I am standing on West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sometime in the 1930s: a horse-drawn ice wagon has just come down the street, and I am looking at the golden apples the horse has dropped and saying to myself (not the horse), “Your necktie is maroon.”
My mother had an elegant way with colors, which devolved on us children, a flair she developed along with her flair for elegant names; this was clear in the voluntary refinement of her name from “Esther” to “Estelle”—a habit acquired by her younger brother Yitzchak (Isidore, Izzy), who chose to be known to the world as “Morton.” My father, an affable salesman of millinery (i.e., ladies’ hats), did not care for his eccentric brother-in-law; and when he called, my father would answer the phone, saying almost nothing but declaring to my mother, after she had asked who’d called, “Itza Mutt,” reducing her to literally helpless laughter. My father liked to make my mother laugh so hard that she had to run, as best she could, out of the kitchen . . . but I digress.
In the late 1920s, those perfervid Noel Coward sort of days, my brother got to be named “Noel”; but when it was time for me, the register had declined once again to the English and Scottish royals, viz. “Harold,” “Robert,” “Malcolm,” “Stanley”—more familiarly, Hal, Bob, Mal, and, well, Stan, usually followed by a Polish- or Imperial Austrian-sounding family name, like Sadowsky, Hershkowitz, or, indeed, Corngold.
Even in these waning years of the Great Depression, we saw horse-drawn carts delivering ice and coal. Burly men with squares of burlap on their shoulders and giant tongs carried ice to houses with signs in their windows asking for twenty pounds or more. Kids hung around, watching the coal clatter down cellar chutes. There was a feeling of scarcity and need. Ragged men wanted to sharpen your knives for pennies; others sold old clothes. Beggars came to our door, but we were lucky: my father kept his job throughout those years, and my mother literally counted pennies. If halfpennies had still been in circulation (they went out in 1857), she would have inscribed them in a ledger and stored them in a tin tea box. She was the spine of our domestic life, with her jars of small manila envelopes from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company into which she put coins to pay for milk, haircuts, life insurance, The Wonderland of Knowledge, and other necessities. She was good at math, and as a result we could have steak on some Sundays and on other nights, from time to time, beef liver, veal cutlets baked in tomato soup, and filet of flounder.
I grew up in fairly safe, compact neighborhoods, together with a lot of wild kids, for the most part children of immigrants—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Hungarian. Despite the remote horrors of the war, our days were calm except for a bit of non-lethal ethnic strife, especially between the Italian and the Jewish boys. On my way home from junior high, a tough Italian named Rudy would accost me and say, “You a Jew?” He could curse in Sicilian, fingers upraised menacingly: “Ba fungu!” If I said I was a Jew, he would hit me, and I would either stand there, puzzled, or curse quietly and keep walking. One day, I dreamed up the idea of hitting him first, whence I learned a lesson. When he came up to me again and asked his question, I answered by hitting him in the face. But I was not used to hitting, so I did not hit him very hard. My blow merely heightened his desire to bloody my nose. I came home bleeding, and my mother was angry with me. Even this rather docile woman somehow conveyed the idea to me: If you’re going to hit someone who fights better than you, make sure your punch knocks him down or otherwise makes a lasting impression. If not, don’t even try. Jonathan Miller reported the same experience of being asked, as a boy, menacingly, whether he was a Jew. With a deprecatory wave of the hand, he offered the answer: “Jew . . . ish.” Had I known that at the time, it might have startled Rudy long enough for me to make my getaway unharmed.
I had two—and probably only two—rather deep experiences of heightened self-awareness. I was very young at the time. One was the knowledge that I was a Jew, and that was a drawback, a black mark, a piece of trouble embedded in me. I had next to no objective awareness of what being Jewish meant except that it was nothing you wanted. Later on, with my brother’s rheumatic fever, for which there was not yet penicillin, Dr. Benny Rubinstein prescribed bed rest for a year and thereafter “loads” of fresh air. And so, we spent the summer of 1943 at a bungalow colony in Wurtsboro in upstate New York, where I heard, for the first time, that my mother could no longer “keep kosher.” So, until then she had kept kosher. There was Passover when we ate matzo brei (scrambled eggs with broken pieces of matzo mixed in and topped with cherry jam) on special plates (“pesadich”) saved under plastic for the occasion. And there was the strange fall holiday of Yom Kippur, when I had to endure the misery of hunger and utter boredom at a local shul, enlivened, finally, by a rabbi’s blast on a ram’s horn—the shofar—which bode well, for then we would soon be home where, in carnivalesque fashion, we ate breakfast at night! I went to Hebrew school with the unspoken determination to learn as little as possible: I was an American, the sort of American illustrated in Life magazine—a fighter pilot or a movie star—goyish-leaning from the word Goy. Our teacher—near-sighted, spindly Mr. Bogaisky—was nothing like the man I intended to be, though he made us more puzzled than sad when he used cheder-time to tell us that a great friend of the Jewish people, Frenklin Delanor Rosenfeld, had died in Warm Springs.
