Standard Dreaming Read online

  Standard Dreaming

  A Novella

  Hortense Calisher

  Contents

  Introduction to Standard Dreaming

  Standard Dreaming

  About the Author

  Introduction to Standard Dreaming

  “THERE IS, IT WOULD seem, in the dimensional scale of the world, a kind of delicate meeting-place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.” Thus Nabokov, accounting for the magical efficacy of lanternslides, microscope views and the like.

  The work I rejoice is an expression of that “delicate meeting-place,” a triumphant incarnation of a literary form whose name is uncertain among us and therefore, as a genre, somewhat mysterious. Henry James, a master of it, called such things as The Aspern Papers and The Spoils of Poynton, after the French fashion, nouvelles; and often we encounter the word novella (used by Willa Cather, Peter Taylor, Jean Stafford, to name three American practitioners) to describe what has quite as urgent a reality as the “short story,” though if we say short novel I wonder if it is clear that we refer, invariably, to the responsibility of function rather than of extent …

  Perhaps a better, though equally outlandish, label—and in these matters, naming is as emergent a task as ever it was in Eden: we know only what we name, and only so far—for the work of single transformation would be récit, that generic title Gide claimed for his Immoralist back in 1900; for the sake of suggestiveness, we could identify as récits such fictions as Notes from Underground and Benito Cereno. In these texts (written by authors who elsewhere spread themselves thick, since for them writing large and even loose implies an analogous intention to write lean and intense) we hear the resonance of a separated consciousness, the murmur of the singled-out soul at grips with some environing and opposing other. There is an inevitable defeat or submersion registered and, at the same time an emblem of conscious and therefore tragic triumph (one thinks of Death in Venice, of The Secret Sharer)—but I have invoked enough great names to qualify the effort with which I want to associate Hortense Calisher’s trophy in the genre: the finest of the three récits she has written, and the fullest realization of just that opposition Nabokov proposes as a compositional device which will enable the form.

  We are, we begin, at the start of the seventies, an interval when the generations are more explicitly at war with each other in the United States than perhaps at any other time. So fierce has the contention become that it is possible—speculates our central self, our singular consciousness—the race may have been given over, humanity lost. It is a preposterous donnée, yet so familiar, as apocalypses go these days, that the assured reality of place and presumed identity must do everything for us—everything else. In a work of this narrowness of scope, this sharpness of focus, there is no occasion for promiscuous detail, for what Barthes calls “l’effet du réel”: we cannot here suspend narrative action in the name of our delight in representational presence. Everything must immediately signify, must do what it says, and indeed it is the ransom of all Calisher’s work elsewhere as a “mere” novelist, or as a mere “novelist,” that it does so. She enforces the city symbolically—New York, capital of group therapy, as essential to the design of this over-determined fiction as Venice to Aschenbach or Amsterdam to the narrator of Camus’ The Fall. And quite as compulsive in its hold upon our understanding is the profession of Calisher’s hero: “We begin the surgery,” he says at the end, “which is a relationship.” The notion that what must be incised, severed, withdrawn is, under certain kinds of pressure, in the presence of a certain attention, a link, a rapport, indeed a relation (for we are to be speaking of fathers and sons), is the entire justice of Hortense Calisher’s design upon us: absence becomes presence, loss is transformed not into possession but the meaning which possession seeks; and all the negatives turn into a kind of consecration: “He bowed his head, and in his dream, his son anointed it.”

  Imagine, Calisher commands, a kind of encounter-group consisting of parents who have been repudiated by their children—parents cut adrift who have nothing more in common with each other than that, the failure of that continuity which might assure the survival of our kind. To their erratic meetings proceeds—into Harlem—Dr. Berners, Swiss and accountable, prepared throughout to report to us, readers in the ghostly amphitheater which surrounds his every movement and failure to move, his operations, indeed, with a kind of sulphuric (or is it celestial) glow:

  We are all here with him; he knows who we are. We are that animal, which whether it is entering the sea of death or the ark of hope, turns equally to look back on itself.

