"Which artfulness, shall we call it, extends to Narrator's keeping Our Winifred, shall we call her, on hold, let's say, for lo these many pages, phone in hand on hand-me-down couch in Briarwood Three-zero-four with Lou Levy on the line, the Triple-F story's Present Action frozen in interrupted mid-interruption while he takes his sweet time and ours filling in the blanks of Background. Far be it from a mere bass-shaped scholar-critic to criticize, but one wonders whether Narrator's artfulness mightn't extend further to wrapping up this extended Exposition and getting on with the effing story, at least Part One thereof, dot dot dot question mark? Tell Me, man!"
Roger maybeco, old buddy who never had the much-mixed blessing of growing old. The Effing Story is what's getting itself told, believe it or not, in its less-than-straight-forward fashion: a story one of whose apparent meanders fetched us to that spring '49 mid-morning in Briarwood 304 when nineteen-year-old Wilfred Chase, winding up his sophomore year at VVLU and hearing once again his mentor-friend's trademark imperative Tell Me, set about happily reminding all hands of that so-consequential mid-term day in Alfred Baumann's freshman Lit & Phil section when the young instructor had drawn on the blackboard an equiangular Y and said, "Okay, guys: In eight to ten pages' worth of sentences both articulate and legible, tell me before next Friday what this symbol says to you." Which recounting — prompted by Winnie Stark's observation that her gynecologist's wall chart of the Human Female Reproductive System (by her remarked on her recent annual visit to that office), with its bubblegum-pink fallopian tubes converging L & R upon the uterine cervix, was yet another pregnant analogue, so to speak, to the Place Where Three Roads Meet — had been interrupted and remained suspended by what we would learn presently but did not yet know just then to be a phone call from Louis Levy: proprietor, headmaster, and sole full-time employee of the Levy Preparatory School, a.k.a. the Cheatery.
The Important Thing, Will had been saying back then, was not that he'd happened in that mid-term essay to mention a number of associations that his so-savvy instructor hadn't thought of, like say the confluence of sperm and egg into embryo, or for that matter of father and mother into child — or, in the other direction, the forking of headwaters into river branches or tree trunks ditto, echoing the Primordial One's self-division, in sundry myths already mentioned in class, into Two and thence into Many; or (reversing Al's analogue of Hegelian dialectic, wherein Thesis versus Antithesis gives rise to Synthesis) the anti-Synthetic process of Analysis…
"What I had mentioned," put in Al here (back there back then, for Winnie's benefit), " — along with Siamese twins sharing a single lower body, like the mythical Melionides who fought Herakles, and the actual freaks illustrated in Aldrovandi's sixteenth-century Monstrorum Historia— was how at the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, where the green Moselle joins the mud-brown Rhine, one is reminded not only of Hegelian Synthesis but of why Moselle wines come in green bottles and Rhine wines in brown. What F-Three added was that his Chesapeake tidal rivers, like say the handsome Wye (but unlike its eponymous one-way English counterpart), switch from Synthesis to Analysis, or Fusion to Diffusion, every six and a half hours, changing the Place Where Three Roads Meet, or two become one, into the place where one becomes two. But that's not what mattered."
Yes it isn't. What mattered, as Will was saying to Al and Win (not for the first time) when the phone rang (ditto), was that he'd seen fit to cast these mid-term observations, whatever their merits, into the form of a gloss on Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," et cetera), which the Lit & Phillers had read earlier that semester: more specifically, into the firstperson monologue of a nonconformist spermatozoon swimming alone against the current up a different fork of some dark stream from the one that his countless ejaculation-mates have chosen, and speculating on the overall layout of wherever in the world he is and on the mystery of what it's all about…
"Poor shmuck," had commiserated Winnie — who, like Al but not yet like Will, had acquired a handy array of Yiddish disparagements from Jewish friends and classmates.
"Poor fucking shmuck," had added Aclass="underline" From the veterans on campus all hands were picking up the liberal use of what they called "the word that won the war."
