The Discomfort Zone

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE

I WAS INTRODUCED to the German language by a young blond woman, Elisabeth, whom no word smaller than “voluptuous” suffices to describe. It was the summer I turned ten, and I was supposed to sit beside her on the love seat on my parents’ screen porch and read aloud from an elementary German text — an unappetizing book about Germanic home life, with old-fashioned Fraktur type and frightening woodcuts, borrowed from our local library — while she leaned into me, holding the book open on my lap, and pointed to words I’d mispronounced. She was nineteen, and her skirts were sensationally short and her little tops sensationally tight, and the world-eclipsing proximity of her breasts and the great southerly extent of her bare legs were intolerable to me. Sitting next to her, I felt like a claustrophobe in a crowded elevator, a person with severe restless-leg syndrome, a dental patient undergoing extended drilling. Her words, being products of her lips and tongue, carried an unwelcome intimacy, and the German language itself sounded deep-throated and wet compared to English. (How prim our “bad,” how carnal their “schlecht.”) I leaned away from her, but she leaned over farther, and I inched down the love seat, but she inched along after me. My discomfort was so radical that I couldn’t concentrate for even one minute, and this was my only relief: most afternoons, she lost patience with me quickly.

Elisabeth was the little sister of the wife of the Austrian rail-equipment manufacturer whom my father had helped introduce to the American market. She’d come over from Vienna, at my parents’ invitation, to practice her English and to experience life with an American family; she was also privately hoping to explore the new freedoms that Europeans had heard were sweeping our country. Unfortunately, these new freedoms weren’t available in our particular house. Elisabeth was given my brother Bob’s vacated bedroom, which looked out onto a soiled, fenced square of concrete where our neighbors’ piebald hunting dog, Speckles, barked all afternoon. My mother was constantly at Elisabeth’s side, taking her to lunch with her friends, to the Saint Louis Zoo, to Shaw’s Garden, to the Arch, to the Muny Opera, and to Tom Sawyer’s house, up in Hannibal. For relief from these loving ministrations, Elisabeth had only the company of a ten-year-old boy with freedom issues of his own.

One afternoon, on the porch, she accused me of not wanting to learn. When I denied it, she said, “Then why do you keep turning around and looking outside? Is there something out there I don’t see?” I had no answer for her. I never consciously connected her body with my discomfort — never mentally formed any word like “breast” or “thigh” or “dirty,” never associated her knockout presence with the schoolyard talk I’d lately started hearing (“We want two pickets to Tittsburgh, and we want the change in nipples and dimes…”). I only knew that I didn’t like the way she made me feel, and that this was disappointing to her: she was making me a bad student, and I was making her a bad teacher. Neither of us could have been less what the other wanted. At the end of the summer, after she left, I couldn’t speak a word of German.

IN CHICAGO, WHERE I was born, our neighbors on one side were Floyd and Dorothy Nutt. On the other side were an older couple who had a grandson named Russie Toates. The first fun I remember ever having involved putting on a new pair of red rubber boots and, incited by Russie, who was a year or two older, stomping and sliding and kicking through an enormous pile of orange-brown dog poop. The fun was memorable because I was immediately severely punished for it.

I’d just turned five when we moved to Webster Groves. On the morning of my first day of kindergarten, my mother sat me down and explained why it was important not to suck my thumb anymore, and I took her message to heart and never put thumb to mouth again, though I did later smoke cigarettes for twenty years. The first thing my friend Manley heard me say in kindergarten came in response to somebody’s invitation to participate in a game. I said, “I’d rather not play.”

When I was eight or nine, I committed a transgression that for much of my life seemed to me the most shameful thing I’d ever done. Late one Sunday afternoon, I was let outside after dinner and, finding no one to play with, loitered by our next-door neighbors’ house. Our neighbors were still eating dinner, but I could see their two girls, one a little older than I, the other a little younger, playing in their living room while they waited for dessert to be served. Catching sight of me, they came and stood between parted curtains, looking out through a window and a storm window. We couldn’t hear each other, but I wanted to entertain them, and so I started dancing, and prancing, and twirling, and miming, and making funny faces. The girls ate it up. They excited me to strike ever more extreme and ridiculous poses, and for a while I continued to amuse them, but there came a point where I could feel their attention waning, and I couldn’t think of any new capers to top my old ones, and I also could not bear to lose their attention, and so, on an impulse — I was in a totally giddy place — I pulled my pants down.

Both girls clapped hands to their mouths in delighted mock horror. I felt instantly that there was no worse thing I could have done. I pulled up my pants and ran down the hill, past our house, to a grassy traffic triangle where I could hide among some oak trees and weather the first, worst wave of shame. In later years and decades, it seemed to me that even then, within minutes of my action, as I sat among the oak trees, I couldn’t remember if I’d taken my underpants down along with my pants. This memory lapse at once tormented me and didn’t matter at all. I’d been granted — and had granted the neighbor girls — a glimpse of the person I knew I was permanently in danger of becoming. He was the worst thing I’d ever seen, and I was determined not to let him out again.

CURIOUSLY SHAME-FREE, BY contrast, were the hours I spent studying dirty magazines. I mostly did this after school with my friend Weidman, who had located some Playboys in his parents’ bedroom, but one day in junior high, while I was poking around at a construction site, I acquired a magazine of my own. Its name was Rogue, and its previous owners had torn out most of the pictures. The one remaining photo feature depicted a “lesbian eating orgy” consisting of bananas, chocolate cake, great volumes of whipped cream, and four dismal, lank-haired girls striking poses of such patent fakeness that even I, at thirteen, in Webster Groves, understood that “lesbian eating orgy” wasn’t a concept I would ever find useful.

But pictures, even the good shots in Weidman’s magazines, were a little too much for me anyway. What I loved in my Rogue were the stories. There was an artistic one, with outstanding dialogue, about a liberated girl named Little Charlie who tries to persuade a friend, Chris, to surrender his virginity to her; in one fascinating exchange, Chris declares (sarcastically?) that he is saving himself for his mother, and Little Charlie chides him: “Chris, that’s sick.” Another story, called “Rape — In Reverse,” featured two female hitchhikers, a handgun, a devoted family man, a motel room, and a wealth of unforgettable phrases, including “‘Let’s get him onto the bed,’” “slurping madly,” and “‘Still want to be faithful to wifey?’ she jeered.” My favorite story was a classic about an airline stewardess, Miss Trudy Lazlo, who leans over a first-class passenger named Dwight and affords him “a generous view of her creamy white jugs,” which he correctly takes to be an invitation to meet her in the first-class bathroom and have sex in various positions that I had trouble picturing exactly; in a surprise twist, the story ends with the jet’s pilot pointing to a curtained recess “with a small mattress, at the back of the cockpit,” where Trudy wearily lies down to service him, too. I still wasn’t even hormonally capable of release from the excitement of all this, but the filthiness of Rogue, its absolute incompatibility with my parents, who considered me their clean little boy, made me more intensely happy than any book I ever read.

