Henry Miller
Henry Miller
was born in 1891 in Brooklyn, New York. He had a variety of jobs as a young man, including several years working for the Western Union Telegraph Company. During this time, encouraged by June Mansfield Smith, the second of his five wives. Miller began to write. Aside from articles, stories for pulp magazines and prose poems, Miller worked on his first novels. Crazy Cock and Moloch, and on the copious notes which would eventually transmute into the notorious 'Tropics' books.
In 1930, Miller went to live in Paris. For the next ten years he mingled with impoverished expatriates and bohemian Parisians, including Brassai, Artaud and Anais Nin, with whom he had a much documented affair. His first published book. Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934 from the Obelisk Press in Paris. It was followed five years later by its sister volume. Tropic of Capricorn. Sexually explicit, these books electrified the European literary avant-garde, received praise from Eliot, Pound, Beckett and Durrell, but were almost universally banned outside France.
Miller returned to America in 1940, settling in Big Sur, California. Here, he wrote the 'Rosy Crucifixion' trilogy - Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1959) but, regarded by many as a writer of 'dirty books', he was unable to get his major works published in America. In 1961, after an epic legal battle. Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the States (in England in 1963). Miller became a household name, hailed by the Sixties counterculture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. With the subsequent unbanning of the rest of his books, Miller's work was finally available in his own country.
He died on June 7 1980.
BY ÒÍE SAME AUTHOR
MODERN CLASSIC
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Capricorn
With an introduction by Robert Nye
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPuhlishers
Flamingo
An Imprint of HatperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith,
London W6 8JB
A Flamingo Modem Classic 1993 98765
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1966 Reprinted 14 times
First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Limited 1964
Copyright 0 Henry Miller 1957 Introduction copyright O Robert Nye 1993
ISBN 0 00 654584 X Set in Plantin
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd,
Glasgow
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
INTRODUCTION
by Robert Nye
Henry Miller's first book. Tropic of Cancer, was published in Paris in 1934 and was immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. With its sequel. Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which actually covers an earlier period in Miller's life, it makes up a running fictional autobiography remarkable for its candour, gusto, and completeness. The two books have in common a plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy discovered somewhere on the far side of despair, things that their author was seldom to match and never to surpass in later self-unravellings.
When the 'Tropics' were at last made generally available in Britain and America in the Sixties, they were praised as works of sexual liberation. Since then they have sometimes been attacked as works of sexual misogyny. All this seems to me rather to miss the point, as does criticism of the two books for their verbal extravagance and their lack of art. Probably it is no accident that nobody was ever indifferent concerning Henry Miller. There are those who love him and there are those who hate him. His work does not allow of the mild alternatives of liking or disliking. A case could be made that this itself constitutes a fault, but I prefer to
find a virtue in such passion, and an important one. The Miller that emerges from the books is, to my mind, an honest and lovable person, splendidly undefeated by experience, a man with an unquenchable appetite for the fundamental realities, and an infinite capacity for being surprised by his own innocence. If there is any message extractable from his work it is that of someone who - against all the odds and in spite of most of the evidence - says 'More' to life. This I find honourable.
Even in the 'Tropics' Miller is, of course, an extraordinarily diffuse and uneven writer. He repeats, paraphrases, and parodies himself with an abandon that in a lesser spirit would be suicidal. He is sometimes brutal, he is often sentimental. But having said that, I have said most of what might be said against him. The best pages here, as in his one other great work. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), are white-hot and inspired, both funny and terrible, a man's attempt to tell the whole truth about the life that he has known. Miller is one of the few modern writers who can move a reader to tears, quite simply, by the pressure of his own feeling. He can also communicate, and induce in the reader, a delicious delight in the fact of being alive. I never read Miller on song without feeling better, happier, more myself and less alone, for having done so.
On the ovarian trolley
Foreword to Historia Calamitatum
(the story of my misfortunes)
Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are
soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore, because I too have
known some consolation from speech had with one who was a witness thereof, am I now minded
to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one
who, though absent, is of himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your
sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of
small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.
Peter Abelard
0 10
What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me
to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but
if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal,
and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I
have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for
everybody and everything.
From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything
too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had need of nobody
because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment
anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took.
I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a
poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she
weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children rebel, or make a
pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn, I was a philosopher when still in
swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of
futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared
to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap.
And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born
with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown
up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that
perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which
everything is offered you gratis? The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow
and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls
in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones,
as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally
cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were "warm"
countries, places where you didn't have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that
it
11
was tonic and exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who
work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the
gospel of work -which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people were
entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been
expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of
righteousness. They were painfully dean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they
opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap
into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after
the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were
washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for
tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they
are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the
bridge.
In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better
to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways. For a long while I thought I had
escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I am even a little worse,
because I saw more dearly than they ever did and yet remained powerless to alter my life.
As I look back on my life it seems to me that I never did anything of my own volition but
always through the pressure of others. People often think of me as an adventurous fellow;
nothing could be farther from the truth. My adventures were always adventitious, always
thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I am of the very essence of that
proud, boastful Nordic people who have never had the least sense of adventure but who
nevertheless have scoured the earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics and ruins
everywhere. Restless spirits, but not adventurous ones. Agonizing spirits, incapable of
living in the present Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For there is only
one great adventure and that is inward towards the self, and for that, time nor space nor
even deeds matter.
Once every few years I was on the verge of making this
12
discovery, but in characteristic fashion I always managed to dodge the
issue. If I try to think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the
streets I knew and the people who inhabited them. I can think of no street in America, or
of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on towards the discovery of the
self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the world but nowhere have I felt so
degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in America combined as
forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and
drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic
wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works
and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a
nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity
in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth,
statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. At
least I knew that I was unhappy, unwealthy, out of whack and out of step. That was my only
solace, my only joy. But it was hardly enough. It would have been better for my peace of
mind, for my soul if I had expressed my rebellion openly, if I had gone to jail for it, if
I had rotted there and died. It would have been better if, like the mad Czolgosz, I had
shot some good President McKinley, some gentle, insignificant soul like that who had never
done anyone the least harm. Because in the bottom of my heart there was murder: I wanted
to see America destroyed, razed from top to bottom. I wanted to see this happen purely out
of vengeance, as atonement for the crimes that were committed against me and against
others like me who have never been able to lift their voices and express their hatred,
their rebellion, their legitimate blood lust.
I was the evil product of an evil soil. If the self were not
imperishable, the "I" I write about would have been destroyed long ago. To some
this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have happened did actually
happen, at least to me. History may deny it, since I have played no part in the
history of my people, but even if everything I say is wrong, is
13
prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a poisoner,
it is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed. As to what happened ...
Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of
a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that
somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solutions to all things. I thought, when
I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could
bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach
myself to - and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach
myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for - myself.
I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is
called living - but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in
living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it
at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what
is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day
in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has
been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel -
that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this
spectre, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else
is a lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty
much the greater part of my life.
I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be
serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and earnest, or to be
negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once - and beyond that I was something
else, something which no one suspected, least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I
used to sit at my grandfather's workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him
vividly in those
14
moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a coat, he
would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window dreamily. I remember
the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming, better than the contents of the
books I read, better than the conversations we had or the games which I played in the
street I used to wonder what he was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself.
I hadn't learned yet how to dream wideawake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of
a piece. His daydreaming fascinated me. I knew that he had no connection with what he was
doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone and being alone he was free.
I was never alone, least of all when I was by myself. Always, it seems to me, I was
accompanied: I was like a little crumb of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose,
though I never stopped to think about it. But I know I never existed separately, never
thought myself the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had reason to be miserable,
to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a universal misery.
When I wept the whole world was weeping -so I imagined. I wept very seldom. Mostly I was
happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time. I had a good time because, as I said
before, I really didn't give a fuck about anything. If things were wrong with me they were
wrong everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when one cared
too much. That impressed itself on me very early in life. For example, I remember the case
of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole year he lay in bed, suffering the worst
agonies. He was my best friend, so people said at any rate. Well, at first I was probably
sorry for him and perhaps now and then I called at his house to inquire about him; but
after a month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering. I said to
myself he ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and having thought
thus I acted accordingly, that is to say, I promptly forgot about him, abandoned him to
his fate. I was only about twelve years old at the time and I remember being proud of my
decision. I remember the funeral too - what a disgraceful affair it was. There they were,
friends and relatives all congregated about the bier and all
15
of them bawling like sick monkeys. The mother especially gave me a pain
in the ass. She was such a rare, spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and
though she didn't believe in disease and didn't believe in death either, she raised such a
stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave. But not her beloved Jack! No,
Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable. He was dead and there were no two
ways about it. I knew it and I was glad of it. I didn't waste any tears over it. I
couldn't say that he was better off because after all the "he" had vanished. He
was gone and with him the sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly
inflicted on others. Amen! I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I
let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.
This caring too much - I remember that it only developed with me about
the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn't care enough. If I had really cared I
wouldn't be here now writing about it: I'd have died of a broken heart, or I'd have swung
for it. It was a bad experience because it taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to
smile when I didn't want to smile, to work when I didn't believe in work, to live when I
had no reason to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of
doing what I didn't believe in.
I was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got
so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion, that it's a wonder things
didn't explode around me.
It is customary to blame everything on the war. I say the war had
nothing to do with me, with my life. At a time when others were getting themselves
comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another, and never enough in it to
keep body and soul together. Almost as quickly as I was hired I was fired. I had plenty of
intelligence but I inspired distrust. Whereever I went I fomented discord - not because I
was idealistic but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of
everything. Besides, I wasn't a good ass-licker. That marked me, no doubt. People could
tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn't give a damn whether I got it or
not. And of course I generally didn't get it. But after a time the mere looking for a job
became an activity, a pastime, so to speak.
16
I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time -
now worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and I had my own
hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my own bankruptcy. I was not
a corporation or a trust or a state or a federation or a polity of nations - I was more
like God, if anything.
This went on from about the middle of the war until... well, until one
day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I needed it.
Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that
of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of the telegraph company - the
Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America - towards the dose of the day, prepared to
go through with it. I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some
fat books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the job.
The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard.
He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was dear enough from my application
that I had long left school. I had even honoured myself on the application with a Ph.D.
degree from Columbia University. Apparently that passed unnoticed, or else was
suspiciously regarded by this runt who had turned me down. I was furious, the more so
because for once in my life I was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride,
which in certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual leer
and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking about it, still
smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on. The fact that I had a wife and
child to support didn't bother me so much, people didn't offer you jobs because you had a
family to support, that much I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they
had rejected me. Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked
for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn't get over it. In the morning
I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and hot-footed it to the subway.
I went immediately to the main offices of the telegraph company ... up to the 25th floor
or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presi-
17
dents had their cubicles. I asked to see the president. Of course the
president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn't I care to see the
vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president's secretary, an
intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly,
without too much heat, but letting him understand all the while that I wasn't to be put
out of the way so easily.
When he picked up the telephone and demanded the general manager I
thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that from one to
the other until I'd get fed up. But the moment I heard him talk I changed my opinion. When
I got to the general manager's office, which was in another building uptown, they were
waiting for me. I sat down in a comfortable leather chair and accepted one of the big
cigars that were thrust forward. This individual seemed at once to be vitally concerned
about the matter. He wanted me to tell him all about it, down to the last detail, his big
hairy ears cocked to catch the least crumb of information which would justify something or
other which was formulating itself inside his dome. I realized that by some accident I had
really been instrumental in doing him a service. I let him wheedle it out of me to suit
his fancy, observing all the time which way the wind was blowing. And as the talk
progressed I noticed that be was warming up to me more and more. At last some one was
showing a little confidence in me 1 That was all I required to get started on one of my
favourite lines. For, after years of job hunting I had naturally become quite adept, I
knew not only what not to say, but I knew also what to imply, what to insinuate.
