John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Buddy, who had risen at first sight of Yegudkin, would say shyly, “Morning,sir.”

“You haff met my wife, Mrs. Yegudkin?” the old man would say, taking the great black cigar from his mouth. He asked it each Saturday, month after month.

“Yes sir. How do you do.”

The old man was too deaf to play in orchestras anymore. “Hvatt’s the difference,” he said. “Every symphony in America, they got a Yegudkin. In Hollywood at the movies, my boys play horn for twelve dollars a minute. Who teaches them to make so much money? The General!”

He would sit in the chair beside Buddy’s and would sing, with violent muscular gestures and a great upward leap of the diaphragm to knock out high notes— Tee! Tee! — as Buddy read through Kopprasch, Gallay, and Kling, and when it was time to stop, give Buddy’s lip a rest, Yegudkin would speak earnestly, with the same energy he put into his singing, of the United States and Russia. The world was filled, in the late forties and early fifties, with Russophobes, and Yegudkin, whenever he read a paper, would be so filled with rage at the stupidity of man he could barely contain himself. “In all my age,” he sometimes said, furiously gesturing with his black cigar, “if the Russians would come to this great country of America, I would take up a gun and shot at them— boof boof! But the newspapers telling you lies just the same. You think they are dumb fools, these Russians? You think they big fat-face bush-overs?” He spoke of mile-long parades of modern, terrifying implements of war, spoke of Russian cunning, the beauty of Russia’s oldest cities, spoke with great scorn, a sudden booming laugh, of Napoleon. What it all meant Buddy Orrick could hardly have told you, at the time, and since he never answered, merely agreed politely with whatever the General might say, the General probably had no idea at all of where Buddy stood on these matters of such importance. Nevertheless, he raged on, taking great pleasure in his rage, sometimes talking like a rabid Communist, sometimes like a rabid anti-Communist fascist, sometimes like a poor citizen helplessly caught between mindless, grinding forces. Then abruptly he would stop, and Buddy would raise his horn and they’d go back to work. He put Buddy in the Eastman Junior Symphony (Howard Hanson would remember him years afterward as having always played sharp) and got him paying, though not very well-paying, jobs with small orchestras.

The General rarely played for his students, though even at the time Buddy Orrick studied with him, when Yegudkin was in his seventies and no longer performed in public, the old man claimed he practiced six, seven hours every day. Buddy heard him once. A new horn he’d ordered from Germany, an Alexander, arrived at his office — a horn he’d ordered for a graduate student. The old man unwrapped and assembled it, the student looking on, and the look in the General’s eyes was like madness, or at any rate lust, perhaps gluttony. When the horn was ready he went to the desk where he kept his clippings, tools for the repair of French horns, cigars, photographs, and medals, and pulled open a wide, shallow drawer. In it he had perhaps a hundred mouthpieces, of all sizes, shapes, and colors, from raw brass to lucite, silver, and gold, from the shallowest possible cup to the deepest. He selected one, fitted it into the horn, pressed the rim of the bell into the right side of his large belly so firmly that the horn was more a part of him than the limb of a maple is a part of the tree, clicked the valve keys a moment to get the feel of them, and played. In that large, cork-lined room, it was as if, suddenly, some awesome creature from another sphere of reality, some world where spirit is more solid than stone, had revealed itself. The sound was not loud but was too big for a French horn, as it seemed to Buddy Orrick. Too big for a hundred French horns, in fact. It fluttered and flew crazily, like an enormous trapped bird hunting wildly for escape. It flew to the bottom of the French horn register, the foundation concert F very few among even the best can play, and went below it, and on down, as if the horn in Yegudkin’s hands had no bottom, and then suddenly changed its mind and flew upward in a split-second, absolutely flawless run to the horn’s top E or concert A, dropped back to the middle and then ran once more, more fiercely at the E, and this time crashed through it as a terrified bird might crash through a skylight, and fluttered, manic, in the trumpet’s high range, then lightly dropped back into its own home range, and abruptly, in the middle of a note, stopped.

“Good horn,” said Yegudkin, and put it in its case.

Buddy Orrick stared. Timidly he said, “You think I’ll ever learn to play like that?”

Yegudkin smiled, beatific. “No,” he said.

