Extreme Magic Read online

  I turned, wanting to answer him properly, to answer them all. At that moment, the light went off, perhaps to reinforce forever my faith in the mundanity of France.

  “Ah, ça va, ça va!” I said strongly, into the dark. “Couci-couça. Schpuh.”

  Two Colonials

  WHEN YOUNG ALASTAIR PINES came out from Leeds, England, to teach on an exchange fellowship at Pitt, a small college about a hundred miles from Detroit, Michigan, he was the second foreign teacher ever to be in residence there. Pitt, founded in the Eighteen-sixties by a Presbyterian divine, and still under a synod of that church, had kept its missionary flavor well up to the Second World War. Set in Pittston—a bland village of white and cream-colored houses whose green roofs matched, even in summer, dark lawns compelled by lamasery effort (and perhaps a cautious hint of divine favor) from the dry Michigan plain—the school had kept a surface calm even during the war. It was the centripetal calm of those who, living in the sacred framework of morning, noon and evening service and a perfect round of dedicatory suppers, could not help feeling ever so slightly chosen—of people whose plain living and high thinking was not that of poverty, but of ample funds conserved. Some of the college halls had been built as recently as the Thirties (when labor was so cheap) and the organ (though not baroque to the point of Episcopalianism) was first-rate. Salaries had lagged well behind. Since, however, the non-smoking rule was still in effect on campus, and no teacher was supposed to have wine or spirits in his larder, he was officially helped to escape the extravagances of the age, as well as some of its anxieties. True, the table set by most of the younger faculty was somewhat farinaceous, but this might be less Franciscan than Middle Western, since most of the teachers and students came from that region. A glance at the roster showed a global scattering of names which were American, not international; the Kowalskis and Swobodas were Poles and Czechs from Hamtramck in Detroit, the Ragnhilds and Solveigs from Minnesota, and so on. Alone in the catalogue until the advent of Mr. Pines, the name of Hans Weil—philologist and onetime professor of Linguistik at Bonn—represented a Europe not once, twice, or further removed.

  With Hans Weil’s arrival in 1945, there had also come to Pittston the first of certain changes brought by the war. Like so many other scholars in the days of Hitler, Weil had been passed from hand to libertarian hand like a florin stamped “Freedom”—whisked, in his case, to London, via Holland, in 1939, and from London to Rochester, New York, in 1942, after which he was presumed to be on his own. In 1945, at his own behest, or rather at that of his wife, whose sister and brother-in-law, helped by the Weils to America, now had a flourishing but immovable dry-goods shop in Lansing, he had come to nearby Pitt as provisional candidate for a newly established chair in the humanities, and had remained there ever since. There was small need for philology at Pitt, most of whose students were on their way to being music teachers, social workers or ministers, and Weil, lacking new-world versatility, did not find it easy to “double” in related courses. Nevertheless, he had no fears for his job.

  On this fine fall morning of the new term, as Weil walked across campus at his short, duck-footed pace, the beret that he wore for his baldness emphasizing Raphael curves of cheek which softened the fact that he was almost as old as the century, and—as he would blithely have admitted—as profane, he well knew that his value to Pitt went subtly beyond its being able to mutter behind him that he had recently refused an offer from Yale. Thirty years ago, he was thinking, if by some unlikely chance he had landed at Pittston, he might at least have had to grow a beard, and, under the old tradition that all German professors were a kind of nursery-uncle emissary from the land of sugared postcards and cuckoo clocks, might also have had to submit to being called “Dr. Hans,” or “Papa Weil.” But as things were, he was not even under any particular necessity of writing those little monographs that sometimes brought him an Eastern offer. For, since the war, the GI Bill, and an engineering endowment from one of the big labor unions in Detroit, although Pitt’s lawns were still clear of cigarette butts and its brains still Protestantly clear of fumes, a complexity had entered its air. Through the windows of the music department’s practice rooms, once so liturgically pure with Bach and Buxtehude, he could now hear Bartók, Khatchaturian and even Sauter-Finnegan squawking under official sanction. Opposite, in Knox Hall, although there were still two strong classes in scriptural exegesis and one on missions, called “The Protestant Evangel,” a visiting divine from Union Theological was treating of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr and Buber in a course called “Quest”—and all four of these classes were embarrassingly near a group of acolytes studying guided missiles, on the grant from the C.I.O.