My other in-depth moment of self-awareness is said to be ubiquitous in psychological journals: it is the “I-am-I-am-I . . .” experience of finitude and mortality—the knowledge that I, being I, was one thing, unmoored from the rest, and as this one thing I had limits . . . and would die. I did not have to wait to study Heidegger’s magisterial opus Being and Time with the eminent deconstructionist Paul de Man twenty years later to appreciate the concept of Being-toward-death. But that will take us far afield from a time when death lay hidden for most of the years of my growing up.
We moved a few times to other parts of our Bensonhurst village to save a dollar a month on rent, once swapping a three-room apartment on West Ninth Street and Bay Parkway for the ground floor of a two-story family house on 76th Street near Fourteenth Avenue. There was a tiny alleyway alongside, almost too narrow to turn around in; you could not play there or in the postage-stamp-sized backyard, full of stones, crabgrass, and poison ivy. You played in the street.
Our landlord was Mr. Bosco, who worked in Manhattan on Tenth Avenue—a hot-tempered butcher, and a startling contrast to my father, an experienced traveling salesman for a moderately upscale company—my father witty, articulate, and soft-spoken, and Mr. Bosco few of those things. He might have been articulate in a Sicilian dialect. Both of them—my father and Mr. Bosco—commuted to work in Manhattan. They kept their distance but may have felt a tremor of mutual recognition as day laborers on this stubborn earth. Perhaps Bosco even had a touch of mean streets wit: one day, when I was seated on the wooden bench in front of the house, struggling with a large, impressive volume of The Wonderland of Knowledge, Bosco stopped by, and glanced. “Watcha doin.’ kid,” he said, “studyin’ to be a rabbi?”
But there was little to bond my mother Estelle with Mrs. Bosco. One day, which will live in infamy, my father returned to find my mother crying; this was a rare event; my mother was stoic and cerebrally inclined. But what she had done was something completely out of character and altogether dreadful. There was a badly planted clothes pole in the back yard; clotheslines ran to it from our windows and from the windows above. The women would hang up their hand-washed clothes with clothespins and then pull the rough, damp clotheslines through a pulley at the windows to make room for more wash. My mother was doing this when suddenly a tug on the clothesline brought the giant wooden pole crashing down, flinging all the wet clothes on the dirt. Above my mother’s head a window flew open: Mrs. Bosco put her head out and shouted at my mother that she’d knocked the clothes pole down. My mother’s reply was succinct: “Shut up!” she said. But that was not all she said. “Shut up, you wop,” she added. Now, why did she have to add that?! Diplomacy was never our strong suit.
That night we heard the butcher overhead screaming his head off. My father, weary from a day’s work, a tiring subway ride home, and the nightly slog through half-a-dozen streets from the BMT station, scolded my mother and then made his way upstairs. I was not privy to the conversation except for Bosco’s shouts. We hoped he would not be swinging his butcher knives around. The two fathers evidently discussed the rights and wrongs of the event, but the wrong outweighed the right. The latter had to be reduced to my mother’s mere right to say “Shut up!” when unfairly accused of what was only an accident provoked by the failure of the landlord to provide a properly anchored clothes pole. But the abusive addendum could not be easily explained away. My father returned, silent and even more exhausted. I was too young to have gathered up all the features of the argument, but the outcome was plain. From now on it would be my duty at the end of each month to climb the stairs and, blithe and smiling, present the monthly rent of some $30 to Mr. Bosco. I can now see that the memory of my earlier encounters with Rudy, my persecutor, might have percolated through my mother’s consciousness. In attacking Mrs. Bosco, she was in principle attacking, as well, the woman from Sicily who had carried Rudy.
