The Grasshopper King Read online

  The Gravinics department was a hoops house—one of the worst. The chairman, Professor Rosso, had been a Princeton cager, and was willing, even eager, to invent passing grades for members of the squad. Under the circumstances, Dean Moresby told Higgs, it was perhaps the best thing to waive the ordinary teaching requirement, and it would be no trouble. But Higgs insisted. He would be happy to teach, he told the dean; he did not want to be perceived as commanding special favors, and, moreover, he was confident that the athletes, presented with an enthusiastic and thorough account of the material, would become inclined to learn.

  And against all reason, Higgs was right. Something in Henderson’s crabbed, defiled poems struck a resonant spot in the minds of the basketball players. His persecution was somehow their own. In his commingled affection and condescension toward the Kaiser (“my blundering, beloved uncle with the spiked derby”) and the German war machine, they saw mirrored their own ambivalence toward the nonstop routine of competition; his dismissals of religion, rule of law, and the rights of women were topical and thrilling; his scarlet hatred of the intellectual and all his accoutrements was not unfamiliar to them. Soon Higgs’s course was joined by players from the other hoops houses: from physical education they came, from Spanish and journalism, from agricultural studies and the rest. By the end of the semester the whole team was in his class. There were no absences or late papers, and no end-of-term visits to Rosso. Higgs had made students of them. Quite a few quit basketball altogether to devote themselves more fully to Henderson; though among these there was only one starter, and he’d broken his wrist.

  And the rest of the team: in practice they were sullen and insubordinate, slogging through drills as if each layup, each free throw were a personal and spiteful imposition. But at game time they played with a fierceness such as Coach Mahemeny had never seen. It made him uneasy (he told me) but he knew that he was an older man and it was his time to become uneasy with the new ways of doing things. And it worked, whatever it was. His unsmiling players had developed a ghostly way of slipping out from their coverage, then, alone, flicking in a jumper, not even watching to see the shot drop in—was it a kind of contempt he saw in their eyes? But it worked. They were humiliating the opposition.

  In 1956 the Prospectors won the national championship in Syracuse. To celebrate the players’ return the university organized a gigantic reception at the convention center downtown. Some five hundred of Chandler City’s notables filed between the chipped, stolid columns of the former Temple of Reason, into the great open ballroom, lined floor to ceiling with empty marble shelves. It was to have been the library.

  Higgs drifted among the celebrants, bearing an untouched scotch and water. Arnold Meadows, the mayor, was calling the players to the podium one by one. The P.A. lifted their names to the marble ceiling, where they shattered and echoed down into the crowd, incomprehensible. The mayor was fresh from his own national triumph. He had convinced the previous session of Congress to attach to an uncontroversial appropriations bill a provision to study the feasibility of tapping the mysterious source of Tip Chandler’s spring for geothermal energy. The first group of federal geologists, and the first installment of the concomitant federal funds, had arrived in town the month before.

  At the party too was Ellen Moresby, the dean’s daughter, home from Vassar on spring break. Her father had made her come. She made a point, whenever she could, of avoiding university functions, which she found provincial, and which were always well-attended by old men in ridiculous mustaches who wouldn’t stop looking down her dress. She was halfway through her second gin and tonic and she knew she would soon have to find something to do but drink. Otherwise she would start laughing at people and it would be bad for her father.

  When she saw the slight young man standing in the corner, bearing an expression of such perfect peace and detachment that he seemed to believe himself alone in the cavernous ballroom, she thought: ah, there’s someone. She supposed he was a teaching fellow—he’d wrestled the starting point guard through Math 1, or something, and this was his reward, this hallful of cold cuts and deviled eggs and awful bores. Presumably he was a bore as well. But he was almost certain not to tell her what a fine young lady she’d grown up to be.

  “I hate these things,” Ellen said, joining him.

  Higgs leaned back thoughtfully, resting his hands on the shelf behind him as if testing its ability to hold his weight.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Higgs said.

  His politeness made Ellen’s face hot. “I mean it,” she said.

  “‘Hate’ is a strong word,” he said. “Do you really mean it? It suggests malice. Are you willing to say you want this party”—he gestured upward and outward—“destroyed? If you could, would you end it now and ensure that it was never repeated?”

