Living with a Dead Language Read online

  Because Maurice had published an exposé of Scientology (only now, forty years later, something that mainstream publishers are willing to do), he was hounded by the sect, which set him up for a marijuana bust. A resulting immigration case was taken up by the courts.

  The million he’d been given didn’t last long, and, broke and tied up in litigation, he had to scramble to stay afloat. Working for Maurice allowed us, his three part-time employees, as well as him, to keep our illusions—Maurice pretended he had a publishing company, we pretended we had jobs that might lead somewhere. He paid us, sporadically, with the proceeds from selling Olympia Press first editions and Lilla’s family silver.

  Maurice opened to me the New York world I’d longed for: sophisticated, witty, filled with eccentric characters and louche charm. He and Lilla threw large parties at their SoHo loft, her tony friends from the likes of the Financial Times, his leftovers from Warhol’s Factory, and never enough food. In Catullus XIII, Catullus invites his friend to dinner, so long as the friend brings the dinner. Catullus will provide all the other entertainments: meros amores seu quid suavius elegantiusve est (unadulterated love or whatever is more suave and elegant).

  That poem expresses well what working for Maurice was: He provided charm, wit, dazzling stories, and access to the downtown demimonde, if not much financial remuneration. It was at Freeway that I met Humphrey, Ed, and Secret Storm, who would become, in order, my most beloved best friend, my first New York boyfriend, and my first husband. All had attended Yale together and were four years older than I. Humphrey and Ed, like me, worked for Maurice when they weren’t trying to earn some reliable money elsewhere, and Secret played music with Humphrey.

  Humphrey was a character unlike any I had ever encountered. A witty, theatrical gay man, he had scraggly, chin-length hair and was always dressed in grey chinos, T-shirt, a well-worn tuxedo jacket, and a red silk scarf. (He resembled a scruffy Mark Morris.) A child prodigy avant-garde composer, he was a true eccentric: brilliant and iconoclastic and fond of punctuating his sentences with cartoonish squeals of French, Spanish, German, and Hindi (his early childhood had been spent in India—his parents had both worked for the CIA, though they were long divorced). He knew music from inside out. One evening he sat before me as a Mozart piano concerto played on the stereo and matched his facial expressions to the emotional timbre of every chord change.

  He made a star, a superstar, of everyone in his life. In true Warholian fashion, he mythologized his friends and had a nickname for each: Lucky, Lotus Blossom, Auntie Line, Mouser, Burb, and Rhonda. I was Annie Ekaterina, or when he was especially happy with me, Beauty and Intelligence [sic]. The only nickname he used for himself was one given to him by his mother, Doris—Chico. I didn’t realize until it was too late that Humphrey put out so much sympathetic energy and encouragement for others that he saved little for himself. He should have been composing, but he wasn’t. He was in the grip of composer’s block, and he fueled that demon with alcohol.

  Ed had been a scholar of classics and philosophy at Yale, a classmate of Humphrey’s. He came from an impoverished Bronx Sicilian family and was dark of mien and affect. His father had kept a gun, with which he killed the rats that infested their apartment. Ed was tall, thin, and somber, bearded, half bald. And he was desperately in love with me. I treated him terribly. He was too dark for me, still a sunny, optimistic California girl. As Humphrey’s friend Lucky once said of me, “I’ve never met anyone so lacking in a sense of irony.”

  I was in love with Humphrey, but he was gay, and I had to find a new way to love him respectfully, which I did. In those days, it was still socially unacceptable to be homosexual, but Humphrey let his gay flag fly. He raised my consciousness and set the template for my perennial need for a gay man in my life.

  Romantically, I turned my attention to Secret, who had been named Secret Storm by Humphrey, and whom I found extremely appealing and elusive. We never called him by his real name, which was Robert; he was always uncomfortable with his given name, and over the years he variously called himself Robert, Roberto, and by his last name. But for the first eight years I knew him, until our daughter, Sophie, was born, he was always Secret.

