PARTISAN REVIEW
601
trees. Neither of them could see the other but sensed where he
stood. Each heard him scarcely breathing.
"Bloodsuckin Jew Niggerhater."
"Anti-Semitic Ape."
Their metal glinted in hidden light, perhaps starlight filtering green–
ly through dense trees. Willie's eyeglass frames momentarily gleamed.
They aimed at each other accurate blows. Lesser felt his jagged ax
sink through bone and brain as the groaning black's razor-sharp
saber, in a single boiling stabbing slash, cut the white's balls from
the rest of him.
Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.
THE END
o
Mercy, the both of you, for Christ's sake, Levenspiel cries. Hab
rachmones, I beg you. Mercy on me. Mercy mercy mercy mercy
mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy....
Levenspiel is the irrelevant third force in the archetype triangle,
taking the place of those Jews at the end of
The Fixer
who see Yakov
Bok's carriage rattle doomwards through the streets and fall to "openly
weeping, wringing their hands. One thinly bearded man clawed his face.
One or two waved at Yakov. Someone shouted his name."
Levenspiel's too is the cry from off the streets, but it saves nothing
else, only a novel's art; ritual death solves nothing, though it finally
gives Harry Lesser a way to complete his novel. Before his death his
fountain pen "made lines but no words." The imagined apocalypse
provides the terminal words, and no human compensation.
There's not even a Czar to blame nOW. Nor is it enough to blame
Sophie Ginsky or LBJ or Philip Roth's latest Jewish mother, Richard
Nixon, the U r-Wasp. All of Bellow's quavering fingerpointing victims
have, like kids playing cops and robbers, cried "bang" and dropped,
playacting the mortally wounded for the last time. Take away the
romance and the religious overtones
and
you have the
irony
of
Faullt–
nerian communion best represented
ill
the whipping
Df
the
child Joe
Christmas by McEachern (that is,
IOn
of Each or Everyman)
in
Light
in Augu.st:
He [Joe] was looking straight ahead, with
a
rapt, calm expression
like a monk in a picture. McEachern began to strike methodically,
with slow and deliberate force , still without heat or anger.
It
would
have been hard to say which face was the more rapt, more ca lm,
more convinced.