Soon the assistant general manager was called in and asked to listen to my story. By this
time I knew what the story was. I understood that Hymie - "that little kike", as
the general manager called him - had no business pretending that he was the employment
manager. Hymie had usurped his prerogative, that much was dear. It was also dear that
Hymie was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odour with the general manager, nor with
Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who was a thorn in the general manager's side.
Perhaps it was Hymie, "the dirty little kike" who was
responsible for the high percentage of Jews on the messenger
l8
force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the
employment office - at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent opportunity, I
gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a certain Mr. Bums who, he
informed me, had been the employment manager for some thirty years now and who was
evidently getting lazy on the job.
The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr.
Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss of the
Works. Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me as a special favour,
and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand me in good stead, to work as a
special messenger. I would receive the salary of employment manager, but it would be paid
me out of a separate account. In short I was to float from office to office and observe
the way affairs were conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time
to time as to how things were going. And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to visit
him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the conditions in the hundred and
one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in New York City. In other words I was
to be a spy for a few months and after that I was to have the run of the joint. Maybe
they'd make me a general manager too one day, or a vice-president. It was a tempting oner,
even if it was wrapped up in a lot of horse shit. I said Yes.
In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a
demon. It was a slaughter-house, so help me God. The thing was senseless from the bottom
up. A waste of men, material and effort A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and
misery. But just as I had accepted the spying so I accepted the hiring and firing and all
that went with it. I said Yes to everything. If the vice-president decreed that no
cripples were to be hired I hired no cripples. If the vice-president said that all
messengers over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without notice. I
did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had to pay for it.
When there was a strike I folded my arms and waited for it to blow over. But I first saw
to it that it cost them a good penny. The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so
lousy, so hopelessly corrupt
19
and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or
order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against the
whole rotten system of American labour, which is rotten at both ends. I was the fifth
wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except to exploit me. In fact,
everybody was being exploited - the president and his gang by the unseen powers, the
employees by the officials, and so on and around, in and out and through the whole works.
From my little perch at "Sunset Place" I had a bird's eye view of the whole
American society. It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically,
numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you
examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone
individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the
chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so
utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could
see the whole American life - economically, politically, morally, spiritually,
artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out
cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn't even see anything resembling
a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life, did produce something, did at
least give a moment's pleasure, a moment's thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it
looked rottener than the wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn't
carry'em off... I'm using the past tense all the time, but of course it's the same now,
maybe even a bit worse. At least now we're getting it full stink.
By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps
of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it stank like one. I
had dug myself into the first line trench and I was getting it from all directions at
once. To begin with, the man I had ousted died of a broken heart a few weeks after my
arrival. He held out just long enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened
so fast that I didn't have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the
office it was one long uninterrupted pandemon-
20
him. An hour before my arrival -1 was always late - the place was
already jammed with applicants. I had to elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my
way in to get there. Hymie was worse off than I because he was tied to the barricade.
Before I could take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls. There were three
telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss out of me
before I had even sat down to work. There wasn't even time to take a crap - until five or
six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off than I because he was tied to the switchboard.
He sat there from eight in the morning, until six, moving waybills around. A waybill was a
messenger loaned by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of
the hundred and one offices ever had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess with the
waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a miracle I succeeded in
a day of filling all the vacancies, the next morning would find the situation exactly the
same - or worse. Perhaps twenty per cent of the force were steady; the rest was driftwood.
The steady ones drove the new ones away. The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars a
week, sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars a week,
which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often more than their own
managers. As for the new ones, they found it difficult to earn ten dollars a week. Some of
them worked an hour and quit, often throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or
down the sewer. And whenever they quit they wanted their pay immediately, which was
impossible, because in the complicated bookkeeping which ruled no one could say what a
messenger had earned until at least ten days later. In the beginning I invited the
applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to him in detail. I did that
until I lost my voice. Soon I learned to save my strength for the grilling that was
necessary. In the first place, every other boy was a born liar if not a crook to boot.
Many of them had already been hired and fired a number of times. Some found it an
excellent way to find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds of offices
which normally they would never have set foot in. Fortunately McGovern, the old trusty who
guarded the door and
21
handed out the application blanks, had a camera eye. And then there
were the big ledgers behind me, in which there was a record of every applicant who had
ever passed through the mill. The ledgers were very much like a police record; they were
full of red ink marks, signifying this or that delinquency. To judge from the evidence I
was in a tough spot. Every other name involved a theft, fraud, a brawl, or dementia or
perversion or idiocy. "Be careful - so-and-so is an epileptic!" "Don't hire
this man - he's a nigger 1" "Watch out - X has been in Dannemora - or else in
Sing Sing."
If I had been a stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been
hired. I had to learn quickly, and not from the records or from those about me, but from
experience. There were a thousand and one details by which to judge an applicant: I had to
take them all in at once, and quickly, because in one short day, even if you are as fast
as Jack Robinson, you can only hire so many and no more. And no matter how many I hired it
was never enough. The next day it would begin all over again. Some I knew would last only
a day, but I had to hire them just the same. The system was wrong from start to finish,
but it was not my place to criticize the system. It was mine to hire and fire. I was in
the centre of a revolving disk which was whirling so fast that nothing could stay put.
What was needed was a mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was
nothing wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things were
temporarily out of order. And things being temporarily out of order brought on epilepsy,
theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews, whores and what-not - sometimes strikes and
lockouts. Whereupon, according to this logic, you took a big broom and you swept the
stable dean, or you took clubs and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were
suffering from the illusion that things were fundamentally wrong. It was good now and then
to talk of God, or to have a little community sing - maybe even a bonus was justifiable
now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad for words. But on the
whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and firing; as long as there were men and
ammunition we were to advance, to keep mopping up the
22
trenches. Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills -enough to blow
out his rear end if he had bad a rear end, but he hadn't one any more, he only imagined he
was taking a crap, he only imagined he was shitting on his can. Actually the poor bugger
was in a trance. There were a hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a
staff of messengers which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers
were real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from morning
to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary because who could say when
a recruit had been dispatched to an office whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow
or never. Some of them got lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers;
some rode around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free ride
and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the elevated lines. Some of
them started for Staten Island and ended up in Canarsie, or else were brought back in a
coma by a cop. Some forgot where they lived and disappeared completely. Some whom we hired
for New York turned up in Philadelphia a month later as though it were normal and
according to Hoyle. Some would start for their destination and on the way decide that it
was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them in the uniform we had given them,
until they were picked up. Some went straight to the observation ward, moved by some
strange preservative instinct.
When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he
did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he explained to
me later, if he didn't sharpen the pencils first thing off the bat they would never get
sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out the window and see what the weather was
like. Then, with a freshly sharpened pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate
which he kept beside him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me,
often turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground covered
with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not shuffling the waybills around
more speedily, and the employment manager might also be excused for not filling up the
holes on such days,
23
no? But why he didn't take a crap first instead of plugging in on the
switchboard soon as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. That too he explained
to me later. Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints, constipation and
vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad breaths, with ragged nerves,
with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages, with back pay that was overdue, with
worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions, with flat feet and broken arches, with pocket
books missing and fountain pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with
threats from the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes,
with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency and old ones
that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a prayer for the bonus which never
came. The new messengers were going over the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones
were digging in deeper and deeper, like rats in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially
not the public. It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it might
take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for - or it might never
reach him.
The Y.M.C.A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in
America, were holdings meetings at noon hour and wouldn't I like to send a few
spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a five minute talk on
service. Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to know if I could spare a few
minutes some time to tell me about the model prisoners who were on parole and who would be
glad to serve in any capacity, even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish
Charities would be very grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes
which had broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the
family. Mr. Haggerty of the Runaway Home for Boys was sure he had just the right
youngsters for me, if only I would give them a chance; all of them had been mistreated by
their stepfathers or stepmothers. The Mayor of New York would appreciate it if I would
give my personal attention to the bearer of the said letter whom he could vouch for in
every way -but why the hell he didn't give said bearer a job himself was a
24
mystery. Man leaning over my shoulder hands me a slip of paper on which
he has just written - "Me understand everything but me no hear the voices."
Luther Winifred is standing beside him, his tattered coat fastened together with safety
pins. Luther is two sevenths pure Indian and five sevenths German-American, so he
explains. On the Indian side he is a Crow, one of the Crows from Montana. His last job was
putting up window shades, but there is no ass in his pants and he is ashamed to climb a
ladder in front ofa lady. He got out of the hospital the other day and so he is still a
little weak, but he is not too weak to carry messages, so he thinks.
And then there is Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him? He
has been waiting in line all morning to get a word with me. I never answered the letters
he sent me. Was that just? he asks me blandly. Of course not. I remember vaguely the last
letter he sent me from the Cat and Dog Hospital on the Grand Concourse, where he was an
attendant. He said he repented that he had resigned his post "but it was on account
of his father being too strict over him, not giving him any recreation or outside
pleasure". "I'm twenty-five now," he wrote, "and I don't think I
should ought to be sleeping no more with my father, do you? I know you are said to be a
very fine gentleman and I am now self-dependent, so I hope ..." McGovem, the old
trusty, is standing by Ferdinand's side waiting for me to give him the sign. He wants to
give Ferdinand the bum's rush - he remembers him from five years ago when Ferdinand lay
down on the sidewalk in front of the main office in full uniform and threw an epileptic
fit. No, shit, I can't do it! I'm going to give him a chance, the poor bastard. Maybe I'll
send him to Chinatown where things are fairly quiet. Meanwhile, while Ferdinand is
changing into a uniform in the back room, I'm getting an earful from an orphan boy who
wants to "help make the company a success". He says that if I give him a chance
he'll pray for me every Sunday when he goes to church, except the Sundays when he has to
report to his parole officer. He didn't do nothing, it appears. He just pushed the fellow
and the fellow fell on his head and got killed. Next: An ex-consul from Gibraltar.
Writes a beautiful hand - too beauti-
25
fill. I ask him to see me at the end of the day - something fishy about
him. Meanwhile Ferdinand's thrown a fit in the dressing room. Lucky break! If it had
happened in the subway, with a number on his hat and everything, I'd have been canned. Next:
A guy with one arm and mad as hell because McGovem is showing him the
door. "What the hell! I'm strong and healthy, ain't I?" he shouts, and to prove
it he picks up a chair with his good arm and smashes it to bits. I get back to the desk
and there's a telegram lying there for me. I open it. It's from George Blasini,
ex-messenger No. 2459 of S.W. office. "I am sorry that I had to quit so soon, but the
job was not fitted for my character idleness and I am a true lover of labour and frugality
but many a time we be unable to control or subdue our personal pride." Shit!
In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the
clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the vice-president or
not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and lectured for having "too big a
heart". I never had any money in my pocket but I used other people's money freely. As
long as I was the boss I had credit. I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes
away and my linen, my books, everything that was superfluous. If I had had the power I
would have given the company away to the poor buggers who pestered me. If I was asked for
a dime I gave a half dollar, if I was asked for a dollar I gave five. I didn't give a fuck
how much I gave away, because it was easier to borrow and give than to refuse the poor
devils. I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I'll never see it
again. Men are poor everywhere - they always have been and they always will be. And
beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible.
