The Grasshopper King
THE GRASSHOPPER KING
COPYRIGHT © 2003 by Jordan Ellenberg
COVER + BOOK DESIGN by Linda S. Koutsky
COVER ILLUSTRATION by Marcia McEachron
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Pryde Brown
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION
Ellenberg, Jordan, 1971–
The grasshopper king / by Jordan Ellenberg. — 1st ed.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-56689-386-2
1. Europe—Study and teaching (Higher)—Fiction. 2. Poetry—Study and teaching (Higher)—Fiction. 3. College teachers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3605.L435G73 2003
813’.6—DC21
2003041236
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and most, I thank my teachers:
Harold White, Adrienne Marek, and Peggy Pfeiffer.
Thanks, too, to Stephen Burt, Malinda McCollum, and Tanya Schlam;
Michael Martone and Jill McCorkle; the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins;
Jay Mandel, Rosalie Siegel, and everyone at Coffee House Press.
for my parents
THE GRASSHOPPER KING
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Part One
Chapter 1: Athenae Occidentalis Americae
Part Two
Chapter 2: A Little About Myself
Chapter 3: Little Bug, Little Bug
Chapter 4: Double Date
Chapter 5: Henderson Between the Wars
Chapter 6: The Implications
Chapter 7: The Grasshopper King
Part Three
Chapter 8: History
Recent Fiction from Coffee House Press
Funder Acknowledgments
PART ONE
“TITHONUS: a member of the royal family of Troy, who married Eos, the goddess of dawn, and subsequently suffered an unusual fate. Eos loved Tithonus desperately, and could not bear the fact that, as a mortal, he was doomed to leave her when his time for death had come. So she petitioned the gods to grant Tithonus immortality; and her heartfelt request was granted. But Eos had forgotten to ask also for eternal youth. So Tithonus grew older and older, unable to die. His mind became deranged and he lost the power of speech. Eos kept him in a baby’s crib in a locked room. Some versions of the story have it that, out of mercy, Eos eventually transformed poor Tithonus into the chirping grasshopper.”
—HEINRICH DUBLER,
Enzyklopädie der griechischen Mythologie
CHAPTER 1
ATHENAE OCCIDENTALIS AMERICAE
I think it’s best that I begin with a legend—a mostly true one.
It goes like this: in 1871, a luckless prospector and aesthete named Tip Chandler, lost in the desert, his mules weakening and his canteen two days empty, came to the edge of a tremendous mesa. Seeing that he could travel no farther, and knowing that no salvation lay behind him, he fell to his knees and resigned himself to death. But at that moment, a spring of fresh water gushed out from the desiccated ground. Chandler threw himself down, pressed his lips to the earth, and drank; and when, at last, bloated and drenched, he allowed himself to lift his head and breathe, he was overtaken by a vision. He saw, he wrote later, “a splendid City, replete with and dedicated to the sundry pursuits of Knowledge, Art, and Faith; truly a second Athens, through whose avenues progressed Architects, Mathematicians, Clergymen, Poets, and Scientists of all sorts; and having in it a great College, which stood upon the Cliffside, a Testament to the Power of Reason whose Beacon shined forth unto the savage and uncomprehending Plain!”
Hallucinations were hallucinations, and Chandler had seen his share; but the next morning, fortified by the springwater and the roasted flanks of his mules, the old prospector, for the first time in his dismal career, struck gold. As was customary, he interpreted his good fortune as a supernatural directive. He devoted the remainder of his life, and the balance of his riches, to realizing the learned city of his vision.
