In Partial Disgrace (44 page)

Authors: Charles Newman,Joshua Cohen

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: In Partial Disgrace

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This war of two instincts must be mediated by a third, for contrary to conventional wisdom, the instincts of men go to far greater extremes than those of animals, especially when acting en masse.
Tack, tack, tackatack a tack
. Now the Chetvorah’s time has come, where all models, methodologies, paradigms, and parameters have been abolished, and one must rely upon a love quite distinct from the love one feels for oneself. Man is
une
bête d’aveu
(a confessing animal) and man requires the Chetvorah’s classic firmness and
scrupulosité
to mitigate our most recent mannered tendernesses.

Presently you will discover how much your dog is like you in action and temperament. For during the short time the bird is in a trance it is possible to take three long steps toward it, then quickly come to a halt before the next stanza, behind a tree large enough to hide. When making this stalk, it is the Chetvorah who picks the next tree, often standing straight up on his hinder legs to conceal himself and beckoning you with a single vibrating ear. (Whilst waiting, take care to neither whistle, whittle, nor munch on bilberries, but occupy yourself only with the plaiting of grasses.)

Prompted by the occasion, we are summoned to the final stage of education, and the hardest. For the dog has, after all, been trained to point, retrieve, and track—yet the bird is too high to give a scent, strong enough to carry away any ball or shot, and is in any case too large to retrieve. To go the final mile, it is necessary to roust out the errors which come from undivided attention. For to succeed in Sport, forgetfulness is the precondition for all action; one must disrecollect the last thing one has learned.

The bird’s antics permit us to advance another three steps into a standoff, where the dog dares not to move and the bird dares not to call. In the gray dawn, the envelope of the real, in a world without premises and presuming, where our duo knows only that they do not know what is going to happen, they must slip the wraiths of reason, fantasy, memory, and education, and lay down the gauntlet of the heart. Submerged in this atrocious confluence of nothingness, wrapped in their solitude, both must exercise a
counter-
instinct; the Chetvorah realizing that the time has come for the dumber of the two parties to take the lead, straight upstream against the current of their training time together, an
impromptu extempore
.

For your part,
Chasseur
, do not allow your sport to consume you. One must not be reluctant to abandon what it has cost so many hours to learn—that is to say, one must give up the role of Master, and in directing movement, do so in a way which does not invite a particular response. No written lesson, no spoken words, no lectures, be they too often repeated, can teach a dog or man to finish the capercailzie chase with a flourish. If there’s an ultimate command, ’tis this: “Don’t look at me; I’ll follow you.”

So if you would not break the hunter’s heart, let the hound be your mark. In all the packs of hounds and herds of hunters that you see, only one is really hunting, the others are just doing what the others do. It is for you to follow the real guide in view, not behind your hound but drawing alongside, keeping your distance but losing no yard, whilst not reminding him of your presence. It should be your honor and glory to so place yourself, and
si inter eos ita vives, te vertens sicut se vertuant, sed numguam inter eos verteus
(“If thus you live with them, turning as they turn, but never turning among them”) you will have mastered, with the help of your wide-awake wiseacre, the noble artifice of
venere
, the aim of which is no affected piety, but a sentient society without sanctimony, where the estimable is esteemed and the mediocre ignored, the style of styles. For an alert respect is the highest mood a man can hope for, and the most difficult of all to sustain.

Then that liminal figure who sings and dances suddenly flies up, rising as always with his breast upwind, not from fright but in laughing sadness, to settle on a rock, soft with lichen, where he may better copulate. And one feels that miraculous exhilaration which hunters have experienced from the beginning of time. The world ceases to exist, and nothing else matters but this perpetually alert encounter on the bulge of the horizon—a
delectatio nervosa
. Thus the sunken world arises.

Black Game
forever foresees the hunter and lives forever in the hunter’s eyes. We hunt each other’s favors, but keep score by different rules. And the truth is, man promiscuously hunts whatever crosses his path, so why not devote ourselves to a first-rate quarry? Life is a grandiose torment and something of a joke, but we together, fellow hedonists and fellow victims, may for a moment outwit existence.

As the day wears on and you fail to hold your sights even on a haystack, the sundry violent hisses are repeated as two knives whetting against one another, until further acceleration seems impossible. Finally, often between five and six p.m., the male closes with a distinct
smack
. (Before the amorous ditty ceases, all must be still as the grave, as the twilight reveals the hunter, his dog calmly backing him, balancing on one leg in the final approach: the
anspringen
.)

When he emits his
smack
, the bird is entirely deaf for a moment and his eyes shut for three or four seconds, just time enough for a man to make a large jump toward him. Even the greatest Sportsman will turn away his head as he pulls the trigger in partial disgrace.

About the Author

C
HARLES
N
EWMAN
(1938–2006) was born in St. Louis and grew up in the Chicago area. In 1964 he became editor of
TriQuarterly
, which he nurtured into a journal with an international reputation. Newman’s own novels have been compared to the work of both Thomas Pynchon and J. D. Salinger, and his two works of nonfiction are both classics of the form. Newman was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis from 1985 until his death.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newman, Charles, 1938-2006.

In partial disgrace / Charles Newman. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-56478-816-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-1-56478-803-0 (cloth : acid-free paper)

1. Europe, Central--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3564.E915I5 2012

813’.54--dc23

2012033703

Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.