Sophie's Choice - William Styron [113]
It was a grand display of wizardry, Nathan’s production-inspired mockery of such outrageous, runaway, sublime silliness that I found myself emulating my father, gasping, shorn of strength, collapsing sideways on the greasy banquette. Sophie, half choked on her own mirth, made weak little dabs at her eyes. I sensed the local barflies regarding us glumly, wondering at our delirium. Recovering, I gazed at Nathan with something like awe. To be able to cause such laughter was a god’s gift, a benison.
But if Nathan had been merely a clown, had he remained so exhaustingly “on” at all times, he would have, of course, with all his winning gifts, become a staggering bore. He was too sensitive to play the perpetual comedian, and his interests were too wide-ranging and serious for him to permit our good times together to remain on the level of tomfoolery, however imaginative. I might add, too, that I always sensed that it was Nathan—perhaps again because of his “seniority,” or maybe because of the pure electric force of his presence—who set the tone of our conversation, although his innate tact and sense of proportion prevented him from hogging the stage. I was no slouch at storytelling, either, and he listened. He was, I suppose, what is considered a polymath—one who knows a great deal about almost everything; yet such was his warmth, his wit, and with such a light touch did he display his learning, that I never once felt in his presence that sense of gagging resentment one often feels when listening to a person of loquaciously large knowledge, who is often just an erudite ass. His range was astonishing and I had constantly to remind myself that I was talking to a scientist, a biologist (I kept thinking of a prodigy like Julian Huxley, whose essays I had read in college)—this man who possessed so many literary references and allusions, both classical and modern, and who within the space of an hour could, with no gratuitous strain, weave together Lytton Strachey, Alice in Wonderland, Martin Luther’s early celibacy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the mating habits of the Sumatran orangutan into a little jewel box of a beguiling lecture which facetiously but with a serious overtone explored the intertwined nature of sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism.
It all sounded very convincing to me. He was as brilliant on Dreiser as he was on Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Or the theme of suicide, about which he seemed to possess a certain preoccupation, and which he touched on more than once, though in a manner which skirted the purely morbid. The novel which he esteemed above all others, he said, was Madame Bovary, not alone because of its formal perfection but because of the resolution of the suicide motif; Emma’s death by self-poisoning seeming to be so beautifully inevitable as to become one of the supreme emblems, in Western literature, of the human condition. And once in an extravagant piece of waggery, speaking of reincarnation (about which he said he was not so skeptical as to rule it beyond possibility), he claimed to have been in a past life the only Jewish Albigensian monk