But the architects and the poets, for the most part, stayed East, and the ones who did not stay passed over Chandler’s city for the more agreeable frontier of California. The museums and zoos were never built; the electric railway, half-completed at the time of Chandler’s death, was left to sink, slat by slat, into the clay. The streets—laid out in golden rectangles, each named for a hero of the antique world—filled up with roughnecks, unsupervised children, and shopkeepers. The Temple of Reason stood empty for years. Finally it found use as a municipal convention center. By the time Stanley Higgs arrived, in 1950—thirty-five years before I met him, thirteen before I was born—the only reminder of the prospector’s vision was Chandler State University, Higgs’s new employer, which sat moodily on the mesa’s edge. The rest of Chandler City stretched out to the west, hanging back from the cliff.
Then, as now, Chandler State was known primarily for doling out a four-year diet of Western Civilization to whatever men and women of our state came forward to be educated, and for fielding a basketball team that could be relied upon each year to make a more or less brief appearance in the national collegiate playoffs. None of our academic departments were much thought of in their fields. The worst of them—the “hoops houses”—survived almost entirely on their reputations as dependable sources of credits for the basketball players. So the arrival of Higgs, a scholar of much-heralded promise, was an occasion of rare optimism; some, caught up in the excitement, went so far as to call it hope.
Higgs’s subject was the literature of the Gravine, a tiny valley-nation in the Soviet Carpathians. He had made his reputation on a thoroughly forgotten Gravinian poet of the thirties, a child of British expatriates named Henderson. Two years before, Higgs—gung ho back then for comp lit, combing Düsseldorf for certain letters of Hölderlin and his circle, to be digested into his dissertation thereon—had come across Henderson’s Poems Against the Enemies Both Surrounding and Pervading Us in a trashbin. He could tell from the first poem (untitled: “The wanton whores of Germany gum up my sight . . .”) that Henderson was not a great poet, or even a good one. Nonetheless, walking zig-zags through the blasted streets, holding the sour, mottled book in one hand, his gaze flickering from book to traffic to beggar to sky, Higgs was smitten. Smitten! He had not in general been given to discontinuity of feeling. But now—the awful, shriveled poems of Henderson firm in his memory, after a single reading—he saw that his life had been shunted to a new course, instantly and by accident, as in the ten-cent novels he suffered himself to read on the train. Henderson, in his hatred for the reader, for the female sex, for his adopted Germany—really, for everyone—had arrived at a sort of perfection of which ordinary and good poets could not be capable. His work was cleansed entirely of affect, wit, and sense. And so, as he read, was Higgs. He had to lean on a wall; he was shell-shocked; he could smell the evening’s fog coming in, and the fish. It was like a glimpse of a world where all laws were suspended: not just human laws but natural selection, the relation of energy to mass, gravity.
Higgs thought of his half-written thesis, its measured conclusions, its cadences, heaped on his dim desk at t
he rooming house, and was struck with a deep disconsolation, tinged with nausea. The thesis seemed a foolish waste of his energy and youth, and furthermore it seemed to him that he had known this for some time, months perhaps, the knowledge helpless until now to break through the sea wall of his consciousness. Again he looked down at his rescued volume. Absently, he flicked a daub of mayonnaise from its battered spine. He began to decide.
(This is a kind of legend too. The facts are checkable; I’ve checked them. But for Higgs’s thoughts I have had to rely on the testimony of his wife. Less than ideal, I admit—but the best I can do, under the circumstances, the unusual circumstances, which are perhaps, even at this early stage, gathering themselves above him, us . . .)
Four weeks later, back at Columbia, Higgs strode into his advisor’s office in an attitude of silent challenge, shut the door behind him, and dropped a stack of one hundred eighty-five typed pages on the desk. The pages were the first draft of his new dissertation, the paper that would earn him his degree a year early and make both him and Henderson household names—where by household, of course, I mean department of Gravinic literature. We have modest expectations, here in the business of learning. And even Higgs’s small celebrity was enough to arouse long-dormant ambitions in the sardonic, wizened hearts of our senior faculty. He was young and appropriately humble; his references were effusive; best of all, he had grown up in Chandler City and graduated from Chandler State itself. (Not a few professors spoke quietly of having remarked, even then, his promise—though he’d made B’s, though he’d been admitted to Columbia in the first place only because our state was “underrepresented,” their courteous way of saying “unrepresented.”) There was no question that Higgs could have had his pick from dozens of preferable institutions. But he had fixed on his alma mater. His fierce affection for his native terrain, he wrote our dean, had only been reinforced by his time East.