But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it it can become a conflagration. I
was constantly urged not to be too lenient, not to be too sentimental, not to be too
charitable. Be firm! Be hard! they cautioned me. Fuck that! I said to myself, I'll be
generous, pliant, forgiving, tolerant, tender. In the beginning I heard every man to the
end; if I couldn't give him a job I gave him money, and if I had no money I gave him
cigarettes or I gave
26
him courage. But I gave! The effect was dizzying. Nobody can estimate
the results of a good deed, of a kind word. I was swamped with gratitude, with good
wishes, with invitations, with pathetic, tender little gifts. If I had had real power,
instead of being the fifth wheel on a wagon. God knows what I might have accomplished. I
could have used the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America as a base to bring all
humanity to God; I could have transformed North and South America alike, and the Dominion
of Canada too. I had the secret in my hand: it was to be generous, to be kind, to be
patient. I did the work of five men. I hardly slept for three years. I didn't own a whole
shirt and often I was so ashamed of borrowing from my wife, or robbing the kid's bank,
that to get the car fare to go to work in the morning I would swindle the blind
newspaperman at the subway station. I owed so much money all around that if I were to work
for twenty years I would not have been able to pay it back. I took from those who had and
I gave to those who needed, and it was the right thing to do, and I would do it all over
again if I were in the same position.
I even accomplished the miracle of stopping the crazy turnover,
something that nobody had dared to hope for. Instead of supporting my efforts they
undermined me. According to the logic of the higher-ups the turnover had ceased because
the wages were too high. So they cut the wages. It was like kicking the bottom out of a
bucket. The whole edifice tumbled, collapsed on my hands. And, just as though nothing had
happened they insisted that the gaps be plugged up immediately. To soften the blow a bit
they intimated that I might even increase the percentage of Jews, I might take on a
cripple now and then, if he were capable, I might do this and that, all of which they had
informed me previously was against the code. I was so furious that I took on anything and
everything; I would have taken on broncos and gorillas if I could have imbued them with
the modicum of intelligence which was necessary to deliver messages. A few days previously
there had been only five or six vacancies at dosing time. Now there were three hundred,
four hundred, five hundred - they were running out like sand. It
27
was marvellous. I sat there and without asking a question I took them
on in carload lots - niggers, Jews, paralytics, cripples, ex-convicts, whores, maniacs,
perverts, idiots, any fucking bastard who could stand on two legs and hold a telegram in
his hand. The managers of the hundred and one offices were frightened to death. I laughed.
I laughed all day long thinking what a fine stinking mess I was making of it Complaints
were pouring in from all parts of the city. The service was crippled, constipated,
strangulated. A mule could have gotten there faster than some of the idiots I put into
harness.
The best thing about the new day was the introduction of female
messengers. It changed the whole atmosphere of the joint. For Hymie especially it was a
godsend. He moved his switchboard around so that he could watch me while juggling the
waybills back and forth. Despite the added work he had a permanent erection. He came to
work with a smile and he smiled all day long. He was in heaven. At the end of the day I
always had a list of five or six who were worth trying out. The game was to keep them on
the string, to promise them a job but to get a free fuck first. Usually it was only
necessary to throw a feed into them in order to bring them back to the office at night and
lay them out on the zinc-covered table in the dressing room. If they had a cosy apartment,
as they sometimes did, we took them home and finished it in bed. If they liked to drink
Hymie would bring a bottle along. If they were any good and really needed some dough Hymie
would flash his roll and peel off a five spot or a ten spot as the case might be. It makes
my mouth water when I think of that roll he carried about with him. Where he got it from I
never knew, because he was the lowest paid man in the joint. But it was always there, and
no matter what I asked for I got. And once it happened that we did get a bonus and I paid
Hymie back to the last penny - which so amazed him that he took me out that night to
Delmonico's and spent a fortune on me. Not only that, but the next day he insisted on
buying me hat and shirts and gloves. He even insinuated that I might come home and fuck
his wife, if I liked, though he warned me that she was having a little trouble at present
with her ovaries.
28
In addition to Hymie and McGovem I had as assistants a pair of
beautiful blondes who often accompanied us to dinner in the evening. And there was O'Mara,
an old friend of mine who had just returned from the Philippines and whom I made my chief
assistant. There was also Steve Romero, a prize bull whom I kept around in case of
trouble. And O'Rourke, the company detective, who reported to me at the dose of day when
he began his work. Finally I added another man to the staff - Kronski, a young medical
student, who was diabolically interested in the pathological cases of which we had plenty.
We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the company at all costs. And while
fucking the company we fucked everything in sight that we could get hold of, O'Rourke
excepted, as he had a certain dignity to maintain, and besides he had trouble with his
prostate and had lost all interest in fucking. But O'Rourke was a prince of a man, and
generous beyond words. It was O'Rourke who often invited us to dinner in the evening and
it was O'Rourke we went to when we were in trouble.
That was how it stood at Sunset Place after a couple of years had
rolled by. I was saturated with humanity, with experiences of one kind and another. In my
sober moments I made notes which I intended to make use of later if ever I should have a
chance to record my experiences. I was waiting for a breathing spell. And then by chance
one day, when I had been put on the carpet for some wanton piece of negligence, the
vice-president let drop a phrase which stuck in my crop. He had said that he would like to
see some one write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers; he hinted that
perhaps I might be the one to do such a job. I was furious to think what a ninny he was
and delighted at the same time because secretly I was itching to get the thing off my
chest. I thought to myself- you poor old futzer, you, just wait until I get it off my
chest... I'll give you an Horatio Alger book .. . just you wait! My head was in a whirl
leaving his office. I saw the army of men, women and children that had passed through my
hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming,
threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, the
29
freight trains lying on the floor, the parents in rags, the coal box
empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the
cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or falling
backwards in the epileptic frenzy, the mouth twitching, thesaliva pouring from the lips,
the limbs writhing; I saw the walls giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged
fluid, and the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to blow over,
waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting, waiting contentedly, smugly, with big
cigars in their mouths and their feet on the desk, saying things were temporarily out of
order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick American, mounting higher and
-higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent,
then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all
the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with
ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft. You shits, I said to myself, I will give you
the picture of twelve little men, zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits, the twelve
uncrushable worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten edifice. I will give you
Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared
away.
From all over the earth they had come to me to be succoured. Except for
the primitives there was scarcely a race which wasn't represented on the force. Except for
the Ainus, the Maoris, the Papuans, the Veddas, the Lapps, the Zulus, the Patagonians, the
Igorotes, the Hottentots, the Touaregs, except for the lost Tasmanians, the lost Grimaldi
men, the lost Atianteans, I had a representative of almost every species under the sun. I
had two brothers who were still sun-worshippers, two Nestorians from the old Assyrian
world; I had two Maltese twins from Malta and a descendant of the Mayas from Yucatan; I
had a few of our little brown brothers from the Philippines and some Ethiopians from
Abyssinia; I had men from the pampas of Argentina and stranded cowboys from Montana; I had
Greeks, Letts, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Czechs, Spaniards, Welshmen, Finns,
Swedes, Russians, Danes, Mexicans, Porto
30
Ricans, Cubans, Uruguayans, Brazilians, Australians, Persians, Japs,
Chinese, Javanese, Egyptians, Africans from the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast, Hindus,
Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Germans, Irish, English, Canadians - and plenty of Italians and
plenty of Jews. I had only one Frenchman that I can recall and he lasted about three
hours. I had a few American Indians, Cherokees mostly, but no Tibetans, and no Eskimos: I
saw names I could never have imagined and handwriting which ranged from cuneiform to the
sophisticated and astoundingly beautiful calligraphy of the Chinese. I heard men beg for
work who had been Egyptologists, botanists, surgeons, gold-miners, professors of Oriental
languages, musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists,
mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison warders, cow-punchers,
lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters, dentists, surgeons, painters,
sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope peddlers, abortionists, white slavers, sea divers,
steeplejacks, farmers, cloak and suit salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps,
aldermen, senators, every bloody thing under the sun, and all of them down and out,
begging for work for cigarettes, for carfare, for a chance, Christ Almighty, just
another chance! I saw and got to know men who were saints, if there are saints in this
world; I saw and spoke to savants, crapulous and uncrapulous ones; I listened to men who
had the divine fire in their bowels who could have convinced God Almighty that they were
worthy of another chance, but not the vice-president of the Cosmococcus Telegraph Company.
I sat riveted to my desk and I travelled around the world at lightning speed, and I
learned that everywhere it is the same -hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, greed,
extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to man: the fetters, the
harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs. The finer the calibre the worse off
the man. Men were walking the streets of New York in that bloody, degrading outfit, the
despised, the lowest of the low, walking around like auks, like penguins, like oxen, like
trained seals, like patient donkeys, like big jackasses, like crazy gorillas, like docile
maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like guinea pigs, like
31
squirrels, like rabbits, and many and many a one was fit to govern the
world, to write tile greatest book ever written. When I think of some of the Persians, the
Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their grace, their
tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness, I spit on the white conquerors of
the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug self-satisfied French.
The earth is one great sentient being, a planet saturated through and through with man, a
live planet expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly;
it is not the home of the white race or the black race or the yellow
race or the lost blue race, but the home of man and all men are equal before God
and will have their chance, if not now then a million years hence. The little brown
brothers of the Philippines may bloom again, one day and the murdered Indians of America
north and south may also come alive one day to ride the plains where now the cities stand
belching fire and pestilence. Who has the last say? Man! The earth is his because
he is the earth, its fire, its water, its air, its mineral and vegetable matter,
its spirit which is cosmic, which is imperishable, which is the spirit of all the planets,
which transforms itself through him, through endless signs and symbols, through endless
manifestations. Wait, you cosmococcic telegraphic shits, you demons on high waiting for
the plumbing to be repaired, wait, you dirty white conquerors who have sullied the earth
with your cloven hooves, your instruments, your weapons, your disease germs, wait, all you
who are sitting in clover and counting your coppers, it is not the end. The last man will
have his say before it is finished. Down to the last sentient molecule justice must be
done - and will be done! Nobody is getting away with anything, least of all the
cosmococdc shits of North America.
When it came time for my vacation -1 hadn't taken one for three years,
I was so eager to make the company a success! -1 took three weeks instead of two and I
wrote the book about the twelve little men. I wrote it straight off, five, seven,
sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do at
least five thousand words a day. I thought he must say everything all at once - in one
book - and collapse
32
afterwards. I didn't know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless.
But I was determined to wipe Horatio Alger out of the North American consciousness. I
suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal tome and faulty
from start to finish. But it was my first book and I was in love with it. If I had the
money, as Gide had, I would have published it at my own expense. If I had had the courage
that Whitman had, I would have peddled it from door to door. Everybody I showed it to said
it was terrible. I was urged to give up the idea of writing. I had to learn, as Balzac
did, that one must write volumes before signing one's own name. I had to leam, as I soon
did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must
write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if
nobody believes in you. Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real
secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible,
as they said, was only natural. I was attempting at the start what a man of genius
would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted to say the last word at the beginning. It
was absurd and pathetic. It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and
sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt
something big. Today, when I think of the circumstances under which I wrote that book,
when I think of the overwhelming material which I tried to put into form, when I think of
what I hoped to encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A. I am proud
of the fact that I made such a miserable failure of it; had I succeeded I would have been
a monster. Sometimes, when I look over my notebooks, when I look at the names alone of
those whom I thought to write about, I am seized with vertigo. Each man came to me with a
world of his own; he came to me and unloaded it on my desk; he expected me to pick it up
and put it on my shoulders. I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed
like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back. To
inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad. I didn't dare to think of anything
then except the "facts".