Until today, this part of Bensonhurst has successfully resisted gentrification: the small brick buildings, with their original inhabitants and family line, still sport geranium window boxes, gated stoops, and skinny alleyways—some a bit wider than ours, for cars. At one point, my brother and I returned to 2040 76th street on a journey of nostalgia and discovery, to glimpse with adult eyes the scenes in which we had exhausted the energies of our younger years. We walked into the very alleyway adjoining the house, whereupon a window flew open and an Italianate woman thrust out her head out, none too friendly. I cried up to her, “Hi. I’m Stanley Corngold. We used to live downstairs—a long time ago. We thought we’d have a look at where we grew up.” The woman, not young, was not Mrs. Bosco but her daughter Joan. She smiled: she remembered us. We had never quarreled with her. We asked her how she was faring and she explained that her husband, who was in Waste Management, was not at home but paragliding in the Bahamas. Our attempt to fathom this event as a significant object of Cultural Studies occupied my brother’s and my conversation the rest of the day.
My brother Noel, some five and a half years older than I, was a teenager in the mainly Jewish neighborhood of West 9th Street (now, in 2017, exclusively Taiwanese)—I, in the more thuggish, mixed Jewish, Italian, and Hungarian neighborhood of 76th Street. More than one old-time playmate is a three-time loser in Ossining. In an interview conducted at the California Institute of Technology, where my brother taught particle physics for many years, he recalled “its packed variety of life: if you wanted to meet a red-headed boy, say, who was left-handed and collected stamps from Sarawak, you could find him within one or two blocks of where you lived.” Only my energetic, miniature society, and not his, had its gangs—in the best sense of the word, its “social athletic clubs” (mine in a foretaste of the colors that would mark my professional years at Princeton University, were the Orioles, with their black and orange wool and satin jackets)—in which kids mostly goofed around, practiced petty crime, smoked cigarettes, or played ball.
“Petty crime?” Meaning . . . what? Today I grieve that we would filch empty milk bottles from the wood and wire cases in which they were stored outside of small grocery shops. We’d take a few, enter the store, and demand the deposit—a few cents—and then make a quick getaway. But I did not fail to turn around and see the distress in the figure of the agitated owner of the grocery store on discovering as many spaces freed up in his milk case as there were new bottles to insert.
Aryeh (“Lion of God”) Brettschneider, our gang leader—a handsome, agile rogue, my preceptor in petty crime—taught me another ploy. When we were at Coney Island, look sad and say to an adult, “Mister!” and on the verge of bawling, say, “I have only four cents and I need five cents for the subway to get home. Could you please give me a penny?” An elderly man took pity on my fictive predicament and put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some change. “I don’t have a penny,” he said, “but I have a nickel. Give me your four cents, and I’ll give you the nickel.” What?! I was not prepared for this dialectical thrust. As in those days our main defensive arm was our flying feet, I turned tail and ran down the boardwalk fast, until I was far from the scene of my ruse. I did not try it again or play the milk bottle filching game either: Aryeh had not prepared us for the retaliation we could face on the playing field or when the news of our antics would surface—at home. But the primitive morality of requited harm might have been a less potent reason for stopping than the fact that we were quickly bored and could not endure repeating anything.
There was more variation in sports, which announced themselves at different seasons. In very early days, there was chalk season with hopscotch, one for marbles (shooting “immies”), and one for pitching heels. A bit like bocce, you would pitch heels to get close to a certain crack in the sidewalk. We would get old heels from the Italian shoemaker, Mr. Gianpetto—who on Sundays, in his basement, to make ends meet, would cut my hair—“like wire,” he said—for 25 cents and a nickel tip. It is bemusing to note the symmetry in the way that inflation has battered regular commodities: today a decent haircut costs 200 times more, at $50; but so does filet of flounder, which in the ‘30s cost nineteen cents a pound. Today, at $38/pound, it exhibits the same 20,000 per cent increase. Our playing fields were the streets, the schoolyards, and the vacant lots, which were also the scene of communal dining with archaic roots. We would get some matches and a potato from our mother and go there at night with friends and roast the potatoes on burning twigs and newspapers.
Our ball games were stoopball, punch ball, and stickball: a good hitter could hit “two sewers”—meaning, the length between the first, second, and third sewer plates embedded in the street. The balls we used were pink-taffy-colored and dusted with talcum at first—“Spaldeens.” We could fish them out of sewers with a metal clothes hanger shaped into a vertical wire with a horizontal circle at the bottom, a bit smaller in circumference than the ball. We’d lie face down on the sewer and insert the wire through one of the small square openings of the grate and slip the wire loop under the floating ball. Then, sticking our skinny arms through the hole, we’d retrieve it, so we could hit it again with our broomsticks and, if it could not be caught, into another sewer. Somewhat older, I joined softball pickup games at the schoolyard. Once I hit a ball over the centerfielder’s head, rounded the bases, had a solid triple from it, but then kept running and was easily thrown out at home. Today, this says a lot to me about my character.