“Is he joking?” Dean Moresby thought, peering out at what terrain he could see from his office window: the campus lawn, gamely struggling to cover the unnourishing red clay, and the blacktop paths that crisscrossed the lawn, and the students progressing along the paths, themselves gamely struggling through the April heat, their curls drooping. Beyond the row of cloned Parthenons (the philosophy building, history, math) was the skyline: a few smokestacks, half obscured by a low, off-red awning of haze. “He’s joking.” But Higgs was serious. He made it clear that his intention was to stay on at Chandler State as long as he was welcome. By all indications it would be a long time.
The dean, accompanied by his wife and younger daughter, met Higgs at the train station. Above them, on the pediment, Hephaestos wrestled sullenly with an ingot. And at the appointed time came Higgs, doing little better with his luggage.
Dean Moresby moved forward: “I’ll get it.”
Higgs shook his head, withheld his valises.
“But it’s perfectly all right,” the Dean maintained, without conviction: then, as they turned toward the exit, “Let me introduce my wife, Mary, and my daughter, Pamela.”
“Our oldest attends Vassar,” Mrs. Moresby said.
“All right,” Higgs said. They proceeded in silence to the car, looking, Dean Moresby thought, like a family retrieving their son from school back East—Higgs could have passed for twenty. Clean living? More good news, if so. But then again, Higgs was silent on the drive back, which could betoken secret thoughts; and, more worrying, for the length of the trip, despite all Moresby’s collegiality, his exclamations on the unexclaimable scenery, even an arm thrown genially, and at some risk to all involved, about the new man’s shoulders, Higgs—like a coward, like a banker, like a sneak—refused to meet his eyes.
But it turned out Higgs was always like that. His eyes, turned down at the corners like a sheepdog’s, were never still. Otherwise he was handsome. His face was boyish and broad, his skin clear; his hair sprigged out above his ears in an agreeably academic fashion. In photos from those days he comes off as one inclined to good cheer, committee membership, uncontroversial politics. He seems the picture of easy charm; but in fact he was not charming. It was those eyes. And then, too, there was the way he talked. Higgs never said a word that was off the point, and it was unknown for him to commit an error of fact. His sentences hewed tightly to every standard of grammar and usage, so that he gave the impression of reciting from memory. But his speech was marked by judicious pauses, tiny and ever-present, and during these pauses, it was understood, he must have been composing his remarks. He was polite—everyone agreed on that. But even his politeness was eerily precise; as if he’d had to learn about politeness in books, had skimmed through all the formulas of courtesy and rehearsed the ones he thought he’d need.
So not charming, no, but still . . . it was Higgs’s uncanny eloquence, more than his prestigious degree, more than the brilliance and influence of his dissertation, that kindled in his new colleagues the hope that the university might come in their lifetimes to resemble the motto that Tip Chandler, in the giddy aftermath of groundbreaking, had affixed to the college seal: Athenae Occidentalis Americae. But: no Athens without Pericles, no Algonquin without Dorothy Parker, no Metropolis (if I may) without Superman. Now there was Higgs. And among the professors there was a sense of bare possibility, a sense that things might be about to change for the better, sharply and finally, as if by a sudden tectonic shift.