  Humphrey also was in love with Secret (as was his habit with heterosexual men), though Secret was determinedly heterosexual. The two played in what they called a “Balinese conceptual rock ’n’ roll band” called Chow Chow World War, though Secret was, at best, an amateur on both the guitar and flute he played.

  Secret came from an old plantation-owning western Missouri family, had attended private school there, and had finished Yale in only three years, with honors. The family money was long gone, leaving in its wake eccentricity and a sense of superiority and entitlement. Extremely smart, arrogant, and fey, he was an “avant-garde” filmmaker. With a shoulder-length bush of frizzy blond hair, and big pillow lips, he would fling long bright scarves about his neck, masking his native shyness with pretentious bravado. He was part Lou Reed, part Françoise Hardy. And he usually carried with him a Super 8 camera.

  Secret Storm had a job teaching filmmaking at City College of New York, and was as much under the spell of Humphrey’s bombastic charm as I, so he, too, hung around the Girodias scene. After a time, Humphrey, Secret, and I formed a triangle, all in love with one another, but only two of us being of mutual sexual persuasion.

  During much of the Girodias period, I had another, equally glamorous part-time job, in a very different part of Manhattan: the beau monde of the Upper East Side. Two mornings each week I took the subway uptown to the gracious apartment of the urbane Irishman Patrick O’Higgins. He had been Helena Rubinstein’s amanuensis and had written a best seller, Madame, about his time with her. Now he was writing a memoir about his charming Irish father, Pa. My job was to type up the many legal-size pages on which he wrote longhand. I would arrive around 10:00 A.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and as I sat down at the typewriter he’d ask, “Would you like a little pillule?”

  Of course I would. It was a diet pill, low-dose speed. He’d write in his bedroom while I typed in his living room, then he’d make me lunch, which always included a bottle of wine. We’d discuss what he’d written, but mostly he’d entertain me with stories about his life among the rich and famous: Marilyn Monroe, who had lived just across 58th Street from where Patrick still lived and had sometimes dined at his house; the Duchess of Windsor, for whom he often served as a “walker”; as well as many other luminaries, both literary and theatrical (Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Diane von Furstenberg, Estée Lauder), who were featured players in his daily life.

  “When we do the revisions, we’ll go together to Morocco and stay with Betty Hutton,” he promised. For a few months, I had the best of both worlds.

  It was during that heady time that I was notified of my acceptance to graduate school in Berkeley in linguistics, but I was having so much fun, delving into an entirely different sort of study—of New York class and society—that I turned my back on academia for the next forty years.

  Two months into class, I needed so many books to translate Catullus that I had to devote an entire table in my library to Latin study. The old, much-weathered oak table from my grandparents’ kitchen in Indiana became my Latin table; I imagine my grandfather would have approved that it be put to such use. The table holds a large pencil box with many retractable pencils and several erasers, my Latin grammar from last year, a more compact Latin grammar assigned for class this year, my Latin-English dictionary, my laminated SparkNotes, and both the Quinn text and Lilla’s volume of Catullus poems.

  I couldn’t rely on the English translations in Lilla’s volume, though they helped me get a sense of the poems’ subjects. Mr. Gregory had taken great liberties with Catullus, and not only in XVI. For example, in Catullus V, he had changed malus (bad man), which referred back to the senum severiorum (rather severe old men) of line 2, to “poor fools and cuckolds.” God knows where that came from! Perh
aps he was revealing his own love trials.

  Soon we turned to the pejorative poems in class, of which there were many. Catullus often criticized his fellow poets, other men (and women) about town, and he named names. Some read like the columns in the New York Observer, the gossip rag of the media business. They discussed what happened at parties, who was walking about with whom, who stole napkins from a dinner party. The randiness of the poems, if not my classmates, increased as we read more. Along with the words for sodomize and face-fuck, we soon learned the word for fuck (futuo, futuere), which led to the words for the homosexual “bottom” (cinaedus, cinaedi and pathicus, pathici) and, so as not to leave out the ladies, two for whore (moecha, moechae and scortum, scorti). Here I must note that the latter, though a neuter noun, refers mostly to females. It is difficult to know what that says about Roman sex.