WEIDMAN AND I once forged notes from our respective mothers so that we could leave school at noon and watch the first Skylab liftoff. There was nothing either technological or scientific (except, in my case, animals) that Weidman and I didn’t interest ourselves in. We set up competing chemistry labs, dabbled in model railroading, accumulated junked electronic equipment, played with tape recorders, worked as lab assistants, did joint science-fair projects, took classes at the Planetarium, wrote BASIC programs for the modem-driven computer terminal at school, and made fantastically flammable “liquid-fuel rockets” out of test tubes, rubber stoppers, and benzene. On my own, I subscribed to Scientific American, collected rocks and minerals, became an expert on lichens, grew tropical plants from fruit seeds, sliced stuff with a microtome and put it under a microscope, performed homemade physics experiments with springs and pendular weights, and read all of Isaac Asimov’s collections of popular science writings, back to back, in three weeks. My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time. My first stated career goal was “inventor.” And so my parents assumed, not implausibly, that I would become some sort of scientist. They asked Bob, who was studying medicine, what foreign language a budding scientist ought to take in high school, and he answered unequivocally: German.

WHEN I WAS seven, my parents and I had gone to visit Bob at the University of Kansas. His room was in Ellsworth Hall, a teeming high-rise with harsh lighting and a pervasive locker-room smell. Following my parents into Bob’s room, I saw the centerfold on his wall just as my mother cried out, in anger and disgust, “Bob! Bob! Oh! Ugh! I can’t believe you put that on your wall!” Even apart from my mother’s judgment, which I’d learned to fear greatly, the bloody reds of the pinup girl’s mouth and areolas would have struck me as violent. It was as if the girl had been photographed emerging, skinny and raw and vicious, from a terrible accident that her own derangement had caused. I was scared and offended by what she was inflicting on me and what Bob was inflicting on our parents. “Jon can’t be in this room,” my mother declared, turning me toward the door. Outside, she told me that she didn’t understand Bob at all.

He became more discreet after that. When we returned for his graduation, three years later, he taped a construction-paper bikini onto his current pinup girl, who in any case looked to me warm and gentle and hippieish — I liked her. Bob went on to bask in my mother’s approval of his decision to come home to St. Louis and go to medical school. If there were girlfriends, I never had the pleasure of meeting them. He did, though, once, bring a med-school acquaintance home for Sunday dinner, and the friend told a story in which he mentioned lying in bed with his girlfriend. I barely even clocked this detail, but as soon as Bob was gone my mother gave me her opinion of it. “I don’t know if he was trying to show off, or shock us, or act sophisticated,” she said, “but if what he said about cohabiting with his girlfriend is true, then I want you to know that I think he’s an immoral person and that I’m very disappointed that Bob is friends with him, because I categorically disapprove of that kind of lifestyle.”

That kind of lifestyle was my brother Tom’s. After the big fight with my father, he’d gone on to graduate from Rice in film studies and live in Houston slum houses with his artist friends. I was in tenth grade when he brought home one of these friends, a slender, dark-haired woman named Lulu, for Christmas. I couldn’t look at Lulu without feeling as if my breath had been knocked out of me, she was so close to the ideal of casual mid-seventies sexiness. I agonized over what book to buy her for a Christmas present, to make her feel more welcome in the family. My mother, meanwhile, was practically psychotic with hatred. “‘Lulu’? ‘Lulu’? What kind of person has a name like Lulu?” She gave a creaky little laugh. “When I was a girl, a lulu was a crazy person! Did you know that? A lulu was what we called a kooky crazy person!”

A year later, when both Bob and Tom were living in Chicago and I went to see them for a weekend, my mother forbade me to stay in Tom’s apartment, where Lulu also dwelt. Tom was studying film at the Art Institute, making austere non-narrative shorts with titles like “Chicago River Landscape,” and my mother sensed, accurately, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence over me. When Tom made fun of Cat Stevens, I removed Cat Stevens from my life. When Tom gave me his Grateful Dead LPs, the Dead became my favorite band, and when he cut his hair and moved on to Roxy Music and Talking Heads and DEVO, I cut my hair and followed. Seeing that he bought his clothes at Amvets, I started shopping at thrift stores. Because he lived in a city, I wanted to live in a city; because he made his own yogurt with reconstituted milk, I wanted to make my own yogurt with reconstituted milk; because he took notes in a six-by-nine-inch ring binder, I bought a six-by-nine-inch ring binder and started a journal in it; because he made movies of industrial ruins, I bought a camera and took pictures of industrial ruins; because he lived hand to mouth and did carpentry and rehabbed apartments with scavenged materials, hand to mouth was the way I wanted to live, too. The hopelessly unattainable goddesses of my late adolescence were the art-school girls who orbited Tom in their thrift-store clothes and spiky haircuts.

THERE WAS NOTHING cool about high-school German. It was the language that none of my friends were taking, and the sun-faded tourist posters in the room of the German teacher, Mrs. Fares, were not a persuasive argument for visiting Germany or falling for its culture. (This much was true of the French and Spanish rooms as well. It was as if the modern languages were so afraid of adolescent scorn that even the classrooms were forced to dress predictably — to wear posters of the bullfight, the Eiffel Tower, the castle Neuschwanstein.) Many of my classmates had German parents or grandparents, whose habits (“He likes his beer warm”) and traditions (“We have Lebkuchen at Christmas”) were of similarly negligible interest to me. The language itself, though, was a snap. It was all about memorizing four-by-four matrixes of adjective endings, and following rules. It was about grammar, which was the thing I was best at. Only the business of German gender, the seeming arbitrariness of the spoon and the fork and the knife,[3] gave me fits.

EVEN AS THE bearded Mutton and his male disciples were recapitulating old patriarchies, Fellowship was teaching us to question our assumptions about gender roles. Boys were praised and rewarded for shedding tears, girls for getting mad and swearing. The weekly Fellowship “women’s group” became so popular that it had to be split in two. One female advisor invited girls to her apartment and gave vivid tutorials in how to have sex and not get pregnant. Another advisor challenged the patriarchy so needlingly that once, when she asked Chip Jahn to talk about his feelings, he replied that he felt like dragging her out to the parking lot and beating the shit out of her. For parity, two male advisors tried to start a men’s group, but the only boys who joined it were the already-sensitized ones who wished they could belong to the women’s group.

Being a woman seemed to me the happening thing, compared to being a man. From the popularity of the weekly support groups, I gathered that women truly had been oppressed and that we men therefore ought to defer to them, and be nurturing and supportive, and cater to their wishes. It was especially important, if you were a man, to look deep into your heart and make sure you weren’t objectifying a woman you loved. If even a tiny part of you was exploiting her for sex, or putting her on a pedestal and worshipping her, this was very bad.

In my senior-year journal, while I waited for Siebert to return from her first year of college, I constantly policed my feelings about her. I wrote “Don’t CANONIZE her” and “Don’t be in love or anything idiotically destructive like that” and “Jealousy is characteristic of a possessive relationship” and “We are not sacred.” When I caught myself writing her name in block letters, I went back and annotated: “Why the hell capitalize it?” I ridiculed and reviled my mother for her dirty-mindedness in thinking I cared about sex. I did, while Siebert was away, date a racy Catholic girl, O., who taught me to enjoy the raw-cauliflower aftertaste of cigarettes in a girl’s mouth, and I did casually assume that Siebert and I would be losing our virginity before I had to leave for college. But I imagined this loss as a grown-up and serious and friendship-affirming thing, not as intercourse of the kind I’d read about in Rogue. I’d finished with sex like that in junior high.

One summer evening, soon after Siebert broke her back, just before I turned eighteen, my friends Holyoke and Davis and I were painting a mural, and Holyoke asked Davis and me how often we masturbated. Davis answered that he didn’t do that anymore. He said he’d tried it a few times, but he’d decided it wasn’t really something he enjoyed.