33
To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one
doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting
points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born
again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards
from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel
from the very roots of your being. One can't make a new heaven and earth with
"facts". There are no "facts" - there is only the fact that
man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the
long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own
way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient. In my enthusiasm
certain things were then inexplicable to me which now are dear. I think, for example, of
Carnahan, one of the twelve little men I had chosen to write about. He was what is called
a model messenger. He was a graduate of a prominent university, had a sound intelligence
and was of exemplary character. He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day and earned more
than any messenger on the force. The clients whom he served wrote letters about him,
praising him to the skies; he was offered good positions which he refused for one reason
or another. He lived frugally, sending the best part of his wages to his wife and children
who lived in another city. He had two vices - drink and the desire to succeed. He could go
for a year without drinking, but if he took one drop he was off. He had deaned up twice in
Wall Street and yet, before coming to me for a job, he had gotten no further than to be a
sexton of a church in some little town. He had been fired from that job because he had
broken into the sacramental wine and rung the bells all night long. He was truthful,
sincere, earnest. I had implicit confidence in him and my confidence was proven by the
record of his service which was without a blemish. Nevertheless he shot his wife and
children in cold blood and then he shot himself. Fortunatdy none of them died; they all
lay in the hospital together and they all recovered. I went to see his wife, after they
had transferred him to jail, to get her help. She refused categorically. She said he was
the meanest,
34
cruellest son of a bitch that ever walked on two legs - she wanted to
see him hanged. I pleaded with her for two days, but she was adamant. I went to the jail
and talked to him through the mesh. I found that he had already made himself popular with
the authorities, had already been granted special privileges. He wasn't at all dejected.
On the contrary, he was looking forward to making the best of his time in prison by
"studying up" on salesmanship. He was going to be the best salesman in America
after his release. I might almost say that he seemed happy. He said not to worry about
him, he would get along all right. He said everybody was swell to him and that he had
nothing to complain about. I left him somewhat in a daze. I went to a nearby beach and
decided to take a swim. I saw everything with new eyes. I almost forgot to return home, so
absorbed had I become in my speculations about this chap. Who could say that everything
that happened to him had not happened for the best? Perhaps he might leave the prison a
full-fledged evangelist instead of a salesman. Nobody could predict what he might do. And
nobody could aid him because he was working out his destiny in his own private way.
There was another chap, a Hindu named Guptal. He was not only a model
of good behaviour - he was a saint. He had a passion for the flute which he played all by
himself in his miserable little room. One day he was found naked, his throat slit from ear
to ear, and beside him on the bed was his flute. At the funeral there were a dozen women
who wept passionate tears, including the wife of the janitor who had murdered him. I could
write a book about this young man who was the gentlest and the holiest man I ever met, who
had never offended anybody and never taken anything from anybody, but who had made the
cardinal mistake of coming to America to spread peace and love.
There was Dave Olinski, another faithftil, industrious messenger who
thought of nothing but work. He had one fatal weakness - he talked too much. When he came
to me he had already been around the globe several times and what he hadn't done to make a
living isn't worth telling about. He knew about twelve languages and he was rather proud
of his linguistic
35
ability. He was one of those men whose very willingness and enthusiasm
is their undoing. He wanted to help everybody along, show everybody how to succeed. He
wanted more work than we could give him - he was a glutton for work. Perhaps I should have
warned him, when I sent him to his office on the East Side, that he was going to work in a
tough neighbourhood, but he pretended to know so much and he was so insistent on working
in that locality (because of his linguistic ability) that I said nothing. I thought to
myself - you'll find out quickly enough for yourself. And surely enough, he was only there
a short time when he got into trouble. A tough Jew boy from the neighbourhood walked in
one day and asked for a blank. Dave, the messenger, was behind the desk. He didn't like
the way the man asked for the blank. He told him he ought to be more polite. For that he
got a box in the ears. That made him wag his tongue some more, whereupon he got such a
wallop that his teeth flew down his throat and his jaw-bone was broken in three places.
Still he didn't know enough to hold his trap. Like the damned fool that he was he goes to
the police station and registers a complaint. A week later, while he's sitting on a bench
snoozing, a gang of roughnecks break into the place and beat him to a pulp. His head was
so battered that his brains looked like an omelette. For good measure they emptied the
safe and turned it upside down. Dave died on the way to hospital. They found five hundred
dollars hidden away in the toe of his sock. ... Then there was Clausen and his wife Lena.
They came in together when he applied for the job. Lena had a baby in her arms and he had
two little ones by the hand. They were sent to me by some relief agency. I put him on as a
night messenger so that he'd have a fixed salary. In a few days I had a letter from him, a
batty letter in which he asked me to excuse him for being absent as he had to report to
his parole officer. Then another letter saying that his wife had refused to sleep with him
because she didn't want any more babies and would I please come to see them and try to
persuade her to sleep with him -. I went to his home - a cellar in the Italian quarter. It
looked like a bughouse. Lena was pregnant again, about seven months under way, and on the
verge of idiocy. She had taken to sleeping on the roof
36
because it was too hot in the cellar, also because she didn't want him
to touch her any more. When I said it wouldn't make any difference now she just looked at
me and grinned. Clausen had been in the war and maybe the gas had made him a bit goofy -
at any rate he was foaming at the mouth. He said he would brain her if she didn't stay off
that roof. He insinuated that she was sleeping up there in order to carry on with the coal
man who lived in the attic. At this Lena smiled again with that mirthless batrachian grin.
Clausen lost his temper and gave her a swift kick in the ass. She went out in a huff
taking the brats with her. He told her to stay out for good. Then he opened a drawer and
pulled out a big Colt. He was keeping it in case he needed it some time, he said. He
showed me a few knives too, and a sort of blackjack which he had made himself. Then he
began to weep. He said his wife was making a fool of him. He said he was sick of working
for her because she was sleeping with everybody in the neighbourhood. The kids weren't his
because he couldn't make a kid any more even if he wanted to. The very next day, while
Lena was out marketing, he took the kids up to the roof and with the blackjack he had
shown me he beat their brains out. Then he jumped off the roof head first. When Lena came
home and saw what happened she went off her nut. They had to put her in a straight-jacket
and call for the ambulance... There was Schuldig the rat who had spent twenty years in
prison for a crime he had never committed. He had been beaten almost to death before he
confessed; then solitary confinement, starvation, torture, perversion, dope. When they
finally released him he was no longer a human being. He described to me one night his last
thirty days in jail, the agony of waiting to be released. I have never heard anything like
it; I didn't think a human being could survive such anguish. Freed, he was haunted by the
fear that he might be obliged to commit a crime and be sent back to prison again. He
complained of being followed, spied on, perpetually tracked. He said "they" were
tempting him to do things he had no desire to do. "They" were the dicks who were
on his trail, who were paid to bring him back again. At night, when he was asleep, they
whispered in his ear. He was powerless against
37
them because they mesmerized him first. Sometimes they placed dope
under his pillow, and with it a revolver or a knife. They wanted him to kill some innocent
person so that they would have a solid case against him this time. He got worse and worse.
One night, after he had walked around for hours with a batch of telegrams in his pocket,
he went up to a cop and asked to be locked up. He couldn't remember his name or address or
even the office he was working for. He had completely lost his identity. He repeated over
and over - "I'm innocent... I'm innocent." Again they gave him the third degree.
Suddenly he jumped up and shouted like a madman - "I'll confess ... I'll
confess" - and with that he began to reel off one crime after another. He kept it up
for three hours. Suddenly in the midst of a harrowing confession, he stopped short, gave a
quick look about, like a man who has suddenly come to, and then, with the rapidity and the
force which only a madman can summon he made a tremendous leap across the room and crashed
his skull against the stone wall... I relate these incidents briefly and hurriedly as they
flash through my mind; my memory is packed with thousands of such details, with a myriad
faces, gestures, tales, confessions all entwined and interlaced like the stupendous
reeling facade of some Hindu temple made not of stone but of the experience of human
flesh, a monstrous dream edifice built entirely of reality and yet not reality itself but
merely the vessel in which the mystery of the human being is contained. My mind wanders to
the clinic where in ignorance and good-will I brought some of the younger ones to be
cured. I can think of no more evocative image to convey the atmosphere of this place than
the painting by Hieronymus Bosch in which the magician, after the manner of a dentist
extracting a live nerve, is represented as the deliverer of insanity. All the trumpery and
quackery of our scientific practitioners came to apotheosis in the person of the suave
sadist who operated this clinic with the full concurrence and connivance of the law. He
was a ringer for Caligari, except that he was minus the dunce cap. Pretending that he
understood the secret regulations of the glands, invested with the powers of a mediaeval
monarch, oblivious of the pain he inflicted, ignorant of everything but
38
his medical knowledge, he went to work on the human organism like a
plumber sets to work on the underground drainpipes. In addition to the poisons he threw
into the patient's system he had recourse to his fists or his knees as the case might be.
Anything justified a "reaction". If the victim were lethargic he shouted at him,
slapped him in the face, pinched his arm, cuffed him, kicked him. If on the contrary the
victim were too energetic he employed the same methods, only with redoubled zest. The
feelings of his subject were of no importance to him; whatever reaction he succeeded in
obtaining was merely a demonstration or manifestation of the laws regulating the operation
of the internal glands of secretion. The purpose of his treatment was to render the
subject fit for society. But no matter how fast he worked, no matter whether he was
successful or not successful, society was turning out more and more misfits. Some of them
were so marvellously maladapted that when, in order to get proverbial reaction, he slapped
them vigorously on the cheek they responded with an uppercut or a kick in the balls. It's
true, most of his subjects were exactly what he described them to be - incipient
criminals. The whole continent was on the slide - is still on the slide - and not only the
glands need regulating but the ball-bearing, the armature, the skeletal structure, the
cerebrum, the cerebellum, the coccyx, the larynx, the pancreas, the liver, the upper
intestine and the lower intestine, the heart, the kidneys, the testicles, the womb, the
Fallopian tubes, the whole god-damned works. The whole country is lawless, violent,
explosive, demoniacal. It's in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-grandiose landscape,
in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the torrential rivers that bite through
the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal distances, the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush
crops, the monstrous fruits, the mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects,
beliefs, the opposition of laws and languages, the contra-dictoriness of temperaments,
principles, needs, requirements. The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of
antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom.
The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and
39
runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at
all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a
moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan
it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental
urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people -
healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and
they blow up.
Often it happened, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his
shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out often he was a
good fellow, a fellow whom everybody liked. But when the rage came on nothing could stop
him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him
was to shoot him on the spot. It always happens that way with peaceable people. One day
they run amok. In America they're constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for
their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacifistic
and cannibalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones
crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it's a slaughterhouse, each man
killing off his neighbour and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks
like a bold, masculine world; actually it's a whorehouse run by women, with the native
sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it
is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is
faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a
grand nightmare is taking place.
