I’ll try to tell you how I slowly grew to understand him.
“Sin is the art form of the petit bourgeois,” he once said in passing.
As usual, whenever he said something like this, he stroked his bald head the way a conjurer does when he produces doves from his top hat. Later he tried to explain his peculiar opinion. What he said was that sin, to the petit bourgeois — a pleb, in other words — was what vision and creation were to an artist. But an artist is after more than a plebeian. He wants to articulate some hidden message, then to say it, or paint it, or compose it in music: something that enriches life.
These things are beyond us, my dear.
He told me how bizarre ideas are realized in the mind of a sinner, how a sinner weighs up possibilities — a murderer, a general, a statesman, no matter which — and then, like an artist at the moment of inspiration, how he realizes his idea, quick as lightning, with breathtaking skill and ingenuity. How he commits the crime that is his dreadful masterpiece. There is a Russian writer — don’t frown, darling, it ruins your magnificent marble brow, and his name doesn’t matter in any case; I myself have forgotten it. I see how grumpy, how ill-tempered you become when I start talking about writers. You really don’t like the type. But anyway, said my bald friend, there was a Russian writer who wrote a book about murder. And, so my friend went on, it is not impossible that this Russian might actually have wanted to commit a murder. But he didn’t commit one, because he wasn’t a pleb but a writer. He wrote about it instead.
He didn’t want to write anymore. I never once saw him writing. I never even saw his handwriting. He did have a fountain pen, I did see that. It lay there on his writing desk next to the small portable typewriter. But he never opened the typewriter case, not once.
For a long time I didn’t know what his problem was. I thought he had dried up, that he no longer had the energy either for sex or for writing. Instead, he was playing out some comic part, pretending to be hurt, putting on a dumb show because he no longer felt able to exercise his miraculous, unique gift, the gift only a “master,” a vain, deluded, aging writer, possessed. The world would have to do without him. That’s what I thought. I thought he’d realized he’d come to the end of his talent. No longer capable of making love to a woman, he’d set out to play the celibate, someone who has had more than enough of success in bed and was simply bored. The game was no longer worth the candle. Resentment had turned him into a hermit. But eventually I understood why he had stopped — what this long preparation was all about.
The man didn’t want to write anymore because he was afraid that every word he committed to paper would fall into the hands of traitors and barbarians. He felt the new world would be one where everything an artist produced, whether in words, paint, or music, would be falsified, betrayed, sold down the river. Don’t look so surprised. I can see you don’t believe me. You think I am imagining it, making it all up! You couldn’t possibly understand this, my darling, because you are a heart-and-soul, fully committed artist, an artist through and through. You can’t imagine throwing away your drumsticks the way that man locked his manuscripts up in his drawer and let his pen gather dust. Am I right? I can’t imagine it, either, because you are the sort of man who will go on practicing his art as long as he lives. Drum till you die. But this poor unfortunate was a different kind of artist, darling.
This poor unfortunate was afraid of becoming a collaborator, a kind of traitor, by writing anything at all, because he was convinced that in the days to come, everything writers ever wrote would be falsified. He feared his words would be misinterpreted. He was like a priest who is terrified that excerpts from his sermons should help sell mouthwash or provide a text for a political rant on some street corner. So he stopped writing.
What’s that? You want to know what a writer is? A bum? Someone of less consequence than a mechanic or a lawyer? Yes, if that’s the way you think, a writer is indeed a bum. And we don’t need writers anymore … just as we don’t need anyone without money or power? A waste of space, as my ex-husband put it?
Calm down, no need to shout. Yes, you’re right, he was a bum. But what was he like close up? Not a lord or a minister of state. Nor a party secretary. Take money, for example; he was peculiar in that way. Believe it or not, he did have money. He was the kind of bum who secretly thought of everything, even money. Don’t go thinking he was a crazy hermit, the kind that wears animal skins, lives on locusts he catches in the desert, and slurps water from tree bark the way bears do. He did have money, but he didn’t deposit it in an account. No, he preferred to keep it in the left-hand pocket of his coat. When paying, he would draw out a wad and hand it over. It was a negligent sort of gesture since decent people keep their money in a bank account — the way you do ours, am I right, darling? When I saw him hand over money negligently, like that, I knew he was not a man you could cheat or steal from, because he would know precisely how much money he had, right down to the last dime.
But he had more than the worthless currency of our homeland. He had dollars, thirty ten-dollar notes. And French gold napoleons too. I remember he kept his gold in an old tin cigarette case that once contained Egyptian cigarettes. He had thirty-four gold napoleons. He counted them in front of me once, very anxiously. His spectacles were glittering at the end of his nose as he examined them and put the gold pieces to his nose to smell them. He put his teeth to each one and tried it in his hand. He gave each a thorough look and held it to the light. He was like a picture of one of those old money dealers, going about his business with ruthless, even malicious, efficiency.
But I never saw him earn a penny. When he was brought a bill he would study it with deep concern without saying anything, with great solemnity. Then he paid and added a handsome tip to the person bringing the bill. I do believe that, deep down, the truth was that he was miserly. One time, round about dawn, when he had drunk his wine, he started talking about how one had to respect money and gold because they had some magical property. He didn’t explain what he meant by that. Knowing how much he respected money, it was surprising how extraordinarily grand his tips were. He threw tips around, not like the rich — I have known a number of rich men, my husband included, but never found one who handed out tips the way this bum of a writer did.
I believe the truth is that he was poor. But he was so proud he didn’t think it worthwhile denying his poverty. Please don’t imagine I could tell you what he was really like. I just observed him with a pained fascination. But never, not for one moment, did I myself imagine I knew what the man was like inside.
You asked me what a writer is. Good question. What is he, after all? A big nobody! He has neither rank nor power. A fashionable black bandleader earns more than he does, a police officer has more power, the commander of a fire brigade has a higher rank. He knew all that. He warned me that society has no official way of recognizing a writer — that’s the kind of nobody a writer is. Sometimes they put up statues of writers or throw them in jail. But really a writer means nothing in society. He is just a scribbler. You could address a writer as “Mr. Editor” or “Dear Genius.” But he wasn’t an editor, because he wasn’t editing anything, and he couldn’t be a genius, because geniuses had long hair and an imposing appearance, or so they say. He was bald, and by the time I met him he wasn’t doing anything. Nobody addressed him as “Dear Writer,” because it seemed to make no sense. Somebody was either a proper person or a writer. One couldn’t be both. It’s pretty complicated.