The Party
Excerpted from Stet
By James Chapman

Somebody has built a dacha here, beside the cow-pasture. A set of buildings, in fact: barns, offices, stables, an auditorium, and a golf course that turns the pastures to fairways, and the reservoir into a water hazard. Finally the drinking-straw factory across the field is converted into an art museum. And is all this owned by a private citizen? What has happened?

Russia is restructuring as usual. After all, if a thousand cow-pastures vanish, they will all be replaced by something else. The great idea remains—record everything, save souvenirs of everything—the voice of Tolstoi (Lev) was saved—we can still hear Tolstoi speak, asking us again and again, in every language he knows, if we are living the right life.

Suppose you are living in the village at the bottom of the hill, in the present regime, and an unknown man knocks loudly at your door? It will not be what you fear, but only be a messenger bringing you an invitation to a party, and this invitation will be as expensive, as wasteful as possible, an invitation in the form of a large hardcover book, almost an art monograph, with different colors of paper and inks, and color photos of the host, and photos of his absurd sprawling dacha with its buildings like uneven teeth on the old landscape, pictures of his collection of antique clarinets, he owns the clarinet of American jazz genius Dolphy as well as clarinets that belonged to B. Goodman, also instruments dating back to the sixteenth century, all these are illustrated here in color photographs. Also some pictures of lesions. Do you want to attend?

But what is this about lesions?

Well, lesions, yes, lesions are the source of this party-giver’s wealth. In the 1980’s, during the restructuring, he began to telephone AIDS patients internationally and offer them moderate sums of money if they would make him the beneficiary of their life insurance policies—of course the infected were most often in desperate need of money, and they accepted—when they died, as they all did, his profit on the insurance policies was startling, and as the disease spread throughout the world he became the first billionaire of Perestroika. Numbers are not dreams, they don’t drift around on the breeze, they line up in rows, and a row of numbers will tend to march in one direction, for instance down the throat of the man who can open his mouth the widest. Capitalism in Russia is naturally more heartfelt than in the West, more all-embracing, the cold gets all the way into the marrow, the cold cracks open the teeth. For what purpose is a party? (Meaning the gathering, not the political organ.) It seems that Russians used to sit together to discuss life, to joke over troubles, to enjoy the prickle and warmth of other souls. A party could change your life, even if it was only three people at a kitchen table. However, to greet the new era we have restructured the idea of a party as well; now it is a machine for comparisons. You go and consider the worth of others, based on their clothing and their boasts, and you decide whether you are of less worth than these others, these utter successes. Successes everywhere. No longer does a man give a party at all unless he has a home to show off, an unspeakably perfect wife, a German car, Argentinean cattle, jewels dug from the moon. The host of this vast gathering, than whom no private citizen has ever possessed quite so much blood money, has organized an irresistible party simply to provide himself with an audience to whom he can play two hours of jazz clarinet in his personal auditorium, played in a billionaire style, profoundly cautious, as if swing music were a field of critical theory, and perhaps by now it is.

Once after he’d played for two hours, the American saxophonist Coltrane was grabbed by an audience member, who with the privileges of every member of every audience, told him he was no musician at all, only a maker of horrible noise, and that he should be only allowed to play for deaf people. Coltrane had large eyes and he didn’t say a thing to this critic, but looked into his face and listened sadly to every word. Dead still young of liver cancer, he’s at this moment playing “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” over the telephone wire of a moneylender in the new Russia, he is a piece of on-hold music.

Eric Dolphy’s clarinet has been exiled to this cursed model-train society, because abandoned souls have to go someplace. The soul of this clarinet is contained in its old brass and lacquered wood, whereas a clarinet reed is always a new soul, fresh out of the tube, the wooden reed screwed into the old mouthpiece this evening will speak and be tossed out this same night by this wealthy insurance speculator whose leisure has enabled him to listen to so many phonograph records. The reed has only tonight to learn why it’s here. And if it is a brilliant soul, it may understand its position, that of making a great clarinet speak nonsense to a crowd of bribed drunks, and may forgo the applause of these guests, it may crack in half, from mouth to tail, and go mute right in the middle of “Body and Soul.” But, look—perhaps we misunderstood, tell us again: aren’t you the one who admires hobbyists, and isn’t jazz this man’s hobby? Would you prefer him to count his gold all night? It is true that even that face, so red with beef and wine, that face does close its eyes while it plays its note-for-note copies of Bix Beiderbeck solos, and it changes, the face does soften. There was a lamb who was shaven so that little red felt rings could be produced and glued around the keyholes of this man’s clarinet, and that lamb can still breathe out into this room, just a little. Someday this wealthy man, the inventor of a collision between hypercapitalism and fatal disease, may get two successive notes stuck in his heart. Right now he only hears one note at a time, but what if he were to hear himself really put two notes together? He might be lost to the insurance industry. So find him a fresh reed, a simple reed that enjoys the applause, and let him listen to himself.

