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

the couch-arm, made him feel heavy, wide as a truck; yet he did not feel ugly tonight. In fact, no doubt because she watched him with interest, he felt handsome. The sportcoat he wore had just come from the cleaner’s; the pale blue shirt was the first he’d bought since he’d left Ellen. He reached for his pipe, found it still half full of tobacco, and felt for his matches.

“Usually when people of our age say they’re failures,” she said, “they’re telling the truth. In your case, I don’t believe it.”

“ ‘Our age,’ ” he mocked.

She laughed. “I’ll say this: you’ve got your act down pat.”

“I don’t mean it as an act,” he said, then grinned. “Probably you’re right.”

“What were you like?” she asked. “I mean, when you were younger.”

“You wouldn’t have cared for me,” he said. Now he had his pipe lit. She waited.

He shook his head as if in admiration of the young man he’d been. “I was a name to conjure with, in my grad-school days,” he said. “I’d played a little football as an undergrad, which people still remembered—I may have mentioned that.” When he glanced at her, she nodded, and he saw that he’d mentioned it too often. “Well, now that I threw myself into it, I found I was pretty good at book-work too,” he said. “Did a dissertation—published later by Temple University—on Luther, Nietzsche, and the modern predicament. Got some pretty fair reviews.” He scowled, mock-petulant. “Nowhere important, to tell the truth. Philosophy Today. ‘A bold and original contribution to the Nietzsche reassessment’—that sort of thing. It really was, in fact.” He made his face modest but tucked his thumbs under his armpits. “I don’t mean to brag.”

Jessica rolled her eyes.

He said, smiling again, still mock-modest, “I showed in great detail how Nietzsche—and Nietzsche’s deep-down hatred of Martin Luther—lies behind every contemporary philosophical leaf and flower. Nietzsche is contemporary thought, in a way. He’s the trunk whose branches are Freud, Sartre, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger—whatever still thrives on that maddening sap.” He cocked one eye as if surprised and displeased by the pun, then waved it away with the backs of three fingers.

“So the book was good, in fact.”

“Not bad,” he admitted.

But the book had not been linguistic, he explained with a sigh, which had been sufficient reason, in those days, for dismissing an argument unread. His present chairman believed even now that analytic philosophy was philosophy enough, much to Mickelsson’s disgust. He pursed his lips, rubbed his palms together, and decided to tell her of his first run-in with Tillson, at some party soon after Mickelsson had arrived here. Tillson had said—eyes bugging, mad smile twitching, his index finger six inches from Mickelsson’s chin—”Do you realize that, of the jobs announced in this year’s Proceedings, only twenty per cent are not in analytic? And do you realize how many of that twenty per cent are not in ethics? I do not say, believe me, that ethics is an insignificant concern! Heavens no!” He leaned closer. “But statistically speaking it is not exactly the central fascination of our time!” He’d jerked forward, laughing, spitting out cracker crumbs and tiny bits of cheese, his head returning to its rightful place, level with the hump on his back. “He must’ve been drunk,” Mickelsson had later said to friends. “No, no,” they’d said, “that’s just his way. You’ll get used to old Tillson!” “I hope not,” Mickelsson had answered sternly—his deportment (he would have to admit, looking back) self-righteous, bordering on ridiculous. Well, so be it.

“Tillson’s probably a better man than you think,” Jessica said, and looked down at her sherry glass. “I can’t judge how good or bad he is as a philosopher. But his students like him.”

“He’s got me there,” Mickelsson said, and gave her his crazed grin.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked. “Does it please you that some of your students dislike you?” He could say this for her: she did not come at you crooked, like a wolf, but straight, like a striking Alsatian.

He leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers together over his paunch. “Students are a necessary evil,” he said.

“Really? Is that what you think?” Though her expression was noncommittal, her eyes nailed him where he sat.

“No,” he said. He brazened it out with a smile, but if there was someone invisibly keeping score, he thought glumly, Mickelsson had lost another point.

It had been something that the work of a young philosopher should be noticed at all, and his book had in fact received praise from philosophers of the kind whose respect he most valued. (His wife had put it succinctly, not meaning to hurt: “Old men.”) And it would not be quite right to say that from there his work had gone downhill. He’d written two textbooks which had remained in print for several years and a short, quite brilliant book (in Mickelsson’s opinion) which looked at medical ethics from a more or less Darwinian point of view. He’d known, of course, that in taking that long-abandoned tack, scorned by Nietzsche and dead in ethical theory at least since 1903—G. E. Moore’s demolition of naturalism (Jessica suppressed a yawn)—he had been asking for it. That had always been part of the game, for Mickelsson. He had not guessed how “controversial“—that is, how deeply hated in some quarters—his book would be. (He found himself glaring at Jessica as he said this; she smiled blandly back. Was it possible that she wasn’t listening? He leaned closer, glaring harder.) Nor had he guessed the depths to which his critics would be willing to sink. He could show her reviews. (“Please don’t!” she said, raising her hands as if to fend him off. So she was listening. To some extent. He hurried on.) He should have expected it, their shrill, mindless wrath. He himself had dislocated Nietzsche’s great, dark secret, how in his rage at those who had “stolen Christianity“—those holiness perverters who had reached their obscene peak in Martin Luther—Nietzsche had