One of Buddy Orrick’s virtues — though he was then unaware that he had any virtues — was that he couldn’t be discouraged by the knowledge that he was destined never to be the greatest French horn player, or the greatest anything else, in the world. Nothing in his background demanded anything like greatness of him. His Grandmother Orrick had been a good, honest lawyer, as some of his cousins would be the best country or, later, city lawyers they knew how to be, but with no strong urge to become flashy trial lawyers who defended rich murderers in spectacular cases, or to become famous and powerful politicians, or even to become rich. His grandfather and father were merely careful, honest farmers who kept their animals fed and sheltered, saw to the general upkeep of their land, kept the fences patched, and never sold a bushel of apples that wasn’t a firm, honest bushel. Neither his father nor his grandfather saw virtue in working harder than was necessary, violating the Sabbath, or neglecting the non-material needs of their families. Buddy’s Grandfather Davis, whom he never saw, was in a sense emblematic of what they all stood for. He was the best possible carpenter, which in his day was merely to say a good carpenter. His prices were fair, he understood his tools, he left no gouges, cracks, splinters, loose pegs, badly sunk screws, or carelessly unbeveled edges. The idea of greatness was inherently foreign to a family so firmly and even proudly middle class. Nor was it in their nature to pick and choose what kind of work, in their chosen professions, was worthy of them and what work not. When Charles E. Davis, carpenter, was hired to put the roof on the tower of the St. Louis railroad station, he looked up and sadly shook his head, thinking what a hell of a ways it would be if he happened to fall, then gathered together his tackle and went up, with his helpers, and put the roof on. The houses he built were square and true and had no foolishness in them except what some fool demanded and paid good money for. His sheds and barns were as steady and firm as any in Missouri, though no one could tell which barns were his and which ones were built by Clarence Rogers, his partner, or by Odell Crow, from across the river. He was a craftsman who worked by medieval standards, to whom it would have seemed a sacrilege to introduce some clever, original detail, some cunning device that might serve as a signature. Only time, he would have said, can determine value. In both style and structure, he approved what had been tested, what had proved inoffensive after years of looking at. When he fished he used cane poles, cotton lines, and corks made of cork, and made no concession to machine technology except metal fishhooks and lead eargrip sinkers. (As Martin Orrick would write, reconstructing his grandfather’s character on the basis of old letters and family talk, “He might have been persuaded, by the passage of an acceptable number of years, to give his tentative approval to the precision and intricacy of an Ambassadeur reel, the smooth hardness of monofilament line, but it would not have been within the twentieth century.”) With conservative care like a carpenter’s, with the determined, step-by-step diligence of a farmer in the days when men still ploughed with horses, Buddy Orrick — or rather Martin — would write his long, complex novels, constructing, half a page a day, his incredible interlace of literary theft and original labors of imagination, leaving drafts constructed from the center outward, intricate and messy as the confused, enormously serious web of a black widow spider, drafts so cluttered by cross-outs, inserts, and erasures, balloons and parenthetical questions or remarks, that no one but the author could figure them out, and not even he when as much as a day had passed. One looks in vain through the early drafts for any sign of brilliance or even common wit; one finds only corrections aimed at getting colors more exact, or changes in the estimates of a building’s height, or revisions of the weather. Surely any other writer would have quit in disgust a dozen times, but Orrick labors on, so that one begins to half believe — at least with regard to his own writings — his famous remark on literature, that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent obdurate stupidity.” In his teens, when writing poetry and fiction was still for him a casual hobby, he put this stubborn, almost mindless doggedness into playing the French horn. Yegudkin had of course been right, he lacked the true musician’s gift; but he had, as he would always have, amazing persistency, and playing allowed him not to think. On a summer evening after chores, he would sometimes walk out past the barn with his horn and climb the steep hill to the apple orchard and play — his father’s cows watching from the far side of the electric fence — until his lips felt flabby and he could hardly keep his eyes open. He would play scales, lip trills, open-horn arpeggios, études, fragments from concertos, orchestral snippets. Sometimes on clean-smelling warm summer nights he would walk farther, to the wide, high hill at the back of the farm from which he could see all the houses and villages for miles around, and there, in sight of his neighbors’ lights but as safely remote from their judgments and opinions as from the stars overhead, he would play his emotions without daring to name them, without even directly feeling them, lightly distracted — as once he had been by ensilage in his collar — by the exigencies of horn technique. He became in those moments, as he would become in his writing long afterward, a sort of human conduit, a spokesman for the ordinary human feelings coming up from the scattered lights below (and from his own chest) and a spokesman for the ice-cold absolutes in the black sky above him — though he felt himself separate from, rejected by both his neighbors and the stars; and because he was only a musician, not a philosopher, he had no real idea what it was — if anything at all — that his music was expressing. It would be the same when he was a famous novelist, years later. The stories he told would be intricate, elaborately plotted, complex; his characters would have the depth, the ambivalence, and the ultimate unpredictability we encounter in real people; the world he created would seem, in his best work, more solid than the world of the reader’s chair; but Martin Orrick, moon child — born, that is, under the sign of the Crab — would have no more idea what his novels meant than did the shelves on which they stood. He built them of carefully recollected emotions set side by side or one against another — the emotions of characters, the emotions implicit in particular kinds of language, the emotions embodied in particular acts — and he tinkered with the thing he’d brought into the world with an old-fashioned carpenter’s stubborn, unambitious concern for workmanship, until he could feel his creation beginning to resist him, beginning to be itself, at which point, like any benevolent god, he would abandon it, wishing it good luck.