“It’s hard to describe how it was. For a while half my mind was holding back, you might say, watching the development of this fantasy in my own brain with cool amusement, but little by little it took over my whole spirit, and by dawn I was panting over the idea as I haven’t panted about anything—including a girl—since I was eighteen.
“It all started, Margie, with that charming Sapersteen woman, and her precious little Neville the Devil. What she said about your Passover, when she blew up, was pretty much what I’d been thinking—folk legends, primitive totemism, and so forth. It occurred to me that anything that woman said must be wrong. She sounded exactly like one of these characters I play chess with here, a dreary ass with a headful of Modern Library Giants. That’s when I started to pay attention to the seder. I started to read your prayer book and listen to the melodies. My mind began to catch fire. You know what offended me most about my father’s after-dinner speech? The fact that I actually was beginning to feel what he said he was feeling—the power of the whole Exodus yarn, the terrific charm of an observance practiced by Jews who crumbled to powder a thousand years before Shakespeare was born, and observed in exactly the same way by your father in 1936 on West End Avenue. It’s electrifying, when you think about it—”
“Maybe your father really felt it, too, Noel. Why not?” She was very excited.
“Darling, take my word for it, the man’s a phonograph. Now, please understand me, Marjorie, I don’t believe your Exodus story or anything else about your religion. But what I suddenly realized that night was, what does that matter? Suppose it isn’t literally true? Suppose it’s emotionally true, poetically true? Does that count for nothing? Is Macbeth true? It’s a childish ghost story, but nothing truer has ever been written. Well, all this is old stuff, it’s straight Santayana, but it came alive for me the other night, wildly alive. And I thought to myself, why must this thing dry up and die? How much literal truth is there in this lousy world? How much truth of any kind is there? This religion is full of fire and comfort, it’s beautiful, it’s a way of life far wiser and better than random scrambling for dough….
“And then—I remember distinctly I was in a bar on Broadway in the Forties, and the man beside me, with a scraggy pink face, was ogling a fat whore in blue satin two stools down—it hit me: I’d go to some theological seminary, study day and night, master Hebrew, give myself two years of the most fanatic work, or at most three—
“Margie, I’ve wandered into temples, you know, just for the hell of it, to hear young rabbis preach. I really think they must all be subnormal. It’s inevitable, when you think about it. What man with any kind of brains and will power goes in for the pulpit in a commercial society? You get the bunnies, the misfits, the mama’s darlings, and so forth—
“And I thought, why, glory be, I’d have the field to myself. I’d be a national sensation. I’d start a whole trend of talented intellectuals back into this field. It would spread to the Christian denominations—I’m sure they have the same problems—oh, I tell you, by the time dawn came I was the biggest thing since Moses, and better, because I was going to cross that old Jordan myself, and be first man into the Promised Land. I was also somewhat fried. But not feeling it, believe me.”
Noel put aside the two chess pieces, which he had been jumping incessantly from square to square. He bolted several more oysters. Marjorie said, “Is this what you’ve been working on for the last four days? I think Sam Rothmore’s likely to forgive you—”
“When I got home I took down the Bible and got into bed and started to read. You’d think I’d have fallen asleep. Not at all. I was so stimulated, my nerves were strung so tight, that I read the Old Testament straight through in about eighteen hours, not skipping anything. It’s not so long, you know. I’ll bet The Brothers Karamazov is longer. I didn’t eat. All I did was drink coffee. But as soon as I finished the last page, I did fall asleep. I don’t know to this hour how long I slept. It was blazing day when I woke up. I staggered out and went to Fourth Avenue, and hunted up a history of the Jews, and a book on the customs and ceremonies. Then I took those home and read them straight through. That only took a few hours. Now maybe I should have stopped at some point and called Sam Rothmore, and explained that I’d suddenly gotten religion and he’d have to excuse me for a few days. But I tell you, Margie, Sam Rothmore might have been on Mars for all I knew or cared.