Holyoke looked at him with grave astonishment. “You didn’t enjoy it.”

“No, not really,” Davis said. “I wasn’t that into it.”

Holyoke frowned. “Do you mind if I ask what…technique…and materials…you were using?”

I listened carefully to the discussion that ensued, because, unlike Davis, I hadn’t even tried it.

THE FIRST-YEAR GERMAN teacher at Swarthmore College was a flamboyant, elastic-mouthed one-man show, Gene Weber, who pranced and swooped and slapped desktops and addressed his first-year students as “bambini.” He had the manner of an inspired, witty preschool teacher. He found everything in his classroom hilarious, and if the bambini couldn’t generate hilarity themselves, he said hilarious things for them and laughed on their behalf. I didn’t dislike Weber, but I resisted him. The teacher I adored was the drill instructor, Frau Plaxton, a woman of limitless patience and beautifully chiseled Nordic looks. I saw her every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 a.m., an hour made tolerable by her affectionate, bemused way of saying “Herr Franzen” when I walked into the room. No matter how badly her students had prepared, Frau Plaxton couldn’t frown sternly without also smiling at her sternness. The German vowels and consonants she overpronounced for heuristic purposes were as juicy as good plums.

On the other weekdays at 8:30, I had Several-Variable Calculus, a freshman class designed to winnow out students whose devotion to math/science was less than fanatical. By spring break, I was in danger of failing it. If I’d intended to pursue a career in science — as the official fifty-year-old continued to assure his parents that he did — I should have spent my spring break catching up. Instead, my friend Ekström and I took a bus from Philadelphia to Houston so that I could see Siebert, who was out of her back brace and living in a dorm at the University of Houston.

One night, to get away from her roommate, she and I went outside and sat on a bench in a courtyard surrounded by concrete walls. Siebert told me that one of her teachers, the poet Stephen Spender, had been talking a lot about Sigmund Freud, and that she’d been thinking about her fall from the downspout at Eden Seminary a year earlier. The night before she’d fallen, she and our friend Lunte had been hanging out at my house, and the doorbell had rung, and before I knew what was happening, Siebert was meeting my former sort-of girlfriend, O., for the first time. O. was with Manley and Davis, who had just taken her up to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower. She was flushed and beaming from the climb, and she didn’t mind admitting that Manley and Davis had tied ropes around her and basically dragged her up the downspout; her physical unfitness was something of a joke.

Siebert had lost all memory of the day after she met O., but other people had subsequently told her what she’d done. She’d called up Davis and said she wanted to climb the same tower that O. had climbed. When Davis suggested that Manley come along, or that they at least take a rope, Siebert said no, she didn’t need Manley and she didn’t need ropes. And, indeed, she hadn’t had any trouble climbing up the downspout. It was only at the top, while Davis was reaching down to help her past the gutter, that she’d thrown back her hands. And Freud, she told me, had a theory of the Unconscious. According to Stephen Spender, who had a way of singling her out and fastening his uncanny blue eyes on her whenever he spoke of it, Freud believed that when you made a strange mistake, the conscious part of you believed it was an accident, but in fact it was never an accident: you were doing exactly what the dark, unknowable part of you wanted to do. When your hand slipped and you cut yourself with a knife, it was because the hidden part of you wanted you to cut yourself. When you said “my mother” instead of “my wife,” it was because your id really did mean “my mother.” Siebert’s post-traumatic amnesia was total, and it was hard to imagine anyone less suicidal than her; but what if she’d wanted to fall off the roof? What if the Unconscious in her had wanted to die, because of my dalliance with O.? What if, at the top of the downspout, she’d ceased to be herself and become entirely that dark, other thing?

I’d heard of Freud, of course. I knew that he was Viennese and important. But his books had looked unpleasant and forbidding whenever I’d pulled one off a shelf, and until this moment I’d managed to know almost nothing about him. Siebert and I sat silently in the deserted concrete courtyard, breathing the vernal air. The loosenings of spring, the fragrances of breeding, the letting go, the thaw, the smell of warm mud: it was no longer as dreadful to me as it had been when I was ten. It was delicious now, too. But also still somewhat dreadful. Sitting in the courtyard and thinking about what Siebert had said, confronting the possibility that I, too, had an Unconscious that knew as much about me as I knew little about it, an Unconscious always looking for some way out of me, some way to escape my control and do its dirty work, to pull my pants down in front of the neighbor girls, I started screaming in terror. I screamed at the top of my lungs, which freaked both me and Siebert out. Then I went back to Philadelphia and put the whole episode out of my mind.

MY INSTRUCTOR FOR third-semester intensive German was the other tenured professor in the department, George Avery, a nervous, handsome, scratchy-voiced Greek-American who seemed hard-pressed to speak in sentences shorter than three hundred words. The grammar we were supposed to review didn’t greatly interest Avery. On the first day of class, he looked at his materials, shrugged, said, “I’m guessing you’re all familiar with this,” and embarked on a rambling digression about colorful and seldom-heard German idioms. The following week, twelve of the fourteen students in the class signed a petition in which they threatened to quit unless Avery was removed and replaced with Weber. I was against the petition — I thought it was mean to embarrass a professor, even if he was nervous and hard to follow, and I didn’t miss being called a bambino — but Avery was duly yanked and Weber came prancing back.

Since I’d nearly flunked Several-Variable Calculus, I had no future in hard science, and since my parents had suggested I might want to pay for college myself if I insisted on being an English major, I was left with German by default. Its main attraction as a major was that I got easy A’s in it, but I assured my parents that I was preparing myself for a career in international banking, law, diplomacy, or journalism. Privately, I looked forward to spending my junior year abroad. I wasn’t liking college much — it was a comedown from high school in every way — and I was still technically a virgin, and I was counting on Europe to fix that.

But I couldn’t seem to catch a break. The summer before I left for Europe, I inquired about an odd, lanky beauty I’d once danced with in a high-school gym class and had been fantasizing about at college, but she turned out to have a boyfriend and a heroin habit now. I went on two dates with Manley’s younger sister, who surprised me on the second date by bringing along a chaperone, her friend MacDonald, who’d thought I was a cheater. I went off to study German literature in Munich, and on my third night there, at a party for new students, I met a lucid, pretty Bavarian girl who suggested that we go have a drink. I replied that I was tired but it might be nice to see her some other time. I never saw her again. The ratio of male students to female students in Munich’s dorms was 3:1. During the next ten months, I met not one other interesting German girl who gave me the time of day. I cursed my terrible luck in having been given my only chance so early in the year. If I’d been in Munich even just a week longer, I told myself, I might have played things differently and landed a terrific girlfriend and become totally fluent in German. Instead, I spoke a lot of English with American girls. I contrived to spend four nights in Paris with one of them, but she turned out to be so inexperienced that even kissing was scary for her: unbelievably bad luck. I went to Florence, stayed in a hotel that doubled as a brothel, and was surrounded in three dimensions by people industriously fucking. On a trip to rural Spain, I had a Spanish girlfriend for a week, but before we could learn each other’s languages I had to go back to stupid Germany and take exams: just my luck. I pursued a more promisingly jaded American, sat and drank and smoked with her for hours, listened to “London Calling” over and over, and tested what I believed were the outer limits of pushiness compatible with being a nurturing and supportive male. I lived in daily expectation of scoring, but in the end, after months of pursuit, she decided she was still in love with her Stateside ex. Alone in my dorm room, I could hear multiple neighbors humping — my walls and ceiling were like amplifiers. I transferred my affections to yet another American, this one with a rich German boyfriend whom she bossed around and then bemoaned behind his back. I thought if I listened long enough to her complaints about the boyfriend, and helped her realize what an unsupportive and unnurturing asshole he was, she would come to her senses and choose me. But my bad luck was beyond belief.