  “Don’t joke. It’s asinine.”

  “I’m not joking. I’m only making sure I understand what you mean.”

  “Well, I don’t hate it, then, not the way you take it. I dislike it—is that all right?”

  “It’s all right with me.”

  “And I dislike basketball too, if you want to know. It’s moronic. It makes me sick the way they go on about it as if they’d cured polio or something. I dislike that. The absolute honest truth is that there isn’t anything about this stupid place I don’t dislike. What do you think of that, mister?”

  She was too drunk already. The sickening realization silenced her. She had embarrassed herself in front of a stranger, her father would have to leave early to drive her home, he’d be furious; and wouldn’t he be right?

  But Higgs didn’t denounce her; didn’t stalk away, didn’t summon her father. He just stood there, head cocked, at a loss for words. If Ellen had known who he was, or had heard anything of his reputation, she would have known just how extraordinary this was; but she didn’t know. She thought he was giving her another chance.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was inappropriate. I’m a little drunk.”

  “It was perfectly appropriate. As long as you meant it.”

  “I did mean it.” She was confused now as to what they were discussing. But she liked the stranger’s weird forthrightness. It emanated from him like a soothing light. It inspired her to forwardness.

  “Do you like it here?” she said.

  “Yes,” he told her. His eyes were fixed on her face—and this great anomaly, too, she was unequipped to recognize. “I like it here a great deal.”

  “You must be nuts.”

  “Do I look like nuts?” Higgs said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Higgs cocked a finger at her. A joke. Suddenly it seemed the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She knew it was the alcohol, or relief at not being in trouble; but she couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Acorns,” she said, when she could breathe. “Almonds. You look like a big pile of pistachios.”

  “If I’m nuts,” Higgs said, “who are you?”

  “I’m Ellen Moresby,” she said. “My father is the dean.”

  There it was: the admission that had gotten her chucked from a dozen fraternity parties in her teenage years—“See you at school,” her friends said from the front porch, beaming, each with a brother’s thickset arms around her lucky waist. . . . She studied Higgs’s face. If he blanched—or, still worse, if opportunism clinked to life in his eyes—the conversation was over. She could walk home from here.

  Higgs just nodded. He offered his hand.

  “I’m Stanley Higgs,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  And this last conventionality was uttered with an expression of such concentration that it seemed not a conventionality at all; it seemed like something that had never before been said. It seemed, that is, as if Higgs meant it.

  The party went on around them: hundreds of hands lifting pigs-in-blankets to equally many champing mouths, feet shuffling, arms pumping, the echoing din of men punctuated by shouts of recognition—“Rogers!” “Old man!”—the drink-reddened c
heeks of the triumphant crowd . . . Three hours passed. The Prospectors departed, the floodlights were shut off, the drunkest guests sat morosely alone, faces cupped against the half-light. And by the time Dean Moresby arrived, query-eyed, to take his daughter home, she and Higgs were lovers—more or less.

  Ellen went back to Vassar, and the two exchanged long letters for the remainder of the term. In July they were married in a businesslike ceremony at the university chapel; Dean Moresby, relinquishing his daughter, could not help reflecting glumly that now he would always have to call Higgs “Stan.” Ellen transferred to Chandler State, which she had come to dislike much less, for her final year. The couple moved into a gabled two-story house on the edge of campus—that is, on the edge of the cliff—from which the anthropology department had been summarily ushered out. Ellen, who had never been handy, surprised herself by taking great pleasure in the house’s workings, in checking the caulking and the soundness of the joists, the bolts of the thick mahogany door. Might one suppose she felt some premonition of the day, still nearly two decades in the future, when she would set that bolt in vain against the men from the university with their wires and tape recorders; or even speculate further that Ellen’s habit of leaving the radio on all day, turned so loud she could hear it in every room, was a remedy in advance for the silence that was on its way? One might. But what would be the use?

