The Reader Suffers The Loss of Dostoevsky.
By Max G. Bernard
Smashwords Edition
http://www.smashwords.com
Copyright 2010 Max G. Bernard, all rights reserved.
It was, I believe, sometime in the spring of 1968 that someone at a party at my apartment on Halsted Street in Chicago, unbeknownst to me at the time, stole my entire collection of books by Dostoevsky. I was attending Roosevelt University at the time, and had been going there since September of 1965.
There had to be close to 200 people at the party. I had done up a ditto stencil to make invitations to the party, and then just passed them out at school. There were a lot of people I knew, but also a lot of people that I didn’t. Somewhere in the crowd, apparently, there was someone who coveted the works of the epileptic Russian novelist.
Whoever that person was, I believe they were operating under some strange compulsion. They couldn’t leave well enough alone. And they couldn’t be satisfied by merely taking Crime and Punishment, or the Brothers Karamokov or The Gambler or The Idiot or Notes From Underground. They had to take them all.
I believe that I’m the sort of person who, had I been asked, would have lent this person the entire collection. No Questions Asked. But no request was made. Nor were the books ever returned. I do hope that they were read.
Books in my possession usually wind up being read. Not always, however. One book that I have which I have never read is The Guilty Head by Romain Gary. I did start it once, recently. It was given—or perhaps “lent”—to me by my Danish friend Vaughn, who thought I would enjoy it, and who seemed to suggest that it was a book with some profound lesson for me to grasp.
Vaughn is dead now, alas, as dead as Marley, and somehow, in the back of my mind, it feels like I will only finally completely lose Vaughn when I finish reading that book. So I delay doing so. And I wonder if I will understand what Vaughn wanted me to realize from reading it. If I don’t, of course, he is no longer available to ask. What a lousy friend I was to him by ignoring his suggestion that I read the book while he was still alive, and by retaining it and never returning it. Too late now.
Shared experience among friends is one of life’s real treasures. I once had a wonderful conversation about this fact with Elaine, who was the director of student activities at Roosevelt University back in the 60s (and for some time after that). She is a very perceptive person. She said that one of the saddest things in life occurs when the last other person with whom you share an important memory or experience dies, and you alone remember it, perhaps imperfectly. Lost, as Rutger Houser’s character says in Blade Runner, “like tears in rain.”
It was an interesting time to be there, and there were a good number of fascinating teachers. Sue in the Education Department, who had been one of the Japanese-Americans interned in the government’s camps during World War II (and who I just learned recently also died). Yolanda in the English Department whose singing of the song The Great Capitulation from Brecht's Mother Courage in her drama class had to be one of the greatest performances of all time, a momentary and fleeting moment of lost time. And my Iranian sociology professor, Mr. Nezami, whose whereabouts and survival I wonder about at times. He went back to his country, and he and I ultimately lost touch.
The party at my house that night was notable for two other things. One was that for some reason someone firebombed a car that was parked right in front of the apartment building. When it occurred, a lot of the people from my party went downstairs into the street, and watched the auto burn. I myself went down there. When I did so, for some reason, one of my seven cats leaped up onto my left shoulder and stayed there as I walked around, and only leapt off again when I walked back up the stairs and back into the apartment.
And the third notable thing about the party? Well, suffice it to say that there are three types of people in the world: people who can count, and people who can’t. I should have studied more math, I suppose, but I always suspected that if I had done so, my days would have been numbered.
It was a nice apartment, right above a glass store, where construction people went to purchase panes of glass. There were three bedrooms and three other rooms. In the biggest of the rooms, I painted a truly asinine mural on the wall, with a drawing of a strange creature that I actually labeled “Heroic Anti-Dog.” It was oddly shaped, and looked more like a dinosaur than anything else. It was sort of cartoon like, and was very definitely smiling and showing a lot of teeth.
About a year later, when I abandoned the apartment, I wonder what the landlord thought of the drawing. I imagine it was painted over. It has to be gone by now, doesn’t it? After all, a full forty years have passed.
There was a wonderful hot dog stand across the street, run by a guy named George. He would always give you an enormous portion of fries with your hot dog or polish sausage, and once explained to me that this was because, before he owned the place, and prior to even working there, when he was really poor, the prior operator of the place had been extremely generous with the fries, and it helped him survive.
