340
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
to them his secret desire to become a writer: "And even though
I asked how I had offended them, they behaved like Joseph's
brothers and could not answer amicably.. .. What was it they
envied? My dreams...." But the archetypal beginning implies the
archetypal ending; and just as mysteriously as they had rejected him,
Singer's comrades end by asking his forgiveness:
"It
reminded me
of Joseph and his brothers.
They
had come to Joseph to buy grain,
but why had my friends come to me? Since I had not become Egypt's
ruler, they were not required to bow down to the earth. I had noth–
ing to sell but new dreams."
Actually it was a chance phrase in a most
goyish
poet which
provided me with a clue to the meanings I am pursuing here, a verse
in the Sixth Satire of Juvenal, where-describing the endless varieties
of goods on sale in Rome, wares especially tempting, he tells us, to
women-he remarks that "for a few pennies" one can buy any dream
his heart desires "from the Jews."
From the Jews!
It
was those few
words which fired my imagination with their offhand assumption that
dream-peddlery is a Jewish business, that my own people have
traditionally sold to the world that commodity so easy to scorn and
so difficult to do without: the stuff of dreams. And I found myself
reflecting in wonder on the strange wares that have been in the
course of Western history Jewish monopolies, real or presumed:
preserved mummy, love philtres, liquid capital, cut diamonds, old
clothes-Hollywood movies; which brought me almost up to date.
Moving backward in time, however, in reversion from such un–
comfortable contemporaneity, I found myself in
Mizraim,
face to face
with the archetypal ancestor of all Jewish dreamers, with that Joseph
whom his brothers hailed mockingly, saying, "Behold, here comes the
Master of Dreams," and whom they cast into the pit, crying out,
"And then we shall see what will become of his dreams." But we
know
what, in fact, did become of those self-flattering dreams of that
papa's spoiled darling. And how hard it is to believe that there was
ever a
first
time, when the envious brothers did not know in their
deepest hearts what the event would be: how Joseph, after he had
ceased to dream himself, would discover that his own dreams of glory
had prepared him to interpret the dreams of others, and how, inter–
preting them, he would achieve the wish revealed in his own.
Not, however, until he had gone down into Egypt; becoming in
