Free Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

His speech was full of mutterings, warnings. The artist’s life is strewn with traps. Beware “the machinations of the enemy.”
    “Mr. Lytle,” I whispered, “who is the enemy?”
    He sat up. His unfocused eyes were an icy blue. “Why, boy,” he said, “the bourgeoisie!” Then he peered at me for a second as if he’d forgotten who I was. “Of course,” he said. “You’re only a baby.”
    I’d poured myself two bourbons during nap time and felt them somewhat. He lifted his own cup and said, “Confusion to the enemy.” We drank.
    *   *   *
     
    It was idyllic, where he lived, on the grounds of an old Chautauqua called the Assembly, one of those rustic resorts deliberately placed up north, or at a higher altitude, which began as escapes from the plagues of yellow fever that used to harrow the mid-Southern states. Lytle could remember coming there as a child. An old judge, they said, had transported the cabin entire up from a cove somewhere in the nineteenth century. You could still see the logs in the walls, although otherwise the house had been made rather elegant over the years. The porch went all the way around. It was usually silent, except for the wind in the pines. Besides guests, you never saw anyone. A summer place, except Lytle didn’t leave.
    He slept in a wide carved bed in a corner room. His life was an incessant whispery passage on plush beige slippers from bed to sideboard to seat by the fire, tracing that perimeter, marking each line with light plantings of his cane. He’d sing to himself. The Appalachian one that goes, “A haunt can’t haunt a haunt, my good old man.” Or songs that he’d picked up in Paris at my age or younger: “Sous les Ponts de Paris” and “Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.” His French was superb, but his accent in English was best, that extinct mid-Southern, land grant pioneer speech, with its tinges of the abandoned Celtic urban Northeast (“boyned” for burned ) and its raw gentility.
    From downstairs I could hear him move and knew where he was in the house at all times. My apartment had once been the kitchen; servants went up and down the back steps. The floor was all bare stone, and damp. And never really warm, until overnight it became unbearably humid. Cave crickets popped around as you tried to sleep, touching down with little clicks. Lots of mornings I woke with him standing over me, cane in one hand, coffee in the other, and he’d say, “Well, my lord, shall we rise and entreat Her Ladyship?” Her ladyship was the Muse. He had all manner of greetings.
    For half a year we worked steadily, during his window of greatest coherence, late morning to early afternoon. We read Flaubert, Joyce, a little James, the more famous Russians, all the books he’d written about as an essayist. He tried to make me read Jung. He chopped at my stories till nothing was left but the endings, which he claimed to admire. A too-easy eloquence, was his overall diagnosis. I tried to apply his criticisms, but they were sophisticated to a degree my efforts couldn’t repay. He was trying to show me how to solve problems I hadn’t learned existed.
    About once a day he’d say, “I may do a little writing yet, myself, if my mind holds.” One morning I even heard from downstairs the slap-slap of the typewriter keys. That day, while he napped, I slid into his room and pulled off the slipcover to see what he’d done, a single sentence of between thirty and forty words. A couple of them were hyphened out, with substitutions written above in ballpoint. The sentence stunned me. I’d come half expecting to find an incoherent mess, and afraid that this would say something ominous about our whole experiment, my education, but the opposite confronted me. The sentence was perfect. In it, he described a memory from his childhood, of a group of people riding in an early automobile, and the driver lost control, and they veered through an open barn door, but by a glory of chance the