The Way of the Dog (3 page)

Not every teacher reveled in acts of explicit cruelty and humiliation. Not all of them actually
enjoyed
parading their trembling victim in front of a tittering mob. The others, the milder,
indifferent
ones, would send you, who were at their mercy, who were fat and nearsighted and dependent on them for protection, out into the jeering yard to be stoned, to stand bewildered in the schoolyard while they stoned you. Were teachers to behave in that way today they would be thrown instantly into prison.

To this day my throat constricts, my heart pounds, I sweat and struggle to get my breath, if I so much as walk past a school building, as if I expected a large stone to come flying over the fence. Year after year I was daily at the mercy of teachers whose idiocy and incompetence were matched only by their cruelty. It is symptomatic, nothing could be more telling and symptomatic and actually damning than the fact that today I am not able to recall the face of a single one of my tormentors. I can remember the most trivial details of the various classrooms in which I was confined year after year—the color and texture of the walls, the shape and physical feel of the desks and the names and initials carved into them, the exact arrangement of the windows, the direction of the light falling through them, the precise locations of the calendar and clock—but in front of the blackboard stands a black-clothed figure (none of my teachers, I believe, actually wore black), holding in its hand the long wooden ruler with which they used to strike us repeatedly, the black-clothed shape of a person minus the face. Instead of a face it bears on its shoulders a ghoulish white oval.

They pass beneath my window every weekday morning, in little strings and clumps, the children walking to school, shouting, jostling, sometimes turning and walking backwards. My attention goes to the outlier, the straggler, the one trudging behind the others, not too close to any of them, not
with
any of them, a child alone, head down, feet dragging, bowed under the weight of his book bag, shoulders hunched almost to his ears. A pasty, homely,
unattractive
child.

Of course it is possible, even likely in most cases, that happy people are only pretending, I have often thought. It is probable, viewed scientifically, that their so-called happiness is at bottom an elaborate superstructure of evasion and denial, a Darwinian survival mechanism of some sort, a genetic falsehood designed to stave off the suicide of the species. This is undeniably the case in those who seem most happy, those who have by virtue of their social or business or artistic success a vested interest in appearing to be the happiest of all, when in fact they secretly are the most miserable people. In fact the
professional
happiness of these people deprives them even of the meager solace they might otherwise derive from a public exposition of their misery. Surely there are many cases where happiness is only possible on the basis of some sort of mental illness.

Of course one is not talking now about the mass of ordinary, well-adjusted, supposedly happy individuals. One is talking about the crème de la crème of that mass, which would include people like Peter Meininger.

The news lady used to throw me a paper too, occasionally into the bushes next to the steps, from where I would have to poke it with a stick or leave it to come slowly apart in the rain. They raised the price last year, nearly doubled it, and I let the subscription lapse. I was not reading the paper anyway. Roy would shit on spread-out sheets after I stopped taking him out regularly, before he discovered the basement. A year has passed and bits of paper still cling here and there to the bushes by the steps.

I have always had a gift for sniffing out misery, antennae that can pick up the faintest reverberations of suffering, the flicker of a shadow across a face, the scarcely perceptible catch in a voice, the infinitesimal tug at the corner of a mouth. This ability, though it is hardly sympathy for the sufferers (I don’t give a damn about them personally), creates a sort of bond. The fact is, they
interest
me. The woman across the street, for example, who seems ill, and who for all I care can drop dead tomorrow,
fascinates
me. Standing safely on the shore—I have no intention of diving in—I amuse myself by watching her drown.

The elation and immense relief that a released prisoner must feel when he steps from the prison door, while different in degree, are in kind like my feelings upon being released from boredom.

What is the point of minor artists? What justification, what possible
excuse?
The litter, the mountains of
waste product
churned out by so-called artists,
self
-called artists, who aren’t artists at all but defilers of the idea of art. Instead of artists they should call themselves
besmirchers.

By minor I don’t mean unknown. The most famous painters today, for example, are also the most minor, just as the most famous writers are also the most insignificant writers. They are actually
minuscule
artists. It has always been like this, the insignificant and in fact inflated and empty rising naturally and even inevitably to the top and the weighty and significant sinking inevitably to the bottom, at least at the beginning, and there is nothing to be done about that.

I don’t include so-called commercial artists, who are in the entertainment business and not artists at all.

When I talk of minor artists, I include myself of course.

Two slim books, two juvenile
pamphlets
written thirty years ago, that I can’t open now without blushing: an essay on Balthus, a tedious, pretentious, art-critical “assessment” of Balthus—as if I could
measure
Balthus—and a collection of ostentatiously off-the-cuff “art reflections” absolutely stuffed with juvenile
poetic
prose.

I belittle them now in order to show myself superior to them, but at one time I was full of grandiose illusions.

Instead of a body of work I have an index-card habit.

I was able to live as a minor artist because of my independent fortune, my small independent fortune that let me be a minor artist for most of my life. A minor
literary
artist in my case.

I never admitted it of course, never admitted to being an artist at all. Not after the first years, when I was in fact a minor juvenile artist. Unlike other so-called artists, I never boasted of being an artist, and especially not of being a literary artist. I was a secret artist. For most of my adult life I was a collector of paintings and a concealed minor artist. I would not admit it because I could not accept the status of minor artist, what I considered the
disgrace
of the minor artist. I could have been a successful minor artist, but instead I was a failure as a major artist. I was a concealed failure as a major artist. By concealing the artist I was able to conceal the failure.