  An unlabelled, water-damaged reel tape, fifty minutes long, in the university library’s repository downtown, is the only recording still in existence of a lecture by Higgs. Click the tape into the apparatus, lean firmly on PLAY (the button sticks) and listen: an aggregate of youthful voices, the beseeching scrape of desks. Professor Higgs has not yet arrived. There’s about a minute of this; a soft voice behind the microphone saying, “Check. Check. Check”—and then Higgs enters, or so we infer from the sudden settling of conversation. Mentally we grant him ten or fifteen seconds to mount the dais. But the pause is longer; it stretches; we wait thirty seconds, a minute, and still there is no sound but the anxious coughing of the undergraduates. What is he waiting for? We strain to hear the rustling of notes on the podium; but Higgs, we remember, never used notes. He lectured from memory, or, for all we know, impromptu. Someone close to the microphone says to his neighbor, “That’s what she actually said, can you believe it?” The neighbor: “I can’t believe it.” The first boy: “And you know what I said?”

  But we never find out, because just then Higgs begins to speak.

  “Henderson between the wars,” Higgs says, “was a figure of solitude, and an object, when his solitude was interrupted, of derision and contempt. He was an expatriate in Berlin held fast by perfectly balanced hatreds for Germany and his homeland. His linguistic skills were negligible and his philosophic viewpoint was juvenile. For all these reasons, and for other reasons which I will put forth to you during the term, Henderson’s body of work constitutes one of the most important poetic moments of the century. In this class—”

  But here the aged tape gives way to the inflictions of moist years. The lecture dissolves into a high angry screech, ten minutes long, like a superhuman trumpet blast, and when the sound comes back Higgs is reading from Poems Against the Enemies Both Surrounding and Pervading Us.

  He reads: “. . . the hectoring of the vendors of spoiled fish/ is equal in offensiveness to/ the/ hideous coughing of my mother/ Berlin is dying/ of syphilis and I/ am its rotting nose.”

  And from the lecture hall there is silence, a perfect and unnatural silence, unbroken by the clearing of a throat, the scratching of a pen, or the shifting of a single chair. The students are transfixed. Before five minutes have passed the tape goes silent too, all the way to the end, and that is all that remains of the voice of Professor Higgs—all, that is, except one word. But here, again, I’m getting ahead of the story.

  So: years passed, uneventfully enough. Higgs had gained a measure of fame among the undergraduates, not so much for his scholarly standing as for his habit, when warm weather came around, of playing checkers with students on the outdoor tables in the quad. He was very good. He was known to play one man down, or blindfolded, with an onlooker calling out his opponent’s moves. When the whim struck him he would play three blind games at once, striding between the tables with his arms waving madly in front of him. Girls crowded the tables to watch him; in concentration he was fascinating, his fickle gaze hidden behind the gingham blindfold, his arm’s motion, as he reached for a checker, as smooth and quiet as a submarine.

  After a particularly commanding victory, or trio of victories, the bravest of the coeds might press forward to ask Higgs a question: what was his secret?

  Higgs seemed embarrassed by this attention. He lifted the blindfold from his face and let it dangle off one finger as he surveyed his opponents’ hopeless positions—as if he didn’t know exactly what he’d see. He demurred: “It’s simply a matter of thoroughness. One has to consider every possible move and eliminate those that lead to defeat. That’s all.”

  Out in the world there were the missiles in Cuba and all the nagging worry that followed—red-starred boots tromp-tromping on Fifth Avenue and all that. The university, miles from anyplace that could even generously be called strategic, went about its sober business. The basketball team continued winning many more games than it lost; the children of the state kept marching through the terms, en route to the slots awaiting them in the middle levels of hardware stores and banks; and Higgs went on publishing.

  His project now was a survey of Henderson’s influence on his contemporaries. Henderson ought to have—was previously thought to have—influenced exactly nobody. His books were underprinted and unreviewed; worse, they were in a hinterland language that no one of any importance bothered to understand, and whose grammatical complexities had frustrated even those few who had attempted to so bother. Before Higgs, only Poems Against the Enemies had even been translated, and that so amateurishly that the German edition appeared as Verses for the Foreigner Who Lives Inside My Body. But Henderson’s work, despite all, had made its way to the literary heroes of Europe. A German girlfriend had given Sartre Poems Against the Enemies as a joke. Brecht, like Higgs, had found it in the trash—so had Böll. Paul Celan, caught in a downpour on the Kurfürstendamm, had ducked arbitrarily into Café Maeterlinck, where Henderson was giving a rare reading in his execrable German. And so it went. Higgs exposed these links, and dozens more like them; not satisfied, he probed the writers’ works, line by line, teasing out the traces of Henderson’s thoughts, the echoes of his maladroit phrasings, his psychic fingerprints—unmistakable once pointed to—blotting their clean white pages. Henderson had infiltrated the world’s literature through the low cunning of coincidence; now Higgs had found him out.