“So there I was, still reading, it must have been late afternoon, four or five. I hadn’t talked to anybody or eaten for two days. My head was swirling with Moses and Isaiah, with phylacteries and Talmud sages, with the Spanish Inquisition and the separation of milk and meat dishes, the whole picturesque mass tumbling in my brain—when the bell rang, and in walked Imogene with a suitcase.” Noel chuckled at Marjorie’s groan. “She was dog-tired, famished, thirsty, covered with grime. She’d just come on a bus from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to New York—walked out on her husband after a bloody fight, and hocked nearly all her clothes for the bus fare. This so-called oil man she married turned out to be just a shady hick promoter. But she was really in love with the guy, so she stuck it out for three years, and then quit. All this she told me sort of weeping into a few scotch and sodas. Which rather surprised me, as I never figured Imogene to have any more feelings than a buffalo. Why she picked my place to come to, I’m not sure. Probably because out of all that dizzy crowd we ran with I’m the only one whose name’s still in the phone book.
“Well, so I told her to take a shower and change her underwear and so forth, and I took her out and bought her a steak, and she perked up amazingly. We got to talking of old times, and the crazy things we’d done in that crowd, and we laughed and got pretty drunk and all that, and then her fatigue caught up with her, and she went to sleep in my bed. And I was out walking the streets again, trying to pick up the threads where I’d left off.
“Margie, this may strike you as the strangest part yet. It had all vanished—vanished, faded like a dream. I didn’t have anything left. Well, no, I had something. Sorry, cigarette?” He was lighting one.
She took it, hardly aware of what she was doing, her gaze fixed on his drawn stubbly face and gleaming eyes. “What did you have left?”
“Revulsion,” Noel said, “fearful depressed revulsion, luckily relieved with amusement at myself, the most colossal jackass in the whole Village full of jackasses. I was back in the twentieth century. I was Noel Airman, and there were autos and neon signs all along the street, and a plane going by overhead in the night sky, with its red and green lights blinking. And the notion that I might become a rabbi was about as silly as the thought of my climbing Mount Everest some summer afternoon in sneakers. My mind had exploded in a crazy fantasy, that’s all. The whole incident would make me fear for my mental health, if I didn’t have a good idea of what caused it. Imogene pulled me back from the brink. I’ll always be grateful to the dull cow.”
Marjorie shook her head slowly, sadly. “I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane. What living man ever tried to absorb a religion in a couple of days, starting from total ignorance? It was lunacy. The marvel is that you actually went through all that reading. No wonder you had such a violent reaction, it was absolutely inevitable—but it proves nothing. Heaven knows I don’t want you to become a rabbi, that part was wild, but some of the things you’ve just said make sense, Noel—”
He laid his hand on her arm and patted it. “Marjorie, my dear, please give it up, you’re wasting breath. This fantasy was the last gasp of my resolve to try to become respectable, which really went glimmering after I’d been at your seder an hour. I saw what you were, and what I was. I shut the realization out of my mind with this whole burst of sickly enthusiasm because I’m in love with you, and because I know in your case love means marriage. Back of this whole dream was the delicious figure of the young would-be actress Marjorie Morningstar, a reformed, sedate, utterly charming spouse with downcast eyes. Oh, you were in it, all right, but incidental, casual, in true daydream fashion, the real motive
masked.”
Something in his tone when speaking of her frightened Marjorie. She said hurriedly, “Well, but you say you’re working on something—”
“Yes.” He drummed on the table with the fingers of both hands. “I’m suddenly ravenously hungry. I’ve got to have a steak or I’ll kill myself. You, too?”
“Noel, I just had lunch.”
“I keep forgetting.” He rapped loudly with a chess piece, and when the woman came he said, “How about a steak, rare, just off purple, and some home fries? And rolls, huh?”
The woman beamed. “Good. You need some meat on your bones, Mister Airman. Iss better than oysters.” She hurried out.
“I feel like having a cigar, too, right this second,” Noel said. “I’m full of queer yens. Can it be that I’m pregnant? Intellectually, maybe. Stop me if I start eating chalk. I’ll be right back.” She could see him buying a cigar from the bartender. He came back smoking it. “You know, I don’t smoke half a dozen cigars a year. But this one tastes ambrosial.” He dropped down beside her and puffed.