  For “comparative” thinking—the modern disease, the modern burden—had come to Pittston. And as Hans Weil walked down the main street, on his way for a word with Mrs. Mabie, the wife of the art historian in whose house Mr. Pines, the exchange fellow, was to be quartered, he knew that he owed his tenure to it. He had begun by being Pitt’s “refugee professor,” and, with certain accretions of prestige and affection, he would end that way. He had merely to wear his beret, pay attention in his own classes in Anglo-Saxon, stubbornly drink his forbidden wines at dinner in full sight of whatever of the faculty, and on their insufflated bosoms abide. He was their prideful little exercise in comparative humanity—he had merely to be.

  A passing car slowed, and the driver, unknown to him, called out, “Lift?”

  “Walking, thanks,” said Weil, thinking of how often he would have to say this until the new students got used to his intransigence, born of a youth spent with alpenstocks. For here, this near the automotive Rome, driving a car on the shortest haul had nothing to do with economy or abstinence. Even the poorest student might have his secondhand leviathan; Weil himself had his Pontiac at home.

  Passing under McFarland’s open windows, he waved up at the president’s housekeeper, who was airing the living room against a background of teal-dark wall. A good many of the Pittston parlors had taken on this color in the three years since the president’s mother had chosen it for hers. And at the curb, McFarland’s new two-tone Buick shone in silver-blu beauty, Rhadamanthine sign that by next year or so, other two-tone jobs, less violent in color of course than some that were floating the highways like zooming banana splits, would be chosen by those of the faculty who were “turning theirs in.” He would keep his old one as long as he could. Whether from age, or from that creeping anti-Americanism which so often flawed the recipients of American bounty, he had begun to have a horror of turning things in.

  And now, just ahead of him, was Mrs. Mabie’s. As Mr. Pines, presently riding undreaming through Pennsylvania or Ohio, might well say, once he got to know her—now he was for it. Professor Weil’s affectionate remembrance of London and the English went deep, deeper than the language lilt and the old gray streets, down to that sudden rest of the heart when he had stepped off the Dutch plane into a ring of their steady, un-Wagnerian faces. Its compound would already have been working in him, at the good thought of young Pines, had he not been all too sure of what was already working in Mrs. Mabie.

  Portia-Lou Mabie, a quondam painter known at her own insistence by her maiden-professional name of Potter (and therefore a constant twinge of explanation in the salons of Pittston and in poor old Mabie-Potter), was an unsuccessful faculty wife who was the more annoying because she gave no sign of knowing it. She was not, however, of that familiar sort, objects of pity, who were always twenty-three sour diapers too late for the Inter-Faith Tea. Dr. Mabie had met and been married by her while he was on a field trip to Mexico City, where—in common with others from St. Louis, Stroudsburg, Orlando—she had been leading the stridulant life of Greenwich Village when it hits the corrida. A bony princesse lointaine of about thirty-five, who wore her hair in a weak-lemonade waterfall down the small of her back, she was to Weil a confirmation of his private opinion that art historians ought never to come that close to art. She had a talent for endorsing the worthiest convi
ctions in a way that made their very holders wish immediately to disavow them. Openly lamenting that she had been born too late to join the Left Bank expatriates of the Twenties, her shrill disparagements of the crass standardization of life in the United States brought a sudden flush of amor patriae to the most disaffected cheek. And ever since the Mabies’ recent Fulbright year at Oxford, her conversation, fresh with Anglophiliac sighs and knowing locutions, was likely to become especially matey in the presence of Hans Weil—climaxing on the occasion of the Weils’ yearly dinner for the McFarlands, when he had had to explain to the elderly wife of a Kansas divine what Mrs. Mabie had meant when she had left the table with a bright look at Weil, and the remark that she had to go and spend a penny.

  Now, on her doorstep, he deplored, for Mr. Pines’s sake, the enthusiasm of her offer to house him, but the childless Mabies had two spare bedrooms, and there were not many such in Pittston.

  Mrs. Mabie opened the door, chin forward, hair brimming over. “Oh Hans, did you try to ring me? I was out getting in some coal.”

  “Coal?” He knew the Mabies heated with oil.