The daily round, usually without incident, was lit up, from time to time, by the sudden appearance on the curb outside our house of a silver-grey Cadillac. That fetish meant a visit from my father’s half-sister Evelyn, who had the blond beauty of a chorus girl and the extraordinary luck of having married a wealthy nightclub agent who called himself Bill Kent and knew Sinatra and his minions from the Copacabana. Evelyn lived in Manhattan in an expensively furnished apartment at 240 Central Park South.
Seeing her car on my way home from school, I would burst up the porch stairs in the expectation of at least two good things: her enthusiastic hugs and the extraordinary one-dollar chocolate cake with a maraschino cherry in the middle that far surpassed the ordinary limits on excess that prevailed at home. At one point Aunt Evelyn realized her ambition of “kidnapping” me and taking me home with her to her grand apartment on Central Park. “Take him,” my father said, “but don’t bring him back!” Brooklyn humor: I was used to it. I might have been eight or so, and so it was somewhat odd for her to hit upon the next best thing for us to do after arriving at her Manhattan address: she would give me a bath.
I bathed—or was actively bathed—the event has passed into the impenetrable chamber of post-Oedipal repression. I do remember sitting in the tepid water on porcelain and feeling it was very odd. Thereafter I was put into a small bedroom to sleep until the next morning, when poor Aunt Evelyn was beset once again with the dilemma of what to do with me as the object of some appropriate project, about the form of which she was clueless. At this moment of writing, I think of her situation, discounting all questions of scale, as not unlike the predicament of Donald Trump, another peroxide blond.
So, we had the breakfast she prepared—which was to become the highlight of my visit—and then, after asking me what I wanted to do, she took me shopping for a baseball glove, which turned out to be not much larger than a handball glove—maybe its unwelcome shrinkage a sign of Evelyn’s growing malaise about the entire project, or just an expression of her ignorance of the rules of this game as well. I was too shy to protest and kept pounding my fist into the recalcitrant center of the thing, unable to make a pocket. And then, even as I continued to concentrate on noisily breaking in the glove, we made a circuit of the park in a horse-drawn carriage. It made little impression on me. It might have been something to compare with an automobile ride or a bicycle ride but—strange to say—I had no experience of either of those things. We did not have a car and I did not have a two-wheeler, which was considered, as many things and events at home, “inconvenient and expensive.”
Evelyn had had quite enough. I doubt if we’d have any conversation at all following a rather spare exchange in the Cadillac coming into the city, and so I was put into a taxi and sent home.
My parents seemed pleased to have me home unhurt and were interested to learn the highpoint of my visit. I could barely contain the memory of my pleasure: “Burnt toast with strawberry jam,” I said. This remark made a very pleasant impression, and it soon made the round of my parents’ small circle of friends. It must also have summed up their impression of Evelyn, as well, as glamorous but unsolid.
Evelyn, I am sad to say—after Bill Kent’s death by fire in a hotel room—he accidentally set his mattress on fire with a lit cigarette—married the affluent president of Cott “beverages”—as my mother was pleased to say—but Evelyn, in her growing unhappiness, began to drink other beverages and became notably alcoholic. I saw her only once again, twenty years later. She was tipsy, she no longer resembled the woman who had kidnapped me, and after I had stared at her—she thought me condescending—I did not mean to be—she began to curse. The difference between us, which had once been thrilling, was now merely perplexing.
The dream, rooted in experience, of being magically transported by a beautiful woman lay dormant in me. I was blessed when three decades later, once again, it would be awoken. We shall see about this.
The life of my other drives was decisively awakened on a gorgeous afternoon in late August 1942 when my brother took me to Yankee Stadium. Not only was it the first professional baseball game I had ever seen; it was one of the very rare times I had ever left Brooklyn for that great journey “over the bridge.”
My brother and I took the BMT subway to Manhattan. Crossing the East River, you could see a huge sign for the S. Klein department store, advertising suits and pants for “Stout and Husky Boys.” My brother, who had a sadistic edge, would prod me and ask me to pay special attention to the sign, poking me and nodding to say that the sign was meant for me. I was neither stout nor husky—just a bit chubby at twelve years old—and so was not amused.