  A profoundly reflexive work, then, and it is its author’s cunning to have been able to fold into it so many other people (Hegel’s definition of Hell), so many felt and affabulated lives, so much of the anomalous beauty which makes living in New York such an apparent wonder. The five severed parents—their alienated children in jail or jeopardy of terrible sorts—are indeed the fingers of what by the récit’s end we believe to be the Society of the Hand, that agent of human continuity which is to be reattached on the last page, and which has already been reattached on the first. Between the miraculous event and its fulfillment falls, or writhes, the bitter lyric of this painful and splendid prise de conscience. Though we have come to some sort of accounting, in the bookkeeping sense, for the other four parents—honorably widowed, married, unmarried, deserted—it is Dr. Niels Berners whose metamorphosis (his acceptance of the chance that his son’s will-to-death can, if released, turn to a life of his own) we trace in that acknowledged alembication of Hortense Calisher’s—her confidence, which is soon enough ours, that if we are patient with the details, the story will transpire through them, will be them in time. For that is what a story is, Calisher here shows us: details in the medium of time. The little circuit, with all the Swiss doctor’s youth and education in another country, his dead French wife and estranged colleagues, manages to enter itself doubly, a kind of specific ledger which clocks the way out as an inference of the way back. Boehme and Darwin are the books which Dr. Berners reads in parallel with his self-starving, life-denying son: science and religion, analysis and faith. And at the end of the story, of the circuit, which must be its beginning, the books are returned, the freedom is granted:

  let us be the uncollected place

  that is the mysterious pseudo-zen message this repudiating yet reprieving son grants his father, who is “grateful for the ‘us’.”

  I believe only a writer capable of such prodigies of design, not single details only but chains and clusters of repetitive imagery, the kind we usually identify with poetry—the elegant patterning and revelation of such language as, implicitly, must supply the meanings a diligent reader may trace on his own—only such a writer could make the sharpest point of her récit, of her dramatic monologue in prose, that there is a freedom beyond all artifice, something which refuses the mere mastery of design, and transcends it. The art of this fiction is entirely committed to the demonstration that there is an “uncollected place” beyond art. Perhaps that is just the “meeting-place” Nabokov meant; surely that is the pervasive irony of the short novel as a form, and of this triumph of the genre as a passion.

  —Richard Howard

  STANDARD DREAMING

  AT SIX O’CLOCK ON the evening of the last Friday in the past July, Dr. Berners tells us, he reentered his office here in the hospital after reattaching the severed hand of an accident victim, and stood before the window, as is his habit when recovering his nonsurgery self. Thinking as well of this report. To calibrate a parent is not easy. So much of it is not parenthood. He decides to put everything in.

  Midsummers
around that time, he could watch the city changeover telegraph itself west-east from river to river—the New York invitation, or threat—in his blood ever since his early teens and first visit here, as one freshly arrived boy-vegetable, opal-cheeked and cocoa-calm, from Switzerland. In winters, the office light goes from bluebell to dark; then only he thought of his alp-ringed childhood, the neat prunings around his father’s dispensary, and air like a carillon breathed.

  This night, the window was letting in a heat-roughened rosiness already browning at the edges, with less than usual hints of golden goings-on elsewhere. The weekend buzz outside was a leaving one. Technically sundown, nighttime for the single here. All this would loom large in such a report.

  Over his secretary’s rounded back, he saw on his desk a bowl of fresh lichee nuts; half his patients were now from Chinatown, almost all of his practice being now through this hospital.

  “Lichee light,” he said—he always says something—and reaches over for one of the nuts, fondling its cobbled, inflamed brown—not wood, not bark, not skin. “That sky.”

