Joseph Aisenberg: I have not
yet read the whole story. First, I was struck by that spring-ridden couch
Natasha's father is laying around dying on; N. never got over that couch from
the opening of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Illych" did he? It's very
poetically written, but the scene where the man and the girl go out to the
country together and both turn out to be pathetic liars who are only more
enchanted by their boasting, is cute but not quite convincing. I'll get
back when I've finished up.
JM: I enjoyed J.Aisenberg's
description of the Baron and Natasha as "pathetic liars" in a "cute", but
unconvincing, rendering as I did his promise to "get back when I've
finished up".
The mercurial couch is not the father's, but
Natasha's, although he seems to have lost something underneath. A bed and a
couch...these begin to sound familiar ( I must return to
Tolstoy!)
Even in VN's early stories ( and rejects) I find
various levels of allusion. The Baron, permanently denying external
reality to invent new worlds, serves at the same time to denounce the alienation
of "ars gratia artis" and to suggest the connection bt. art and "the other
world". Natasha's self-absorption reminds me of a sexist sentence, by the
Viennese Freud, who states that men usually fall in love with narcisistic ( ergo
infantile) women in order to compensate for their own narcisism, which
they had to give up to perform in society. Or else they go for the
"anaclitic" maternal kind ( sometimes both?). The old man is a mystery to me,
unlike the formerly predatory and successful businessman in S&S. By the
inkstained newspapers and abundant cigarette stubs he might have been a printer
or newsman in a very small village, not necessarily a "visionary".