WITHOUT THE DISTRACTION of a girlfriend, I did learn a lot of German in Munich. Goethe’s poetry particularly infected me. For the first time in my life, I was smitten with a language’s mating of sound and sense. There was, for example, all through Faust, the numinous interplay of the verbs streben, schweben, weben, leben, beben, geben[4]—six trochees that seemed to encapsulate the inner life of an entire culture. There were insane German gushings, like these words of thanks that Faust offers Nature after a really good night’s sleep—

Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschließen

Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben[5]

— which I endlessly repeated to myself, half in jest and half adoringly. There was the touching and redeeming German yearning not to be German at all but to be Italian instead, which Goethe captured in his classic verse in Wilhelm Meister:

Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn,

Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn…

Kennst du es wohl?[6]

There were other lines that I recited every time I climbed a church tower or walked to the top of a hill, lines uttered by Faust after cherubs have wrested his spirit from the Devil’s clutches and installed him in Heaven:

Hier ist die Aussicht frei,

Der Geist erhoben.

Dort ziehen Frauen vorbei,

Schwebend nach oben[7]

There were even, in Faust, short passages in which I recognized an actual emotion of my own, as when our hero, trying to settle down to work in his study, hears a knocking on his door and cries out in exasperation, “Wer will mich wieder plagen?”[8]

But despite my pleasure at feeling a language take root in me, and despite the tightly reasoned term papers I was writing on Faust’s relationship with Nature and Novalis’s relationship with mines and caves, I still saw literature as basically just the game I had to master in order to get a college degree. Reciting from Faust on windy hilltops was a way of indulging but also defusing and finally making fun of my own literary yearnings. Real life, as I understood it, was about marriage and success, not the blue flower. In Munich, where students could buy standing-room theater seats for five marks, I went to see a big-budget production of Part II of Faust, and on my way out of the theater I heard a middle-aged man snickeringly offer his wife this “complete and sufficient” summary of the play: “Er geht von einer Sensation zur anderen — aber keine Befriedigung.”[9] The man’s disrespect, his philistine amusement with himself, amused me, too.

THE GERMAN DEPARTMENT’S difficult professor, George Avery, taught the seminar in German modernism that I took in my last fall at college. Avery had dark Greek eyes, beautiful skin, a strong nose, luxuriant eyebrows. His voice was high and perpetually hoarse, and when he got lost in the details of a digression, as often happened, the noise of his hoarseness overwhelmed the signal of his words. His outbursts of delighted laughter began at a frequency above human hearing — a mouth thrown open silently — and descended through an accelerating series of cries: “Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah!” His eyes gleamed with excitement and pleasure if a student said anything remotely pertinent or intelligent; but if the student was altogether wrong, as the six of us in his seminar often were, he flinched and scowled as if a bug were flying at his face, or he gazed out a window unhappily, or refilled his pipe, or wordlessly cadged a cigarette from one of us smokers, and hardly even pretended to listen. He was the least polished of all my college teachers, and yet he had something that the other teachers didn’t have: he felt for literature the kind of headlong love and gratitude that a born-again Christian feels for Jesus. His highest praise for a piece of writing was “It’s crazy!” His yellowed, disintegrating copies of German prose masterworks were like missionary Bibles. On page after page, each sentence was underscored or annotated in Avery’s microscopic handwriting, illuminated with the cumulative appreciations of fifteen or twenty rereadings. His paperbacks were at once low-priced, high-acid crapola and the most precious of relics — moving testaments to how full of significance every line in them could be to a student of their mysteries, as every leaf and sparrow in Creation sings of God to the believer.

Avery’s father was a Greek immigrant who’d worked as a waiter and later owned a shoe-repair shop in North Philadelphia. Avery had been drafted into the Army as an eighteen-year-old, in 1944, and at the end of basic training, in the middle of the night before his unit shipped out to Europe, his commanding officer shook him roughly and shouted, “Avery! Wake up! YOUR MOTHER’S DEAD.” Granted leave to attend her funeral, Avery reached Europe two weeks late, arriving on V-Day, and never caught up with his regiment. He was passed along from unit to unit and eventually landed in Augsburg, where the Army put him to work at a requisitioned publishing house. One day, his commander asked if anyone in the unit wanted to take a course in journalism. Avery was the only one who volunteered, and over the next year and a half he taught himself German, went around in civilian clothes, reported on music and art for the occupation newspaper, and fell in love with German culture. Returning to the States, he studied English and then German literature, which was how he’d ended up married to a beautiful Swiss woman and tenured at a fancy college and living in a three-story house in whose dining room, every Monday afternoon at four, we took a break for coffee and pastry that his wife, Doris, made for us.

The Averys’ taste in china, furniture, and room temperature was Continental modern. As we sat at their table, speaking German with varying degrees of success, drinking coffee that went cold in five seconds, the leaves I saw scattering across the front lawn could have been German leaves, blown by a German wind, and the rapidly darkening sky a German sky, full of autumn weltschmerz. Out in the hallway, the Averys’ dog, Ina, an apologetic-looking German shepherd, shivered herself awake. We weren’t fifteen miles from the tiny row house where Avery had grown up, but the house he lived in now, with its hardwood floors and leather upholstery and elegant ceramics (many of them thrown by Doris, who was a skilled potter), was the kind of place I now wished I’d grown up in myself, an oasis of fully achieved self-improvement.

We read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, stories by Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and a novel by Robert Walser that made me want to scream, it was so quiet and subtle and bleak. We read an essay by Karl Kraus, “The Chinese Wall,” about a Chinese laundry owner in New York who sexually serviced well-bred Caucasian women and finally, notoriously, strangled one of them. The essay began, “Ein Mord ist geschehen, und die Menschheit möchte um Hilfe rufen”[10]—which seemed to me a little strong. The Chinatown murder, Kraus continued, was “the most important event” in the two-thousand-year history of Christian morality: also a bit strong, no? It took me half an hour to fight through each page of his allusions and alliterative dichotomies—

Da entdecken wir, daß unser Verbot ihr Vorschub, unser Geheimnis ihre Gelegenheit, unsere Scham ihr Sporn, unser Gefahr ihr Genuß, unsere Hut ihre Hülle, unser Gebet ihre Brust war…[D]ie gefesselte Liebe liebte die Fessel, die geschlagene den Schmerz, die beschmutzte den Schmutz. Die Rache des verbannten Eros war der Zauber, allen Verlust in Gewinn zu wandeln.[11]

— and as soon as I was sitting in Avery’s living room, attempting to discuss the essay, I realized that I’d been so busy deciphering Kraus’s sentences that I hadn’t actually read them. When Avery asked us what the essay was about, I flipped through my xeroxed pages and tried to speed-read my way to some plausible summary. But Kraus’s German opened up only to lovers with a very slow hand. “It’s about,” I said, “um, Christian morality…and—”

Avery cut me off as if I hadn’t spoken. “We like sex dirty,” he said with a leer, looking at each of us in turn. “That’s what this is about. The dirtier Western culture makes it, the more we like it dirty.”

