Not only was there, in addition to all his former burdens, the $224 a month that must go to house payments, and another $20 for fire insurance—required by the bank (fire was the only insurance he carried)—he’d also had to lay out $700, plus insurance, registration, and licensing, for a misshapen, cranky old Jeep. He’d met Tim Booker on the street, down by the Acme Market, on a bright September morning when the air had a smell of winter in it, and Tim had said, grinning, delighted to see him, “Hay, you geared up for snow, Prafessor?”
Mickelsson had laughed sociably. “I guess winter’s right around the corner.” The smell in the air had been the only evidence of it. Not a leaf had turned, and nights were often so warm he had to sleep with the windows open.
“Up there where you are,” Tim said, “they’ll be drifts ten foot deep, and that’s if the winter’s a light one!” He made it sound like praise, as if Mickelsson had done something masterful in choosing such a troublesome place to get to. “I hope you’ve gaht something to plow your driveway owt!”
Mickelsson had looked at him thoughtfully, half smiling because Tim was infectiously smiling; but he was feeling anxious. Heaven knew he couldn’t afford a truck and snowplow! What were they these days—five, six thousand dollars used? For a moment the very thought of having to lie to the bank for more money made it hard for him to breathe. (He thought of Finney, Rifkin, his wife and children. He, a man with his name in Who’s Who, walked around even now in shoes with holes in them; all his collars and cuffs were frayed. Sometimes students, usually young women, would point it out to him and laugh.) He said, though in fact the idea had only now occurred to him, “I’ve been thinking of trading the Chevy for a Jeep, if I can find one that’s not too expensive.” He glanced at Tim.
“Might be a good idea,” Tim said. “In fact I might know of one, if you’re interested.” He shoo
“You think it would run? I’d hate to lay out—”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure it would run OK. He’s taken pretty good care of it, if you don’t mind a wired-up tailgate and a couple of windows that won’t roll down. You know these fahrmers.” Again he laughed, clapping his hands as if he’d told an extremely funny joke. Though the laugh seemed as open and innocent as a boy’s, Mickelsson, still half smiling, eyed him narrowly.
After an instant Mickelsson asked, “You’re sure it’s not haunted or anything?”
Abruptly, each for his own reasons, both of them laughed, and Tim reached out to put his hand on Mickelsson’s upper arm, the gesture of an athlete, winner to loser. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “You hear the story about the feller who stayed there all night and it turned his hair white?”
“Not me,” Mickelsson said. “Nobody tells me anything.” But he felt good now, relieved and cleansed, the whole thing behind them.