“But I already all but said yes to him,” Cass tried to explain. “I think I may have verbally committed myself to him.”
“No such thing. From now on, I’m the one he deals with. I’m your representative. Do you get it?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“Well, here’s something that might help you process it. If I can’t get you more than that offer, then I’ll forgo my commission.”
“But he was so nice to me.”
The agent laughed, a mirthless noise.
“What did he do that was so nice?”
“Well, for one thing, he took me out to an expensive restaurant.”
“Which restaurant?”
“Balthazar.”
The agent laughed again.
“Listen, if you let that junket to Balthazar persuade you to accept that offer, then that will be the most expensive lunch you’ve ever had. That lunch will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Auerbach had held an auction for The Varieties of Religious Illusion, and not only had the Balthazar editor made a bid five times his “absolute upper limit,” but he had been roundly outbid.
Cass has certainly had his moments of doubt about his agent, wondering whether beneath the cynical exterior there was an even more cynical interior. Is he showman or shaman? A little of both, Cass has come to think, but a force for good for all that. Sy Auerbach has an agenda that goes beyond putting the “antic” back in “pedantic” and the “earning” back in “learning.” His idea is that the time has come for a different kind of public intellectual. The old-time intellectuals, who were mostly scientifically illiterate, not knowing their asses from their amygdalas, have been rendered worse than dead; they’ve been rendered irrelevant by the scientists and techno-innovators, who are the only ones now offering ideas with the power and sweep to change the culture at large.
Auerbach harbors such impatience for the glib literati-the “gliberati,” as one of his own digerati had christened them-that Cass has wondered whether there might not be some personal history. In particular, Cass has wondered whether Auerbach might not have known Jonas Elijah Klapper, the man of letters who had once reigned unopposed over vast stretches of the humanities, including Cass Seltzer’s. Certainly, Auerbach must have known of Klapper. There was a time when Jonas Elijah Klapper had been revered by scholars the world over-with the notable exception of the British, whom Klapper had been forced to despise en masse, observing that “they seem to have lost, with their empire, the possibility of understanding me.” The only thing that Klapper, born on the Lower East Side, must have admired about the English was their accent, since he had successfully acquired it. When Sy Auerbach describes the kind of thinker he detests, obscure references rendered in dead languages falling from their lips like flecks of food off a messy eater, it always sounds to Cass as if he’s holding Frankfurter’s former Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values up to his mind’s eye and ticking off his attributes one by one.