I was irritated by his “we.” My understanding of sex was mainly theoretical, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like it dirty. I was still looking for a lover who was, first and foremost, a friend. For example: the dark-haired, ironic French major who was taking the modernism seminar with me and whom I’d begun to pursue with the passive, low-pressure methods that, although they’d invariably failed me in the past, I continued to place my faith in. I’d heard that the French major was unattached, and she seemed to find me amusing. I couldn’t imagine anything dirty about having sex with her. In fact, in spite of my growing preoccupation with her, I never came close to picturing us having sex of any kind.

THE PREVIOUS SUMMER, to prepare for the seminar, I’d read Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It immediately became my all-time favorite book, which was to say that there were several paragraphs in the first part of it (the easiest part and the only part I’d completely enjoyed) which I’d taken to reading aloud to impress my friends. The plot of the novel — a young Danish guy from a good family washes up in Paris, lives hand to mouth in a noisy rooming house, gets lonely and weirded out, worries about becoming a better writer and a more complete person, goes for long walks in the city, and otherwise spends his time writing in his journal — seemed highly relevant and interesting to me. I memorized, without ever quite grasping what I was memorizing, several passages in which Malte reports on his personal growth, which reminded me pleasantly of my own journals:

Ich lerne sehen. Ich weiß nicht, woran es liegt, es geht alles tiefer in mich ein und bleibt nicht an der Stelle stehen, wo es sonst immer zu Ende war. Ich habe ein Inneres, von dem ich nicht wußte. Alles geht jetzt dorthin. Ich weiß nicht, was dort geschieht.[12]

I also liked Malte’s very cool descriptions of his new subjectivity in action, such as:

Da sind Leute, die tragen ein Gesicht jahrelang, natürlich nutzt es sich ab, es wird schmutzig, es bricht in den Falten, es weitet sich aus wie Handschuhe, die man auf der Reise getragen hat. Das sind sparsame, einfache Leute; sie wechseln es nicht, sie lassen es nicht einmal reinigen.[13]

But the sentence in Malte that became my motto for the semester was one I didn’t notice until Avery pointed it out to us. It’s spoken to Malte by a friend of his family, Abelone, when Malte is a little boy and is reading aloud thoughtlessly from Bettina von Arnim’s letters to Goethe. He starts to read one of Goethe’s replies to Bettina, and Abelone cuts him off impatiently. “Not the answers,” she says. And then she bursts out, “Mein Gott, was hast du schlecht gelesen, Malte.”[14]

This was essentially what Avery said to the six of us when we were halfway through our first discussion of The Trial. I’d been unusually quiet that week, hoping to conceal my failure to read the second half of the novel. I already knew what the book was about — an innocent man, Josef K., caught up in a nightmarish modern bureaucracy — and it seemed to me that Kafka piled on far too many examples of bureaucratic nightmarishness. I was annoyed as well by his reluctance to use paragraph breaks, and by the irrationality of his storytelling. It was bad enough that Josef K. opens the door of a storage room at his office and finds a torturer beating two men, one of whom cries out to K. for help. But to have K. return to the storage room the next night and find exactly the same three men doing exactly the same thing: I felt sore about Kafka’s refusal to be more realistic. I wished he’d written the chapter in some friendlier way. It seemed like he was being a bad sport somehow. Although Rilke’s novel was impenetrable in places, it had the arc of a Bildungsroman and ended optimistically. Kafka was more like a bad dream I wanted to stop having.

“We’ve been talking about this book for two hours,” Avery said to us, “and there’s a very important question that nobody is asking. Can someone tell me what the obvious important question is?”

We all just looked at him.

“Jonathan,” Avery said. “You’ve been very quiet this week.”

“Well, you know, the nightmare of the modern bureaucracy,” I said. “I don’t know if I have much to say about it.”

“You don’t see what this has to do with your life.”

“Less than with Rilke, definitely. I mean, it’s not like I’ve had to deal with a police state.”

“But Kafka’s about your life!” Avery said. “Not to take anything away from your admiration of Rilke, but I’ll tell you right now, Kafka’s a lot more about your life than Rilke is. Kafka was like us. All of these writers, they were human beings trying to make sense of their lives. But Kafka above all! Kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. And he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out. That’s what this book is about. That’s what all of these books are about. Actual living human beings trying to make sense of death and the modern world and the mess of their lives.”

Avery then called our attention to the book’s title in German, Der Prozeß, which means both “the case” and “the process.” Citing a text from our secondary-reading list, he began to mumble about three different “universes of interpretation” in which the text of The Trial could be read: one universe in which K. is an innocent man falsely accused, another universe in which the degree of K.’s guilt is undecidable…I was only half listening. The windows were darkening, and it was a point of pride with me never to read secondary literature. But when Avery arrived at the third universe of interpretation, in which Josef K. is guilty, he stopped and looked at us expectantly, as if waiting for us to get some joke; and I felt my blood pressure spike. I was offended by the mere mention of the possibility that K. was guilty. It made me feel frustrated, cheated, injured. I was outraged that a critic was allowed even to suggest a thing like that.

“Go back and look at what’s on the page,” Avery said. “Forget the other reading for next week. You have to read what’s on the page.”

JOSEF K., WHO has been arrested at home on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, returns to his rooming house after a long day at work and apologizes to his landlady, Frau Grubach, for the morning’s disturbances. The arresting officials briefly commandeered the room of another boarder, a young woman named Bürstner, but Frau Grubach assures K. that her room has been put back in order. She tells K. not to worry about his arrest — it’s not a criminal matter, thank God, but something very “learned” and mysterious. K. says he “agrees” with her: the matter is “completely null and void.” He asks Frau Grubach to shake his hand to seal their “agreement” about how meaningless it is. Frau Grubach instead replies, with tears in her eyes, that he shouldn’t take the matter so much to heart. K. then casually asks about Fräulein Bürstner — is she home yet? He has never exchanged more than hellos with Fräulein Bürstner, he doesn’t even know her first name, but when Frau Grubach confides that she worries about the men Fräulein Bürstner is hanging out with and how late she’s been coming home, K. becomes “enraged.” He declares that he knows Fräulein Bürstner very well and that Frau Grubach is completely mistaken about her. He angrily goes into his room, and Frau Grubach hastens to assure him that her only concern is with the moral purity of her rooming house. To which K., through a chink in the door, bizarrely cries, “If you want to keep your rooming house clean, you’d better start by asking me to leave!” He shuts the door in Frau Grubach’s face, ignores her “faint knocking,” and proceeds to lie in ambush for Fräulein Bürstner.