  In the Roman world, no distinction was made between homo- and heterosexual men; rather, it was all about perceived power: who penetrated and who was penetrated. A bottom was also considered mollis (a little soft) and associated with being female. The Romans seemed to assume that every woman was a bottom.

  All this information was received with bland-faced decorum by the still taciturn class. I began to wonder if Matthew was deliberately choosing a run of obscene poems to wake up my classmates and get their juices flowing. Unfortunately, there was no handout for Catullan Obscenities.

  We used these urbane, pejorative, and downright dirty poems to review gerunds and gerundives; the rules of direct and indirect statements; direct commands; and my old favorite, the ablative absolute. Matthew gave us an assignment to write a joke in Latin. None of our five were good enough to merit repeating, but two old standbys do: The punning semper ubi sub ubi (always where under where) and the reversal of Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered) to Vidi, vici, veni (I saw, I conquered, I came).

  After the midterm (which, being an auditor, I decided I didn’t need to take), the class came a bit more to life. Perhaps everyone had scored well, or perhaps we were happy, after a two-week break, to be back with Catullus again. God knows I was! I’d spent the two weeks at home, bored, working on a freelance project and counting the days till class began again. I studied my word list for the semester so far—314 words. I took the typed-up list with me for reading when waiting; since my type-A self was often early for appointments or at least on the dot of time, I spent a good deal of my life waiting. A few favorites stood out: nugae (trifles) I could remember as a little candy, pipio, pipiare (to tweet) is onomatopoeic, and fortasse (perhaps) I just liked. It made possibility sound smooth and sweet, and its long syllables drew out anticipation.

  One word, vegetus, was a lesson in itself. In Latin it means “lively, vigorous, animated, sprightly”; not, as one would guess from English, its opposite. In Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem To His Coy Mistress (a poem clearly inspired by Catullus V), he refers to his “vegetable love.” We can be sure he meant lively rather than dull. The American Heritage Dictionary states that it was not until the eighteenth century that vegetable, both noun and adjective, came to refer to the plants we associate it with today. None of my dictionaries reveal when the figurative usage synonymous with dull, passive, and still, as in a vegetative state, came to be its primary meaning.

  Another favorite of mine is pervigilo, pervigilare (to stay up all night), from per (through) and vigilo, vigilare (to remain alert). That one word held another key to the language for me. Hundreds of Latin words have the prefix per to signal “very” or “thoroughly”; per is pervasive. Pervigilo assumed if you were being thoroughly vigilant, you would be staying up all night: the military culture reflected in the language.

  Naftali began speaking up more whenever someone was stumped by a case. Alissa and I now chatted from time to time before class. She told me she had written a fantasy novel. I wanted to be friendly and offer to have a look at it, but I stopped myself. I really didn’t know much about fantasy writing, a genre, she told me, she loved as much as she loved Latin. I knew better than to offer to read any novel by a nonprofessional, since so much of my freelance work consisted of the same. And that allows me to throw in another favorite Latin phrase, coined by Juvenal, which working freelance had made me more and more familiar with: insanabile scribendi cacoethes (the incurable itch to write, independent of having anything to say).

  Charles, the only senior and classics major, was more fluent in Greek than Latin, and now and again offered Greek antecedents to a Catullan line. Roger, the sweet but hopeless economics student, gave his all to his father’s injunction (from in plus iungere, to join or yoke; one of the many definitions of the Latin in is “immovable”), but he was hopeless at learning Latin. Though a good memorizer, he just couldn’t comprehend cases and syntax, so mostly he struggled.

  I often asked the questions the other students were afraid to ask: Is there a word for “give a blow job,” or only for “get a blow job”? And indeed there was: fello, fellare, from whence today’s fellatio derives.

  I will leave my poetic semester with the short, enigmatic Catullus poem CV:

  Mentula conatur Pipleium scandere montem:

  Musae furcillis praecipitem eiciunt.