Nobody could have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this
nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in my ears. Like
my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The millions who were put away in the
carnage passed away in a cloud, much like the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the
red Indians and the buffaloes. People pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren't.
They were simply tossing fitfully in their sleep. No
40
one lost his appetite, no one got up and rang the fire alarm. The day I
first realized that there had been a war was about six months or so after the armistice.
It was in a street car on the 14th Street crosstown line. One of our heroes, a Texas lad
with a string of medals across his chest, happened to see an officer passing on the
sidewalk. The sight of the officer enraged him. He was a sergeant himself and he probably
had good reason to be sore. Anyway, the sight of the officer enraged him so that he got up
from his seat and began to bawl the shit out of the government, the army, the civilians,
the passengers in the. car, everybody and everything. He said if there was ever another
war they couldn't drag him to it with a twenty mule team. He said he'd see every son of a
bitch killed before he'd go again himself; he said he didn't give a fuck about the medals
they had decorated him with and to show that he meant it he ripped them off and threw them
out the window; he said if he was ever in a trench with an officer again he'd shoot him in
the back like a dirty dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general.
He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he'd picked up over there, and nobody
opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got through I felt for the first time that
there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that
despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it
would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the
electric chair because he had performed his duty towards his fellow men, which was to deny
his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away
the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all. And the second
time I experienced the reality of war was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night
messengers, flew off the handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the
railway stations. They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn't have the heart to
fire him. He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction that I felt more like
hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ he would go up the 25th floor, or
wherever it was that the president and the
41
vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang.
But in the name of discipline, and to uphold the bloody farce it was, I had to do
something to punish him or be punished for it myself, and so not knowing what less I could
do I took him off the commission basis and put him back on a salary basis. He took it
pretty badly, not realizing exactly where I stood, either for him or against him and so I
got a letter from him pronto, saying that he was going to pay me a visit in a day or two
and that I'd better watch out because he was going to take it out of my hide. He said he'd
come up after office hours and that if I was afraid I'd better have some strong-arm men
around to look after me. I knew he meant every word he said and I felt pretty damned quaky
when I put the letter down. I waited in for him alone, however, feeling that it would be
even more cowardly to ask for protection. It was a strange experience. He must have
realized the moment he laid eyes on me that if I was a son of a bitch and a lying,
stinking hypocrite, as he had called me in his letter, I was only that because he was,
which wasn't a hell of a lot better. He must have realized immediately that we were both
in the same boat and that the bloody boat was leaking pretty badly. I could see something
like that going on in him as he strode forward, outwardly still furious, still foaming at
the mouth, but inwardly all spent, all soft and feathery. As for myself, what fear I had
vanished the moment I saw him enter. Just being there quiet and alone, and being less
strong, less capable of defending myself, gave me the drop on him. Not that I wanted to
have the drop on him either. But it had turned out that way and I took advantage of it,
naturally. The moment he sat down he went soft as putty. He wasn't a man any more, but
just a big child. There must have been millions of them like him, big children with
machine guns who could wipe out whole regiments without batting an eyelash; but back in
the work trenches, without a weapon, without a clear, visible enemy, they were helpless as
ants. Everything revolved about the question of food. The food and the rent - that was all
there was to fight about - but there was no way, no dear, visible way, to fight for it. It
was like seeing an army strong and well equipped, capable of licking anything
42
in sight, and yet ordered to retreat every day, to retreat and retreat
and retreat because that was the strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing
ground, losing guns, losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, losing
life itself finally. Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was this
retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason except that it was the
strategic thing to do. It was eating the heart out of him. To fight was easy, but to fight
for food and rent was like fighting an army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat,
and while you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped on, one after the
other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He
was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that he put his
head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he's sobbing like that suddenly the
telephone rings and it's the vice-president's office - never the vice-president himself,
but always his office -and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say
Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don't say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him
and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself
that if I have to fire that guy somebody's going to pay for it - and anyway I want to know
first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the
vice-president's office in the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did
you give the order I ask - and why? And before he has a chance to deny it, or to
explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and
where he don't like it and can't take it - and if you don't like it, Mr. Will
Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass
- and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work
as usual. I expect, of course, that I'll get the sack before the day's over. But nothing
of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager saying to
take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don't do anything hasty, we'll
look into it, etc. I guess they're still looking into it because Griswold went on working
just as
43
always - in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a
dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved
his pride and it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that's
what happens to a guy when he's just a hero in his sleep. Unless the nightmare is strong
enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you
end up as vice-president. It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a
fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I woke up. And when I woke
up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I had walked in - without as
much as a by your leave, sir!
Things take place instantaneously, but there's a long process to be
gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the
second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law - and with the full
consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb
had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the
bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like
a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent
as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period
they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I
went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me.
Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn't seem to make much difference whether
I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example,
despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back
from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn't seen much of each other since
boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an
important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often
dreamed about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on the
comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street towards dusk. I remember it because it seemed
44
utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Aetna
and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the comer of Sixth Avenue and
49th St., Manhattan. I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who
hadn't quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a
horrible mistake in returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time - this has no
value, no value whatever. He didn't say that, however, but just this over and over:
"I'm sure you'd like it! I'm sure it's just the place for you." When he left me
I was in a daze. I couldn't get hold of him again quickly enough. I wanted to hear it all
over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this
glowing account from my friend's own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that
we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends -
and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had
travelled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day
to day, and never a thought for the future. O'Mara, yes, he had travelled a bit, almost
all over the world - but as a bum, or eke in the army, which was even worse than being a
bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met whom I could truly say had
travelled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences.
As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently
thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after
dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every
slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since,
even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes,
still vivid, still real. Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a
taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in
passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacre Coeur, through
the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight. Just a Brooklyn boy! That was an
expression he used sometimes when
45
he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately.
And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men.
But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any
one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in
Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my
being here to-day. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of
them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he
created them in our rambles through the park.
Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and
texture of Lawrence's work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still
sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas. Looking back on these
discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning
of Lawrence's words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it
did. Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I
can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had
nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and
dear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America,
renounced my past.
My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias". It
was a sly way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow
would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long stretches of
gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration.
Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds strange to say so, yet I was never myself.
I was either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree.
In the latter mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a
trolleycar. Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager.
I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in one of my states of
"euphoria".
46
We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn Bridge to go to some flat in
Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to
talk to me in his usual way about his wife's ovaries. In the first place he didn't know
precisely what ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple
fashion. In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and
ridiculous that Hymie shouldn't know what ovaries were that I became drunk, as drunk I
mean as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea of diseased ovaries there
germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of tropical growth made up of the most
heterogeneous assortment of odds and ends in the midst of which, securely lodged,
tenaciously lodged, I might say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also
suddenly recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle of
the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word "ovaries" had broken. I realized
that everything Hymie had said up till the word "ovaries", had sieved through me
like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, was what I had begun
time and time again in the past, usually when walking to my father's shop, a performance
which was repeated day in and day out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a
book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious
activity. Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on my
way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going over the bridge the sun setting, the
skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the remembrance of the past set in ...
remembrance of going back and forth over the bridge, going to a job which was death,
returning to a home which was a morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the
cemetery, spitting into the cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the
platform every morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new
skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing below, the Fall
River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work, what will I do to-night, the warm
cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles into her groin, run away
47
and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines, get off and turn
around, don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, river, end it, down, down, like
a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud, legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow
a new life, where, anywhere, why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is
the solution, but don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new
friend, millions of chances, you're too young yet, you're melancholy, you don't die yet,
wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on over the bridge into the glass
shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants, crawling out of a dead tree and their
thoughts crawling out the same way . . . Maybe, being up high between the two shores,
suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs
blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself,
maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it
in, to announce myself, anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone, and whenever
that happened the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never
breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the hopes, the
dreams, the delusions I never admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous,
and what's more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to
continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the
street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead
cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it
was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its
independent existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking at
Hymie and thinking of that strange word "ovaries", now stranger than any word in
my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside
me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing more. I was jumping from the bridge
head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs dear and waiting for a bite; like that
Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the solid
48
core of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of the
earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert
and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was
walking again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above him a
man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky. The woman hanging on
my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside her would
be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would know that it was a
cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails
formed on every finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest
toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out. On one
side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodge-podge of wisdom
and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one
couldn't disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toe nails,
hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in
another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The
bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat; they were
stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button was an ovary that had
come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary without benefit of lucubration;
lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a
subterranean chill, the skating rink of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the
legs free and waiting for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his
vision, and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his
work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of rage to emerge
in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of non-comprehension swept dear by
gales of laughter. From the hub of the bull-frog's eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer
lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving
sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was an
49
ovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him
the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the
buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin dries had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the
caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat upside down in the
sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the anaesthetic was invented and the high
forceps and the big Bertha which could destroy what the eye could not see; for him the
molecule was broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night
the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of
gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all movement, be
it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and
incontestably by the high priests of the de-possessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of
the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a
conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I
wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation
which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was
expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was
denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same
time. I could see it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying
"death" but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but this
life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something
still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love
this night happen, or sorrow, or being born with a dub foot; the cause nothing, the event
everything. In the beginning was the Word . .. Whatever this was, the Word,
disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time
and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all
words - for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In
every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would
50
never be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only
that which expressed itself in beginning and end. So, on the ovarian trolley there was
this voyage of man and bull-frog composed of identical stuff, neither better nor less than
Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely the meaning of anything, the
other knowing too precisely the meaning of everything, hence both lost and confused
through beginnings and endings, finally to be deposited at Java or India Street,
Greenpoint, there to be carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of
sawdust moils with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.
What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or
unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had
any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate detached, insignificant
thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house;
it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled
me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people
who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside
their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a
perverse love of the thing-in-itself-not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate,
desperately passionate hunger, as if in the discarded, worthless thing which
everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.
Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I
attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle which particularly
claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness
which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or
made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was
perverse it was also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world
which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects which I
venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was definitely dated, that was
51
certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But
never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I wished to, when I had the itch, I could
single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him
spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit
was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which,
because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown;
it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I
underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I
would have been famous. People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not
have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood. That
would have been a relief, to say the least.
It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could
become rued just listening to me talk. Perhaps my speech was somewhat extravagant, though
often it happened when I was holding myself in with main force. The turn of a phrase, the
choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came to my Ups, the
allusions to subjects which were taboo - everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw,
as an enemy to society. No matter how well things began sooner or later they smelled me
out. If I were modest and humble, for example, then I was too modest, too humble. If I
were gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I was too free, too gay. I could never
get myself quite au point with the individual I happened to be talking to. If it
were not a question of life and death - everything was life and death to me then - if it
was merely a question of passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it
was the same thing. There were vibrations emanating from me, overtones and undertones,
which charged the atmosphere unpleasantly. Perhaps the whole evening they had been amused
by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches, as it often happened, and everything seemed
to augur well. But sure as fate something was bound to happen before the evening came to a
dose, some vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or
52
which reminded some sensitive soul of the piss-pot under the bed. Even
while the laughter was still drying off the venom was beginning to make itself felt.
"Hope to see you again some time", they would say, but the wet, limp hand which
was extended would belie the words.
Persona mm grata! Jesus, how clear it seems to me now! No pick and
choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and leam to like it. I had to learn to
live with the scum, to swim like a sewer-rat or be drowned. If you elect to join the herd
you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself
indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you are dreaming simultaneously. But if
you dream something different you are not in America, of America American, but a Hottentot
in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a "different"
thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become something different you
find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.