He has no particular desire for the girl — can’t even remember what she looks like. But the longer he waits for her, the angrier he gets. Suddenly it’s her fault that he skipped his dinner and his weekly visit to a B-girl. When she finally comes in, toward midnight, he tells her that he’s been waiting more than two and a half hours (this is a flat-out lie), and he insists on having a word with her immediately. Fräulein Bürstner is so tired she can hardly stand up. She wonders aloud how K. can accuse her of being “late” when she had no idea he was even waiting for her. But she agrees to talk for a few minutes in her room. Here K. is excited to learn that Fräulein Bürstner has some training as a legal secretary; he says, “That’s excellent, you’ll be able to help me with my case.” He gives her a detailed account of what happened in the morning, and when he senses that she’s insufficiently impressed with his story, he starts moving her furniture around and reenacting the scene. He mentions, for no good reason, that a blouse of hers was hanging on the window in the morning. Impersonating the arresting officer, who was actually quite polite and soft-spoken, he screams his own name so loudly that another boarder knocks on Fräulein Bürstner’s door. She tries again to get rid of K. — he’s now been in her room for half an hour, and she has to get up very early in the morning. But he won’t leave her alone. He assures her that, if the other boarder makes trouble for her, he’ll personally vouch for her respectability. In fact, if need be, he’ll tell Frau Grubach that everything was his fault — that he “assaulted” her in her bedroom. And then, as Fräulein Bürstner tries yet again to get rid of him, he really does assault her:

…lief vor, faßte sie, küßte sie auf den Mund und dann über das ganze Gesicht, wie ein durstiges Tier mit der Zunge über das endlich gefundene Quellwasser hinjagt. Schließlich küßte er sie auf den Hals, wo die Gurgel ist, und dort ließ er die Lippen lange liegen.[15]

“Now I’ll go,” he says, wishing he knew her first name. Fräulein Bürstner nods tiredly and walks away with her head down and her shoulders slumping. Before he falls asleep, K. thinks about his behavior with her and concludes that he’s pleased with it — indeed, is surprised only that he’s not even more pleased.

I thought I’d read every word of the first chapter of The Trial twice, in German and in English, but when I went back now I realized that I’d never read the chapter even once. What was actually on the page, as opposed to what I’d expected to find there, was so unsettling that I’d shut my mind down and simply made believe that I was reading. I’d been so convinced of the hero’s innocence that I’d missed what the author was saying, clearly and unmistakably, in every sentence. I’d been blind the way K. himself is blind. And so, disregarding Avery’s talk of three universes of interpretive possibility, I became dogmatically attached to the opposite of my original supposition. I decided that K. is a creepy, arrogant, selfish, abusive shmuck who, because he refuses to examine his life, is having it forcibly examined for him.

THAT FALL, I was happier than I’d been since high school. My friend Ekström and I were living in a two-room double in a centrally located dorm, and I’d lucked into the job of editing the college literary magazine. In the same zany early-seventies spirit that had saddled the college’s art-film series with the name TAFFOARD,[16] the magazine was called The Nulset Review. Its previous editor was a petite red-haired poet from New York who’d had a mostly female staff and had mostly printed poetry by female poets. I was the outsider who was supposed to freshen up the magazine and find new contributors, and the first thing I did was organize a contest to rename it. The red-haired former editor relinquished her post graciously, but without conceding that anything had been wrong with The Nulset Review. She was a languid, large-eyed woman with a soft, tremulous voice and a thirty-year-old Cuban boyfriend in New York. My staff and I spent the first half hour of our first editorial meeting waiting for her to show up and tell us how to run a magazine. Finally, someone called her at home and woke her up — it was one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon — and she drifted in half an hour later, carrying an enormous mug of coffee and basically still sleeping. She lay on a sofa, her head pillowed in the nest of her curly red hair, and rarely spoke unless we were struggling to understand a submitted manuscript. Then, accepting the manuscript with a languid hand, she cast her eye over it briefly and delivered an incisive summary and analysis. I could see she was my competition. She was living upstairs from a grocery-and-meat market, in an off-campus apartment where the dark-haired French major I was chasing also lived. They were best friends. At a party in November, while everybody else was dancing, I found myself standing alone with the competition for the first time. I said, “I guess this means we finally have to have a conversation.” She gave me a cold look, said, “No, it doesn’t,” and walked away.

I was making pretty good progress with the French major. One night in December she asked me to check the grammar in a paper on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexander-platz which she was presenting in Avery’s seminar the next day. I disagreed with her thesis in it, and at a certain point I realized that if I just kept discussing the book with her, we might end up spending the night together. We developed a better thesis — that Döblin’s working-class hero, Franz Biberkopf, believes in masculine STRENGTH, but in order to find redemption he must admit his absolute weakness in the face of DEATH — and then, side by side, scribbling madly, smoking Marlboro Lights, we wrote a whole new paper. By the time we’d finished, at six in the morning, and were eating pancakes in an IHOP, I was so wired on nicotine and excited by the situation that I couldn’t believe we wouldn’t be falling straight into bed together after breakfast. But, my usual luck, she still had to type the paper.

On the last night of the semester, Ekström and I threw a big party. The French major was there, as were all our other friends and neighbors, and as were George and Doris Avery, who stayed for hours, sitting on Ekström’s bed and drinking Gallo Hearty Burgundy and listening avidly to what our classmates had to say about literature and politics. I already suspected that Avery was the best teacher I would ever have, and I felt that he and Doris had done us a big favor by showing up and making our party extraordinary, not just a kid thing but a grownup thing as well; all evening, friends of mine came up to me and marveled, “They’re such great people.” I was aware, though, that I’d done the Averys a favor, too — that they didn’t get invitations from students all that often. Every year an upperclassman or two fell under Avery’s spell, but never more than one or two. And even though Avery was handsome and loyal and tenderhearted, he wasn’t a lot more popular with his younger colleagues than he was with students. He had no patience with theory or political doctrine, and he was too obviously fascinated by good-looking women (just as Josef K. can’t help mentioning to Fräulein Bürstner that a blouse of hers was hanging on her window, Avery was powerless, when speaking of certain female faculty, to omit descriptions of their clothes and bodies), and he was perhaps not always truthful in calling balls in or out on the tennis court, and he and his colleague Weber loathed each other so profoundly that they resorted to strange circumlocutions to avoid even pronouncing each other’s names; and too often, when Avery was feeling insecure, he assaulted his and Doris’s guests with hour-long recitations of raw literary-historical data, including, for example, the names and titles and capsule biographies of various contemporary archivists in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It was this other side of Avery — the fact that he so visibly had an other side — that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

Ekström and I had cleared the furniture from my bedroom and made it the dance floor. Well past midnight, after the Averys and our less good friends had gone home, I found myself alone on the floor, dancing to Elvis Costello’s “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” in my tightly wound way, while a group of people watched. They were watching my expressivity, I wrote in my notebook the next day, on a plane to St. Louis. I knew this, and about a minute into the song I cast an “Oh so much attention showered upon modest me” smile at the whole line of them. But I think my real expressivity was in that smile. Why is he embarrassed? He’s not embarrassed, he loves attention. Well, he’s embarrassed to get it, because he can’t believe that other people can so quietly be party to his exhibition. He’s smiling with good-hearted disdain. Then “Chelsea” gave way to “Miss You,” the Stones’ moment in disco, and the French major joined me on the floor. She said, “Now we’re going to dance like we’re freaked out!” The two of us brought our faces close together, reached for each other, dodged each other, and danced nose to nose in a freaked-out parody of attraction, while people watched.