Yes, well. What mattered, Narrator had been gratefully reminding them when the telephone rang, was that upon reading said mid-term essay its author's instructor was even more pleased by the narrative conceit and prose style than by what it had to say about that equiangular Y: enough so that he not only A-plused it but declared to the Three Freds' drummer at their next Trivium session, "What we have on our hands here, my friend, is a capital-G fucking Gift: the one you wished you'd had for music but did not, and the one I wish I had for lit-making but do not. We're talking capital-V Vocation, man! The capital-C fucking mythic-heroical Call!"
Of the authenticity whereof he became so generously convinced — through the rest of that freshman semester and the next, and the summer following and the sophomore fall semester after that, as the Three Freds worked, played, and, increasingly, lived together — that at his urging, self-skeptical Will gave VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course a try. And although he learned more from his mentor-friend's editorial comments on those primitive efforts (and from keen-eared Winnie's, and from the classic authors they bade him read) than from his classmates and course instructor, Fred-the-Mentee resolved, in the semester following (i.e., spring '49, the "now" of this section of this Three Freds story), to change his academic major from General Arts and Sciences to the university's recently established program in Creative Writing: not necessarily what Al Baumann thought the best curriculum for aspiring writers, inasmuch as literature had managed quite well for millennia without such programs, but he shrugged his (non-)shoulders at the news and agreed that further intensive practice, with feedback more various than his and Winnie's alone, wouldn't likely do harm and might well be of some benefit—if one were sufficiently alive to Literature's vastness and variety to counter every facile generalization about what constitutes Good Writing with an inarguably brilliant contradictory example.
This would by him get said, of course, only after Will got his say said: his declaration of major-changing intent, with which he meant to follow his grateful reminiscence-in-progress of that first-semester term paper on Analogues to the Y which had led him to what he was now entirely persuaded was his true Calling, however ably or otherwise he responded to that call. And it was in the midst of just that reminiscence that Briarwood 304's telephone rang, first with a wrong number and then — as Will was saying "As I was saying, guys" — with a mellifluous baritone response to Winifred Stark's "Hello?"
"Is there a Wilfred Chase there, please? Louis Levy calling."
Win arched her never-plucked eyebrows, puckered her ever-unpainted lips, beamed conspiratorially at Freds One and Three, held out the receiver to that latter, silently mouthed the name Lou Levy, and (not for the first or last time in this trio's history) said to same, "It's yours."
2. THE CHEATERY
In his Lit & Phil class discussions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Alfred Baumann was at pains to distinguish Truth from Fact: "We speak of the truths of great novels, or the truths of great myths, even though both involve made-up stories," et cetera. And he was fond of pointing out to his students how different were the meanings of Veritas vos liberabit to Jesus, for example (as quoted by his disciple John in the eponymous book, 8:32); to the research university whose motto, eighteen centuries later, those words became; and to the newly founded U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which had also seen fit to appropriate that "bit o' Scripture" as its motto. He enjoyed pointing out (the class was reading Sophocles) that while "the truth" might indeed be liberating — whether from soul-damning Error in the first instance, intellectual benightedness in the second, or perilous ignorance of what the nation's designated enemies were up to in the third — it could also be devastating, even fatal, as witness poor Oedipus and various other tragic heroes. "Gnothi seauton, the Delphic oracle advises," he would remind his more or less attentive freshmen. "Know thyself. Because, adds Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. So, then: Was Oedipus in better shape, was he more quote-unquote free, for learning that the old guy he'd knocked off at the Place Where Three Roads Meet was in fact his dad, who'd tried and failed to have him knocked off at birth? And that the widow-queen he'd then married and sired kids upon was his birth-mom? Remembering the King James Bible sense of 'to know' as 'to have carnal knowledge of,' one could fairly say that in Oedipus's case, to know himself was to screw himself altogether! So tell me: Given that for him the examined life was literally unlivable, would our Oed have been better off not knowing? One bluebook's or fifty minutes' worth of lucid commentary, s.v.p., whichever comes first."