The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📕

to read. On the other hand, he was also celebrated for lapping up the most impudent syrups of flattery, so when Olof Flodcrantz sent—sent!—a copy of the criminal volume, eloquently inscribed, to Sven Strömberg, and when Sven Strömberg took in the inscription naming him the foremost man of letters in the nation, it was natural enough for Sven Strömberg (a courteous man) to return the compliment by endorsing Olof Flodcrantz’s newest lucubrations. “Purely original,” he wrote to Olof; “purely original,” he said to everyone he ran into. Sven’s confirmation of Olof’s pure originality had already been well circulated in the stewpot when, thumbing through the pages to gaze once again on Olof’s pleasing inscription, Sven Strömberg happened to come on the familiar lines by Robert Frost. In his own translation. Pirated; usurped.

The most delectable shock of the season so far. The three-o’clock gossips—it was now nearer five o’clock—turned it this way and that, testing for motives, for consequences. Who had duped whom? Mad Olof!—putting his head in the lion’s mouth, but only after first waking up the lion. Yet the poor lion was hardly in a position to bite. Was it a case of rage, malice, revenge, despair? Or—“Contrariwise,” said Gunnar—puckishness, camp, comedy, dada? A postmodernist plot. Sven was behind it all: it was Sven who had dug up for Olof all those Americans cleverly named Robert. Creeley and Mezey and Bly! Lowell, Penn Warren, Graves. Anders would have nothing to do with this theory of looking under beds for the culprit. A solemn accident of reformist patriotism, whatever the intent. Just what we need, showing us up for what we are, rubbing our noses in the dollhouse dust. Ultimate ironic burlesque of Swedish parochialism. Exposure, once and for all, of the littleness of the life of letters in decrepit old Stockholm.

“Crocodiles! Earn your keep,” Nilsson yelled, running by. The secretaries were going home. The moonlike sun had faded in the windows. It was the stewpot at full boil.

“Well, there’s something else,” Lars said. No one heard. They had moved on to Olof Flodcrantz’s fate at his paper, whether he would be fired or kept on as a culture hero. He was, whatever else you thought of him, daring—you had to admit he had brio: all those Roberts! Not to mention the blurring of borders, of property lines. Internationalism versus the local pond. Socialism in the ideal—the text’s the thing, never mind who sets it down. Shakespeare by any other name. A narrow moralist might speak of theft, but what was it if not the halo of the universal that the whole planet strains toward? Non-exclusive loveliness going from hand to hand among the nations. The fool in the case was Sven Strömberg—showing up the impostor, even at the price of his own dignity. How ludicrous the leap from “purely original” to “Stop, thief!”—everything turns on whose ox is gored: there you are.

In spite of which, not one of them would mind it if Olof Flodcrantz got fired.

Thus the stewpot in the early winter dark. Cigarette smoke like torn nets hanging. All over the world the great ladle was stirring, stirring. The poets, dreamers, thinkers, hacks. The ambitious and the meditative. The opportunists and the provocateurs. The cabalists and the seducers. This stewpot—these hot tides—Lars under his quilt a short walk away had shut out, week after week: for the sake of catching sight of his father’s eye. His father too had shunned the stewpot. Drohobycz instead of Warsaw, Drohobycz instead of Paris, Drohobycz instead of anywhere.

“Deadlines, gentlemen!” Nilsson yelled, flying past; he had on his coat and muffler. The tight little cluster loosened, and out from the middle of it serenely stepped, or was mildly ejected, the Morgontörn’s only literary woman, in her man’s shirt and tie, saluting Lars with two fingers raised, one with a blackened writer’s bump. She was rumored to be Sven Strömberg’s lover of twenty years’ standing; she had not spoken a syllable in his defense—her voice anyhow had the brittle electronic character of an official interpreter—but her small sly mouth was rich with a certain moist-looking sweetness. There was a sweetness in all of them, the whole three-o’clock crew—the weak honey of reverence. Literary creatures who served, sidestepped, and sometimes sold out the Muses. Their so-called scandals, their scramblings, their feuds, their polymorphous life in the stewpot: how innocent, how distant from the palaces of live thunder, how weak they were before the altar of Lars’s father’s unmoving eye. Now they were putting on their padded jackets, fur hats, fleece boots; it seemed to Lars they were snubbing him, or else they were oblivious—here was Gunnar rushing by, and then Anders, hurrying toward wives, stepfathers, aunts, groaning elderly households. The stewpot was breaking up. The Morgontörn was beginning to take on its rickety nighttime mien.

“Wait,” Lars called again, “there’s something else.”

They were streaming past him, some toward the bottleneck in front of the elevator, most down the grunting wooden stairs. The poor old Morgontörn, collapsing backward—into the last century, into night, into decay. Already the mice were preparing to emerge; you could hear them drilling in phalanxes behind the walls.

Lars ran to the top of the stairwell and called down, “Something else! News!”

Sven Strömberg’s lover, hitching her sailor’s coat over her shirt and tie, stopped on the landing.

Lars called, “The Messiah’s turned up! Here! In Stockholm!”

Clatter on the steps; chatter; rumblings. “It’s Lars Andemening,” Sven Strömberg’s lover explained to the landing below. “I think he’s announcing the Second Coming.”

“Don’t tell me Olof Flodcrantz is back from Finland?” someone hooted up. “That soon?”

Laughter up and down the stairs.

“His daughter’s got the manuscript. It’s found,” Lars called.

“What manuscript?”

Lars leaned over the rail. In the twilight of all those flights of stairs a thousand flickering faces were lifting toward him. “The Messiah,” he called. “The lost Messiah of Bruno Schulz.”

“Stockholm rumors. The world’s hotbed.”

“That Pole? He never had a daughter.”

“If you’ve never heard of it, leave it to Lars.”

“Or if it’s dead.”

“No, no, everybody’s dead. Tolstoy. Ibsen.