We got to the Bronx and to the stadium, somehow, and I walked under the coliseum-like arches in the semi-dark to emerge at a spectacular sight: a vast, beautiful, sunlit ocean of green grass surrounded by gigantic grandstands in which, sooner or later, 50, 383 people would be sitting. We would add two to that number. I had never before seen more than a handful of adults in any one place or a lawn of these dimensions. I was awed beyond speech. I had a feeling we were not in Brooklyn anymore.
The thrill possessed me: I saw Joe DiMaggio, with his wide, legs-apart stance and—no slouches: Charlie Keller and Tommy Henrich. On that very afternoon Henrich batted in the ninth inning for the last time that season. An announcer declared that it was his “last appearance in a Yankee uniform until the war is over”: he was joining the Coast Guard. The war took second place to the game being played before our eyes.
The great Hal Neuhauser pitched for the Tigers and lost the first game 7-1. DiMaggio hit a patented clothesline double down the left field line–a rocket. His at bats, recorded as fly balls, were screaming line drives or 450-foot blasts to left center field that were caught. The second game was tense and thrilling. The score was tied at the end of the ninth inning. At his last at bat at the bottom of the inning, DiMaggio, who had tripled earlier, hit two astonishing line drives that just curved foul down the left field line. The crowd shouted, then moaned—and then he grounded out. Some advanced baseball cognoscenti took it as a sign that the Yankees would not win; or even if they would win, it would be in an uncharismatic way. The high point of the drama had passed, and they began leaving the stadium. We stayed! A good thing, too. In the tenth inning, after three Yankee walks, George Selkirk hit a single to right field; the winning run trotted across the plate; the remaining fans screamed in ecstasy. So, this is “the world,” I registered—unspeakably more engaging than Bensonhurst; and ever since then I’ve preferred being out—even if only eating out—to being at home.
We rooted for the Yankees during all those years of their greatness—my admiration for this Other team a plain sign of a craving to leave Brooklyn for more aristocratic spheres—that imagined life of beauty and grandeur standing in proportion to life at home as Yankee Stadium, on a bright Sunday afternoon, to our puny, chain-link fenced-in schoolyard on a rainy Monday morning. In the absence of the real thing, we would listen intently to the radio broadcasts of Yankee games by Mel Allen, an indefinable being, Jewish and from the Deep South. One summer day all the boys ran screaming into the streets: “Aaron Robinson hit a home run, Aaron Robinson hit a home run”—in the twelfth inning! It was Saturday, August 10, 1946: Trailing 5-4 against the Red Sox—Ted Williams having just hit his second home run of the game in the top of the 12th inning—with two outs, DiMaggio singled, Charlie Keller singled, and Aaron Robinson hit a three-run home run! The Yankees won again in extra innings! Life doesn’t get any more satisfying than that—one will have thought.
Our passion for baseball was the beginning of a serious extracurricular interest in history and literature. We read The Sporting News and studied old Yankee statistics—with special pleasure those of the greatest team ever to have played, the Yankees of 1927—(shall I recite the roster? perhaps another time). And we heard legends of their greatness, including Ruth’s allegedly signaling to the Cubs in 1932 his next hit: a home run to center field—our overweight, slobby Achilles with tiny ankles. Lou Gehrig, on the other hand, was perfect.
I had learned to read early. My brother, who, thankfully, had strong pedagogical urges, was there to encourage me, though we had few books to practice on, discounting the obligatory Wonderland of Knowledge: a few badly printed novels—The Last of the Mohicans, The Count of Monte Christo, and The Corsican Twins. From our local library, however, I could take out such books as Wild Animals by Frank Buck, Blue Angels and Whales by Robert Gibbings, and, as my tastes grew more refined, the collected works of the humorist H. Allen Smith. I was an adequate reader but preferred our fraternal carryings-on. Left alone, I did not fall on books and devour them; instead, I did math problems my brother set for me and imagined great transformations. The daydream that occupied me for many of those years was becoming third baseman for the New York Yankees—a position owned by Gil McDougald—with whose shocking traumas of deeply injuring others and himself being injured by line drives I would later empathize. On the topic of sport, reading, and pedagogy, I was also taught by a cousin, Joan, now well over ninety years old and still deep in life. I’ve had mixed feelings about her over the years. Once, after I had qualified as a swimmer at the local Jewish Community House by swimming across the pool and then back, I hoisted myself up, grinning with achievement, when my hands slipped and my mouth crashed down and began spewing blood and even bits of my front teeth. “Well,” cousin Joan is said to have remarked to my brother, “From now on we’ll have to stop calling him ‘Fatso’ and start calling him ‘Toothless.’” Some seventy-five years later, however, we have been fully reconciled, and she is an exemplary friend.
