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My Secret Hero
by Mark Slouka
Like most readers (and many writers, I suspect), Ive insinuated myself into history regularly and shamelessly. Ive walked the streets of Pragues Mala Strana with Jaroslav Seifert, sailed up the Congo with André Gide, fished for perch and metaphors with Thoreau. More often, though, Ive brought history to myself, invited it to dinner. As though death were no more of an obstacle than a crack in the pavement, or time, like the rock, subordinate to the paper and scissors of the will, Ive imagined sitting up late over a bottle of wine with men and women whose days on earth Id missed. Whose words, fixed by their passing, were all that remained of them. Their society was, and remains, one of the great indulgences of my imaginative life.
Some, like Robert Musil or Knut Hamsun or Matsuo Basho (in my dreams, I spoke more languages than Sir Richard Burton) I invited out of sheer curiosity; others, like Flaubert and Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, for the dual pleasures of meeting genius and making trouble. A select few, however, I invited alone, because we were friends.
What is it that creates this conviction in us that we would have been close to someone who died generations before we were born? That, had we met, there would have been some instant affinity between us, some deep and undeniable understanding? Is it simply, as the psychologists would suggest, some lack in ourselves that forces us to seek friendships in the past? Are we indulging in this kind of risk-free fantasizing to compensate for some deficit in our present lives?
Perhaps. My own explanation (if explanations are needed at all) is more complicated and, I like to think, more charitable. The paths by which we meet one another across history, it seems to me, are in many ways the same as those by which we meet across the room. We sense (or imagine) a connection, a common window on the world. We sense that this person shares some of our desires and fears, strengths and weaknesses, or, at least, understands them. We intuit a correspondence, an alignment. And suddenly we feel less alone in the world. Its called friendship. Its called love. And though our relations in the imagined world can never match the depth of those in the tangible one, we should be careful how strongly we draw the line between them. After all, who can deny the role that imagination plays in how a wife perceives her husband (or a mother her daughter)? The people in our lives see how we see them and, whether they resist or accommodate us, are molded accordingly.
When I was nineteen, I spent the winter holidays alone on the top floor of a New York City dormitory, watching the snow come in over the Hudson. That was the December I first read Moby Dick, which struck me with the force of revelation, and since then Ive carried around the conviction that Melville and I would have been tremendous friends. That I would have liked his laugh, which others found too loud, and his passion, which many found too untempered by expressions of piety. That his outrage over the injustices of man and God would, in some way, have found their correspondence in my own. That his indomitable allegiance to this world would have been strengthened, and validated, by mine. A gross form of self-flattery, perhaps, but there it is. I would have understood this mans deserts, you see, and he, in turn, would have understood mine.
Othershundreds of othershad touched me, most notably, I supposeKarel Capek and Franz Kafka. But the first was too whole, in some ways, he didnt need meand the latter too damaged, a wound searching for its arrow. Melville was different. What I responded to, I realize now, was the profound loneliness that invested his life and his work. Having lost his father at the age of twelve, he had spent his life searching for the connection that had escaped him. Where is the foundlings father hidden? he had written. Where is the one that will say to you, I endorse you, over and over.
I would be that friend, and mine would be that endorsementunstinting, unreserved, unshakeable. We would form a republic of two. The dollars damn me, he had said to Hawthorne, who seems rarely to have complained of anything. Well, they damned me, too. Throughout his life he had struggled to keep the stubborn independence of the sea, to resist the pull of the slavish shore. I knew that shore, and had felt the necessity of that open sea, whichthen as nowcould both drown and save us. He persists in wandering these dreary wastes, Hawthorne had written, and can neither believe, nor rest his unbelief. I would wander with him.
It hardly mattered to me when I discovered that there were apparently thousands of men, just like myself, who felt some kind of kinship with him. Or when I realized that on some level Melville was for men what Marilyn Monroe was for women: someone they instinctively felt they could comfort, perhaps even rescue. It didnt matter, because our relationship was of a different sort. Closer. More complicated. Less condescending.
In the dream, wed sit up late into the night, our feet up on the railing Ive been intending to fix for four years now. Wed share a bottle of wine. The lakesmall water for him, but appreciated nonethelesswould begin just beyond our feet, thick with life. A half-moon would separate from the oaks, and we would talk, and laugh, and agree with each other, nodding to ourselves in the dark, and every now and again we would be quiet, listening to a high wind, running its hand over the top of the world, move the continents of leaves above our heads. And I would tell him about the world, and that I had written a sentence or a paragraph that day that had not displeased me, and he would take a sip of wine and say, Good. And when the moment came we would drain our glasses, and say our goodbyes, and he would leave by the path that runs along the wall, disappearing under the trees.
And in the morning I would be back to my words, sustained by his voice, his laughter, his presence, as surely as if, on getting up that morning, I had found two dark, intersecting rings on the wooden table, not one.
Mark Slouka is the author of the short-story collection Lost Lake and the recent novel Gods Fool. He teaches at Columbia University, and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
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