  “Yes, you know how they like a morning fire. And Pattini wouldn’t deliver less than half a ton, so I brought some home in the car. Come on in.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I came only to say I cannot go with you to meet him tomorrow; I must go earlier for the language convention in Chicago. So I have here a little note—” He heard his own words, the German juxtaposition, with outrage. He almost never did that any more; the woman acted on him like a solvent, fuddling all his backgrounds together.

  She made him come in, and, although he kept out of her sooty clutch the coat his wife, Hertha, had just cleaned for him, he had to follow her up the stairs to see the bedroom.

  “Hope he’ll like his digs.” She flung the door back smartly. “Just finished distempering the walls.”

  Looking, Weil hoped that Mr. Pines would see nothing more unusual than kindness in the hot-water bottle prominently posed on the turned-down bed, near the radiator, or in the huge, brass scuttle of coal in a steam-heated American room. “Distemper?” he said. He sniffed an odor. “Oh, yes, rubber paint.”

  “Worst thing about American progress,” she said. “Always sure to bring something bloody nasty along with it.”

  He bent to examine the coal scuttle, thinking that he was not quite enough of an American, although naturalized, to be able to agree with her in comfort. “Didn’t know you used this fireplace. Don’t you burn wood in the one downstairs?”

  Ignoring him, she fingered the hot-water bottle. “Such a naked red, these things look; that’s because we only use them for illness. But of course there wouldn’t be a cover for it in all of Michigan. I tried the tea cozy on it, but it was no go.”

  Weil straightened, and took out the note to the expected guest, placing it on the night table, where, next to the neat pile of towels and soap, he saw a worn packet of Players. “Portia-Lou. They are crazy for our cigarettes, you know. And after all, isn’t he here to see us as we are?”

  She flung out a hand in an impatience that included Pittston, Michigan, the hemisphere. “Don’t worry. He will. He will.”

  “Well—” he said. “’Wiedersehen,” and ground his teeth. He no longer said that, except to Hertha.

  On his way downstairs, she called after him. “You and Hertha wouldn’t have brought over one of those big sponge-things, would you? Isn’t that what they use?”

  He turned his head. “You mean possibly a loofah?”

  “Oh, is that what they call them?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never saw one in London. But if my reading is correct he would carry his own with him. In something called a sponge-bag.” He clapped his beret firmly on his head. “’Bye now.”

  “Cheerio,” said Mrs. Mabie.

  Later that night, at about one-thirty, when Weil could not stay asleep, as often happened, he got up noiselessly and went downstairs to forage in the bookshelves and the icebox until Hertha should miss him and come after him. This, the constant nervous rounding-up of what family was left to her—by telephone, by visit, from room to room—was almost all that remained, after all these years, of the effects of the concentration camp. It was why, as long as her sister Elsa and Sigmund had the store in Lansing, as long as she could talk with Elsa every morning, drive over for the biweekly Kaffeeklatsch, and exchange Sunday dinners, he would never take up the offers from Princeton or Yale. It was no use telling himself that they might none of them be here now had he not gone ahead to England; he could not forget where she had been while he had been safe from all but the bombs in London, nor would he forget her eyes, so blue under the grizzled hair, when she had said to him, on the morning the letter came from Pittston, “Only that we should be together, Hans! Only that we should all of us be together.”

  He was reading when she came to the top of the stairs in her nightgown. “Hans! You will catch cold. Soll ich cocoa machen?”

  “Nein, nein. Ich hab’ ein bischen Wein. Und Schmier-käse. Wilst du?”

  She wrinkled her nose, but came and sat at the table, looking over his shoulder. “You are working?”

  “No, I just wanted to look something up, and I found it.” He chuckled, thinking that he might tell her of his encounter with Mrs. Mabie, but she had little ear or eye for the nuances of their life here, content to display her cuisine at intervals to these supermarket savages, to wonder whether she could get the fruiterer to stock fennel, and to lament with Elsa that there was no little Conditorei in East Lansing.

  “Here. Let me read you something.” He got up and put an afghan around her shoulders. “What they call a stole, ja? Sehr schön, matches the eyes.”

  “Schmeichelkatz’. You just want me to let you stay up.” But she liked him to read to her.

