Only towards the close of his reminiscences did he seem to have shared a responsibility with normal men: “They sent me to war,” he told us wryly, voicing that unconvincing complaint against their perpetual situation in the ridiculous made by people who, pleasing to laugh at themselves, one suspects of aiding destiny in detaining them there, “in two left-foot boots, and,” trotting his fingers along the table in a swerve, “the one would follow the other,” he explained as the mental eye also followed that earlier Insel — out of the ranks; on the march to a war that, at its blasting zenith, ceased to be war, for, in elaborating his martial adventures, Insel turned out to have been taking part in a film.
A wound up automaton running down, Insel ceased among the clatter of our amusement.
“I know how you can make money,” I exclaimed agog with enthusiasm. “Write your biography.”
“I am a painter,” he objected. “It would take too long building a style.”
“You’d only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously — like an ant! Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your life?”
“All,” he replied decisively.
“Then start at once.”
“It would need so much careful editing. In the raw it would be scandalous—”
“Scandalous,” I cried scandalized— “the truth? Anyway you can write under a pseudonym.”
“People would recognize me.”
“Don’t you know anything of the world? The artist’s vindication does not lie in ‘what happens to him’ but in what shape he comes out.”
“Oh,” said Insel disinhibiting, “very well. It’s not the material that is wanting,” he sighed wearily, “the stacks of manuscript notes I have accumulated!”
Then, “No,” he reversed, “it’s not my medium.”
“Insel,” I asked breathlessly, “would you let me write it?”
“That would be feasible,” he answered interested. “We will make a pact. Get me to America and you have the biography.”
“Done,” I decided. “I’ll write at once. America shall clamor for you.”
“Don’t overdo it,” warned Insel, “it never works.”
“You can have your dinners with me and tell me— Can you really remember — the minutest details?”
“Every one,” he assured me.
“What a book,” I sighed with satisfaction.
“Flight from Doom — every incident distorted to the pattern of an absurd destiny,” Insel was looking delighted with himself.
He came out to dinner on a few evenings and I would talk with him for hours. The minute details were fewer than I had bargained for, his leitmotif being his strangeness in so seldom having spoken.
“My parents noticed it at once,” he told me. “As a child I would remain absolutely silent for six months at a time.”
He did not give a fig for heredity. All his relatives were chatty.
Another thing he had found in himself was his aptitude for housework. He had once married a stenographer, who simply could not arrange the kitchen with the same precision as he.
“She tried so hard — for so long. She never came up to the mark. What I disliked was her plagiarism. Why,” demanded Insel with retrospective annoyance, “could she not have worked out a system of her own?”
So they separated. Later, when Insel and I became uncannily intimate I understood what his unique orderliness had done to the girl — given her the jitters!
Nevertheless, he himself seemed sometimes to have difficulty in locating things. Once during coffee he drifted off to the lavabo and on his return took a seat some tables away from the one at which he had left me. In the same slightly deferent sociable concern he continued to “pay attention”—
The strain on this biography would consist in his too facile superposing of separate time — his reminiscences flitted about from one end of his life to the other.
“I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a taxi the other day — a portrait of some women. They were extraordinarily attractive to me; I was sure we would have been profoundly congenial. It was labeled ‘The Brontë Sisters.’ Do you know of anyone by that name?” asked Insel, who had not read Goethe nor heard of Shakespeare. “The dealer told me they were authoresses — I feel I should care for what they have written.”
“The sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. I suppose it is one of the greatest novels ever written. I never remember for very long, after having read it, what it’s about — yet whenever I think of it — I find myself standing on wild moors — alone with the elements — elements become articulate—. You would care for it very much.”
I began to think it improbable I should even find a basis for this biography. He was so at variance with himself, he existed on either side of a paradox. Even as he begged for food to throw away, forever in search of a haven, he preferred any discomfort to going home. Constantly he thanked his stars for an iron constitution — while obviously in an alarming state of health.
3
AT LAST THE BIOGRAPHY ABORTED AS HAD THE Quaker oats.
The first stage of Insel’s intimacy completed, when he evidently intended to let you further “in on” his show, he insisted on your reading Kafka, just as on assisting at a foreign opera one is handed a book of the words.
Study this well he tacitly commended. It will give you an angle of approach. “In Kafka,” he explained, “I found a foreshadowing of my hounded existence, recognized the relentless drive of my peculiar misfortune.”
Der Prozess was the volume he borrowed to lend me, and I lay awake reading on and on and on, curious for the book to begin, when, with one eye still open, I came upon the end to fall asleep in the unsatisfied certainty of having become acquainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius who ever lived.
Enraged with bitter disappointment, “Zum Teufel,” I berated Insel, when he appeared for our next session. If he was a lunatic, he was prodigious, dressing up his insanity in another man’s madness. It was no use to me. Flight from Doom, with its pattern of absurd destiny, had already been written.
“You atrocious fake — you have no life to write — you’re acting Kafka!”
“And I,” answered Insel, as I turned him out, “see clearly into you. Your brain is all Brontë.” Flying the colors of his victory, he sauntered off.
4
I THOUGHT I HAD DROPPED INSEL. I WAS MISTAKEN. Some weeks later I was writing letters when all of a sudden I stopped. An urgent telepathy impinging on my mind, I automatically dashed off a card. When I looked to see what I had so unpreparedly written — this is how it began:
“It is interesting,” Insel was to remark significantly later on. “Your note to me was couched in flawless German.”
For a while I sat wondering to what appeal, and why, I had answered. I did not care if Insel were in trouble. Obviously he fabricated trouble and far be it from me to deprive him of it—. I threw the card into the waste paper basket, and started for the post. When I had opened the front door I shut it again and retrieved the postcard. Before the letter-box I put it in my pocket and turned away, only to go back— with a relieved determination I posted it.