Once, when I came home very late at night, and saw that George’s hot dog stand was still open, I bought myself a polish sausage with fries. I walked up the stairs, opened the door to the apartment, and flicked on the light. As I did so, all seven cats, from multiple directions, leapt up into the air, grabbed the polish sausage from my hands, and together tore it apart in mid-air, consuming it entirely before they hit the ground, bouncing away as only cats can do. I was astonished, but I knew why it happened: I must have neglected to feed them that morning, leaving hurriedly. It was their way of telling me what they thought of that omission (as well as making sure that they did get fed).
I wish that I had that on film to watch again. Back in the day, however, there were no readily available video cameras. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, however.
Forty years later, approaching my 60th
birthday, I don’t know why the subject of my purloined
Dostoevsky collection is flitting through my mind. I once told the
Dean of a law school that the true meaning of Crime
and Punishment, unperceived by almost all
readers, was that Raskolnikov, the central character, was a law
student who had to abandoned his studies because he could not afford
his tuition. Subsequently, he commits a brutal axe murder of a woman.
The lesson, I told the Dean, was that he should be extra careful
before being too extravagant in raising tuition. Look what can
happen. A word to the wise.
I remember also the explanation in The Brothers Karamozov concerning happy families and unhappy families. I don’t believe I will repeat it here, however. You should really read the book. When you do, don’t miss the explanation about families. It ranks right up there with the explanation about economics (the relative relationship of income and expenses) and happiness in David Copperfield as one of the most perceptive of statements in literature, rivaled perhaps only by the epigram by Anatole France that Victor Hugo placed at the beginning of Les Miserables, something to the effect that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the rich and poor alike from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.
As you may have gathered by now, I am somewhat of a Reader. That is, I read books. Perhaps, as you are reading these words, you do also. There may be an alternative reason. Perhaps a madman has taken you captive, placed a gun to your forehead, and commanded you to read this or die? Probably not, however. It is a very unlikely explanation. Of course, stranger things have happened.
If you are not a Reader, however, you will not enjoy this book. So, in that event, I would suggest that it may be advantageous to you to stop reading it now. If you are, however, a Reader, please continue. And, in the far less likely event that a madman has ordered you to read it by placing a gun to your head, I would also then encourage you to keep reading. But even in such circumstances, it is ultimately up to you. (The publisher requires me to notify you, however, that in the event that blood or brains are sprayed onto these pages, the book may NOT be returned for a refund. Batteries not included. Action figures sold separately. News at 11).
I am not the sort of Reader who says, of a book, “that was a good ‘read’.” It has always struck me that this description of a book somehow trivializes it, and perhaps is also ungrammatical.
It may not be, however. I was never much better at formal grammar than I was at higher math. When I went to school, the complex art of “diagramming” sentences was much in vogue, but it never made much sense to me, any more than all that business about triangles and such in geometry did. I ken spel gud 2!
I learned to read from the sight recognition method. Phonics never made any sense to me, and had the educational system insisted on it, I might yet be illiterate. I perceived words, and sentences, and pages, and chapters, and ultimately books, and perhaps even the entire body of an author’s work as what in German was called a Gestalt—a whole. That may fail to convey the essence of the notion, unless you already perceive in that manner. It is like Charles Fort wrote, in a sentence he purportedly wrote only to fill a line on a page in one of his four books, when requested to do so by his publisher. “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”
I believe in the magic of words, in the magic of books, in the magic of being a Reader. There are three kinds of people in the world, those who are a Reader, and those who are not. You may think that this only adds up to two types of people. But that is only if you are one of those people who indeed can count.
Vaughn was roommates with a fellow named Martin, who went to Roosevelt University with me. Martin was the first person I met at the school on the first day of registration. He was the person in line in front of me. He would later obtain a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, and today teaches history at one of the schools of the University of Illinois.
He and I got arrested together, along with a bunch of other people, one time in 1968 during a sit-in at Roosevelt protesting the decision by the school’s President Rolf A. Weil, not to renew the contract of radical history professor Staughton Lynd. (There were some other great historians there contemporaneously—Jesse Lemisch and Donald Bluestone among them). Later, when Martin himself was briefly teaching at Roosevelt University, his first teaching job, I attended his class for the first semester, just for the hell of it.