Am I saying this with rancour, with envy, with malice? Perhaps. Perhaps
I regret not having been able to become an American. Perhaps. In my zeal now, which
is again American, I am about to give birth to a monstrous edifice, a skyscraper,
which will last undoubtedly long after the other skyscrapers have vanished, but which will
vanish too when that which produced it disappears. Everything American will disappear one
day, more completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one
of the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where, buffaloes
all, we once grazed in peace. An idea that has caused me infinite sorrow, for not to
belong to something enduring is the last agony. But I am not a buffalo and I have no
desire to be one. I am not even a spiritual buffalo. I have slipped away to rejoin
an older stream of consciousness, a race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race that will
survive the buffalo.
All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are
veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is different. This
is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the usual skyscraper a
1'americaine. In this sky"
53
scraper there are no elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If
you get tired of climbing you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main
lobby. If you are search-ing for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink you
will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this building, and no cigar
stores, and no telephone booths. All the other skyscrapers have what you want! this one
contains nothing but what I want, what I like. And somewhere in this
skyscraper Valeska has her being, and we're going to get to her when the spirit moves me.
For the time being she's all right, Valeska, seeing as how she's six feet under and by now
perhaps picked dean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked dean too, by
the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different tint, a different
odour.
The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in
her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of it whether
you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact that her mother was a
trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the father was nobody knew, not even Valeska
herself.
Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little
Jew from the vice-president's office happened to espy her. He was horrified, so he
informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured person as my
secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the messengers. The next day I was put
on the carpet. It was exactly as though I had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended
that I hadn't observed anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely
intelligent and extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a
short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically proposed to
give her a better position in Havana. No talk of the blood taint. Simply that her services
had been altogether remarkable and that they would like to promote her - to Havana.
Valeska came back to the office in a rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. She
said she wouldn't budge. Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all
54
went out to dinner together. During the course of the evening we got a
bit tight. Valeska's tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me that she was going to
put up a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job. I told her quietly that if
she were fired I would quit too. She pretended not to believe it at first. I said I meant
it, that I didn't care what happened. She seemed to be unduly impressed, she took me by
the two hands and she held them very gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that
I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note sitting opposite
me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye and said she didn't believe
it. But we went to dinner again that night and we had more to drink and we danced and
while we were dancing she pressed herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time,
as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was
telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "why don't
you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next night I brought her home to dinner
and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got
along. Before the evening was over it was agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house
the day of the abortion and take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the
afternoon off. About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the
afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street. When I was about
a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was just the thought that if
anything happened - if the wife were to kick-off- I wouldn't feel so damned good having
spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I walked around a bit, in and out of the penny
arcades, and then I started homeward.
It's strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly
remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take the dominoes
and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull the tablecloth on which
the battleships are floating until they come to the edge
55
of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the
floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got so sleepy that
she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The dominoes were lying all over the
floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the
table, her tongue halfway down my throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on
the table she twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet -
part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of my grandfather
sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day that I was too young to be
reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as he pressed the hot iron against the wet
seam of a coat; I thought of the attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made,
the picture of: Teddy .charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which
I used to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated over
my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral Dewey and of Schley
and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard which I never made because on the way
my father suddenly remembered that we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I
left the doctor's office I didn't have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings
... We had hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the
slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to open the gate.
She was as white as flour. She looked as though she'd never be able to go through another
one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on
the table. Just the other night in a bistrot, as I was going to the toilet, I
happened to pass two old fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a
domino. The feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made
when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith
in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and looked down
towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended
between the two shores,
56
I felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything
that had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal - unnecessary.
Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge seemed to break
all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the other it made no difference:
either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to sever my connection with the world that
human hands and human minds were creating. Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was
spoiled in the bud by the books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a
long time now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there. Now people
are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them aside. I devour them, one
after the other. And the more I read, the more insatiable I become. There is no limit to
it. There could be no end, and there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form
which united me again with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.
A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to
believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under the reign of
Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too late to mean much to me. It was even
so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was born a half hour too late. It always seemed
to me that I was meant to be the sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue
of being born on the 25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was
Jesus Christ . . . perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that's the sort of guy
I was intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she
held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration - with a bad
set-up, in other words. They say - the astrologers, I mean -that it will get better and
better for me as I go on; the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious. But what
do I care about the future? It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the
stairs the morning of the 25th of December and broken her neck: that would have given me a
fair start! When I try to think, therefore, of where the break occurred I keep putting
57
it back further and further, until there is no other way of accounting
for it than by the retarded hour of birth. Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed
to understand it somewhat. "Always dragging behind, like a cow's tail" - that's
how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the
hour had passed? Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in
the right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out. But I had no
choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been born
an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing seems clear, however - and this is
a hangover from the 25th - that I was born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more
precise, I was born a fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me
from early childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes
passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in
something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I
believed. / believed - and the rest of the world did not! If it were only a
question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the
world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed
out, the ground taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind.
Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse, something less
than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are
perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a
sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't
believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess
of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love. The
more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love,
real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails - that's only for
the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are
to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such
58
things as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. Keep off the
grass! That's the motto by which people live.
If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you
become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right yourself.
Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an unnatural gaiety, I might say.
There are only two peoples in the world to-day who understand the meaning of such a
statement - the Jews and the Chinese. If it happens that you are neither of these you find
yourself in a strange predicament. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are
considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable. But if you
would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as
they die and live as they live. That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the
same time. It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In
this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal
conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in
reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with
you and they are of no use to you.
In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the
dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying as if by a great recoil, this
negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity
seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one,
one and indivisible. There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the
fact that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth
rolls on, the stars roll on, but men:
the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image
of the one and only one.
If one isn't crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go
on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious
thing happens. It's as though one had actually died and actually been resurrected again,
one lives a super-normal life, like the Chinese. That is to say, one is
59
unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally indifferent. The
tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and
against Nature at the same time. If your best friend dies you don't even bother to go to
the funeral; if a man is run down by a street car right before your eyes you keep on
walking just as though nothing had happened;
if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you
yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life becomes a spectacle
and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. Loneliness is abolished,
because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is
not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil. You care so
little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything. At the same time
your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This tool is suspect, since
it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause. There is no
fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The
surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond.
And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you
willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the
earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature,
a being without shadow;
you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about
you.
Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time
that I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the nature of a
preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening, I walked out of the
office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the woman who was to liberate me from
a living death. In the light of this I look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the
streets of New York, the white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which
I was born as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O'Rourke, the company detective,
whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the
60
snow was on the ground and the air chill frost. And O'Rourke talking
interminably about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the Golden
Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject of stopping suddenly in the
middle of the street and planting his heavy foot between mine so that I couldn't budge.
And then, seizing the lapel of my coat, he would bring his face dose to mine and talk into
my eyes, each word boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the two of us
standing in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow
blowing down, and O'Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to get off his
chest. Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings out of the comer of my
eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the two of us standing in Yorkville or
on Alien Street or on Broadway. Always it seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness
with which he recounted his banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of
architecture that man had ever created. While he was talking about finger-prints I might
be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just back of his
black hat, I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had been installed, who might be
the man who had designed it and why had he made it so ugly, so like every other lousy,
rotten cornice which we passed from the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we
wanted to push on, beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon,
beyond the Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and
woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to sit and listen
to other people's stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and distress, of love and death,
of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it happened, there came to me each day at least
fifty men, each pouring out his tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and
"receive", it was only natural that at some point along the line I had to close
my ears, had to harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me, I could
chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit there and be
inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to
61
sleep listening, to dream listening. They streamed in from all over the
world, from every strata of society, speaking a thousand different tongues, worshipping
different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of the poorest among them
with a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were written out at length it might all be
compressed to the size of the ten commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a
postage stamp, like the Lord's Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to
cover the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to listen, I
shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it was a rare one, was to walk
the streets alone ... to walk the streets at night when no one was abroad and to reflect
on the silence that surrounded me. Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their
mouths wide open and nothing but snores emanating from them. Walking amidst the craziest
architecture ever invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from these
wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an army of men itching to
unravel their tale of misery. In a year, reckoning it modestly, I received twenty-five
thousand tales; in two years fifty thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand;
in ten years I would be stark mad. Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized
town. What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would they want
skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? Would they too build
sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would they make the same little cornices of
tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum, from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt
it. Only the lash of hunger could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye,
the fear, the fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the same, all
goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the loftiest
skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, making the finest steel, the flimsiest
lace, the most delicate glassware. Walking with O'Rourke and hearing nothing but theft,
arson, rape, homicide was like listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And
just as one can whistle an air
62
of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with, so,
listening to O'Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would stop talking and
say "what'll you have to eat?" In the midst of the most gruesome murder I could
think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure to get at a certain place farther up
the line and wonder too what sort of vegetables they would have on the side to go with it,
and whether I would order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I
slept with my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be wondering
if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had the bad habit of letting
things slide - the important things, I mean. Fresh coffee was important - and fresh
bacon with eggs. If she were knocked up again that would be bad, serious in a way, but
more important than that was fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs.
I could put up with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have
something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing, something
appetizing. I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he had been taken down
from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh. I am sure that the shock of
crucifixion would have been so great that he would have suffered a complete amnesia as
regards humanity. I am certain that after his wounds had healed he wouldn't have given a
damn about the tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon
a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it.
Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of
his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And this joy of
living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which eventually vitiates the
whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal limits of human suffering, acts as a
boomerang and brings about destruction. At night the streets of New York reflect the
crucifixion and death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost
silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen
despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was
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laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance
or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the
streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell
of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable
and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void.
In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a
sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the greatest
curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can remember the dates on
certain buildings and the names of the architects who designed them. I can remember the
temperature and the velocity of the wind, standing at a certain comer; the tale that
accompanied it is gone. I can remember that I was even then remembering something else,
and I can tell you what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one
man in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances;
there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be
me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast of the field.
Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent
death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death.
I was walking around in a stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the
dead centre, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love,
or I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and
all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough
to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one
page be written which would have meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the
impression of chaos but this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely
peripheral, the tangental shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me. Only
a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking about me as years ago I
had looked about me;
again I found myself studying the architecture, studying the
64
minute details which only the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it
was like coming down from Mars. What race of men is this, I asked myself. What does it
mean? And there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was snuffed out in the
gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and incomprehensible world, a world so
removed from me that I had the sensation of belonging to another planet. From the top of
the Empire State Building I looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below:
there they were, in true perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human
lice with whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail's pace, each one
doubtless fulfilling his micro-cosmic destiny. In their fruitless desperation they had
reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and boast. And from the topmost ceiling
of this colossal edifice they had suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned
canaries warbled their senseless warble. At the very summit of their ambition there were
these little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I thought to
myself perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay, demented ones who would sing
about the world to come. Perhaps they would breed a race of warblers who would warble
while the others worked. Perhaps in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that
life below might flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling
creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might all be demented, workers
and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has happened again and again. Another
thousand years, or five thousand, or ten thousand, exactly where I am standing now to
survey the scene, a little boy may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about
this life now passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life
with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on dosing the book will
think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a marvellous life there had
once been on this continent which he is now inhabiting. No race to come, except perhaps
the race of blind poets, will ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this
future history was composed.
