The English Disease

by Joseph Skibell

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

THE ENGLISH DISEASE is a remarkable feat, a story that mixes the Marx brothers and Maimonides, pornographic yoga with Polish paranoia, and the brutality of kindergarten with the beauty of the Kiddush. It's the tale of Charles Belski, an expert in the works of Gustav Mahler, who, like Mahler himself, is talented and neurotic, and a nonpracticing Jew.

Belski suffers guilt over his own contribution to the decline of the Jewish religion, especially since he married a gentile and now has a gentile daughter. As if he can't conjure up enough angst on his own, his great-grandfather appears before him in a dream to admonish him for neglecting the obligations of his faith.

For Belski, the dilemma is how an assimilated intellectual can connect with an ancient and irrational (to him) religion without losing his sense of self. Is he the self-hating Jew that his obstreperous colleague pegs him for? Can his wife and daughter bully him into opening up his heart and letting in a little joy? Belski tries to come to grips with the meaninglessness of modern life, the demands of tradition, the nature of love and fidelity, and the true significance of the lyrics to Goodnight Irene.

Joseph Skibell has written a novel that is sad, funny, daring, and ultimately redemptive.

Release date: September 15, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

English melancholiacs used to tour the ruins of Antiquity as a cure for their depression, which was, in fact, at the time called the English Disease. It was thought that somehow the contemplation of actual ruins would make one’s own ruined life seem less hateful, and that these dilapidated but still beautiful structures might suggest to the sensitive melancholiac the possibility of finding beauty in his own misery, indeed as essential to it.

Masturbation was a part of the English Disease, not just depression. I mention this for no particular reason. It’s unclear to me how a trip, say, to Italy might effect that vice, but I imagine it has something to do with all the open piazzas.

America, too, is filled with ruins. Or the West, at least: Chaco Canyon; Mesa Verde; Betatakin, this cracked and crumbling village of stone houses, hewn into the rockface cavern of an enormous protective butte, not more than a few hundred yards long, but an entire universe, probably, for the people who once lived in it. There’s little trace now of the Anasazi, according to our guide, no more than a few glyphs, a scattered collection of cliff dwellings and an astonishingly symmetrical system of roads. No one knows where they went when they left or even where they buried their dead. It’s a curious fact, but there are no graves here, and it occurs to me to wonder, standing in the shadow of its broken forms, how the Anasazi treated their depression.

“Why would they be depressed, Charles, if they didn’t die?” Isabelle says petulantly, blue eyes narrowing behind mauve lenses and I suppose she has a point, although there is still the masturbation problem, probably not unknown even to the unmelancholic Anasazi. And what about the Italians? it occurs to me to wonder. Surrounded on all sides by ruin and beauty, where were they sent for their depression? To Greece, it’s safe to assume, plenty of ruins there, all of civilization’s, in fact, but at least they knew where their dead were buried, which is more than I can say for myself. My ancestors’ bones are probably on exhibit in some Holocaust museum deep in the Polish countryside.

Now, there’s a depressing thought and I can’t help scowling at Isabelle. How stupid to think a trip out West could save our marriage.

AFTER NEARLY THREE quarters of an hour, the tour guide is ready to leave the ancient village. It’s a long walk up to the parking lot in the blistering Arizona sun. Hurrying only makes it worse, and yet I can’t seem to help myself. In front of me, a tall man, his hands carefully placed upon his hips, ascends the endless stone staircase slowly in what looks like perfect, rapturous calm. His chin is square, enormous. He calls out in Swiss German to his children, who scamper and scurry like rugged goats up and down the bleached stone switchback.

“Probably nothin’ compared to the mountains in their backyard, yuh?” a fellow struggler says to me between puffs of heated air.

I permit myself a smile, albeit a peevish one.

It’s unbearable, this heat, and I have no wish to be jollied or insinuated into this man’s misery-loving company. I’ve lost sight now of Isabelle. I don’t know where she is or even if she’s behind or in front of me. I feel an urgent need to punish her for everything that is happening, including the fact that I don’t know where she is so that I can’t, and the indecision over whether to hurry the rest of the way up or to wait for her here so that I may upbraid her immediately only makes the walk more and more unpleasant. She’s not in the rickety old school bus they brought us in from the ranger station; I see that as soon as I emerge over the plateau line into the dirt lot. I refuse to descend again in order to meet her coming up, and I wait, instead, seething, inside the bus, without ventilation, surrounded by these happy Swiss, so obnoxious in their indifference to the misery all around them.