  She doesn’t answer, hasn’t in eighteen years. The Swiss, with some of the best climate in Europe, are its worst weather bores; on his first working return there after a war he had served as surgeon in, he and his French wife had met in Vevey, on just that note. “They try to be such artists about it,” she’d said, taking him for an American. “A boring people generally,” he told her. “All Europe thinks so—and we know.” Stoically he and they suffered their median selves. Even when they were handsome—like you, Renee said—there was seldom enough flash for one to notice it, and like pigs fed on chestnut, she said, their flesh had no rankness; some early ozone kept their linen fresher than other peoples’ even when they emigrated, and maybe their souls too—how could she have mistaken him for anything else! “Your kisses taste of camomile.” He had chewed tablets, as he had observed doctors there did before examining—since he had never before had a private patient, or a female one. A courtesy to his superior, whose niece she was—a wart removal, from the delicate cheek, tiny lobe. None on the pointed tongue. Sex mixed with the surgery, even when sliding honorably into marriage, was maybe unlucky; all that esprit, boring to him in the end though he never told her so, had carried her off early, leaving him free again to be a monk for medicine. But a father.

  He never missed her sharply, except when he went up to Boston. To stand in that slum alley, first locking the car against the idlers there—maybe they’re not stealers, but they stare at it and him as at a Trojan horse—and look up at the blind windows of that hermit second story, readying himself. To abase himself, before his son.

  He strips a lichee and pops the pure, slippery oval in his mouth. More and more he has a taste for what he thinks of as forest nourishment. “Who brought?”

  “Mei-ling’s mother.”

  That half-formed little fist will never be a beauty, but the new operating rotunda here, in the American style, almost as large as an amphitheater, is full of students, and of us doctors, too, every time he works on it. Reminding him that after his war service, his work with a surgeon’s group, the Society of the Hand, was what had started him on a vanity practice. What are the decent limits of vanity in a human body, he asks us now? At what ridgeback of hair, daily callous of misery, horn of deformity, may it start? Or must it stop.

  Erna the secretary, with him since the beginning, hands him a Kleenex for the juice on his fingers, then a pen and some checks, including one for the rent of the Park Avenue office, which he signs, Niels Berners, without flourish. “Guess I better give up the uptown office.” Where patients seldom called anymore, never finding him there. “Hadn’t I, hmm?” Answers Erna never gave. But he would feel her approval if he had it. He didn’t. “What, no tea today?”

  She brings him his cup of a brew called Constant Comment, a tin of which his son had once sent him from Cambridge, as a joke. Awesome to recall that he once had a Harvard son, and a joke with him.

  “Guess I’m hooked on this stuff.” He says this everyday too. To please her? Stichmain, god of orthopedics at his former hospital, maintained that a daily ounce of ritual was just the placebo to keep the lower staff satisfied. Strange to think of that thick-skinned muscle-guesser (whose daughter, rumor says, now has her own kind of habit) as only another beaten father. Drugs no longer seem to Berners the worst. Rather—incurably simpler. A mass placebo, even when a child—or a parent—dies of them. He admits that if his own only child took drugs he mightn’t see as clearly that the parent-child disease is larger, must be something else. Still, there is Stichmain, one more member of the son-blasted, daughter-bitten Society of the Child.

  “Where’d you get that tea these days, Erna? Altman’s?”

  “Mail order.”

  She knows what he’s hooked on. He’s touched. And brusque to it. “Okay, see you in two weeks. Have a good time on the Cape May, with the mammah. And take with you that box over there.”

  When he sees her redden with pleasure at the perfume and the stole—which will she give to the mammah?—he wants to spirit her upstairs, quick under the arc lights, to lift the sad, virginal forehead, that meek jowl, even those unused breasts—an operation which he now will do for no one—and then? What surgical correction is there for mother-monkey on the back?

