Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

In the lobby behind them the lights flicked on and off. Mickelsson put the palm of his right hand over the pipebowl, the palp of his left thumb over the hole in the stem. “I meant to ask you,” he said as they went in together, following the crowd, “I’m having a little party December twelfth, Friday. Do you think you and Mabel could make it?”

“I’ll ask her,” Garret said, smiling. “Off-hand, it sounds great.”

“Nothing fancy,” Mickelsson said, waving his pipe. “Just a few friends.”

As they rejoined the group at the auditorium door, Edie Bryant was saying, smiling, her wattles shaking like fringe, “Well, Jessie, there they are, two people sharing a talent. I’ll grant them that. Now, Phil and I, we’re as diffrunt as night and day. Outside the sanctuary of the bedroom, all is war.” She winked at Jessica, wicked. Bryant smiled, raising his jaw a little to put on more dignity. Tom Garret, arms folded over his chest again, looked down at the carpet, grinning to himself.

“Phil,” Mickelsson said, “and Jessica, I wanted to ask you this too.” He took her elbow. “I’m having a little party on December twelfth; that’s a Friday. If you’re free that night and you’d like to come—”

Jessica smiled as if wonderfully surprised and pleased but drew her arm away.

For reasons Mickelsson didn’t fully think out, the second half of the concert annoyed him much less than the first. He could have found reasons enough, of course. There was the distraction of Jessica’s emphatic coolness beside him, as if he’d somehow insulted her—whether by leaving her for a smoke outside, or by showing too little respect for Art, or by some other mistake, heaven knew. In any event, the discomfort she caused him made the music seem comparatively unworrisome. He glanced at her occasionally, showing his puzzlement, wordlessly asking for explanation; and though she didn’t see fit to explain to him, she did at least partly relent, patting his hand, then returning her own hand to her lap and resting it with the other.

And part of his increased appreciation, no doubt, had to do with the effect of the music on the Blicksteins’ young friend. She listened with such a rapt expression—head lifted, one diamond ear-ring shooting off needle-sharp arcs of colored light—that it occurred to him to wonder if perhaps the young woman was herself a musician, hearing things inaudible to the common ear. He made a greater effort to feel what the others were feeling. He began to nod, furtively tap his toes inside his shoes, raise his eyebrows in appreciative surprise, smile when those around him smiled.

Once he turned his attention to it, the whole idea of using “serious” modern musical devices (“tone rows,” “clusters,” whatever musicologists would call all this) for comic purposes seemed to Mickelsson rather interesting. Mickelsson knew nothing about the details of music. For all his Lutheran heritage and his father’s special love of singing, he himself had never been musical, as a child; in fact he couldn’t carry a tune. Not that he hadn’t made efforts to inform himself; part of his game was writing articles in aesthetics. He’d read an occasional book—a life of Mahler, another of Berlioz, the memoirs of Shostakovich. But he would hardly have ventured an opinion on Mahler, Berlioz, or Shostakovich in the company of musicians.

Yet for all that, as he listened to the Swissons’ music he began to develop a theory.

The devices Britt Swisson used in his compositions were mainly of the kind an ordinary, uneducated listener (like Mickelsson) would describe as “noise”; discord, scrambled rhythms, an occasional little passage of what might have been jazz, another that might have been the slightly “off” thumpings and poopings of a German town band—passages leading nowhere, ripped from their context, not so much “music” properly speaking as fragments of sound, glittering objects from civilization’s music dump. Surely these devices had entered the vocabulary of contemporary music in the first place (he reasoned) because they gave expression to feelings left unsatisfied in the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic tradition descended from, say, Bach and the eighteenth century. (It was true that in philosophical circles the emotion/expression theory of art had been taking quite a beating lately; but Mickelsson’s money, despite the current fashion, was on Collingwood and his gang.) And surely those unsatisfied feelings—the loss, alarm, paranoia, and vulgar passion in modern music—were none other than the emotions the Enlightenment repressed: the universal or at least very common human sense of vulnerability, encircling chaos, cosmic indifference. Discord and noise, in other words—bits of musical chaos partially ordered by the composer but allowed to stand as chaos, uncancelled or reformed—Being in the rift—were the musician’s expression of the godless, all-but-universal modern world-sense: the rage and alarm of an accidental consciousness stripped of its comforting illusions. It was fitting, it struck him now, that Kate Swisson should have said to him, all righteous sobriety, “Britt and I don’t believe in ghosts” but also it was the usual modern bullshit, for what was the meaning, intentional or otherwise, of Swisson’s comic use of devices invented out of fear and anger if it was not mockery of the devices by misapplication, to demonstrate, by mimicking them, how childish they were in their existential wail—to reveal them, without mercy (but also with no hard feelings), as theatrical rant and hand-wringing? Once all pretensions to tragic grandeur were dashed, once the very scream of “the ungodded sky” was shown for what it was, a self-regarding Waa, what could be expected but—what else was possible than—a return to good humor, classical sociability in place of the Romantic yawp? In other words, “Ideals,” as one used to say—value assertions with rounded edges—rushing up into the world as from a wellspring? (To say “We don’t believe in ghosts” was an act of truly shocking vulgarity. Who was ever quicker to talk about ghosts than the civilized, the effete genteel, the English? Only the opposite assertion, “We do believe in