  “Listen.” He read out bits of the passage he had hunted up, smiling to himself, in Max Müller. “‘We do not want to know languages; we want to know what language is, how it can form a vehicle or an organ of thought…The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the Oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, to trace the social, moral progress of the human race.’”

  He looked up. “You follow? Now listen.” He took a sip of wine. “‘In comparative philology the case is totally different. The jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese, are as important, nay, for the solutions of some of our problems, more important than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero.’”

  He slapped his thigh, and took another sip of wine.

  “‘The clicks of the Hottentots.’ What you think of that for a title for my little Chicago piece on the Middle West ‘r’? Good, hah? In fact, bloody good!”

  “Säufer,” she said. “How much wine did you have? Come to bed.”

  He was still laughing when she got him to go to bed, and the next morning, looking for something to read on the train, he took Max Müller with him.

  Meanwhile, on a Greyhound bus approaching Detroit, Alastair Pines, slumped next to the window he had opened at once on entering, was sleeping off both a night out in New York (paid for with the difference between the cashed-in train ticket sent from Pittston and the bus fare) and the eyestrain of hours of digestive gazing at the country that, unknown to it, he meant to call his own.

  The wind, ruffling a blond lock that flopped engagingly over his forehead even when he was awake, passed without a ripple over his well-rigged old Aquascutum, over his skis and duffelbag on the rack above. Travel fitted him like a skin; he voyaged with all the aplomb of his nation, of school holidays spent in Paris, of walking tours on the cheap in Yugoslavia. He was that unobtrusive man to be met everywhere in or out of the sterling area—leaning over the rails of the small steamers that plied the lesser isles of Greece, knees pressed together in the third-class carriage going over Domodossola or through Torremolinos—the Englishman of between twenty and forty, whose berth in life and appearance is also somewhere adequately middle, who, to Am
ericans, travels disarmingly light in baggage and heavy in experience. To his compatriots, he was recognizable in more detail, as that projectile still spinning with leftover impetus down the targetless postwar years, that “type” known to them as “R.A.F.”

  When he awoke, the bus was nearing downtown Detroit, and he was surprised to see that there were skyscrapers here too, not on a stunning pedestal of bridge and harbor, as in New York, but forming upward like some harder fusion of the smoky, after-barrage air. He leaned forward eagerly, though not romantically; the point about new places, and the duty, was to grip the fact of them. New York’s air, mica-shot, had the fluid chic of big business; this place had the heavy thunder-shade of industry.

  He took out one of their sweets and ate it thoughtfully. With the two strings that he had to his bow, there was no reason why, during the year at Pittston, or after, he should not find some post here that would suit him. He had had three terms reading history at a provincial university, before the war saved him from the likelihood that he would be sent down. After the war, the government had been well pleased to send him to an engineering college, where he had since taught for several years. Browsing over a list of posts abroad, he had come upon the exchange offer from Pitt; trying for it on the hunch that they couldn’t have the pick of his betters, he had found his divided talents suited them to a T. He would be a Fellow in English, but would also teach a course in mechanics on the side—what luck to find that his education, on the spotty side for home, had shifted about in a way they seemed to admire here. And after his year here, he ought to feel cheeky enough to jump ship, into the wider seas of industry.

  To Alastair, third son of a colonial servant who had died in the service before rising in it—but not too soon to see his children reared as they should be, on the strong asses’ milk of the imperial habit—it was normal beyond notice to have a brother in Malaya, another in Johannesburg, a married sister in Cyprus and an uncle in Accra. Hitherto, Alastair had been the one who had worried them, but now he rather pitied them, dogging along as they did, bewailing the loss of India, toward a half-pay retirement in Kensington—and all for a groundling lack-of-vision that had kept them from seeing the modern world as he had once been used to seeing it from his plane. At twenty thousand feet up, the technical lines of empire erased themselves; one saw that one might descend on the States as in other days one might have sailed to Kenya, but carrying a passport now, instead of a gun. And colonial sacrifices were still to be made; although in the modern way one might have to give up one’s citizenship instead of one’s health. Had to be done, unless one wanted to fizzle out in some corner, still denying that sahibs were passé. For, entering a country already in a high state of cultivation, and one in a certain sense already appropriated, the trick was to play it in reverse, to go native as quickly as possible. Which he was fully resigned to do.