Yesterday I returned an unpublished biography of composer Richard Wagner that HW, I will call him, left me two days before he committed suicide. The manuscript of the life of Hitler’s favorite composer represented 50 years of research and writing by an East Coast academic.
It was clear that HW was not the author. There was correspondence in the boxes he had left me for safekeeping that explained everything. In one of them I learned that HW had edited the manuscript, and that’s why it was in his possession. There was a responding letter from HW not yet sent, in which he wrote of his excitement to have edited the manuscript written by an old friend, a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, a factory of American Presidents and world leaders.
HW specified in the unsent letter that the editing of the manuscript was, “the last thing I’ll do in my life that will have value.” He fantasized about the success of the book in print and that royalties he would receive could go to his children from whom he felt he had taken much in the course of his divorce from their mother and the aftermath of all that would constitute his fall from grace.
There were written messages accompanying the manuscript warning that it was the only copy and as such the importance of preserving it was as if it were gold.
When he came to my office two days before he took his life, HW looked very much alive, clean, invigorated, and restored – as though he had regained the confidence and brio of the years when he and his family had been my neighbors. His former elegance was in full display, even now as a thin, old man with a voice still yet attached to his younger self, wearing a handsome black coat and a new, crisp white shirt and red suspenders, worn for fashion, but also to really hold up his pants because his weight had been reduced to feathers in the past months. The presentation of himself that day included new wingtips, a recent stylish haircut, and a shave with a cut covered by a miniscule white dot just below the enormous heavy black writer’s glasses he favored.
He said to me in a voice so low, almost as if he didn’t want me to hear him, “Doc, please put these boxes away. I have to go. Just put them away because I’m moving.” He called me Doc because he swore over the years I could be counted on to help him heal the sorry details of his ramshackle life. I, of course, did not have those powers.
Before I could question him, he got into one of the last remaining yellow cabs in the City that was waiting impatiently for him and drove off. Calls to his cell phone were not answered. I took the heavy boxes into my office and put them away as he requested. I restrained my curiosity to open them.
To digress just a moment, Wagner (d. 1893) is said to have been Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, not only because of his music, but also because his anti-Semitic beliefs seemed to have been in lockstep with the Füher’s unleashing in the next century of the fury of the demonic, atrocities of the Third Reich.
To be clear these were not HW’s beliefs, nor mine, nor those of the academic author.
Among some of the curious details about Wagner is that he was the creator of the orchestra pit, the sinkhole that put the orchestra out of sight, so as not to steal from the drama onstage. One of the most famous of Wagner’s compositions was The Ride of the Valkyries, a depiction from Norse mythology of the soul’s journey from life to the afterlife at the hands of the Valkyries, armored angels who ferried the dead to Valhalla, the Norse version of Heaven where warriors go when they die.
Over the 21 years that I knew HW, I, as did others, observed that his spiral to madness came in several forms that absorbed him and from which he was able to return to be himself if only for a few cogent moments after protracted interludes of agitation.
It became obvious that he had slipped into a black hole that would swallow him to obscure his career as a respected professor, a New York Times bestselling author, a poet, painter, and sculptor. I don’t reveal much in this writing because I’m not authorized to write about him, but at the time we were neighbors. I was a witness when the madness began to overtake him like a furious, caged animal let loose.
Two days after HW’s appearance at my office in elegant attire, my phone rang at 7:45 a.m., caller ID informing me the call was coming from the hotel where HW was living, a shanty hotel on San Bernardo with room rentals for $600 a month. If you’d known HW, you would never picture a learned man of his intellect in such a room, but I could, because I knew the side of him that no longer had much to do with diplomas, good writing, and literary achievements and accolades.
I had found that room for HW a year ago, so he could avoid homelessness after his last arrest. I had given my phone number as an emergency contact to the receptionist who only spoke Spanish and had often wondered aloud why a well-dressed gringo would stay there a day, much less a month. It was she who witnessed him leaving his room, his scale up the earthen embankment on Santa Ursula to the IH-35 overpass, and his leap into eternity. She said that with little hesitation he had jumped as one might into a peaceful lake on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
He fell to the ground headfirst and managed somehow to get up, take a few steps, and then collapse before the astonished gaze of many who passed quickly to get to their jobs before 8 a.m. while sipping their morning coffee.
“The man you brought to live here, he threw himself off the bridge. I think he’s dead,” the receptionist told me in a tearful voice. I was there in less than six minutes, breaking my record for quick responses to other events in my life that had called for immediacy.
I left my car running in the middle of the street and ran towards a soup of cops and investigators. His body had already been removed to the hospital. All that was left of him was a path of bloody sprinkles under the overpass in a sinister but almost aesthetic pattern. A lot of questioning followed, but I was only a friend, the only friend it turns out, so I identified his disfigured body, clothed still in wingtips, black trousers, the same white shirt now soiled, and red suspenders.
I made a sorrowful call to one of HW’s children, the one who lives farthest from here. It was a very difficult morning. I cried when the doctor had held my hand as he gave me the news that HW had passed, he thinking perhaps that I was HW’s son.
I remembered the boxes immediately as I walked into my office. There they were, as though waiting for me — a treasure chest beckoning to be opened. Without questioning my actions, I did this quickly like a desperate child.
I found the manuscript and began the search for how to contact its author. I felt the pain of losing an old, tragically flawed friend, but I felt also the relief of those boxes and the sole copy of the manuscript having fallen into my hands. After a few weeks, I found the time and the will to send them. Their presence had made me uncomfortable. Looking at them would often cloud my day as I acutely felt their presence in the room, two boxes that felt like the presence of a person watching me in the silence of my inertia.
At the Post Office I was asked at the counter, “What is it?”
“Just papers, nothing important.” That’s what I said, knowing in fact how important these 30 pounds of paper were to the writer who had spent decades researching and writing, and to the one who had edited it with all the weight of his dreams, his desire to redeem himself, and the wish to be remembered in another way.
In my letter inside the return package to the author I asked him to publish it, to please get it published, so that something good might come of this. I don’t think I asked him, I begged him.
Gold.