When Donne Made Him Do That

 

[initially written in about 2000 and reworked for public consumption in February, 2022]

When Donne Made Him Do That

     by Do Uglasreimer

Catherine Barkley wisely became Fredrick Henry’s “babe” in the red room in Vienna, though she felt “whorish” at the start when he proposed the red room, and when she was done with the difficult phases of entry into the room and the phase of getting into his “red room” spirit of adventure, she found she liked it. It was not easy to be vulnerable, but it was good. Will is pleasure. 

     Fredrick Henry thought about this as he wrote the section concerning Count Greffi. He and Count had shot pool. They had drunk drinks. They had discussed God. Then they’d parted forever, since Greffi was already ninety and getting on. Next, he and Cat found out in fear that Italians were investigating him and they would have to escape, immediately. They did that, after obtaining a skiff from a gentlemanly servant for a small sum. Rowing, they arrived in Switzerland, they rented a mountain Villa, they skied and they loved. Then, within a few weeks, the baby came due and Cat entered the hospital. There, waiting, he ate alone, across the street from the hospital, he prayed with fervency, he called on God to save her, she took much pain relief, and then she died. Outside, when he heard of it, it was raining. He walked home alone in the rain.

     He walked home alone in the rain. He walked like a statue walking, not looking right or left, unnerved, aimless, sightless, will-less, waifish. He walked, he ate little, he neither placed a hand in a pocket, nor scratched an itch on his nose. When traffic honked, he stopped. The twittering of a meadowlark told him suddenly that he had reached the outskirts of the city and gone beyond, he saw, into a hayfield. Still he trudged until he came, by hook or by crook, to his old apartment on Seventh Avenue.

      The circuity of the route he took recommended itself to him many times in the following months as he prepared to write about the living woman he had loved. He ignored all metaphors, however, because he was of fresh mind. His mind had no comparisons in it. No similes rang there to show a way out of the maze. Images suggested themselves to him now and then but, ignored, soon faded and disappear like type on a page of burning newsprint . 

     Once, when tempted by a set of words that, to one degree or another, smelt of and had been dirtied by counterfeitance, he listed them, contemplated using them, rejected their use, and suddenly flung them out the window. Now and then, though, he did employ a phrase from some book he recalled. Thus, Donne, Jonson, Schoppenhauer, Flagstaff, Milton, Dryden, Locke, Churchill, Flintstone, Wrigley, Chaucer, Wittgenstein, Niebuhr, Dante, Snellhemp and Wangly found their way into his prose, though usually only obliquely. Referential he was no more than he was deferential. 

     All this while, as he wrote these memories of Catherine B, he thought about the red room. Somehow that was, if any, the moment that the book needed to present perfectly. He did it then by negatively showing her as reluctant, almost petulant at first, seeing the redness of their one-night room. Then, abruptly, he showed her artificially happy, announcing (that is, Cat announcing) that she had been crazy, but now she was OK. Next, he had them make love off stage. Afterwards (that is, after their red room initimacy), he had Catherine proclaiming that love was a fine thing. (The entire time, without cessation, during the writing of all this—remember, at this time Cat Bark is dead—he, Fredrick Henry, you must understand, writhed in a state of immeasurable loss and longing, in the grips of the radiation sickness of not ever seeing her again.) That she wished she could stay in this room forever. He showed her enjoying being loose, “sluttish,” playfully pliant to love. She was married to him, after all, not officially, but as corporations are often quietly married when they merge. 

     When she died she was, like that same now-merged corporation, disintegrated. A disintegrated corporation. How he disliked this fact. It was like Milton realizing that Christ was not a military hero. It took Milton thirty years to come to terms with that fact. He was inwardly driven during those thirty years to write Christ as the axer of Satan, as the blaster of beelzebub, as the iron fist of justice on Sin. But he did not. He did not do that and lived. His epic came as a result of making Jesus not a merged corporation, but a disintegrated one, one that knew the ins and outs of gain and loss and, now utterly lost, knew about utter loss, too, so that He/it could begin to see, and so end in the seeing that saves.

     She had saved Fredrick, had Cat. Bark. Saved, he was not saved until he thought. Saved, he was lost until he thought for himself. Thinking for himself, he was not found but still lost, and being still lost he had no ground to stand on. The only thing between him and himself was his remembering what had happened and celebrating it. He remembered her then, in his war story, which is a story six months gone with child. Soldiers in his story are givers-birth-to of babies. Soldiers, trees, rivers, lakes, leaves, and surgeons give birth in this story. They are all giving birth as Cat. Bark. gave birth before she died. He died when she lived in those last days. He died to himself when she died into a living through him that he would not ever understand but be able to describe in a book better than those rest of us who might have the events but not the thought to make pleasure out of those same events. He did, then, not knowing, but feeling her alive in him (though dead in the world), make this story about the disintegration that became, or that already was, the end of the death that Death died when Donne made him do that.