  In the midst of this, in March of 1965, Higgs received a letter from Dr. Georg Knabel, Henderson’s dentist. Higgs had located the man years before, in connection with the matter of the gold crown. The dentist had responded to Higgs’s inquiries with one uninspiring sentence: “I recall Henderson only as a particularly contrary patient.”

  But now Dr. Knabel had come through. He had gone to London for a three-day conference on cosmetic prosthodontics, and on the last night, careening drunkenly down Fleet Street with his fellow whiteners and unsnagglers, he had seen Henderson in a window. Was he sure? Higgs wrote back. Absolutely sure. He had recognized the upper left canine, his handiwork.

  Armed with the dentist’s description and a business map of London, Higgs was able to narrow the list of possible addresses to a few dozen. To each of these addresses he sent a letter, respectful but not obsequious, in perfect Gravinic, stating the author’s admiration for Henderson’s work, summarizing his research thus far, and gently inquiring as to Henderson’s possible interest in a mutually beneficial correspondence.

  Twenty of the letters returned unopened in the first two weeks, stamped “NO SUCH OCCUPANT.” More trickled in over the days that followed, each bearing the same gray message. Before long there was only one let
ter left extant. Months went by. Higgs’s colleagues did their best to encourage him. Surely, they said, Henderson was lingering over his response. No doubt he was tossing draft after draft out into the beery, ancient street.

  But when the letter came back it was Higgs’s own, sealed in a new envelope; under Higgs’s signature, a single Gravinic word was scrawled in red. The closest translation of Henderson’s response is “bastard”—but the English word fails to capture the specific connotation of a son who, not content with dishonoring his mother by his illegitimacy, rapes her upon achieving manhood and abandons her to the poverty of soiled women. In Gravinic there was no firmer way to say no. Higgs must have been disappointed; but he could not have been surprised.

  Soon afterwards, Coach Mahemeny retired. His replacement, a marginal ex-Piston named LaBart, found his players’ dedication to Gravinic more troublesome than Mahemeny had.

  “You can’t paddle a ship with two oars,” he told Dean Moresby significantly. “You can’t have two captains in the middle of the stream.”

  “You’re making sense,” Dean Moresby said.

  LaBart recruited players from his home territory: the flat, sun-blasted counties around Los Angeles. The new boys, shivering and dull-eyed, had no interest in Higgs’s class, or any class. LaBart enrolled them all in the brand-new mass communications department, to graduate from which they had only to perform mock sportscasts once a week and pass a multiple-choice test at the end of senior year.

  So Higgs’s course was cut in half, and subsequently it continued to dwindle. The ideological savor of those years had reached even to Chandler City, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Henderson was not—as they called it then—relevant. His views on women and racial minorities were retrograde, and his attachment to patriarchal militarism, in the person of Kaiser Wilhelm, was no longer endearing. The feeling was not restricted to our university. On the contrary, because of Higgs’s presence it was weaker there than elsewhere. Gravinicists worldwide were turning away from Henderson in favor of other, more palatable artists. A particular favorite was a poet from Henderson’s own hometown, a woman who for thirty years had worked loyally on the line at the provincial collective bread factory, tucking a revolutionary stanza into the crease of each loaf as it rolled by. The remaining Henderson scholars became defensive and mistrustful, exchanging beleaguered late-night calls from their home phones. There were further failed attempts to track down Henderson in London; he’d moved, or had convinced the post office to bounce his mail. This surprised no one. Their journal diminished to a dittoed newsletter, then gave out. Their field had settled into the status of a shared peculiarity; like it or not, they were in with the matchbook collectors now, the cat fanciers, and the Esperantists.