If you are lucky, later on in this narrative, I may, in fact, tell you about one of Martin’s students, who he and I nicknamed “Mr. Hostile.” Mr. Hostile was not a Reader. He once turned in a book report that was plainly based on the blurb on the back of the dust jacket. In that brief book report, consisting only of two typed pages, he managed to repeat twice the fact that the book had 23 illustrations, several of them in color.
Martin and I were very simpatico, for a number of reasons. First, he and I were both Readers. Second, there are three kinds of people in the world, those who like anchovies on pizza and those who don’t. He and I both like those anchovies. Ok, if you insist, there really are three types of people—the third are those who simply don’t care what was on the pizza. I liked Martin, because he really did care. And so did I.
Vaughn and Martin and I would frequently go to the movies. What we watched varied considerably. Vaughn especially loved movies. He once told us that when he had first come to the U.S., and when his English wasn’t all that good, movies were one of his few recreations, and he would often drive a long distance from the suburbs where he was living into Chicago to see a movie alone, at a time when he knew few people here.
He claimed that, on one occasion, he drove a long distance one night to a movie theater, purportedly to see a film he thought was entitled: “Closed Tonight,” only to find out that this was NOT a film title, but a statement of fact. The theater was dark and deserted, much to his dismay. I believe this to be a true story. I cannot prove it. But I find it hard to believe that someone would tell a story about themselves like that to friends if it hadn’t actually happened.
Vaughn, and Martin, and I together saw what we all thought was the truly miserable film The Return of the Secaucus Seven, one of the films of John Sayles, who later made some truly marvelous films, like Matewan and The Brother From Another Planet, both not to be missed. We all hated the characters in Secaucus Seven, however. It was one of only two times in recorded memory that Vaughn was actually trying to insist that we leave a movie before it was over. Martin and I both kept telling him, however, that it was bound to “get better.” Towards the end, he was agreeing. “Perhaps,” he said hopefully, “in the final scene there will be a vicious motorcycle gang that arrives and kills all these irritating characters in a painful way. If there is, I shall applaud.”
The second film he wanted to leave early from was The Killer Elite, one of Sam Peckinpaw’s later films. Ol’ Sam had seen better days, and perhaps was only doing these for the money. (His very final one was The Osterman Weekend, a film with at least the redeemable quality of being bizarre. The Killer Elite was simply stupid). Peckinpaw’s finest work has to be The Wild Bunch, a brilliant philosophical treatise on the nature of friendship and honor. Martin and I, however, took different sides on the central question presented in the dialogue in the film between William Holden and Ernest Borgnine concerning whether what was important was your “word,” as Holden’s character contended, or “who you give it to,” as Borgnine’s character retorted. I still believe that Borgnine’s character was right.
Martin is completely blind in one eye, and has only 7% vision in the other. So we would customarily sit in the very front row, so that at least he could perceive something from the screen. Occasionally, of course, the very front row was occupied. Once, when we were sitting several rows back, and some seats in the row in front of us opened up, we were about to move forward when several people started moving down the aisle, obviously intent on taking those seats in front of us. “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!” Vaughn shouted, “I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE GOING TO SIT WHERE THE KID THREW UP.” The other folks beat a hasty retreat, and we subsequently occupied those one row closer seats.
Vaughn was a character with no shame. Frequently after we saw a movie (often at the famous Biograph theater, now gone, where Dillinger was killed in the alley by the feds) we would go out to eat at the Seminary Restaurant, then at the corner of Lincoln and Fullerton (a three way intersection, as Halsted Street also intersects there).
Vaughn would frequently order the spaghetti plate, as it was one of the cheaper things on the menu. He would ask for the container of grated paramaghn cheese, unscrew the top, and dump out the entire container onto his spaghetti, and then ask the waitress to bring “more cheese,” and repeat the action. This way, he would explain, he could eat about $4 worth of cheese while paying for a $2 plate of spaghetti. This ended one night when the manager at the cash registered informed Vaughn, when he went to pay, that it would be $2 for the spaghetti, and $6 for the “extra cheese.”