“Margie, out of all this turmoil, this queer and rather shattering crisis I’ve been through, I think I’ve gotten a tremendous idea. One advantage of such a shaking-up is that you see things new and clear again for a while—the way everything tastes good and looks good, you know, when you’re recovering from a grippe. You see, I had to ask myself this question: granted that religion is a pathetic dream, what isn’t? What do you really believe? What do you want? What’s good?
“Well, it’s a hell of a thing, I tell you, when all the old philosophic puzzlers come at you suddenly, with the same urgency as—for instance—‘What restaurant shall I eat at tonight? How can I get this girl into bed? Where can I get hold of some more money?’—the questions people really spend their time trying to answer. I believe I’ve hit on a fresh answer, a serious and original idea, that is going to make a bit of a noise.
“I’m still struggling to reduce it to words. Whether I’ll ever be able to get it right, I don’t know. It could be a book—rather short, but rather difficult—or a long Socratic dialogue, or a series of connected essays. I’m just writing it out raw, now. Maybe it’ll never be anything but this white-hot fragment as it stands, a pensée, but I don’t think so, I’m certain the form is going to hit me all at once, like a revelation, the way the idea itself did.
“I’m a philosophy major from way back, you know, and even when I was having this religious seizure, as you might call it, I could ticket it in my mind. Santayana slightly tinctured with James, taking on a sudden feverish personal color. And my revulsion wasn’t against your religion, but all religions. They’re all more or less alike. You can’t blame the human race for preferring some bright storyteller’s dream or other to the black cold meaningless dark of the real universe. And if one has to make a choice among the durable fantasies, I don’t know that your religion is worse than any. But I have an incurable temperamental preference for facts, however cold and nasty. That disposes of Reverend Airman, twentieth-century evangelist extraordinary.
“But I honestly can’t ticket this new idea of mine. And believe me, Margie, I know the classic answers, I’ve read all the philosophers, soaked them up. You see, they all suffer from one fatal defect. They’re philosophers. That, they can’t help. That’s the cage they can’t get out of. They love words. Thinking is pleasant to them. They can’t help conceiving the highest good in terms of intelligence and morality. They can’t avoid it, that’s their nature, they think in those terms the way a cat meows. Whereas the plain people in God’s green world have little morality and less intelligence. People let the butterfly fanciers catch all the butterflies they want, and they let philosophers make up all the philosophies they want. It isn’t as though the philosophers were thereby making sizable sums of money and sleeping with the prettiest women, which would be a serious matter. Philosophy seems to the world a highly involved form of sour grapes, by which very clever men prove to themselves that it really isn’t worth while to make lots of money and get the pretty women. But the world’s absolutely sincere in respecting and praising philosophers, Margie. Its attitude can best be summed up as follows: ‘Philosophy is the real stuff all right. Everybody in the world ought to be a philosopher, except me.’
“Okay. Religion’s an old worn-out comedy. Philosophy’s the sour grapes of ineffectual geniuses. What’s left? Anything? A great deal, obviously. The world moves, it’s well organized, people rush around like mad, work hard, laugh—there’s no chaos, no mass suicide. There must be something under the activity, some guiding sustaining idea, some driving belief we all have that keeps us going. What is it?
“You’ll say Marxism contains the answer to all my questions. That is, you won’t, but everybody else who’s ever warmed the bench where your pretty behind is now resting would say that. But it’s no answer at all. Even granting that Karl with the Smith Brothers’ beard really did figure out a better way to make the world’s goods and pass them around—I don’t grant it, and I can argue for a week against it, very effectively—but all right, let’s say Marxism’s absolutely true. The big question remains, why should anybody bother to be a communist? Why the dedication? Why the drudgery? Why improve society? Why do anything? What do we really want? What keeps us all moving—communists, capitalists, songwriters, little Marjorie Morgenstern too, for that matter, from West End Avenue, with a dream of an electric sign on West Forty-fourth Street blazing out Marjorie Morningstar?” He paused, looking intently into her face.
Marjorie said, “Well, I’ll tell you this, if you’ve really answered the questions you’ve raised, you’ll be the most famous man in the world.”
“I’ve answered them.”
“Well, come on. It’s almost like a murder mystery by now, this big idea of yours.”