The radio was my iPhone, the fully engrossing machine: I would not only listen raptly to the Yankee broadcasts but also settle down to a delicious half hour with raisins and “The Shadow”—do you remember?
“Who Knows? The Shadow Knows!”
This Q & A might have foreshadowed my later interest in epistemology. How does the speaker know the Shadow knows? He’s not the Shadow. And even if he is The Shadow himself, how does this Shadow know “he” knows?
Moreover, there is a difficulty here that we haven’t even entertained: deciding whether the expression “Who knows?” is a genuine question or a rhetorical question—since, if it were merely a rhetorical question—meaning, in effect, “Nobody knows”–it would cast a heavy shadow of doubt . . . on even the Shadow’s claim to know.[1]
Furthermore, as my reading list hinted, I was crazy about animals. The minute we arrived in Wurtsboro that summer of ’43, I ran off into the woods. They were the first woods I had seen, and I went up a trail, and went higher and higher until I emerged into a clearing just as I heard a great crash, and a large shape went bursting through the trees. It was a deer: on my very first adventure into the woods, I saw a deer! I was to hear, many years later, from a brilliant German woman, a translator of novels, that she had been at a conference in British Columbia devoted to the life and works of Malcolm Lowry and discovered that he had had a privileged, a life-defining encounter in the woods with his Muse. His Muse? The sound she’d heard, which meant Muse to her, was spelled M-o-o-s-e. But my experience would make this confusion very nearly plausible. I also fished with a string, a hook, and a worm for small sunfish and bass but was squeamish about seeing them suffer and did everything in my power—to my grief, not always successfully—to unhook them and put them back in the water.
We were not allowed to take animals home with us—stray dogs, for example–though I often tried, claiming the animal had simply followed me. I broke the taboo with my first pet, a newt, a sort of salamander. I had gone to Bear Mountain in upstate New York with my brother, and I returned with my pet newt laid on a chunk of damp moss in a jelly jar. I nursed the jar all the way home, and then the question arose of what I could feed him, so I turned to my father, saying: “Dad, what should I feed my newt?” My father answered, with the trace of a shrug: “Give him chopped liver.” But that was only the beginning of my dilemma. How exactly do you give a newt chopped liver? I had no better knowledge of the anatomy of a newt than I did of the human, which was slight indeed: I grew up in a Jewish-puritanical household, where even the notion of gender difference had never been broached.
So, I wasn’t sure, studying my newt, exactly where its mouth was, so my father said that instead of bringing chopped liver to the newt, we could bring the newt to the chopped liver; so, we just laid him in a pan with the liver and hoped the good nourishment would enter him by that principle to which the most important causal relations in our household were referred: it would enter him by osmosis.
When in the years following, I would complain to my father—my honorable, hard-working father–about a certain lack of the amenities of high culture in our household like, say, twelve-tone music, hieroglyphs, or al fresco painting, he would say, “Whaaat?!” As for such things—culture—he said—I would absorb it, in due course, by osmosis.
I need hardly tell you that the next morning the poor newt had expired of its chopped liver jouissance, whereupon I felt a familiar confusion of bliss (thinking that it might have died happy) and shame, as well, having not only lost my newt but spoiled the chopped liver, since, as we well knew: “it is a crime to waste food when there are people starving overseas”—but why am I telling you of this newt above all other forms of jouissance?
Believe it or not, I happened to be speaking earlier this week to my brother, this smart, highly-placed professor of physics; and I asked him why he thought this incident had suddenly mattered enough for me to tell you, and he said: “There’s a deeper meaning. It’s a parable! At this moment you are happily immersed in telling your story, but if your story is not well received—like your newt—you and your megilah will be chopped liver.” The tradition of reading our Brooklyn life parabolically has been a long-standing one between us: it was a way of avoiding the lethal conviction that what had happened to us could actually be our life!
