Delmore Schwartz - Once and for All - The Best of Delmore Schwartz

“You ought to talk to me,” said Laura, and there were periods when Rudyard enjoyed conversation with Laura. But often he wanted to read and he did not want to converse when he ate the dinner Laura had prepared when she returned from work. To Laura this seemed an unnecessary affront precisely because she had returned to make his dinner.

“First of all,” said Rudyard, to defend his reading, “when I read at dinner it is a manifestation of the truly human. You know very well that if I were an animal, I would take my food somewhere and eat it alone. I would eat it very fast and I would be afraid that some other animal might take it away from me. But since I am a human being and since I have a head,” he touched his head as he said this, “eating does not satisfy the whole of my being and it is necessary for me to read.”

“How about conversation?” said Laura, disgruntled and knowing that she had no hope of persuading Rudyard since she never persuaded him of anything. “I suppose conversation is not a purely human activity?”

“It is, it is!” Rudyard replied. “But reading is superior to it, in general, as authors are superior to other human beings. And as for me, my being is such that to satisfy the rational part of it, I must regard the great works of thought and literature.”

“Half the time you just read the newspaper,” said Laura.

“Yes,” said Rudyard serenely, “but not as others do, for I read the newspaper to rejoin the popular life of this city.”

These grandiose answers, which Rudyard delivered in a tone at once superior and coy, angered Laura, but at the same time impressed her and made her remember that she had long since decided that Rudyard was a genius.

Arriving at the Bell household just after dinner, Jacob was asked his opinion.

“If a brother and sister don’t have a great deal to say to each other,” answered Jacob, “who does? We might as well be deaf and dumb! As a matter of fact, I’d say that we might as well be dead. Conversation is civilization.”

Rudyard bowed to Jacob’s judgment in general, making an exception of himself in that his sister was not as all sisters should be. But he did not say this for he was much interested in the idea of the truly human at the moment. As the other boys arrived at the apartment, he took them aside and explained it to them, and they too took pleasure in it, as well as being flattered by the appearance of intimacy which Rudyard conferred upon each of them when he took each one aside.

This discussion, which Rudyard conducted in a comic manner since he did not like to be serious about any ideas, much as ideas were dear to him, was halted when Edmund Kish entered with exciting news about the fate of the marriage of B. L. Rosen and Priscilla Gould.

“They have been seen for two weeks at dinner in the same restaurant,” said Edmund breathlessly.

This far-off marriage had first astonished and then fascinated the circle. Some of the boys had been acquainted with B. L. Rosen at school, and they had been contemptuous of the way in which he had continued to be a leader of student political movements long after graduation.

“He wants to be an official youth,” Edmund had remarked.

“He wants to be a permanent youth,” Rudyard had added.

B. L., as all who knew him called him, feeling the nascent executive in him, had become in the end the head of all the radical student movements in all the city universities. He spoke for youth and for students. No one, however, knew of Priscilla Gould until her father, a successful Broadway playwright, wrote an article in one of the national weeklies in which he said that his daughter had been taught to believe in Communism, atheism and free love by her teachers at the university. It was B. L.’s task to see Priscilla and to persuade her to defend the university and her teachers. B. L. had succeeded very well. Priscilla had been bewildered and enchanted by the attention she suddenly received. The truth was that she had been a shy and withdrawn student and she had joined the radical student society as a way of being part of the school life, for she was afraid that she would never be anything but a wallflower. B. L. persuaded Priscilla to write an answer to her father in which she said: “My father is dishonest,” a kind of choral sentence uttered repetitively throughout the detailed exposition of her father’s other shortcomings as a father, such as that he had never given her the attention a child required.

This answer was an overwhelming success and B. L. was credited with a stroke of political genius. But as B. L. had helped Priscilla to write her answer, he had made love to her, almost as if from habit, for he had always absentmindedly courted some girl during his career as a student leader. When Priscilla shyly proposed to him that they get married, B. L. was much too amazed to ask for time to think about such a marriage. His prudence and circumspection had for long been concentrated on matters which were impersonal if not international. His manners and his essential kindness were such that he felt that he had to answer Priscilla immediately. When he saw the fearful and pathetic look upon Priscilla’s face, he had assented immediately, telling himself that she might be as good as anyone else and perhaps better. Moreover, if he were married he might have more time for the concerns which truly interested him.

The news of the marriage was first received by the circle as a thunderbolt, but soon it awakened as much passionate interpretation as any other episode of these years.

It was suggested that some pathological feeling had compelled B. L. to marry Priscilla, either sexual feeling for his own sex, or a desire to possess an utterly passive wife. Francis French suggested that Priscilla might resemble B. L.’s mother when he was an infant at the breast. Rudyard thought it far more likely that Priscilla was seeking to escape from an incestuous desire for her father, since B. L. was truly as far away from her father as she could get. Rudyard also dismissed as banal, trite, obvious and hence untrue the view that B. L. might have married Priscilla because he wished to ascend in the social scale. Edmund, on the other hand, declared that whatever motives might have inspired the newly-wedded couple, the marriage was in actual fact an attack on the ruling class. It was somewhat far-fetched to suppose that Priscilla belonged to the ruling class, but the match had an unequivocal symbolic meaning: it was the beginning of the disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon. Ferdinand regarded the union as a striking example of the degradation which overtook all who were interested in social problems and in politics. The underlying reason for all these speculations was that marriage for all of the circle was far-off, and when Laura said: “Maybe she just likes him and he just likes her,” she was regarded as superficial.

Edmund’s exciting news about the distant marriage was that B. L. and Priscilla had been seen at dinner for two weeks in the same Italian restaurant, and on each night the husband and the wife had been reading two copies of the same newspaper, saying nothing to each other from start to finish.

“It’s too good to be true,” said Edmund joyously, “after all, they have only been married for six months. But probably they no longer can imagine a period when they were not married.”

“Here we see,” said Rudyard, declamatory, “in this reading of the same newspaper, a noble effort on the part of a wife to share her husband’s intellectual interests!”

“This behavior,” said Ferdinand, “is of a matchless vulgarity!”

“If we had any sense,” said Jacob, “we would burst into tears for all the husbands and wives who have nothing to say to each other.”

“How many months,” said the delighted Edmund, “have passed since last they exchanged the time of the day?”