THE HOUSE IN Webster Groves looked tired. My parents were suddenly old. I had the sense that Bob and his wife were secretly appalled by them and planning a revolt. I couldn’t understand why Tom, who’d introduced me to the Talking Heads song “Stay Hungry,” which had been my personal anthem in Germany, kept talking about all the great food he’d been eating. My father sat by the fireplace and read the story and the poem of mine I’d printed in the literary magazine (new name: Small Craft Warnings) and said to me, “Where is the story in these? Where are the word pictures? This is all ideas.” My mother was a wreck. Twice, since September, she’d been in the hospital for knee operations, and now she was suffering with ulcerative colitis. Tom had brought home an unprecedentedly suitable new girlfriend in October, he’d given up filmmaking and was finding work as a building contractor, and the girlfriend seemed willing to overlook his lack of health insurance and conventional employment. But then my mother found out that the girlfriend wasn’t suitable at all. She was, it turned out, cohabiting with Tom, and my mother could not be reconciled to this. It chewed away inside her. So did the imminence of my father’s retirement, which she was dreading. She kept telling anyone who would listen that retirement was wrong for “able, vital people who can still contribute to society.” Her phrasing was always the same.

For the first time in my life, I was starting to see the people in my family as actual people, not merely as relations, because I’d been reading German literature and was becoming a person myself. Aber diesmal wird es geschrieben werden,[17] I wrote in my notebook on my first evening in St. Louis. I meant that this holiday with my family, unlike all the holidays in the past, would be recorded and analyzed in writing. I thought I was quoting from Malte. But Rilke’s actual line is much crazier: Aber diesmal werde ich geschrieben werden.[18] Malte is envisioning a moment when, instead of being the maker of the writing (“I write”), he will be its product (“I am written”): instead of a performance, a transmission; instead of a focus on the self, a shining through the world. And yet I must not have been reading Rilke all that badly, because one of the family members I could now see more clearly as a person was the youngest son, the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook; and I was running out of patience with this performer.

That night, after multiple dreams about the French major, each of which ended with her reproaching me for not wanting to have sex with her, I had a nightmare about the Averys’ sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor of the Averys’ living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking “fag” whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the core. Then she sank her teeth into my arm. As I fell over backward, she went for my throat.

I woke up and wrote: So, eines morgens wurde er verhaftet.[19]

My mother took me aside and said viciously, regarding Tom’s visit with his girlfriend in October, “They deceived me.”

She looked up from a note she was writing at the dining-room table and asked me, “How do you spell ‘emptiness’? Like, ‘a feeling of emptiness’?”

All through Christmas dinner, she apologized for the absence of the traditional cranberry sorbet, which she’d been too tired to make this year. Each time she apologized, we assured her that we didn’t miss the sorbet at all, the regular homemade cranberry sauce was all the cranberries any of us needed. A few minutes later, like a mechanical toy, she said she was sorry she hadn’t made the traditional cranberry sorbet this year, but she was just too tired. After dinner, I went upstairs and took out my notebook, as I had many times before; but this time I was written.

FROM A POST-HOLIDAY letter of my mother’s:

Dad feels your schedule is so light he’s fearing he isn’t getting his “money’s worth” or something. Actually, sweetie, he is disappointed (perhaps I shouldn’t tell you though I suspect you sense it) that you aren’t graduating with a “saleable skill” as you promised — you’ve done what you loved, granted, but the real world is something else—& it has been extremely costly. I know, of course, you want to “write” but so do tens of thousands of other also talented young people & even I wonder how realistic you are at times. Well, keep us informed as to any encouraging or interesting developments — even a degree from Swarthmore is no guarantee of success, automatically. I hate being pessimistic (I’ve usually been a positive person) but I’ve seen how Tom has wasted his talents & I hope there won’t be repetition.

From my letter in reply:

Perhaps I should make clear a few things that I had considered knowledge common to the three of us.

1. I am in the HONORS PROGRAM. In the honors program we take seminars that require large amounts of independent reading; each one is therefore considered the equivalent of two 4 or 5-hour courses…

2. Just when did I promise to graduate with what you continue to call a “saleable” major? What was this promise tied to? Your continued support of my education? All of this seems to have slipped my memory, you’re right.

3. I know that by now you are reminding me weekly of how “extremely costly” Swarthmore is less for information’s sake than for rhetoric’s. Yet I think you should know that there is a point where such repetition begins to have an effect directly opposite to the one you seek.

From my father’s reply to my reply:

I feel that your letter needs a rebuttal as it contains so many critical — and some bitter — comments. It is a little difficult to reply without the letter from your mother but as background you should recognize by now that she is not always rational or tactful — and also consider that she has not felt well since last September…Even her knee is bothering again. She takes four different pills several times a day which I don’t think is good for her. My analysis is that she has mental concerns that throw her out of balance physically. But I can’t figure out what worries her. Her health is our only concern and that becomes a catch-22 situation.

And from my mother’s reply to my reply:

How can I undo the damage I’ve done, hurting you as I did and feeling so down & so guilty ever since when, because of my love and respect for you (not only as my son but as one of the most special of all people in my life), I am depressed over the poor judgment & unreasonableness of the letter I wrote you when I was in an unfortunate mood. All I can say is, I’m sorry, I’m miserable over it, I trust you completely and I love you dearly——I beg your forgiveness and speak from my heart.

THE LAST OF the novels I’d read in German in the fall, and the one I’d resisted most staunchly, was The Magic Mountain. I’d resisted it because I understood it so much better than the other novels. Its young hero, Hans Castorp, is a bourgeois from the flatlands who goes for a three-week visit to a mountain sanatorium, gets sucked into the hermetic strangeness of the place, and ends up staying for seven years. Castorp is an innocent of the sort who might position himself at the Brain end of a Heart/Brain continuum, and Thomas Mann treats him with a loving irony and monstrous omniscience that together drove me crazy. Mann, as Avery helped us to see, has every symbol worked out perfectly: the bourgeois lowlands are the place of physical and moral health, the bohemian heights are the site of genius and disease, and what draws Castorp from the former up into the latter is the power of love — specifically, his attraction to his fellow patient Clawdia Chauchat. Clawdia really is the “hot cat” that her name in French denotes. She and Castorp exchange glances seven times in the sanatorium dining room, and he’s staying in room 34 (3 + 4 = 7!) and she’s in room 7, and their flirtation finally comes to a head on Walpurgis Night, exactly seven months after his arrival, when he approaches her on the pretext of borrowing a pencil, thereby repeating and fulfilling his bold borrowing of a pencil from a Clawdia-like boy he had a crush on long ago, a boy who warned him not to “break” the pencil, and he has sex with Clawdia once and only once, and never with anyone else, etc. etc. etc. And then, because so much formal perfection can be chilling, Mann throws in a tour de force chapter, “Snow,” about the lethal chilliness of formal perfection, and proceeds to take the novel in a less hermetic direction, which is itself the formally perfect move to make.

The so-German organizational consciousness at work here made me groan the way an elaborate and successful pun does. And yet at the heart of the book there was a question of genuine personal interest both to Mann and to me: How does it happen that a young person so quickly strays so far from the values and expectations of his middle-class up-bringing? Superficially, in Castorp’s case, you might think the fault lies with the little tubercular spot that shows up in his chest x-ray. But Castorp embraces his diagnosis so eagerly that you can see that it’s more like a pretext—“ein abgekartetes Spiel.”[20] The real reason he stays on at the sanatorium and watches his life become unrecognizable to him is that he’s drawn to Clawdia’s mons veneris, her so-called magic mountain. As Goethe put it, in his gendered language, “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.”[21] And part of what so annoyed me about Mann’s ironic condescension to Castorp is its complicity in what seemed to me Castorp’s passivity. He doesn’t actively, restlessly abandon the bourgeois flatlands for an alpine bohemia; it’s something that happens to him.