65
Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day. Any day of
my life - back there - would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny, microcosmic life, was a
reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back ... At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I
didn't bounce out of bed. I lay there till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more
sleep. Sleep - how could I sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where
I was already due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already
buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden stairway, the
strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and repeat yesterday's song and
dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out. Working my balls off and not even a clean
shirt to wear. Mondays I got my allowance from the wife -carfare and lunch money. I was
always in debt to her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so
on. I couldn't be bothered shaving - there wasn't time enough. I put on the torn shirt,
gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she were in a bad mood I
would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the subway. I got to the office out of
breath, an hour behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an applicant.
While I make one call there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two
telephones at once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between
calls. MacGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of advice about one
of the applicants, probably a crook who is trying to sneak back under a false name. Behind
me are the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had ever passed
through the machine. The bad ones are starred in red ink;
some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is
crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms, camphor,
lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away - not that we don't need
them, but that even under the worst conditions they just won't do. The man in front of my
desk, standing at the rail with palsied hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York
City. He's seventy now and would be glad to take anything. He has
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wonderful letters of recommendation, but we can't take any one over
forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New York is the dead line. The telephone rings and
it's a smooth secretary from the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn't I make an exception for a boy who has
just walked into his office - a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so. What
did he do? He tried to rape his sister. An Italian, of course. O'Mara, my assistant,
is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him of being an epileptic.
Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy throws a fit right there in the office.
One of the women faints. A beautiful looking young woman with a handsome fur around her
neck is trying to persuade me to take her on. She's a whore clean through and I know if I
put her on there'll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building uptown -
because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few cronies are beginning to
drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it were a vaudeville performance.
Kronski, the medical student arrives; he says one of the boys I've just hired has
Parkinson's disease. I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to go to the toilet. All the
telegraph operators, all the managers, suffer from haemorrhoids, so O'Rourke tells me.
He's been having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch time
and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me, as usual. We gulp
it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants to interview. The
vice-president is raising hell because we can't keep the force up to normal. Every paper
in New York and for twenty miles outside New York carries long ads demanding help. All the
schools have been canvassed for part time messengers. All the charity bureaux and relief
societies have been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don't even last an
hour. It's a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it's totally
unnecessary. But that's not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as Kipling says. I plug on,
through one victim after another, the telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more
and more vile, the holes getting bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a
crust of bread; I have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, experience, etc.
67
All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then
chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for it. So that
what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to
man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in
the street your next of kin may be appraised immediately, that is to say within an hour,
unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and
throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas blanks,
all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the directors and president
and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and maybe the telegram reads
"Mother dying, come at once", but the clerk is too busy to notice the message
and if you sue for damages, spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained
expressly to meet such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and
you will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of course,
will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a messenger's job and he will
be taken on and put on the night shift near the docks where nobody will recognize him, and
his wife will come with the brats to thank the general manager, or perhaps the
vice-president himself, for the kindness and consideration shown. And then one day
everybody will be heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O'Rourke will
be asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him down if it cost
ten thousand dollars. And then the vice-president will issue an order that no more Jews
are to be hired, but after three or four days he will let up a bit because there are
nothing but Jews coming for the job. And because it's getting so very tough and the timber
so damned scarce I'm on the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would
have hired him if he hadn't broken down and confessed that he was a she. And to make it
worse Valeska takes "it" under her wing, takes "it" home that night
and under pretense of sympathy gives "it" a thorough examination, including a
vaginal exploration with the index finger of the right hand. And the
70
nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly
attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the lighthouse itself
- secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath me was solid rock, the same shelf
of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the
earth and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I
was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly,
pitilessly. This eye so wide awake seemed to have made all my other faculties dormant; all
my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take in the drama of the world.
If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be
extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge
the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to
destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I
wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a
cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a
change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in
order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted
something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from
the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely
divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost
of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the
dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the
black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a
night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so
utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen
or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same
time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a
worm or a
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brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the
molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.
It was just about a week before Valeska committed suicide that I ran
into Mara. The week or two preceding that event was a veritable nightmare. A series of
sudden deaths and strange encounters with women. First of all there was Pauline Janowski,
a little Jewess of sixteen or seventeen who was without a home and without friends or
relatives. She came to the office looking for a job. It was towards dosing time and I
didn't have the heart to turn her down cold. For some reason or other I took it into my
head to bring her home for dinner and if possible try to persuade the wife to put her up
for a while. What attracted me to her was her passion for Balzac. All the way home she was
talking to me about Lost Illusions. The car was packed and we were jammed so tight
together that it didn't make any difference what we were talking about because we were
both thinking of only one thing. My wife of course was stupefied to see me standing at the
door with a beautiful young girl. She was polite and courteous in her frigid way but I
could see immediately that it was no use asking her to put the girl up. It was about all
she could do to sit through the dinner with us. As soon as we had finished she excused
herself and went to the movies. The girl started to weep. We were still sitting at the
table, the dishes piled up in front of us. I went over to her and I put my arms around
her. I felt genuinely sorry for her and I was perplexed as to what to do for her. Suddenly
she threw her arms around my neck and she kissed me passionately. We stood there for a
long while embracing each other and then I thought to myself no, it's a crime, and besides
maybe the wife didn't go to the movies at all, maybe she'll be ducking back any minute. I
told the kid to pull herself together, that we'd take a trolley ride somewhere. I saw the
child's bank lying on the mantelpiece and I took it to the toilet and emptied it silently.
There was only about seventy-five cents in it. We got on a trolley and went to the beach.
Finally we found a deserted spot and we lay down in the sand. She
72
was hysterically passionate and there was nothing to do but to do it. I
thought she would reproach me afterwards, but she didn't. We lay there a while and she
began talking about Balzac again. It seems she had ambitions to be a writer herself. I
asked her what she was going to do. She said she hadn't the least idea. When we got up to
go she asked me to put her on the highway. Said she thought she would go to Cleveland or
some place. It was after midnight when I left her standing in front of a gasoline station.
She had about thirty-five cents in her pocket-book. As I started homeward I began cursing
my wife for the mean son of a bitch that she was. I wished to Christ it was she whom I had
left standing on the highway with no place to go to. I knew that when I got back she
wouldn't even mention the girl's name.
I got back and she was waiting up for me. I thought she was going to
give me hell again. But no, she had waited up because there was an important message from
O'Rourke. I was to telephone him soon as I got home. However, I decided not to telephone.
I decided to get undressed and go to bed. Just when I had gotten comfortably settled the
telephone rang. It was O'Rourke. There was a telegram for me at the office - he wanted to
know if he should open it and read it to me. I said of course. Thetelegram was signed
Monica. It was from Buffalo. Said she was arriving at the Grand Central in the morning
with her mother's body. I thanked him and went back to bed. No questions from the wife. I
lay there wondering what to do. If I were to comply with the request that would mean
starting things all over again. I had just been thanking my stars that I had gotten rid of
Monica. And now she was coming back with her mother's corpse. Tears and reconciliation.
No, I didn't like the prospect at all. Supposing I didn't show up ? What then ? There was
always somebody around to take care of a corpse. Especially if the bereaved were an
attractive young blonde with sparkling blue eyes. I wondered if she'd go back to her job
in the restaurant. If she hadn't known Greek and Latin I would never have been mixed up
with her. But my curiosity got the better of me. And then she was so god-damn poor, that
too got me. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if her hands hadn't smelled
73
greasy. That was the fly in the ointment - the greasy hands. I remember
the first night I met her and we strolled through the park. She was ravishing to look at,
and she was alert and intelligent. It was just the time when women were wearing short
skirts and she wore them to advantage. I used to go to the restaurant night after night
just to watch her moving around, watch her bending over to serve or stooping down to pick
up a fork. And with the beautiful legs and the bewitching eyes a marvellous line about
Homer, with the pork and sauerkraut a verse of Sapho's, the Latin conjugations, the Odes
of Pindar, with the dessert perhaps the Rubaiyat or Cynara. But the greasy hands
and the frowsy bed in the boarding house opposite the market place - Whew! I couldn't
stomach it. The more I shunned her the more clinging she became. Ten page letters about
love with footnotes on Thus Spake Zarathustra. And then suddenly silence and me
congratulating myself heartily. No, I couldn't bring myself to go to the Grand Central
Station in the morning. I rolled over and I fell sound asleep. In the morning I would get
the wife to telephone the office and say I was ill. I hadn't been ill now for over a week
~ it was coming to me.
At noon I find Kronski waiting for me outside the office. He wants me
to have lunch with him ... there's an Egyptian girl he wants me to meet. The girl turns
out to be a Jewess, but she came from Egypt and she looks like an Egyptian. She's hot
stuff and the two of us are working on her at once. As I was supposed to be ill I decided
not to return to the office but to take a stroll through the East Side. Kronski was going
back to cover me up. We shook hands with the girl and we each went our separate ways. I
headed towards the river where it was cool, having forgotten about the girl almost
immediately. I sat on the edge of a pier with my legs dangling over the stringpiece. A
scow passed with a load of red bricks. Suddenly Monica came to my mind. Monica arriving at
the Grand Central Station with a corpse. A corpse f.o.b. New York! It seemed so
incongruous and ridiculous that I burst out laughing. What had she done with it? Had she
checked it or had she left it on a siding? No doubt she was cursing me out roundly. I
wondered what
74
she would really think if she could have imagined me sitting there at
the dock with my legs dangling over the stringpiece. It was warm and sultry despite the
breeze that was blowing off the river. I began to snooze. As I dozed off Pauline came to
my mind. I imagined her walking along the highway with her hand up. She was a brave kid,
no doubt about it. Funny that she didn't seem to worry about getting knocked up. Maybe she
was so desperate she didn't care. And Balzac! That too was highly incongruous. Why Balzac?
Well, that was her affair. Anyway she'd have enough to eat with, until she met another
guy. But a kid like that thinking about becoming a writer! Well, why not? Everybody had
illusions of one sort or another. Monica too wanted to be a writer. Everybody was becoming
a writer. A writer! Jesus, how futile it seemed!
I dozed off... When I woke up I had an erection. The sun seemed to be
burning right into my fly. I got up and I washed my face at a drinking fountain. It was
still as hot and sultry as ever. The asphalt was soft as mush, the flies were biting, the
garbage was rotting in the gutter. I walked about between the pushcarts and looked at
things with an empty eye. I had a sort of lingering hard-on all the while, but no definite
object in mind. It was only when I got back to Second Avenue that I suddenly remembered
the Egyptian Jewess from lunch time. I remembered her saying that she lived over the
Russian Restaurant near Twelfth Street. Still I hadn't any definite idea of what I was
going to do. Just browsing about, killing time. My feet nevertheless were dragging me
northward, towards Fourteenth Street. When I got abreast of the Russian restaurant I
paused a moment and then I ran up the stairs three at a time. The hall door was open. I
climbed up a couple of flights scanning the names on the doors. She was on the top floor
and there was a man's name under hers. I knocked softly. No answer. I knocked again, a
little harder. This time I heard some one moving about. Then a voice dose to the door
asking who is it and at the same time the knob turning. I pushed the door open and
stumbled into the darkened room. Stumbled right into her arms and felt her naked under the
half-opened kimono. She must have come
75
out of a sound sleep and only half realized who was holding her in his
arms. When she realized it was me she tried to break away but I had her tight and I began
kissing her passionately and at the same time backing her up towards the couch near the
window. She mumbled something about the door being open but I wasn't taking any chance on
letting her slip out of my arms. So I made a slight detour and little by little I edged
her towards the door and made her shove it with her ass. I locked it with my one free hand
and then I moved her into the centre of the room and with the free hand I unbuttoned my
fly and got my pecker out and into position. She was so drugged with sleep that it was
almost like working on an automation. I could see too that she was enjoying the idea of
being fucked half asleep. The only thing was that every time I made a lunge she grew more
wide awake. And as she grew more conscious she became more frightened. It was difficult to
know how to put her to sleep again without losing a good fuck. I managed to tumble her on
to the couch without losing ground and she was hot as hell now, twisting and squirming
like an eel. From the time I had started to maul her I don't think she had opened her eyes
once. I kept saying to myself- "an Egyptian fuck ... an Egyptian fuck" - and so
as not to shoot off immediately I deliberately began thinking about the corpse that Monica
had dragged to the Grand Central Station and about the thirty-five cents that I had left
with Pauline on the highway. Then bango! a loud knock on the door and with that she opens
her eyes and looks at me in utmost terror. I started to pull away quickly but to my
surprise she held me tight. "Don't move", she whispered in my ear.