My cousin Joan, the author of my sobriquet, “Toothless,” was a scion of the intellectual side of the family, my mother’s side. That part of the family has been productive, especially into the second generation, giving us a raft of doctors and mathematicians. My mother was one of seven, and so I had many cousins who enriched but also complicated my development, such as it was, since each had his or her own view as to what could be done with me. Cousin Bobby for example, got together with my brother to shoot arrows at my forehead—they were fortunately tipped with rather harmless rubber suction cups—to see if they would stick. And I was held in bondage—tied up and placed in a closet—where the entire matter could proceed in a regulated fashion. I’m not sure I protested loudly enough, since I may have been secretly delighted to be the object of interest to boys much older than myself—or, in a word, to be allowed to play with them. My role was less important than the fact of my acceptance. Perhaps a bit of a masochistic streak played its part too: but it was not so much taking pleasure in pain as being a bit indifferent to it. It was simply the case, and I was not inclined to pass judgment on it. This habit of mind will emerge more than once throughout this narrative.
It was a boon that all my cousins were older than I, and all were Brooklynites, as, of course, were their parents. In fact, my mother died at the age of eighty in the same Brooklyn hospital where, fifty years to the day, my brother was born and within eyesight of her grade school. One cousin, Edward (originally: Seymour), more roguish than the others, was an air force navigator during the war. He bailed out over Serbia and was captured and interned in a Stalag Luft for officers where he was able to conceal his Jewish identity and so was treated half-decently. If it were not for this ruse, he would have been sent to a concentration camp and been shot or gassed to death. In fact, he returned after the war with a good deal of cash, as his salary had shot up for his having spent most of the war years in a Combat Zone. Unfortunately, after having squandered almost all of his money in Las Vegas, he came to visit us in Brooklyn to ask my father to help finance a business opportunity, a small plastics factory, which my father refused to support. After this failure, Edward taught high-school math for a while before re-enlisting and then being stationed for years in an American Air Force base near Würzburg Germany, where I was to visit him.
Following a business discussion with my father, one evening Edward took me to Coney Island. I imagine it was vaguely in his mind to “get me laid,” but his numbers were off: I was only twelve. Still, I had been reading Studs Lonigan, by James T. Farrell, and had a vague literary sense that I was about to be classically indoctrinated into the roughneck side of life. But the evening held no more drama for the both of us than his having to watch, no doubt bored out of his skull, my attempt to knock over wood milk bottles with a small leather ball and thereafter take mainly empty swings in a batting practice cage. A vague feeling was mounting in me that I would never be able to satisfy adults who had taken a shine to me with expectations of amusement or insight. It led to my dominant mood of indifference bordering on defiance in such matters: it’s their lookout. Poor Edward was to die of Lou Gehrig’s disease. My brother and I were sad for him and at the same time worried: it’s in our family. Edward’s older brother, Herbert, also a brilliant physicist, was employed at a major war industry. He died of a nearly simultaneous attack of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. When I asked my brother how Cousin Herbert was faring, he replied, “Herb? He’s in a jelly jar in the garage.” That is the way, as Brooklynites, we speak to each other. My brother never says people “die”; he says they “expire.”
The stories of all my cousins on my mother’s side would burst the bounds of this prelude, and I am keen to return to my father, an only child, shuttled in his youth by his father, a dapper, smooth-talking itinerant tailor, from Lower Manhattan, to Montreal, to Harlem, and then to Brooklyn. His father remarried, and my father acquired a passel of airhead stepsisters and one half-sister, Evelyn who, you might recall, played a crucial role in the growth of my desires.
My father, Herman, lived to be eighty-eight, dying of a “benign” brain tumor but fatal by dint of position. In the course of his profession, he acquired a certain worldliness (by contrast, my mother never left the city of New York more than four times in her life or ventured out of state more than twice). My father, on the other hand, traveled up and down the Eastern seaboard, staying at good hotels in Boston and Worcester and Providence. He came to the millinery sales force faute de mieux. One account is that after some very indifferent early schooling, he was faced with the prospect of earning money. Two career options presented themselves. One was radio, the other was women’s hats with feathers. He decided the first option was new-fangled and without substance; on the other hand, women would never stop wearing hats with plumage. If he had chosen the first, it would be a matter of “David Sarnoff, move over!” and I would not have had to wait until I was eight to receive my first tricycle. From then on, my father contrived a living through wit and humor, since his task was to charm the women buyers at upscale department stores to buy his goods, manufactured down below, in the garment district in mid-town Manhattan.