And happened to me, too. After the holidays, I went to Chicago and saw Tom, who was on his way to being a contractor and designer not unlike the one my father had imagined he should be, and I met his new girlfriend, Marta Smith, who was every bit as excellent as promised (and, indeed, less than a year later, became my mother’s most trusted daughter-in-law). From Chicago, I returned to school a week early and stayed in the apartment above the meat market where the French major lived. Here it immediately became clear that the French major and I were sick of each other, sick of nothing happening. Her housemate, however, the red-haired New Yorker, my competition, had broken up with her Cuban boyfriend, and I sat and watched old movies with her after the rest of the house had gone to bed. She was the smartest person I’d ever met. She could glance at a page of Wordsworth and tell you what Wordsworth was up to in every line. It turned out that she and I shared identical ambitions of putting childish things behind us, and that she, too, in her own way, was in flight from the flatlands. Before long, her voice was playing in my head around the clock. It occurred to me that my interest in her best friend, the French major, might never have been much more than an “abgekartetes Spiel.” The competition and I went to dinner at the house of an off-campus student couple, mutual friends of ours, whose taste in food and clothes we afterward deplored in an orgy of like-mindedness. The following day, after the mail came, she asked me if I knew a person in Chicago named Marta Smith. This stranger Smith had somehow got her hands on a copy of Small Craft Warnings, read a long short story called “Dismembering You on Your Birthday,” and spontaneously written to say she loved it. Marta knew nothing of my interest in the story’s author, and the timing of her letter’s arrival was like a mystical sign from a German novel of the sort I’d momentarily forgotten I didn’t care for.

On the night of the competition’s twenty-first (3 x 7th!) birthday, on January 24 (1/24 = 1+2+4 =7!), which was twenty-one (3 x 7!) days before Valentine’s Day (14/2 = 7!)! I came to her party with a pack of expensive Italian cigarettes as a present. The part of me that knew enough to fear enormous long-term complications was hoping that the two of us would just stay friends. But another, more important part of me must have felt otherwise (or so I later speculated, as Josef K. speculated that somebody “must have been” telling lies about him), because I was still on the couch with her at five the next morning, long after the party ended. When I apologized for keeping her up so late, the reply that issued from her infinitely soft, raw-cauliflower-tasting mouth was comforting and neat in the way that Mann was comforting and neat. “My idea of a perfect twenty-first birthday,” she said, “certainly didn’t include going to sleep before five.”

ONE OTHER SCENE from that sort of novel.

They’d been reading Freud intensively in the week before spring vacation. The little red-haired girl had a friend in the village center, a high-school teacher named Chloe, who had offered the girl and the boy the use of her apartment while she was on vacation. The girl and the boy were ready to do things in bed which were entirely new to the boy, if not to the girl, and which seemed to both of them too screamingly carnal for a mere hollow-core bedroom door to conceal from her housemates. So the two of them walked to Chloe’s apartment on a Tuesday afternoon, during a break between spring showers. The magnolia petals they bruised underfoot were beaded with rain. In the girl’s knapsack were bread, butter, eggs, gin, tonic water, coffee, cigarettes, and contraceptives. Chloe’s apartment was a dark ground-floor unit in a featureless brick low-rise that the boy had passed a hundred times and never noticed. Its rooms were half empty following the departure of a boyfriend whom Chloe had badmouthed to the girl until she’d finally found the courage to dump him. The girl and the boy made gin-and-tonics and went into Chloe’s bedroom. Even though they’d locked the front door and nobody else was in the apartment, it was unthinkable not to shut Chloe’s door behind them. To fall into bed in front of an open door was to invite a malevolent stranger to loom up in it while their attention was otherwise engaged; this happened in every teen horror movie ever made. The boy was still getting over his surprise that the girl wanted sex as much as he did, though why this had been such a surprise he could no longer say. He was just thankful for instruction. Nothing this girl could do to him was dirty. The room itself, however, was plenty dirty. There was a musty carpet-pad smell and a big yellow stain on the ceiling. Clothes of Chloe’s were hanging out of drawers, lying in a pile near the closet, hanging in a bulky mass from a hook on the hallway door. The girl was clean and fresh-smelling, but Chloe, whom the boy had never met, apparently was not. So it was dirty to be blown on Chloe’s dirty bed. A rain shower pelted the room’s only window furiously, behind a cheap and damaged plastic blind. The rain continued but was done before the boy and girl were. The sky was nearly dark when they got dressed and went out for a walk and cigarettes. In the west, a narrow panel of clear blue-green sky was visible between receding rain clouds and a warmly lighted college building. Even after cigarettes, the boy could taste the magic in his mouth. In his chest was a feeling of gratitude and embarrassment so large that he whimpered a little, involuntarily, every time his mind alit on what the girl had done for him and let him do.

It was night when they returned to Chloe’s apartment and found that somebody had been inside it while they were gone. The front door, which they’d been careful to lock, was now unlocked. At the end of the hallway, in the kitchen, which they’d left dark, they could see a light burning brightly. “Hello?” the boy called. “…Hello?…Hello!” There was no answer. Nobody in the kitchen. The boy asked if Chloe’s boyfriend might still have a house key. The girl, taking ice from the freezer for a gin-and-tonic, said it seemed unlikely, given that the guy had moved all his stuff out. “He also owes Chloe half a year of rent,” the girl said, opening the refrigerator, and then: “Shit! shit! shit!” The boy said “What?” and the girl said, “He’s been here! Somebody!” Because the bottle of tonic water, which the boy and the girl had left more than half full, was almost empty now. They looked at each other, wide-eyed, and peered down the dark hallway. The boy wished he’d turned a light on. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone here?” The girl was pulling open drawers, looking for knives. But Chloe didn’t seem to have anything larger than a steak knife. The girl took one of them and gave the boy another, and together they moved down the hallway, calling “Hello? Hello?” The living room was OK. So was the little study. But when the boy came to the bedroom door and gave it a push, the man on the other side of it pushed back. The man had a gun, and the boy grabbed the doorknob with both hands and wrenched it toward him and braced his feet on either side of the door, pulling as hard as he could against significant resistance. For a moment, he heard the man with the gun huffing on the other side of the door. Then nothing. The boy kept pulling with all his strength. Both he and the girl were panting with terror. “What do I do?” she said. “Go, go, go, get out,” he said hoarsely, “get outside!” She ran to the front door and opened it, looking back at the boy, who was still pulling on the doorknob. He was only eight steps away from her. He could be outside before the man with the gun got the door open and raised his weapon. And so the boy made his break. He and the girl flung themselves through the building’s lobby and onto the sidewalk and stood there breathing hard. It was six in the evening in a pleasant suburb. Commuters coming home from work, somebody shooting baskets across the street, a winter chill reemerging from the shadows. As the boy and the girl stood on the sidewalk, shivering in the chill, they felt at once sheepish and extraordinary, as if nothing of this sort had ever happened — could ever happen — to anyone in the world but them. From feeling this to getting married would be no scarier a dash than from the bedroom door to safety. “I suppose it’s fair to ask,” the girl said, shivering, “why exactly Chloe’s boyfriend would want to harm us.” The boy, too, wondered if perhaps the weight and the sounds on the other side of the door had simply been Chloe’s clothes, swinging on hangers. The world was becoming rational again. There would be a sticky pool of tonic water on the refrigerator’s bottom shelf, something funky with the front-door lock, a timer on the kitchen light. The boy and the girl would go inside together and put the Unconscious in its place.