A model of a party is always attractive, with all the dolls in tuxedos and the gold foil bunting and the tiny silver platters of tiny canapés. This is not the kind of party you go to to talk about your soul’s philosophy, you come here to meet important people in your field, and impress yourself onto them. Being here will mean that whatever you are doing in your life, it is not enough for you, you also desire success. If you were a filmmaker for instance, it might be smart to talk to that tall man in the astonishing blue silk suit, that is Movie Director V. S. Pachinko, yes! And you say you don’t want to speak to him? You don’t care for his work? Take some advice, learn to stop judging people, that is Stet’s lesson isn’t it? if we are to sum it up? You are supposed to accept everything, this Pachinko can help you, just forget your opinions, or at least suspend them for tonight. After all, why does an important filmmaker who used to, in the Soviet era, create serious and beautiful works like Her First Enlightenment (banned and shelved by the authorities), and who subsequently saw the light in such detail and clarity that he even lives and works in Los Angeles now, and draws up in the steel bucket of his unconscious his dreams for us to view, these shiny dreams of car-chases, shooting guns, and exploding helicopters, why does his soul fly around the world and into a dustbin just to attend a party? Because he is loyal to his friends—at least to his newer friends. Just consider, you could become his newest, and adapt your mind to his mouth.
Such a life as Pachinko’s is difficult. It sometimes happens that a man changes so much that he must, out of embarrassment, abandon all his old friends, even write articles denouncing his former co-workers, as this Pachinko did against Andrei Tarkovsky (“Strangely enough,” he would write in this article, “in my dreams I am haunted by some feeling of guilt toward him.”) Sometimes a man like that must even change wives, just to escape from the one who is almost the same person he himself used to be, she whose opinion of him is now harsh—in fact his first wife sees Pachinko just the way his younger self would have seen him. He had to meet a new woman, she was certain to expect less.

Such a man will have obligations to the new friends who keep telling him his new work is better than ever, these cheerful people who, anyway, care nothing about film, and he will repay them by going to their parties, since they certainly think of party-giving as real accomplishment. Sometimes it’s staggering the number of famous people, no longer doing their best work, who can be found at the party of an insurance executive, and all doing what we do now at parties of the new era—we talk about nothing that matters. People who have, after all, lived in the world, people with a large experience of mankind, all drinking and saying only what is inconsequential. And you might think nothing is happening, but new loyalties are being formed, this is where the power of the world originates, only it’s not the power that lasts. What is the power that lasts? There is no such thing, unfortunately, or at least you can’t prove it exists. Ask Pachinko. You may think he sold out his art, and is a useless person now, but what do you really know about him? Yes, you know his films of today, he does not always make good films anymore, and you may feel that a man’s worst work is a good indication of his inner soul, you may have already traced the rot in Director Pachinko’s. But he is still a man, isn’t he? Aren’t there beautiful moments in all his films, even now? Why not ask him his opinion of himself? He’ll surely tell you. Isn’t his own opinion more important than your critique? Perhaps as he drives his big car around, he is constantly thinking about his own character, and if you walk up to him now he’ll say “I wouldn’t be capable of making Her First Enlightenment today. Morally, I have committed suicide. I still suffer from the same overabundance of emotion you saw in that film, only now the emotion has noplace it dares to go. I will die with exactly this expression on my face, this expression I have now. Smugness is a disease of age, but not all come down with it. You must promise not to turn out like me, No, I am completely serious—promise me, otherwise you should go to hell along with your ambition.” That would be all right, almost like a conversation from an earlier time. Bear in mind that this man is facing an eternity of nothingness with only his career and his money and his early good film to help him. Why do we love to judge people at their worst? When he was young he made one beautiful film! We will remember him as he was then, skinny, argumentative, easily hurt, no silk suits, no English language skills, and no famous friends. That is the eternal man, so thank Russia for growing another such short-lived natural light. All right, don’t speak to him. You will not learn anything about life this way, but that is your affair. Agreed, he looks fearfully sober, nobody even drinks properly any longer, as if vodka would give them too much access to themselves, they walk around with pink and blue frothy things, wine spritzers, abominations of soul-avoidance. All right then, here, this man, he at least is holding a whiskey. Oh, he’s not even Russian, but Irish. How is your English, then? Not good? You will have to learn, this is the era of English. The foreigner is named Rose, and for your information what he is talking about is his work. It seems he is a book editor, and is boasting of having heroically done what no other editor ever dared to do—he took a book that notoriously never received any editorial assistance, the Ulysses of the Irishman J. Joyce, and this man Rose says he revised and improved that book by simplifying the sentences and repairing all the nonstandard punctuation, making the book almost readable by a normal person. And then he even published the result, as being a book called Ulysses by J. Joyce!

The land of Russia has for hundreds of years been inhabited by a great many lovers of poetry and literature, it is one of the problems with the place. Even in the current era, even at this party, there are people who will challenge a man like Editor Rose, and ask him how it is permitted for him to publish a rewrite of another man’s book. Yet the question is civil, nobody throws their drink or beats him up, ours is a reasonable land at last, and besides it is not a Russian author who is being vandalized here. This Rose, flower of modern literary practice, is now explaining international copyright laws, telling the guests that they, too, could become editors—once a work tumbles into the public domain, it can be altered as much as you like, and nobody can prevent it. This practice is called simply “editing” and after all it’s already being applied to every single book published in the present day—Mr. Rose’s only innovation is to claim editorial hegemony over books by the dead. If he wanted to, he could write an obscene bunch of limericks (an Irish literary form) and publish them as Lev Tolstoi’s book The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

Did you ever write anything of your own, asks one young woman.

Everything I alter, I make my own, answers Rose.

And, he is right! And why aren’t you going to speak to him? Are you so determined to remain unaltered? You are too afraid of death, that is your problem, that is why you so much fear slight dilutions and small erasures. Well, you don’t belong here, among these cheerful people. Leave if you want, preserve your sterile purity. Realize however that this party is going on everywhere, there is nothing else now, nothing except solitude, which has always been available. Do you really prefer solitude? Are you sure? Stet and Lilya lived as a solitary unit, and even that was broken in two solitary pieces. You can leave the party by walking away, but what are they going to say about you after you’re gone? And what if they even say nothing at all?

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