“You can’t call Steve “Steve;” you need to change his name, too,” “King Arthur” suggested, after reading the first draft of the chapter I call BOOK TWO: An Explanation, Or the Education of Daniel Paliwoda. “At this point, nearly everyone in my Katyn book manuscript (MSS) has changed names. Steve needs a new name, too,” “King Arthur” added. He was right.
Finding a new name for Steve was difficult. Steve is incomparable. He was the smartest man I ever knew. He was my mentor who guided me into becoming an intellectual. He also suffered terribly from bipolar depression. The highs and lows… would bring ecstatic frenzy of activity but also bring an abysmal stagnation of paralysis. He relied upon Prozac, believing it was the only medication he could use. When off Prozac—he felt humiliated using it—Steve couldn’t move. He stopped eating, answering the phone—everything. I had a key to his apartment, and so I would let myself in, trying to resuscitate his spirit. Doing so worked until it didn’t. While in the lower depths, he would sit in his kitchen… for days.
That image of Steve sitting in his kitchen forever haunts me. When he was alive, we often spoke about Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The parallels between Steve and Bartleby were uncanny. He saw them, too. This realization broke me because we both knew that Bartleby would starve himself to death, dying alone. No matter how often or how emphatically (and empathetically) I tried to persuade him he was family, my family, and that he had support from me, in his darkest moments he saw nothing but the “dead brick wall” of his apartment.
When renaming Steve as “King Solomon, the Scrivener,” I struggled to find a literary or mythological figure who could symbolize the enormity of Steve’s personality. At first, I searched through the Hebrew Bible, looking for the wisest, most profound of the prophets. Since Steve was Jewish—although he wasn’t a practicing Jew—I thought finding a Jewish figure who represented learning, wisdom, guidance, and comradeship would best identify Steve.
Initially I fastened upon “The Prophet,” but felt the honorific sounded pretentious. Remembering that in the Judaic tradition there are 48 prophets (and 7 prophetesses), I decided upon calling Steve “The 49th Prophet.” I liked it; however, quickly I became unimpressed by it. It didn’t capture Steve’s essence. It only addressed half of who he was.
Steve was a scholar, publishing a book and article on Joesph Conrad and an article on D.H. Lawrence. Since the late 1990s, Steve worked on a book project on Henrik Ibsen, the playwright who wrote A Doll’s House. He never finished the Ibsen book.
I sensed I needed to honor Steve’s scholarship, and finding something literary, I wanted to acknowledge his struggles, too. Since he considered my Herman Melville book chapter on Bartleby his favorite, I decided to add the reference to his new name. Given that both Bartleby and Steve suffered soul sickness, I chose to add “the Scrivener” to Steve’s new name.
Steve became “King Solomon, the Scrivener.”