WALTER ABISH
69
took to be an American way of expressing enthusiasm. I wasn't a
particularl y successful student, I hastened to tell her. I don 't believe
that Professor Klude ever paid the slightest attention
to
me. All the
same, I have sent him a copy of every book I have published. Once or
twice, despite his heavy schedule, he was kind enough
to
send me a
note thanking me for the book. He greatly looked forward to reading
the work of one of his former pupils, he wrote, something I had every
reason
to
dou bt.
I didn't mention this
to
Daphne. I didn't want her
to
think of me
as discontent with the notes I received from Klude. Naturally, as soon
as she had discovered that I was a writer she felt impelled or obliged to
buy several of my books, which is more than I can say for most of my
friends and acquaintances, who expect free signed copies which they do
not read. Having completed or partiall y completed one of my books,
Daphne felt compelled to say something about the work, and, .being
straightforward and candid, as well as a student of philosophy, she
couldn't, I recognized, simply say, I enjoyed it, and let it go at that. She
had to say something that would express on her part a recognition of
what I had attempted to achieve, or what she thought I had tried
to
achieve. Obviously she tried to like the books because she liked me, or
was prepared to like me or, possibly, because she wanted to like me, but
no matter how hard she tried, the work was somehow inaccessible to
her. That is hardly surprising in someone who admitted that she found
the exploration or probing of a relationship between two or more
people as something somewhat distasteful. She felt that the writer was
trespassing, and I have to admit that writing is a form of trespassing.
Instead of reading on and on about the tenuousness or uncertainty of
someone's feelings, she preferred
to
question the meaning of a thing, or
the meaning of a thought, preferably raising the question in German, a
foreign or at any rate adopted language that enabled her to reduce these
crucial questions to pure signs, since in German the word
thing
and
the word
thought
did not immediately evoke in her brain the multitu–
dinous response it did in English, where the words, those everyday
words, conjured up an entire panorama of familiar associations that
blunted the preciseness needed in order to bring her philosophical
investigation to a satisfactory conclusion. Could this be the reason why
she came to Germany? To think in German, to question herself in a
foreign language?
Has she ever slept with a German?
She must have, I tell myself.
