Mating by Norman Rush Page B

Irish kindly Satan persona with hair like a Sioux, black as night, dispensing piercing glances left and right, or not?
    People felt so strongly about him. When he was the topic of conversation you got sick of hearing the cliché that either you hated his positions or you loved them, there was no middle ground with him. Friendships had broken up over his book. The development business is full of suppressed hatred between schools of thought, and the passionarises because money is involved. Developmentalists are competing tooth and nail for project money to enact their theories someplace. This is the only way to know you’re on top. It isn’t like English History, say, where the prize is getting into every bibliography until the end of time because what you figured out about Tudor statecraft subsumes and overturns everything anybody else wrote, up until you. Development is more like research medicine, where you rise and fall according to the grants you rack up. In regular scholarship what you get is the joy of subsuming your predecessors and peers: they thought they were rivers but you turn them into creeks, tributaries to your majestic seaward flow. And Denoon not only pierced competitive theories on paper, he did live projects, lots of them one after another.
    Anthropologists were particularly conflicted about Denoon because of his celebrated scorn for the field as a whole. But anthropology needs development and gets dragged perforce into taking sides on schools of thought or on projects. There is hiring involved. You need feasibility studies, you need sensitivity monitoring, you need impact evaluation, you need retrospectives of various kinds and degrees of thoroughness. For some reason he had basically a left academic constituency, which was odd because he was notorious for taking the position that marxists had no development theory worth the name: from Lenin onward development was just whatever took place after the spokesmen for the proletariat took power. But still they loved him. How did they like his famous Capitalism is strangling black Africa: Socialism will bury her! I wondered. He was the theorist you hate to love. I had to know how he was doing. Was he still the equivalent in development terms of Orson Welles in the movie world when he was at his zenith between
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
? Had he slipped at all, since we all slip? I wanted to see him in the flesh.
    Tell me at least if he’s married, I said to Z. He had been, the last I’d heard. I couldn’t help it. Eminence is not the best medium for marriages, is what I was thinking.
    I can tell you something about that another time, Z said. It’s an interesting question. I would say yes and no. It’s an interesting story. But there was the question of our um prognosis.
    I was slightly unforthcoming.
    Well, there was more he could tell me, possibly. Denoon kept his movements in Botswana, when he was offsite, very private. But he thought Denoon was about to be in town for a short while. Z might be able to find out more about that too.
    He had me and knew it.
    Could we not just go on seeing each other for a time, at a pace of say once a week, since I had gotten him well over the hump with his back? It’s your hands I’m going to miss eternally when you leave, he said, your marvelous hands, your great gift.
    Another choppy night ensued after he left me alone with my new fixation. I slept minimally, then got up and cleaned the premises and wrote another lying letter to my mother.

  THE SOLAR DEMOCRAT
A Fête Worse Than Death
    I was wound up when I met Denoon. The night was muggy, with freak intermittent blasts and lurches of hot wind, which was fine somehow when I was walking over to the reception with Z but nerve-wracking during the aeon we had to wait in a mob outside the locked gates of the house we were invited to. The hosts who were keeping us in the street were the USAID mission director Arthur Bemis and his wife, Ariel. Apparently we