716
PARTISAN REVIEW
"There. There!" and the walls of embitterment were crashing down ;
the surface of something long unexposed - Sabbath's soul? The film
of his soul? - was illuminated by happiness. As close as a substanceless
substance can come to being physically caressed.
We are not likely, without doing violence to something we all un–
derstand so well, to dispute the reality of such an experience. The
Mickey who had convinced himself that "profound hatred" is the only
juice that keeps the old motor running suddenly finds himself bouyed up
by a sea of deep feelings . Still under the influence of these feelings he dis–
covers Fish, a cousin long thought dead, living out his last days in the
same seaside ruin he had inhabited when Sabbath was a boy. A new
energy enters the book. Here lives one-hundred year-old Fish: a kind of
ancient conglomerate still containing pebbles of old habits, of fussing and
mumbling and Jewish intonations, even vestiges of old-country irony.
Affectionate inquiry, heart-pounding excitement on Mickey's part. You
must know me: "I'm Mickey. I'm Yetta's son. My brother was Morty."
Pages of patient examination and prodding, a one-sided reminiscence re–
ally, but drawn with such tenderness and longing that they scarcely seem
connected to the rest of the novel.
For hundreds of pages we have been following Mickey the "anti-il–
lusionist," whose peculiar power comes from "being no one with any–
thing much to lose." Then we discover a link to the time before he be–
came "no one," and we learn that he began life fully-equipped, an–
chored, connected, in full possession of
The original ballast, an attachment to those who were nearby when
we were learning what feeling was all about, an attachment maybe not
stranger but stronger even than the erotic.
What remains of this ballast? Its weight has diminished in direct pro–
portion to the extinction of those he loved. By now it is as attenuated
as the centenarian Fish, who inspires in Mickey an urge to "pick him up
and put him on his lap."
Concluding, I am aware of having tried to argue that
Sabbath's
Theater
is an oddly soulful book, that I have been peddling transcen–
dence, making it appear that
this
White Whale, though bristling with
harpoons, is at heart a lovely kind of creature. But make no mistake
about it: all love, all affection in this novel, all real feeling is with the