When Isabelle finally arrives, she’s accompanying an elderly couple who gibber incoherently, half-scalded out of their minds with probable sunstroke. The old man’s pate is boiled a violent lobster red. His bewildered wife searches idiotically through her handbag for the car keys she will not, until later, need. Isabelle helps them to a seat and takes her place beside me. Neither of us speaks, although she can’t help grasping my arm when the bus, at full speeds, trundles down the winding mountain road, edging impossibly close to the drop-off. She whispers “Stop!” and “Please stop! “ involuntarily towards the back of the driver, who couldn’t hear her over the bus’s rumble even if she shouted at him in full voice, as she has done so often lately at me.

I can’t help being further annoyed.

She’s the one who insisted on this trip.

WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS been the source of my greatest unhappiness, beginning with Alma Mahler and my researches into her husband Gustav’s life when I was but a graduate student. Isabelle says I’m wrong to take it personally, but how could she have slept with the architect Gropius and all the others while her husband, music’s most melancholic genius, was slowly and painfully dying, transforming whatever was left of his life into the late magisterial works?

This is not a situation with which I am altogether unfamiliar. At least by analogy. I don’t compare myself to Mahler, but the night before I was to defend my dissertation on the Second Symphony, for instance, I found my then-girlfriend in bed with her roommate, an alluring woman I myself had at one time considered stepping outside of the relationship to approach. None of their well-meaning excuses, nothing they said, could, the next day, erase from my mind, the horrifyingly indelible picture of the two of them devouring each other on her stained futon, their four full breasts corseted tightly against their twin abdomens, as I sat before my doctoral committee. Happily, I passed; but then, not more than two years later, with my first extended monograph, Neuroticism and the Opening Heart in the Song Cycles of Gustav Mahler, accepted for publication, my editor at the university press, an unstable woman that even people with no interest in my work had warned me against, disappeared for five agonizing weeks with the only complete copy of the text. Later, she revealed to me that upon arrival in Montréal for a professional conference, she had given in to an overwhelming need to scour the Canadian border towns in search of the child she’d been forced, as a troubled and unmarried teenager in Ottawa, to surrender up for adoption. Hot on the trail, she had simply forgotten that she had brought along the manuscript to proof, and now, reasonable again and returned to the States and to a somewhat more drastic dosage of Lithium, she felt it was only a matter of time before she might recall, with any clarity, the name of the motel in which it had been left.

(The manuscript, unlike the child, was never located. I see him sometimes around the department, an awkward adolescent, nervous like his mother.)

There were other women, of course, as my life and career progressed, each, it seemed, with her own portion of my heart to break, until at last I met Isabelle and fell in love with her out of exhaustion, more than anything else. This isn’t true, of course. She was catering a faculty recital the first time I saw her, and despite a debilitating migraine, I couldn’t help following her into the kitchen and speaking to her there. Even through the patterned distortions in my visual field (a common migraine symptom), her beauty was alarming. Everything about her seemed blonde. She had large, blonde hands, blonde skin, eyes that were blue, of course, actually, but which were impossible for me, when I conjured her face on the grey walls of my office, to imagine as anything other than blonde.

Her clothes were blonde, and her apartment, or at least its furnishings, which were principally of varnished pine.

I would awaken in the middle of the night, sunken deep in the overstuffed comforters of her bed, and gaze at the long blonde dunes of her body shimmering in the moonlight like a vast expanse of Mediterranean beach in which I had temporarily lost my way. Together, we huddled beneath her sheets, and in the morning, I sat at her wobbly breakfast table and watched her move through her small kitchen like a glistening refraction of golden light, brightening everything she touched, including (most palpably) my own dour moods, which assailed me at a less severe frequency than at any other time I could easily recall.

Isabelle forgave me my sadnesses, my habitual cynicism, and my tendency to speak to her as though I were refuting an accusation made by a rival’s hostile claque.

NOW, WHENEVER ISABELLE is angry, she brings up Gustav Mahler.

True, it’s a fact that before they were married, he forbade Alma to continue on with her own compositions, refusing to marry her otherwise, but I’ve never understood what this has got to do with me, or with Isabelle, for that matter. We are probably the only people in the entire Southwest discussing the subject at the moment, certainly the only two campers in all of Canyon-lands who even know who Gustav Mahler is or was.

It’s not exactly the sort of conversation by which one usually pitches a tent.

This current assault on poor Gustav (who, let us remember, had problems of his own) began shortly after we pulled out of the Navajo National Monument and has increased steadily in animus the farther we’ve driven north into Utah.

And what can one say?

Mahler was a neurotic, granted; an egoist, and a depressive in frail health. It was a different age; men thought of women differently.

Useless to point out that his young wife accepted and stuck to the terms of this idiosyncratic agreement while flagrantly disregarding the weightier ones of her marriage vow. Is it really possible that a woman who would think nothing of sleeping with half of fin de siècle Vienna, who had the ingenuity to stage-manage, well into the twentieth century, a complicated rotation of transatlantic trysts and assignations, couldn’t find a quiet hour away from a busy husband and her two already neglected children to clandestinely compose?

