The Little Book Read Online Free PDF Page A

disciples he had to choose from.
    “What ever happened to the Haze’s ‘Random Notes,’ ” alumni would inevitably ask, “and what ever became of his marvelous ‘Little Book’?” Then someone would have to explain that all of the Haze’s “papers,” books included, ended up in the hands of that strange Burden kid from California. After Wheeler became famous, the bequest made a little more sense, but still not much. In fact, it remained a complete puzzlement, until, that is, the 1988 appearance of the great book.
    Five years after the Haze’s death, in 1970, Wheeler, by then a rising rock music phenomenon, showed the black binder to an imperious young editor from the small Athenaeum Press in Boston, who had made a special appointment and a special trip to San Francisco. “Have you read this?” the editor said, pointing to the bulging pages of the binder, as if its contents were outside the bounds of a Woodstock star’s comprehension.
    “Of course I’ve read it,” Wheeler said. “I have lived and breathed it.”
    The editor looked wide-eyed, having discovered in one casual reading what every St. Gregory’s boy had discovered over an entire prep school career. “There are a lot of parallels here,” he said, failed by words. “The music, the arts, the radical politics of turn-of-the-century Vienna feels like today—Woodstock, antiwar protests, the rise of the arts.” He paused, as if it were more than the mind could encompass. Then, as if reading from some preordained script, he offered, “We want to give you a contract. We will publish it, and we want you to be the editor. It’s a big job.” And Wheeler committed to work on pulling together his beloved mentor’s scribbled observations, a task that would come to consume almost fifteen years—in fact, the last fifteen years—of his life. And for some unexplained reason, Athenaeum Press waited patiently.
    So it was that in the late 1980s, years after the passing of the Venerable Haze, the “Random Notes” finally appeared in print. What had been for prep school boys the collected reflections and reminiscences that inspired the beginnings of an understanding of modern history became, when pulled together in one volume, as the Boston Globe reviewer said, “the poignant and prescient descriptions of the end of an era, profound and detailed reflections of a remarkable observer who spent the first third of his life thinking his culture a fantastic pinnacle of civilization and the remaining two-thirds uncovering exactly how it was all the cruelest of illusions. ” The lessons of these essays, it was agreed by most critics, were ones for our own time. Partially because of the book’s timeliness and insight and partially because of the fame of its editor, Wheeler Burden’s refashioning of the Haze’s “Random Notes” became a national best seller. It brought with it a renewed fame and notoriety for a reclusive rock-and-roll icon, a “second coming,” as his mother called it, that would become fatal.
    For the title of the surprise 1988 hit Wheeler chose simply Fin de Siècle .

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    Young Vienna
    In 1683, the last mighty Turkish army, the Muslim scourge from the east, attacked Vienna and laid siege for six months. It was a horrible affair that took the walled city to the point of near-starvation before the invaders saw the approaching Polish army and fled home, leaving behind bags of green beans the Viennese thought to be camel food. To an enterprising Pole, a man of the world named Franz Georg Kolschitsky, who had risked his life to summon the savior army, the city owed a favor. Kolschitsky had traveled in the Ottoman Empire and, knowing what the bags were, asked for and was given the seemingly worthless beans. He roasted them. With his personal spoils of war, he organized a small shop to sell the brew from those beans, and the first coffeehouse was introduced to Vienna and Western Europe.
    At first, the sensitive Viennese thought the dark Turkish