  At once he reports himself to himself. Old thinking! Which, who knows, may have its quiet victims lying in state in every mortuary in the nation, under every diagnosis but the true? In the parentism produced by the Society of the Child, one never blames the child. Still, having seen that mood-sucking Viennese monkey, Mrs. Krants, he finds it hard to blame poor Erna, who at the heights of her mother’s candy-eating dependency is still called “Lump!” Yet there must be something. Erna is a child, in every house and mortuary the unalterable love-object. Under the terms of the parents’ group which he has been attending all winter, Dr. Berners reminds himself of what he is committed to hold fast to at every corner. A child is blameable. Raoul, up there behind the blind windows in his ashram of one—is a child.

  He puts down his cup; he has finished it. Its gall is still sweet. “Okay, then—the answering service knows where I am tonight?”

  “I gave them all the numbers. You didn’t say where for tonight.”

  “Tonight we meet at Mrs. Hunter’s.”

  Erna, who has met Baba Hunter, must be the only person who doesn’t make a face at the mention of her. Holding fast at the corners for Baba isn’t easy. But this is where the parents’ group comes in. He goes out into that city musk, not single any more. To help Baba Hunter with her blame. Which presumably helps him with his.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night, Doctor. And please remember, if you need me back sooner, just call.”

  As he closes the door, she is trying on the stole.

  Outside, he recalls that when Raoul was little, he and Erna used to exchange postcards. And take trips to the zoo. In her mind, she is a mother to him. It never stops. She would get on my back if she could. With him.

  Going up to Harlem via the East River Drive, he drove on past his goal to a spot just south of the Willis Avenue Bridge, one of those places here that he always says no one but foreigners ever see. He and Raoul used to collect them. He parked the car in a cul-de-sac off the Drive and walked back. Opposite him is an oval of green, oddly undusky shore, on which are two old, curved trees, wineglass elms or the next best; a pair of black boys are gamboling across it, but it is Gainsborough nevertheless. If the river running beneath were cloth instead of water, it would be of that kind once brought to kings, still to be seen in that arras under glass in the musée at Edam, or in the painted riverstreak under a saint’s prow in the town hall at Siena. The finest eel-gray, dirty, iridescent—what was the name of that cloth in which kings used to clothe themselves? It bothers him, this interpenetration of everything, which people got out of easy by calling “culture.” When he can’t remember the name of the cloth, he gets in the car again and drives back slowly,
past that high-rise mortuary of state madness, Manhattan State Hospital. Anybody passing it, who does not cry out, is to blame. At that point he remembers—samite! Raoul, in the eighth-grade pageant. Raoul, in a hospital ten years later, in dirty-gray menswear samite.

  At that point Dr. Berners warns us. Beware the mind, young or old anywhere, that seeks an architectural peace for itself. It will cry out. He reminds himself that this is a full report.

  He eats dinner in the No Name Restaurant near Baba’s, Soul Food Served Here, Your Host—White Sambo, who proves to be an octoroon, that hot mauve color of the proudflesh round a healing wound. Berners is alone in the conversation pit where the tables are, and the ghosts of the Beatles in that pit in Help! If violence should come, aiming for money or color, he is in a straight bead from the door. Ideas aren’t illusory and veiled anymore, rivers either. Yet what is wrong with him, that without logic, he still wants life? The soul food is fine, but he can’t eat. His son is like a plummet of stone in the grave of his chest. This is the evening devoted to thoughts of him.

  The owner, who has seen him and the group here, brings him coffee he says is made with eggshells in a granite pot. Berners drinks it, swallowing hard. Essen sie Seele. Mangez de l’âme, Raoul. Eat! Eat mine.

  “Summin’ wrah-ung food.”

  “My son. He starves.”

  “Uh-uh! Wo’ prisoner?”

  He can only shake his head.

  “Uh …” Then that indescribable common sound, expelled from the catgut of the throat, like spittle. The owner looks about him tallying—white leathers, marble pit, soul. The mauve eyelids flutter. “Won’t take yo’ munnah.”

  “Nobody’s.”

  Berners goes to the washroom and returns. He has wept.

  The owner is waiting, that pleading look on his face. Toss him a bone.