  The penis attempts to ascend the mountain of poetry:

  The Muses cast him out headfirst with their little pitchforks.

  CHAPTER 6

  Facilius enim per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur.

  We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole.

  —Seneca

  After a six-week winter break, and my final girl trip to Belize (Patrick had sold the house), the spring semester found the five of us Catullans together again. This semester, I wouldn’t have Catullus to substitute for the delights of New York City. As if to rub it in, our class met in a small, drab room next to the department offices on the second floor of the Sanders Classroom. It was long and narrow and crammed with furniture: The single tall window was partially obscured by a stained, grey sectional couch, pushed against the wall. The room had a stale smell, probably from the old Latin texts that filled the bookshelves lining one wall, or from generations of professors who had used the couch for napping, and other, perhaps more Catullan, purposes, leaving their combined scents to ripen.

  Roger was already there when I walked into class the first day. We’d become friendly last semester, since we two were always the first to arrive. Roger had been worried, at the end of last semester, that his difficulty with Latin would ruin his plan to spend his junior year abroad in Denmark. One needed a B+ average to participate in the program, and, truth be told, we all knew he was a D Latin student at best. I had suggested that Roger talk to Matthew about his father’s requirement. “After all, he’s a visiting professor. What does he care what grade you get, and he’s a nice chap; I bet he’ll help you out.”

  Roger had gone home to Kansas for the winter break. I wanted to ask him, but didn’t, how last semester’s grade turned out. Instead I said, “So, you’re still here. Your dad hasn’t relented on your Latin?”

  “Nope,” Roger said. “He’s still adamant.” I hoped whatever grade Matthew had bestowed on him hadn’t ruined his chances for a junior year abroad. Now he had only to worry that this semester’s grade wouldn’t queer the deal. As the others dribbled in, wriggling themselves between wall and chairs, they positioned themselves in the same configuration as last semester: Alissa and I at the back, Roger and Naftali on the right, Charles holding down the west side. Silence reigned as we awaited the professor.

  The sound of determined footsteps preceded him. Bert Lott couldn’t have been more different than Curtis and Matthew. While both of them were willowy, scholarly ectomorphs, Bert was a big, blunt-edged endomorph—more Roman centurion than poet, and funny, sarcastic, and iconoclastic. He sat down with a big exhalation and a gusty, “Hello! Welcome! I hope we’ll all have a good time this semester.” He read off his list of na
mes, as he identified each of us in place.

  A very pretty, lively blonde interrupted him with her entrance. “Hi, everybody,” she said with a dazzling smile, “I’m Iris, so sorry I’m late.” All eyes turned to this breath of fresh air, as she took her place next to Charles, where she remained for the rest of the term. She provided, throughout the year, a bit of sunshine in our drab room. She was always cheerful, always greeted everyone. Unfortunately, her good cheer and friendliness did not prove contagious.

  The most fun person in the class was Bert himself, who worked hard to enliven this dull group. “I won’t be asking you to write out translations,” he said, “but to try to further engage with the Latin, by reading it again and again. I want you to get very familiar with the syntax. We won’t have vocabulary tests. Don’t know about you, but I never have succeeded in memorizing the vocabulary.”

  This was news! Bert was in his forties and had obviously been studying Latin for well over twenty years, and he didn’t have control of the vocabulary! (Although it soon became clear that he did; I think he was just trying to make us comfortable.)

  I did not make a vocabulary list that semester. After all, I wasn’t taking the finals. I felt I should get the senior’s discount of not having to cram for finals, a decision I later came to regret: Had I crammed the second-year vocabulary into my brain the way I had the first year, repeating and repeating and repeating the lists to myself, memorizing, I would have a much better grasp of the language today. A big part of learning any language is rote repetition. Of course this is more difficult with Latin because it isn’t a spoken language. It’s hard to drop Latin phrases into everyday conversation the way I’d been doing with French for so many years. Besides, I didn’t know very many everyday Latin phrases.