Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

My insomnia never much improved, though later with the help of kind ladies and fine liquor I was able to enter the closet of total oblivion so necessary to surviving the good life. Buffeted by fate into the most various corners of the world, I have accepted gratefully many a generous and gentlewoman’s easement and aid. But I did not infer even then that as a grown man I would long for those nights of lucid ecstasy, when the door swings open and the madman, the most eternal playmate, punctually presents himself, as you piss all over your insides.

Finally, the day came when I realized I spent more time worrying about Mr. Mooks — that he might be hurt, abandon me, or show me up, that it would all somehow turn out badly — than anything else. And this caused me more anxiety than the Voo. For if the Voo would never go away on his own, did that also mean that Mooks would live forever? And who after all was the more instructive, or entertaining presence?

And so one breakfast morning before Father returned from his walk, I asked Mother to remove Mooks’ plate, and hypocritical tears welled up in her eyes.

“Has Mr. Mooks gone somewhere?” she said. “Is he not feeling well?”

I did not reply, for I had lost yet another language. Mooks had melted away, spot by stripe, blue eye by brown eye, sentence by sentence. My companion had scurried out of my life without so much as a fare-thee-well, a fact much more mysterious than his appearance.

I spent my days hiding in various caves, sinks, love holes, and other dips and ducks around the estate, playing with bear bones and animal skulls. My favorite was the funnel-shaped cavern which formed the crypt of Muddy St. Hubertus. Here the Astingi had elaborated the ochre and hematite prehistoric cave drawings with their own gold leaf, reddened yellows, and velvety blues, drawing human figures amongst the shadowy staggered mammals and reptiles, while impudently restoring the scene to two dimensions. And here was the best likeness of my parents and our domestic aura, the mezzotint “Dogface, Mermaid and Boy Exeunting on a Dolphin.” It was not historical, not a memory of olden times, nor did it record an event. It was an image of memory before it became history, bathed in a light which came from a world beyond, venerating access to a personality you didn’t have, and a life you were not going to live. Nor was it, strictly speaking, “art,” for it demanded no protection and offered none. No one controlled it, and mercifully, it had no theme. It presented itself as actual creatures cooperating with the painter, people, and animals whom the painters had actually known, though the elaborations of the subjects were separated by tens of thousands of years. It was something which could not exist in the mind, but it took no leap of imagination to believe that these creatures were still very much alive. The paintings had been covered over the eons with layers of calcite, and within this dull sheen one could make out the black soot torchmarks of various observers through the ages. At a certain angle, I could see a boy holding a torch accompanying the creatures coming toward me. The more I stared at him, the harder he looked at me. I had to get away from him. He was posing as my spiritual guide, and the last thing I wanted was to be alone with God. But I did not lack for playmates. Ophar Osme Catspaw was our resident artiste and intellectual gent. He variously claimed origins in both Persia and Oxfordshire, and indeed perfectly blended those regional affectations into a kind of seamless seediness — a donnish ayatollah, fearing death but hating life. He lived for ideas and rode every recent train of thought through our premises, great dirty brown carriages on wobbly axles with all their windowpanes smashed. He was clean-shaven except for a pair of narrow whiskers on his cheeks; his thin hair of a strange greenish-gray hue was parted in front at the temples. He was constantly adjusting the collar of whatever shabby jacket he was wearing, and even in winter he never put his arms into his overcoat, but wore it slung over his shoulders, his hands contemplatively intertwined behind him.

He had come to us during Father’s first flush of enthusiasm, the trainer/ patron’s confidence that he might turn willfulness into talent, mere neurotica into a vital névrose . He gave him the Masonic outbuilding for a studio, where in fact he did produce Der Analom, which hung over our dining table, a number of watercolors of Mother running, swimming, or shooting, and a not unflattering oil of my deselfed-self, though, as is often the case with amateurs, the hands were wrong.

Had he remained, like most of us, a mediocre surrealist with strong political inclinations, he would have been an instructive companion, if only as a check on conventional wisdom. Indeed, Father ran every investment idea by him, and if he assented, promptly did exactly the opposite — and in this contrarian scheme, Catspaw proved nearly infallible and worth every ducat expended on him. But I too learned a valuable lesson from Catspaw — that human beings seem capable of remembering only one story at a time in its entirety, and what passes for the life of the mind is largely the adolescent search for a single variable which explains everything. Catspaw was my Yale and my Harvard. He became more famous as a pedagogue than artist, for having one student — me.

He was also renowned for his great character roles in local drama groups — the gravemakers in Hamlet , the touching fool in Lear , Rageneau in Rostand’s Cyrano , the demented steward in Twelfth Night , and the hierophantic soothsayer in Cymbeline . Indeed, he would often drop effortlessly into these roles in the midst of normal social intercourse, delighting in unnerving our many guests. And rarely would he present a glass of champagne without a Faustian riddle,

I may command where I adore

But silence, like a Lucrece knife,

with bloodless stroke my heart doth gore. .

leaving the guest racking his brains for the source of that ghostly echo.

But my dear parents increasingly lacked the patience to sit for their likenesses, or the vanity to review them, and eventually could no longer afford to purchase his work, which of course made poor Catspaw sullen and moody and even more unkempt than usual. He attended meals sporadically, usually arriving only for dessert, and he spent a great deal of time in the attic trying on the many moldy costumes there. But his most baffling move was his renunciation of painting for the literary life. This proved a great tactical mistake with Father, for husbands have no reason to like modern literature — indeed, it was a pillory for husbands. For years, every wife in every modern novel had walked out.

“Has she a child?” Father thundered. “She walks out. Has she no child? She walks out! Then she experiments, becomes disappointed, and we are supposed to be gracious! The only reason to write a novel,” he concluded, “is to attract women, but then in the writing of it you have to forsake them, so what’s the point?”

But Catspaw was not writing a novel; his was an even stranger form of literature, what the Cannonians call kritiki , which took the form of flinging down his napkin at dessert with provocative statements such as, “Dialogue is the anguish of being,” or “Peace is the terror of dialogue,” or “Clothing is the cause of nudity,” and Father would mildly counter, “Yes, even an X is only a Y, ” and then go for a long fast walk. Mother concurred, for why think if it serves only to make you unlovable? And indeed, ours was an era of failed intellectual suicide.

I believe my parents would have terminated him had they not feared that throwing him out to live on his wits would have brought even more grief to the community at large, so they made the brave decision to sequester him at Semper Vero rather than allow him join the ever-increasing band of failed artists who would hijack the century. Mother no longer spoke to him, but communicated only in writing, and Father listened well-manneredly but did not hear, calling him “that aphorism factory” behind his back.