“But composition is not supposed to be a clandestine activity, Charles!” Isabelle nearly screams this, and her voice resounds throughout the deserted canyons. “Infidelity by its very nature is. Comparing the two is totally unfair!”

The tension we’ve been feeling reaches its breaking point and we very nearly come to physical blows over the collapsible tent spines. Neither of us, at this moment, can believe that the other knows anything about constructing a tent. Fortunately, the metal spikes are too dull to pierce skin or else the temptation to stab one another might prove overwhelming. It’s absurd, this petty little war of ours, waged in a landscape as vast and empty as the Heavens. Canyonlands, for those of you who have never seen it, looks like nothing so much as a life-size version of one of those castle-like candle sculptures hippies used to sell in head shops when I was a boy and that are once again popular, those flowing, overcomplicated fire hazards whose architects must have conceived of them through a psilocybinic haze and which Cloud (her real name Marjorie), fetching in a tie-dyed nightshirt, always lit on the bookshelf above her bed the summer I relaxed my strict prohibition against dating any of my students. Its sloping rock hills are a porous limestone called tufa, remarkably facile for climbing, and I’m aware of an impulse to walk out of my marriage by ascending the steep rock wall we’ve pitched our little green tent against, continuing to the highest peaks, ignoring Isabelle’s regret-filled cries, and vaulting into the Empyrean like the biblical Enoch, although Enoch probably—almost certainly—wasn’t running from his wife.

“You can be sure if Mahler had had affairs,” Isabelle presses the point, “they would have been clandestine!”

She ties down a portion of the tent guard.

“But he didn’t, Isabelle, did he?”

“No?” she says. “And why not?”

“Because how could he?” I say. “He was too depressed over Alma for one thing!”

“That’s not the point I’m making, Charles. That is not my point and you know it!”

“And have I asked you to stop composing?” I say boldly in my own defense, immediately aware of how stupid it sounds.

“I’m not a composer, Charles.”

Needlessly, she reminds me of this.

“Or whatever your analogy is.”

“My analogy? My analogy is that I just follow you around, blindly doing whatever you want to do, never asking myself what I want to do, so that we never, in fact, do any of the things I want!”

“Like what?” I say, although I regret it immediately.

It’s no use asking Isabelle for specific examples. She’s too good at throwing them in your face.

“You didn’t want to take this trip, for instance!”

“Because I hate to travel, Isabelle, and you know that!”

“Oh—oh and right—and I’m just supposed to live without it then?”

“But you’re not. Look around you!” I say. “We’re traveling. I’m the one who’s miserable!”

“Yes and making sure I don’t enjoy a minute of it. . . .”

We continue on this way as the afternoon grows short and our tent is completed and our pillows and our mats and our sleeping bags and everything else, including ourselves—(“Don’t you dare touch me!” Isabelle screams)—have been thrown in through its open flap. Inside, we sit on the small hillocks of our sleeping bags, our faces closer than they’ve been in weeks, pressed together now not by the sensual impulsion of a kiss, rather by the narrowing apex of the canvas sheeting. At this range, so near, I can’t ignore the anger traveling visibly across Isabelle’s features, darkening her normally placid face.

All this talk about Alma Mahler—even after all these years, she’s still breaking hearts!—but what could Isabelle have meant by it? Usually she has no patience for the trivialities associated with my work: poor ailing Gustav; his heartless, unfaithful Alma.

Why, suddenly, so spirited a defense?

It’s as though someone, a djinn, had breathed the words into my ear. Certain pointed questions uncurl themselves inside my brain: Has she taken a lover? I wonder. Is that what this is all about? Is she seeing someone behind my back?

These unpleasant thoughts announce themselves as the first light taps of rain, hitting the tent, break into our concentrated animosities. A gigantic thunderclap follows and, instantly, before either of us can say another word, the tent begins to fill with water. I unzip the opaque flap and, through the transparent screening, see a river of rainwater coursing down the rockface and covering the small plateau upon which we’ve constructed our little tent.

There is nothing else to do.

I jump through the flap into the downpour, followed by the whirring murmur of lightning-quick zippers as Isabelle seals herself in behind me. The water is already almost an inch above the tent bottom and, on my knees and soaking wet, I dig a moat by hand into the softened reddish loam, encircling the tent like some medieval king, protecting his wife and castle, but too late, from invaders.

My circle complete, I stand on the far shore of the muddle, a wet and silent figure among the dripping cacti.

The momentary break in the rain lasts only long enough for the two of us to repack our things into the tiny trunk of. . .