Noel nodded, his eyes wide and gleaming, his fingers drumming on the table. “Can’t wait to find out who’s the Bat, hey? Well, it isn’t Moses or Jesus, or any religious figure—and it isn’t Marx, and it isn’t Freud—”
“There’s nobody left nowadays, is there?”
“There’s the butler,” Noel said. “The inconspicuous little character who really did it.”
“What’s his name, for heaven’s sake?”
Chapter 30. NOEL’S THEORY
At that moment Mrs. Kleinschmidt set the steak before Noel on a thick cracked white plate, brown and sizzling, oozing red juice around a heap of potatoes. He seized knife and fork, cut the steak across the middle, and peered into the purple gash. “Very good. Perfect. Thank you. And a bottle of Guinness, please.” He crushed out his cigar. “Margie, I propose to enjoy this steak more than I have any food in my life. Please eat something.”
“No, thank you.”
He ate a bite of steak. “Superb. Now then, listen carefully. If I were to get technical about what I’m writing, I’d say it reintroduces teleology as a major concept in dialectical analysis, which in itself is mighty startling, or would be in a professional journal, or I’m very much mistaken. But I’ll spare you the academic verbiage. I think I can put it clearly and simply, and still be fair to it. I’m developing the concept, briefly, that the force that moves the world is a desire for Hits. Hits.”
“Hits?” Marjorie said, vaguely disappointed.
“Now wait, don’t get that dumb stunned look. All important ideas sound trivial or wild the first time you hear them. Let me spell it out a bit. The central truth about human nature and conduct, I say, is hidden inside a fortress of four rings, four walls of illusion, Margie—remember that, and remember Noel Airman said it. Those four walls of illusion are: religion, philosophy, sex, and money. What worldly wisdom does is punch through those two mushy outer walls, and come upon the big thick bastions of pretty girls and dough. Whereupon it cries, with French gestures, ‘Voilà! Zut alors! Parbleu! Here’s the truth! The real inside story! We’ve found it!’ It stops there. It never learns that the truth is further inside yet, and that you’ve still got to blast.
&n
bsp; “No, ten million dollars in the bank, and all the pretty girls in bed with you, that’s the final wisdom of the world. People talk religion, but they pursue sex and cash—that’s the big secret of life. It’s the entire point of French literature, for instance, the glory of which is supposed to be that it’s wise and matter-of-fact and ironically honest, and lays bare the secrets of the human heart. Well, honey, no man is more saturated with this ironic view than I am. I’ve lived with it for a dozen years. In fact I’ve lived it, the way a monk lives a creed. I’ve found out the hard way that that’s all it is—another creed, another hopeful story, another dreamy lie.
“The pretty girls break down first, once you try to grasp the dream. They’re hard to get at, sure, but not nearly as hard as lots of money. Oh, I suppose if I’d been a little humpbacked spider I’d have tried to become a millionaire, and then gone out to buy women. But as it was, I simply worked myself into the circle of the pretty girls, the wolf in the fold. They really do herd like sheep, you know, in New York. They do the same things, go to the same parties, talk the same talk, all of them. I actually lived the dream life of the college boys and the bald businessmen. I had models, show girls, all I wanted, ‘the real stuff,’ as they would say, for years. There’s nothing anybody can tell me about that answer—I’m not annoying you, I hope?”
Marjorie with an effort took the frown off her face, and unclenched her fists on the table. “Well, you needn’t elaborate the point, that’s all.”
With the shadow of a crooked grin he said, “But what I’m getting at should comfort you, if you’re irritated. The pretty girls turn out to be as phony an answer as philosophy.
“Pretty girls are just girls, Margie, you see. That’s what finally emerges. The most immoral slut among them, even a dumb roundheels like Imogene, at heart just wants a fellow and a nest and clothes and furniture. What’s more, they tend to be stupider than other girls, because being pretty makes life too easy for them. The day they sprout those charming breasts, they usually turn off their brains, and just bob along on the tide of attention and fun that starts up. Then after a while they’re twenty-five and have to start thinking again. Because by that time the breasts are beginning to droop and the fuss is dying down. Of course by then it’s too late, like as not. They’re empty-headed fools, they can’t read, they can’t talk, they can’t think, their emotions have been gutted by random sleeping around, and their lives are a shambles—”