He charmed my mother. She was born into a large family in Nezhin, a city some 90 miles to the north of Kiev, once infamous for its blood cellar, the scene of a vicious Nazi atrocity—but a city famous today, at least in Eastern Europe—for its pickled cucumbers. Her family emigrated to Brooklyn just at the turn of the century. As a young woman she worked as a bookkeeper in Manhattan: she was very quick with numbers. There was this talent across her family. One of the reasons they came to this country was that her older brother had gotten admission to a technical institute in Kiev but was then promptly threatened by a draft into the Tsar’s army. He could imagine another career path, and in America he worked in an engineering factory in Newark and rose to be a foreman. So, now we have established the source of the left-brain parts of my family. On the other side of the brain, my father never entertained an abstract idea in his life but did not lack for visual imagination. Once my brother attempted to instruct him at dinner in the basic principles of relativity. My father pushed his peas and boiled potatoes around the plate, apparently without method, until, with a triumphant swerve of his fork, he announced, as my brother concluded his talk, “Aha! Now my peas and potatoes are relative.” This remark gave credence to his famous quip: on learning that both his sons intended to become college professors, he pretended to deplore their having chosen “the lowest paid branch of the entertainment industry.”
He was a salesman ultimately—a seductive man. But we never saw him read a book in his life or do anything except go to work, come home, enjoy having a cigarette with my mother—as we went to bed—and then come back the next evening. My mother, meanwhile, was our day-to-day administrator—very supportive of us children and very straight arrow—too straight, for my taste, especially when she would knock on the door of my classroom in public school and immediately enter with a bag containing my rubbers. I don’t have to add that the drizzle was hardly remarkable, and we debated that point on the way home, she underlining her argument with cuffs to my ear.
I am now in my early adolescence, at the point where my mother would cry to heaven why the Hungarian boys down the block—the Gabors—ate bologna sandwiches on white bread for breakfast and had schoolgirl complexions whereas both her own offspring, fed on scrupulously toasted whole wheat raisin bread spread with peanut butter, had more pimples than the spring has buds (Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, ascribes these eruptions to Charles Bovary’s first wife, a certain Héloïse Dubuc). My complexion was not helped by my winning the Brainbuster’s Prize.
At the age of 13, I won this prize, awarded at the end of a radio discussion among young people on the topic of the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The path to my victory was not entirely kosher. Winning depended on making a short, successful speech outlining your intended personal contribution to the peaceful uses of atomic energy. My speech consisted of a repetition of the assigned topic prefaced with the subjective pronoun and a militant trope, viz. “I will not cease from mental fight until I have contributed to the peaceful uses of atomic energy.” Success was measured by the applause meter, which looked like a large paper clock without numerals but with a second hand that would swing wildly in response to the acoustic stress of the audience’s applause.
As it happened, my brother was present with a friend or two, and they made certain to clap loudly and persistently, swinging their hands back and forth in a sort of syncopation with the struggling second hand of the applause meter. At last, with a burst of brachial energy, they forced the meter to swing to a point just a bit further ahead of the point that the previous speaker and her cohort had reached, and I was the prizewinner.
The spoils of winning were lavish, I’ll add, but ultimately futile in enhancing my state in any way. I received a gold Gruen wristwatch, which I sported to school the next day and which was promptly stolen; a black felt fedora, which balanced on top of my pompadour, elicited paroxysms of derisive laughter from my classmates; and a sharkskin suit, which I outgrew in a matter of weeks, a surge accelerated by my having swiftly devoured the fourth perquisite—the first monthly shipment of a year’s supply of Mars bars. I will barely mention the secondary effect of this gift on my already spotty complexion, except to make a point. I was soon designated for the latest treatment for adolescent acne—high-powered X-rays—and bombarded for several sessions until my practical-minded father decided to break off the treatment as expensive, inconvenient, and obviously without result. This event makes a point: as this x-ray bombardment, which followed in logical sequence my being showered with prizes, will no doubt shorten my life span appreciably, I conclude that it is not always a good thing to win an award—and so, consistent with what experience has taught me, I have intuitively taken pains to so organize my life as never to win a prize—but I have not always been successful. . . .
Notes
1 I believe it was this background that was to make me so receptive decades later to Paul de Man’s equally famous deconstruction of the sentence “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” at the close of Yeats’s great poem “Among School Children.” Of course, de Man is another story, to which I’ll return in due course.