Higgs seemed completely unaware of the commotion his arrival had occasioned. He was installed in a private office with an air conditioner and a cliffside view; he seldom left it. Toward the affairs of the university outside that one room he maintained a perfect indifference. Once that fall, at the regents’ dinner, in the thirtieth minute of an address on the patriotism of the American farmer, Dean Moresby leaned across a feathered matron and said “Stan.” (The dean hated calling Higgs “Stan.” He wanted badly to call him “Professor Higgs,” like everyone else. But there was something wrong with that from a dean.) “Stan,” he said fiercely—the matron drawing back ungracefully from the boggish smell of steak and bottom-shelf scotch—“Please let me thank you again for coming here.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Higgs said. “The steak is perfectly prepared.”
“Here to Chandler State,” Dean Moresby, dogged, went on. “Not here tonight. You can’t possibly imagine what it means to us—to the university. To the community.”
At this Higgs clicked into a thoughtful aspect.
“No,” he said, “I suppose I can’t.”
The state senator at the podium apostrophized an agricultural virtue whose very mention drew a swell of applause.
“Keep up the good work,” said the dean. Then both men joined the general clapping.
Higgs’s work, for now, consisted of assembling a chronology of Henderson. It would necessarily be fragmentary; Henderson had avoided notice not only as a poet, but in every other facet of life. His lone impingements on the public record were a Gravinian birth certificate dated December 16, 1900 (“the nineteenth century produced me and promptly expired in horror,” Henderson wrote in a rejected letter to the Frankfurter Zeitung) and a 1936 littering citation from the Berlin Department of Works. He rated occasional mentions, none long, few charitable, in the memoirs of his contemporaries. (In a never-performed verse play à clef by Hannah Höch, the character of “Heinrich the vile Pole” was believed by some to represent him.) Where he might be now, or even whether he was still alive, was unknown.
That first year, Higgs published papers on Henderson’s political stance (apathetic, occasionally reactionary), his education (cut off at sixteen by the Revolution), his tuberculosis (chronic), his influences (Greek mythology, the Kaiser). He wrote letters: to policemen who had served in Henderson’s neighborhood in Berlin, to the operators of local restaurants, to madams, druggists, launderers, to the building workers in his apartment house and to the crew who had fixed the road by his window, to his landlord and his landlord’s partners at cards, to every newspaper, large and small, within a hundred miles
of the city. To the post office in Henderson’s part of town he sent two hundred posters and fifty dollars for the trouble of nailing them up. Each bore the same message: Anyone having knowledge or reminiscence of a certain man—a thin overtall man with a wet cough, perhaps carrying a notebook or other writing platform, poor command of German, mostly seen alone—is urged to address correspondence to Stanley Higgs, bitte; there follows the university’s address. There were few responses, and most of those that did come back were useless: obvious misidentifications, intimations of sightings joined to requests for advance payment, letters suggesting blackly that Higgs was somebody or other’s agent, and offering, again for a price, not to tell. Perhaps one letter in a hundred came back a success. A newspaper salesman recalled overhearing Henderson curse a photo of King George v. He was said to have worn a coat sewn together from rags. A bricklayer reported that Henderson wore a gold crown on one of his teeth. (Higgs sent letters to every dentist in Berlin.)
With each of Higgs’s papers the Henderson scholars grew in number and influence. A Henderson Society formed up, whose presidency Higgs courteously, and curtly, declined. Graduate applications began arriving in Chandler City from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, even Moscow, each one breathlessly setting forth the extreme desirability—no, the necessity—of its author being chosen to work side by side with the great man, Higgs. It was unprecedented. And when Dean Moresby, trampling all protocol, offered Higgs tenure at the end of the year, there were few grumbles from the faculty. For the first time in decades they were united in a higher purpose than their meager individual advancements.
Whatever naysayers remained were silenced when Higgs was invited to address the plenary session of an international literary conference at Trieste. The conference was at the height of its fashionability that year, and Higgs’s speech was a tremendous success. A profile in the New York Times ensued, along with a spray of prizes, recognitions, various memberships in learned societies. The last faculty member invited to speak overseas had been an elderly astronomer who, misaligning the lens of the campus telescope, had inadvertently photographed a new satellite of Jupiter. That had been 1920.