ON THE GROUNDS THAT HE WAS STARVING TO death, he would exact from us the minutiae of advice on his alimentary problems to subsequently toss all advice aside in his audacious irresponsibility. Presenting himself as a pauper to the charitable organization of the Quakers, he had harvested, among other things, packages of macaroni and several pounds of cocoa, and as if these staple aliments were already consumed, he begged us to counsel him what to do now. He shook his head over the suggestion that he go there again. “My last supply is yet too recent,” he objected. But, Frau Feirlein told me, on the morrow he presented himself at her flat with these same Quaker gifts intact as an offering preliminary to his indistinct courtship. “What is the use of cocoa to me,” he argued with my bewilderment, “I have no sugar.” And, for some vague reason, one took the opposition of his prodigality to his mendicancy as a matter of course. This reason consisted in an intuition, so deeply imbedded in one’s subconscious it would not rise to the surface of the mind until the final phase in one’s analysis of him—that this skeletal symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of. Throughout his angling for compassion on behalf of his utter destitution, one never resented his open carelessness in throwing back the fish.
Meanwhile, his reserved distinction, as of an aristocrat who should in a lasting revolution have experienced yet unimaginably survived the guillotine, was so consistent it claimed one’s respect for his nonsensical manner of being alive. But once was this impression dispelled when, in courteous haste to answer a question, he shifted the part of a hard roll sandwich he was eating, out of the way, horrifyingly developing a Dali-like protuberance of elongated flesh with his flaccid facial tissue. As if unexpectedly the Schlosser one had hitherto been incapable of relating to him had at length intruded upon us with his anvil stuffed in his cheek.
Only towards the close of his reminiscences did he seem to have shared a responsibility with normal men: “They sent me to war,” he told us wryly, voicing that unconvincing complaint against their perpetual situation in the ridiculous made by people who, pleasing to laugh at themselves, one suspects of aiding destiny in detaining them there, “in two left-foot boots, and,” trotting his fingers along the table in a swerve, “the one would follow the other,” he explained as the mental eye also followed that earlier Insel—out of the ranks; on the march to a war that, at its blasting zenith, ceased to be war, for, in elaborating his martial adventures, Insel turned out to have been taking part in a film.
A wound up automaton running down, Insel ceased among the clatter of our amusement.
“I know how you can make money,” I exclaimed agog with enthusiasm. “Write your biography.”
“I am a painter,” he objected. “It would take too long building a style.”
“You’d only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously—like an ant! Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your life?”
“Then start at once.”
“It would need so much careful editing. In the raw it would be scandalous—”
“Scandalous,” I cried scandalized— “the truth? Anyway you can write under a pseudonym.”
“People would recognize me.”
“Don’t you know anything of the world? The artist’s vindication does not lie in ‘what happens to him’ but in what shape he comes out.”
“Oh,” said Insel disinhibiting, “very well. It’s not the material that is wanting,” he sighed wearily, “the stacks of manuscript notes I have accumulated!”
Then, “No,” he reversed, “it’s not my medium.”
“Insel,” I asked breathlessly, “would you let me write it?”
“That would be feasible,” he answered interested. “We will make a pact. Get me to America and you have the biography.”
“Done,” I decided. “I’ll write at once. America shall clamor for you.”
“Don’t overdo it,” warned Insel, “it never works.”
“You can have your dinners with me and tell me— Can you really remember—the minutest details?”
“Every one,” he assured me.
“What a book,” I sighed with satisfaction.
“Flight from Doom—every incident distorted to the pattern of an absurd destiny,” Insel was looking delighted with himself.
He came out to dinner on a few evenings and I would talk with him for hours. The minute details were fewer than I had bargained for, his leitmotif being his strangeness in so seldom having spoken.
“My parents noticed it at once,” he told me. “As a child I would remain absolutely silent for six months at a time.”
He did not give a fig for heredity. All his relatives were chatty.
Another thing he had found in himself was his aptitude for housework. He had once married a stenographer, who simply could not arrange the kitchen with the same precision as he.
“She tried so hard—for so long. She never came up to the mark. What I disliked was her plagiarism. Why,” demanded Insel with retrospective annoyance, “could she not have worked out a system of her own?”
So they separated. Later, when Insel and I became uncannily intimate I understood what his unique orderliness had done to the girl—given her the jitters!
Nevertheless, he himself seemed sometimes to have difficulty in locating things. Once during coffee he drifted off to the lavabo and on his return took a seat some tables away from the one at which he had left me. In the same slightly deferent sociable concern he continued to “pay attention”—
The strain on this biography would consist in his too facile superposing of separate time—his reminiscences flitted about from one end of his life to the other.
“I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a taxi the other day—a portrait of some women. They were extraordinarily attractive to me; I was sure we would have been profoundly congenial. It was labeled ‘The Brontë Sisters.’ Do you know of anyone by that name?” asked Insel, who had not read Goethe nor heard of Shakespeare. “The dealer told me they were authoresses—I feel I should care for what they have written.”
“The sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. I suppose it is one of the greatest novels ever written. I never remember for very long, after having read it, what it’s about—yet whenever I think of it—I find myself standing on wild moors—alone with the elements—elements become articulate—. You would care for it very much.”
I began to think it improbable I should even find a basis for this biography. He was so at variance with himself, he existed on either side of a paradox. Even as he begged for food to throw away, forever in search of a haven, he preferred any discomfort to going home. Constantly he thanked his stars for an iron constitution—while obviously in an alarming state of health.