The chaos of my childhood—the mind- and soul-killing stupidity of the culture of my childhood in the fifties, the half-educated, middle-class, sanctimonious, self-satisfied culture that was at its core hollow and actually destructive of genuine talent, that hated everything that was different or intellectual or foreign, a culture that my parents and everyone I knew breathed in from the world around them, that was everywhere around them like a poison gas that they sucked into themselves with every breath—left me so damaged I must have seemed almost crazy.

I was crushed by art objects. In the presence of genuine art objects I felt small, I was made to feel small, I felt
belittled
by them. I pretended to be lifted up, even exalted, and I
was
exalted, but I was also humiliated. I could not become a successful minor artist because I was crushed by major art, I could not pursue possible art because I was crippled by
impossible
art.

I have always known that I was wounded by the culture of my childhood, that I was practically destroyed by it. I blamed it for my misfortunes, when in fact, I see now, I brought them all on myself.

Attempting to assert myself, I contemplated doing away with myself. In my puerile romantic way I thought of my death as
emblematic.
I was fascinated by great-artist suicides. By Hart Crane, for example, who called out, “Goodbye, everybody,” before leaping from the stern of a steamship. He was 270 miles north of Havana, returning from a year in Mexico, where he had written nothing. And Vachel Lindsay, who drank Lysol. His last words were, “They tried to get me—I got them first.”

In reality nothing is more laughable than for a minor artist, some art cripple or useless art-product waste producer, to kill himself over his so-called art failure. In his studio perhaps, surrounded by his
mess
, by his
dreck
, by all the
detritus
in which he has invested so much of himself and that nobody will ever give a damn about.

I have known for a long time that my art tastes were outdated and ridiculously romantic. I see now that my paintings, which I collected through a decade of patient acquisition, which I thought were one hundred percent advanced, were in fact already “discards of history.” I see now that they have no value, are essentially worthless daubings. If I had the physical strength I would throw them all out. I would hire a dumpster, park it out front, and toss them in. I imagine that if I really managed to do that I would feel immensely better, that I would be practically
cured.

I am—I will be the first to admit it—the number one besmircher of them all.

It was not entirely my fault. In the beginning, and in fact for years after the beginning, decades after that, I was constantly
interrupted.
The interrupters camped in my house, eating my food, sleeping in every room, sleeping on sofas, rugs; on summer nights the porch was littered with them. There was always somebody around, underfoot. I would get up in the morning, thinking I was alone, planning to set to work that very day; I would enter the kitchen and find three or four of them sitting at the table. I fed them, housed them, gave them money in exchange for paintings. I thought of myself as an art patron, a
mécène
, while in fact I was a vulgar grubstaker. I thought of myself as the center of the art whirl, while in fact they were circling me like hyenas.

They came because of Meininger, they came from all over the world because of him. Not just from Europe—from Turkey, Israel, Brazil, Japan. Hundreds of them came during the three years he stayed at my house. Those people who were always around me, whom I actually took steps to
keep
around me, whom I constantly pandered to even when I was behaving toward them with maximum hostility, prevented me from creating anything but scraps.

The first painting I would destroy would be the most prominent painting, the Meininger
Nude in Deck Chair
that hangs on the wall above the baroque mantel. The garish way the artist has rendered the really classical nude figure, the way he situates her in the midst of the commercial trash that one can see actually
defines
her, the table covered with so-called beauty products, the water in the pool behind her that looks practically toxic, once appealed to me precisely because almost everyone else found them completely offensive. The hideous acrylic colors, the way the details of the body of the woman, this classically
beautiful
woman, are rendered in a soft and even blurred way except for her breasts and sex, which are reproduced in a photographically realist style, making them the actual
focus
of the work, making them actually
obscene
, made me consider this painting extremely daring, though I see now that it was always a completely ordinary painting, a thoroughly boring piece of juvenile art.

I never draw the shades—one is broken in any case—and anyone looking in has a perfect view of my wall of paintings. In the center, directly above the mantel, they see the huge Meininger nude. If they look in the window at night the first thing they notice is this offensive, contemptuous painting. If the frame light above it is turned on, especially when the rest of the room is dark, the painting is practically on the sidewalk.

Peter Meininger never referred to the mantel simply as a mantel or even a chimneypiece. When he spoke of it, it was always the
Nivenson
mantel. The electric bill, he might say, is on the Nivenson mantel. He did this, I understood, to call attention to my foolish
waste
of thousands of dollars.

The woman in the Meininger nude, surrounded by plastic trash, holds a silver bell, a small silver dinner bell clasped between thumb and forefinger as if she is about to make it ring, as if she is about to summon a servant. The hard, even scornful expression on the model’s face, her posture in the deck chair, the position of the legs, the hand—Meininger wanted to call up images of Manet’s
Olympia
, to overlay the nineteenth-century
whore
on this modern American
housewife.

In order not to see the painting when I am in this room, which is almost all the time, I would have to shut my eyes. Even sitting in the wing chair facing the window, my back to the mantel, I see it reflected in the darkened panes.

Moll is back, arriving in the night. Thinking about Meininger, and she turns up like a bad penny.

I open my eyes. She has switched on the lamp in the kitchen, sending a sliver of light under the door to the dining room, and is mucking stealthily about in there, hoping not to wake me. From my bed I can hear the faint rasp of drawers sliding open and closed, the muffled clap of cabinet doors, the sudden brief screech of a chair on tiles. She will be using the chair to climb on, to search on top of the cabinets, hoping I might still keep money up there.

The kitchen light blinks out. Coming through the dining room, groping in the dark, she crashes into the wheelchair, pushes it roughly aside, grunting with effort: the wheelchair’s brake is set. The noise has made her apprehensive, and she holds herself still for a time. I can feel her there, rigid and immobile, a scarcely breathing tension in the air. She is letting her eyes adjust to the dark.