Shula-Slawa then agreed that he should move. She told everyone that her father's lifework, his memoir of H. G. Wells, made him too tense to live with. She had H. G. Wells on the brain, the large formation of a lifetime. H. G. Wells was the most august human being she knew of. She had been a small girl when the Sammlers lived in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, and with childish genius accurately read the passions of her parents--their pride in high connections, their snobbery, how contented they were with the cultural best of England. Old Sammler thinking of his wife in prewar Bloomsbury days interpreted a certain quiet, bosomful way she had of conveying with a downward stroke of the hand, so delicate you had to know her well to identify it as a vaunting gesture: we have the most distinguished intimacy with the finest people in Britain. A small vice--almost nutritive, digestive--which gave Antonina softer cheeks, smoother hair, deeper color. If a little social-climbing made her handsomer (plumper between the legs--the thought rushed in and Sammler had stopped trying to repel these mental rushes), it had its feminine justification. Love is the most potent cosmetic, but there are others. And the little girl may actually have observed that the very mention of Wells had a combined social-erotic influence on her mother. Judging not, and recalling Wells always with respect, Sammler knew that he had been a horny man of labyrinthine extraordinary sensuality. As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and world projects, the molding of a universal order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses--as all of these he appeared to need a great amount of copulation. Nowadays Sammler would recall him as a little lower-class Limey, and as an aging man of declining ability and appeal. And in the agony of parting with the breasts, the mouths, and the precious sexual fluids of women, poor Wells, the natural teacher, the sex emancipator, the explainer, the humane blesser of mankind, could in the end only blast and curse everyone. Of course he wrote such things in his final sickness, horribly depressed by World War II.
What Shula-Slawa said came back amusingly to Sammler through Angela Gruner. Shula visited Angela in the East Sixties, where her cousin had the beautiful, free, and wealthy young woman's ideal New York apartment. Shula admired this. Apparently without envy, without self-consciousness, Shula with wig and shopping bag, her white face puckering with continual inspiration (receiving and transmitting wild messages), sat as awkwardly as possible in the super comfort of Angela's upholstery, blobbing china and forks with lipstick. In Shula's version of things her father had had conversations with H. G. Wells lasting several years. He took his notes to Poland in 1939, expecting to have spare time for the memoir. Just then the country exploded. In the geyser that rose a mile or two into the skies were Papa's notes. But (with his memory!) he knew it all by heart, and all you had to do was ask what Wells had said to him about Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, world peace, atomic energy, the Open Conspiracy, the colonization of the planets. Whole passages came back to Papa. He had to concentrate of course. Thus she turned about his moving in with Margotte until it became her idea. He had moved away to concentrate better. He said he didn't have much time left. But obviously he exaggerated. He looked so well. He was such a handsome person. Elderly widows were always asking her about him. The mother of Rabbi Ipsheimer. The grandmother of lpsheimer, more likely. Anyway (Angela still reporting), Wells had communicated things to Sammler that the world didn't know. When finally published they would astonish everybody. The book would take the form of dialogues like those with A. N. Whitehead which Sammler admired so much.
Low-voiced, husky, a hint of joking brass in her tone, Angela (just this side of coarseness, a beautiful woman) said, "Her Wells routine is so great. Were you that close to H. G., Uncle?"
"We were well acquainted."
"But chums? Were you bosom buddies?"
"Oh? My dear girl, in spite of my years, I am a man of the modem age. You do not find David and Jonathan, Roland and Olivier bosom buddies in these days. The man's company was very pleasant. He seemed also to enjoy conversation with me. As for his views, he was just a mass of intelligent views. He expressed as many as he could, and at all times. Everything he said I found eventually in written form. He was like Voltaire, a graphomaniac. His mind was unusually active, he thought he should explain everything, and he actually said some things very well. Like 'Science is the mind of the race.' That's true, you know. It's a better thing to emphasize than other collective facts, like disease or sin. And when I see the wing of a jet plane I don't only see metal, but metal tempered by the agreement of many minds which know the pressure and velocity and weight, calculating on their slide rules whether they are Hindus or Chinamen or from the Congo or Brazil. Yes, on the whole he was a sensible intelligent person, certainly on the right side of many questions."
"And you used to be interested."
"Yes, I used to be interested."
"But she says you're composing that great work a mile a minute."
She laughed. Not merely laughed, but laughed brilliantly. In Angela you confronted sensual womanhood without remission. You smelled it, too. She wore the odd stylish things which Sammler noted with detached and purified dryness, as if from a different part of the universe. What were those, white-kid buskins? What were those tights--sheer, opaque? Where did they lead? That effect of the hair called frosting, that color under the lioness's muzzle, that swagger to enhance the natural power of the bust l Her plastic coat inspired by cubists or Mondrian, geometrical black and white forms; her trousers by Courrèges and Pucci. Sammler followed these jet phenomena in the Times, and in the women's magazines sent by Angela herself. Not too closely. He did not read too much of this. Careful to guard his eyesight, he passed pages rapidly back and forth before his eye, the large forehead registering the stimulus to his mind. The damaged left eye seemed to turn in another direction, to be preoccupied separately with different matters. Thus Sammler knew, through many rapid changes, Warhol, Baby Jane Holzer while she lasted, the Living Theater, the outbursts of nude display more and more revolutionary, Dionysus '69, copulation on the stage, the philosophy of the Beatles; and in the art world, electric shows and minimal painting. Angela was in her thirties now, independently wealthy, with ruddy skin, gold-whitish hair, big lips. She was afraid of obesity. She either fasted or ate like a stevedore. She trained in a fashionable gym. He knew her problems--he had to know, for she came and discussed them in detail. She did not know his problems. He seldom talked and she seldom asked. Moreover, he and Shula were her father's pensioners, dependents--call it what you like. So after psychiatric sessions, Angela came to Uncle Sammler to hold a seminar and analyze the preceding hour. Thus the old man knew what she did and with whom and how it felt. All that she knew how to say he had to hear. He could not choose but.