was hardly surprised at this. “Nature is apprehended only by asking it a question,” he said to many an astounded visitor. “The river, like time, may flow both ways, but the point is that whichever way it flows, it runnels back into the past before it emerges in the future.”
Often a visitor, beset by literary aspirations, would attempt to amplify the liquid analogy. Count Zich, who knew better, one day tried his hand: “So would you say then, sir, that life is walking alongside a river which gradually disappears?”
“Experience is not a river,” Felix gently riposted. “Experience is countless rivers converging in a damp place, where there is nothing which could be said, in any helpful sense, to be a river.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that a man who first thing each morning (with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a book under his arm) checked to see if the river of Grace had decided to flow east or west, might be simultaneously a believer and an unbeliever, a romantic and a moderate, a stoic and an epicure, a yogi without meditation, deadly serious about his whimsies, humorous about death and taxes, reflective and decisive in the same gesture. He was interested in the minimally implausible, and believed that the function of the intellect was to set stern limits to its own pretensions. He had the skepticism of the peasant, the indifference of the nobleman, and the insistence on value-by-critique of the country gentry, and so lived voluntarily in a no-man’s-land on the borders of the intelligentsia, the Astingi nomads, the lesser aristocracy, and bureaucratic squires, thinking of himself as an intermediary metabolite. He was basically interested in secondary differential, a student of nothing so insipid as change, but of changes in the rate of change; not only in the gray-green river, but in the human métabole as well. How does one thing become another? That was his métier. What exactly is it that the hero doesn’t know before he becomes, well, quite something else? That was his subject. What is the opposite of an epiphany? That was his method. What is the opposite of a hangover? That was his temperament. Born when the voluntary sublime virtues were being replaced by the vulgar obligatory ones, he was still of that amorous tradition, unimaginable to modern ears, in which the desire to please was stronger than the need to be loved. A refugee from smugness, from conformity, and from every chosen people, he was the least guileless of men.
He never wasted a word. Either he was telling you something you wanted to know, or you were telling him something he wanted to know, and the ironclad integrity of these encounters somehow never became tiresome. He had a quiet baton, sparing of the superfluous, and an inscrutable beat.
Imagine the difficulty of having a father who was exactly as he seemed to be.
Father rejected the fashionably tragic and the abnormal, condemned all cults of solitude and unhappiness. As an anglophobophile, he loved people who teased the British. He loathed German misery, German inwardness, German desperation. He particularly loathed Kant for his hierarchies, which placed the dog and the horse somewhere between a stone and us. As an incorrigible improviser, his expansive gaiety of mind struggled against the fathomless boredom which always threatened to strangle our part of the world. Above all, he resolutely denied the cults of Life-Affirmation and Life-Alienation, those elusive twin personages who have washed each other’s hands throughout our dirty century. Yet in his Historae Astingae he was always trying to rescue Nietzsche from being “so damned Nietzschean”; he wanted to tell his tale from the point of view of the brown mare, around whose neck the author of Superman had flung his arms as he died.
No culture has ever made so much and so little of art than the Cannonia of his time. And he was after all, a member of that class—handsome, balanced, and relatively well-off; civic-minded, tolerant, sociable, and progressive—that really had no need of art, and as such ended up as its main patron and audience. Even though they napped through most of it, they somehow didn’t miss a thing. Felix himself was devoted to art while loathing its egotism and vanity. As the most self-reliant of men he knew that autonomy was always overrated. He did not understand why art, when it enjoined any civic impulse, always seemed to degenerate into toadying vapidity, nor why the relentless quest for originality almost always resulted in pointless savagery, lack of sex appeal, and predictable abuse. He was equally amused by what both the clowns of the ruling classes and the damaged narcissists of the avant-garde called thinking. If he was the product of a no longer comprehensible past, to compensate, he prided himself on being a child of his own age. His only real mistake was to think he could compel beauty, and yet he was the only man I ever knew before whom a failed author could sit with ease.
Felix “the Happy” spent most of his time keeping several sorts of overlapping daybooks. The first was what merchants call a klitterbuch (wastebook) in which they inscribe everything that is bought and sold that day, as well as naked thoughts on matters literary and scientific, all of these muddled in no particular order. These were in turn transferred into a journal where everything was made more systematic and the kurb of art began to exert its salubrious effect—a record of his real-time monetary expenditures in the margins of a diary, and further annotated with a meditation on what he might have done. And finally, all this was transfigured into a kind of double-entrance bookkeeping, a Chronik in which the text, “the history of my feelings,” was coextensive with columns of numbers in each margin—one marking the prices of the trading day, another the costs of transactions, and still another, a kind of pictographic evaluation of the psychic experience, as well as symbols for the occasions on which he had made love. The method, as I understood it, was to firmly differentiate the semi-articulate from reinvention, finally producing both an intimate account and its quantification, a natural history of the heart paralleling natural history; the long account of the death of a favorite animal, for example, with the price history of horsemeat in France alongside.
He ignored the daily newspapers in order to try and think historically. He could have produced five or ten books as good as those any literary culture of any country can turn out by the thousands. But he knew we were entering the age of weakening reality, so in order to assert value in an objective world which denied it, he preferred to accompany the commentary out to the dread edge of the page, where the argument became clearer as it became less systematic—attempting to approximate those pre-philosophical sputterings which had not yet been trifled with by Plato or Aristotle, before they had been stitched into myths and stories, when thoughts were really fragments, and the gap between them clear and enticing, not a pile of rhetorical milk bottles to be bowled over by some howling semanticist. My father had no ideas marching through him; he liked it out there on the edge, where the bardic collided with the calligraphic, a small forbearing space where the paltriness of intelligence might be momentarily overcome, where one could write in order to stop thinking, and lose the shame of being an author.
The confidently unrealizable project of his Chronik allowed him to gather strength and move fully formed and with accord. When making an investment for a client, he could turn back twenty years and not only see the historical value of the commodity he was trading, but more importantly, judge his own frame of mind at the time, as well as what the poor dazed world was thinking. From a distance, the Chronik looked like an oriental book, each page transcribed in a different colored ink, a palimpsest strewn with ciphers and perfumed with annotations spiraling off into space. But when you put your face in it, you knew what day it was, what world you were in, and what it felt like before you were born.
In the courtroom, Felix “the Happy” learned that you can destroy any argument by taking the a priori one step backward, that the self and its opposite do not have to exist in mutual antipathy, and indeed that the day of liberation is most often the day of disappointment. Observing the inclination of human nature to crush the human spirit, he reluctantly became the advocate of the trial-and-error boys, reconciling warring factions by insisting that the other’s place does not have to be a fearful one. He often said there are only two sorts of people in this world—those who believe in the law when it promises to protect them, and those who don’t.
No graven portrait of my father’s family ever hung in our house. If there