"Wait!" There was another loud knock and then I heard Kronski's voice saying
"It's me, Thelma ... it's me Izzy." At that I almost burst out laughing.
We slumped back again into a natural position and as her eyes softly closed I moved it
around inside her, gently so as not to wake her up again. It was one of the most wonderful
fucks I ever had in my life. I thought it was going to last forever. Whenever I felt in
danger of going off I would stop moving and think - think for example of where I would
like to spend my vacation, if I got one, or think of the
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shirts lying in the bureau drawer, or the patch in the bedroom carpet
just at the foot of the bed. Kronski was still standing at the door -1 could hear him
changing about from one position to another. Every time I became aware of him standing
there I jibbed her a little for good measure and in her half sleep she answered back,
humorously, as though she understood what I meant by this put-and-take language. I didn't
dare to think what she might be thinking or I'd have come immediately. Sometimes I skirted
dangerously close to it, but the saving trick was always Monica and the corpse at the
Grand Central Station. The thought of that, the humorousness of it, I mean, acted like a
cold douche.
When it was all over she opened her eyes wide and stared at me, as
though she were taking me in for the first time. I hadn't a word to say to her; the only
thought in my head was to get out as quickly as possible. As we were washing up I noticed
a note on the floor near the door. It was from Kronski. His wife had just been taken to
the hospital - he wanted her to meet him at the hospital. I felt relieved! it meant that I
could break away without wasting any words.
The next day I had a telephone call from Kronski. His wife had died on
the operating table. That evening I went home for dinner; we were still at the table when
the bell rang. There was Kronski standing at the gate looking absolutely sunk. It was
always difficult for me to oner words of condolence;
with him it was absolutely impossible. I listened to my wife uttering
her trite words of sympathy and I felt more than ever disgusted with her. "Let's get
out of here," I said.
We walked along in absolute silence for a while. At the park we turned
in and headed for the meadows. There was a heavy mist which made it impossible to see a
yard ahead. Suddenly, as we were swimming along, he began to sob. I stopped and turned my
head away. When I thought he had finished I looked around and there he was staring at me
with a strange smile. "It's funny", he said, "how hard it is to accept
death." I smiled too now and put my hand on his shoulder. "Go on," I said,
"talk your head off. Get it off your chest." We started walking again, up and
down over the meadows, as though we
77
were walking under the sea. The mist had become so thick that I could
barely discern his features. He was talking quietly and madly. "I knew it would
happen," he said. "It was too beautiful to last." The night before she was
taken ill he had had a dream. He dreamt that he had lost his identity. "I was
stumbling around in the dark calling my own name. I remember coming to a bridge, and
looking down into the water I saw myself drowning. I jumped off the bridge head first and
when I came up I saw Yetta floating under the bridge. She was dead." And then
suddenly he added: "You were there yesterday when I knocked at the door, weren't you?
I knew you were there and I couldn't go away. I knew too that Yetta was dying and I wanted
to be with her, but I was afraid to go alone." I said nothing and he rambled on.
"The first girl I ever loved died in the same way. I was only a kid and I couldn't
get over it. Every night I used to go to the cemetery and sit by her grave. People thought
I was out of my mind. I guess I was out of my mind. Yesterday; when I was standing at the
door, it all came back to me. I was back in Trenton, at the grave, and the sister of the
girl I loved was sitting beside me. She said it couldn't go on that way much longer, that
I would go mad. I thought to myself that I really was mad and to prove it to myself I
decided to do something mad and so I said to her it isn't her I love, It's you,
and I pulled her over me and we lay there kissing each other and finally I screwed her,
right beside the grave. And I think that cured me because I never went back there again
and I never thought about her any more -until yesterday when I was standing at the door.
If I could have gotten hold of you yesterday I would have strangled you. I don't know why
I felt that way but it seemed to me that you had opened up a tomb, that you were violating
the dead body of the girl I loved. That's crazy isn't it? And why did I come to see you
to-night? Maybe it's because you're absolutely indifferent to me ... because you're not a
Jew and I can talk to you... because you don't give a damn, and you're right... Did you
ever read The Revolt of the Angels?"
We had just arrived at the bicycle path which encircles the park. The
lights of the boulevard were swimming in the
78
mist. I took a good look at him and I saw that he was out of his head.
I wondered if I could make him laugh. I was afraid, too, that if he once got started
laughing he would never stop. So I began to talk at random, about Anatole France at first,
and then about other writers, and finally, when I felt that I was losing him, I suddenly
switched to General Ivolgin, and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a
cackle, a hideous cackle, like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly
that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between
the cackles he let out the most terrible, heart-rending sobs. "I knew you would do me
good," he blurted out, as the last outbreak died away. "I always said you were a
crazy son of a bitch... You're a Jew bastard yourself, only you don't know it... Now tell
me, you bastard, how was it yesterday? Did you get your end in? Didn't I tell you she was
a good lay? And do you know who she's living with, Jesus, you were lucky you didn't get
caught. She's living with a Russian poet - you know the guy, too. I introduced you to him
once at the Cafe Royal. Better not let him get wind of it. He'll beat your brains out...
and he'll write a beautiful poem about it and send it to her with a bunch of roses. Sure I
knew him out in Stelton, in the anarchist colony. His old man was a Nihilist. The whole
family's crazy. By the way, you'd better take care of yourself. I meant to tell you that
the other day, but I didn't think you would act so quickly. You know she may have
syphilis. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just telling you for your own good. . . ."
This outburst seemed to really assuage him. He was trying to tell me in
his twisted Jewish way that he liked me. To do so he had to first destroy everything
around me - the wife, the job, my friends, the "nigger wench", as he called
Valeska, and so on. "I think some day you're going to be a great writer," he
said. "But," he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer a
bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only
think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first. That nigger wench now...
you don't really suppose that you're in love with her, do you? Did you ever take a good
look at her ass ... how it's spreading, I mean? In
79
five years she'll look like Aunt Jemima. You'll make a swell couple
walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies trailing behind you. Jesus, I'd
rather see you marry a Jewish girl. You wouldn't appreciate her, of course, but she'd be
good for you. You need something to steady yourself. You're scattering your energies.
Listen, why do you run around with all these dumb bastards you pick up? You seem to have a
genius for picking up the wrong people. Why don't you throw yourself into something
useful? You don't belong in that job - you could be a big guy somewhere. Maybe a labour
leader ... I don't know what exactly. But first you've got to get rid of that
hatchet-faced wife of yours. Ugh! when I look at her I could spit in her face. I don't see
how a guy like you could ever have married a bitch like that. What was it - just a pair of
streaming ovaries? Listen, that's what's the matter with you -you've got nothing but sex
on the brain... No, I don't mean that either. You've got a mind and you've got passion and
enthusiasm ... but you don't seem to give a damn what you do or what happens to you. If
you weren't such a romantic bastard I'd almost swear that you were a Jew. It's different
with me -1 never had anything to look forward to. But you've got something in you - only
you're too damned lazy to bring it out. Listen, when I hear you talk sometimes I think to
myself - if only that guy would put it down on paper! Why you could write a book that
would make a guy like Dreiser hang his head. You're different from the Americans I know;
somehow you don't belong, and it's a damned good thing you don't. You're a little cracked,
too - I suppose you know that. But in a good way. Listen a little while ago, if it had
been anybody else who talked to me that way I'd have murdered him. I think I like you
better because you didn't try to give me any sympathy. I know better than to expect
sympathy from you. If you had said one false word to-night I'd have really gone mad. I
know it. I was on the very edge. When you started in about General Ivolgin I thought for a
minute it was all up with me. That's what makes me think you've got something in you ...
that was real cunning! And now let me tell you something ... if you don't pull
yourself together soon you're going to be
80
screwy. You've got something inside you that's eating you up. I don't
know what it is, but you can't put it over on me. I know you from the bottom up. I know
there's something griping you - and it's not just your wife, nor your job, nor even that
nigger wench whom you think you're in love with. Sometimes I think you were born in the
wrong time. Listen, I don't want you to think I'm making an idol of you but there's
something to what I say... if you had just a little more confidence in yourself you could
be the biggest man in the world to-day. You wouldn't even have to be a writer. You might
become another Jesus Christ for all I know. Don't laugh -1 mean it. You haven't the
slightest idea of your own possibilities ... you're absolutely blind to everything except
your own desires. You don't know what you want. You don't know because you never stop to
think. You're letting people use you up. You're a damned fool, an idiot. If I had a tenth
of what you've got I could turn the world upside down. You think that's crazy, eh? Well,
listen to me... I was never more sane in my life. When I came to see you to-night I
thought I was about ready to commit suicide. It doesn't make much difference whether I do
it or not. But anyway, I don't see much point in doing it now. That won't bring her back
to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster. But I don't want to
sick off yet... I want to do some good in the world first. That may sound silly to you,
but it's true. I'd like to do something for others ..."
He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile.
It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life instinct was so
strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to hope for, he was powerless to
kill himself. That hopelessness was something quite alien to me. I thought to myself - if
only we could change skins! Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more
than anything was the thought that he wouldn't even enjoy the funeral - his own wife's
funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there was always a
bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes and some hearty belly
laughs. Maybe I was too young to appreciate
81
die sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and
wept. But that never meant much to me because after the funeral sitting in the beer garden
next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer despite the black
garments and the crepes and the wreaths. It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were
really trying to establish some sort of communion with the dead person. Something almost
Egyptian-like, when I think back on it. Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch
of hypocrites. But they weren't. They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for
life. Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you went only by
what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts. But they
really didn't grasp it at all - not the way the Jew does, for example. They talked about
the life hereafter but they never really believed in it. And if any one were so bereaved
as to pine away they looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an
insane person. There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the
impression they gave me. And at the extreme limits there was always the stomach which had
to be filled - with limburger sandwiches and beer and Kummel and turkey legs if there were
any about. They wept in their beer, like Children. And the next minute they were laughing,
laughing over some curious quirk in the dead person's character. Even the way they used
the past tense had a curious effect upon me. An hour after he was shovelled under they
were saying of the defunct - "he was always so good-natured" - as though the
person in mind were dead a thousand years, a character of history, or a personage out of
Nibelungen Lied. The thing was that he was dead, definitely dead for all time, and they,
the living, were cut off from him now and forever, and to-day as well as to-morrow must be
lived through, the clothes washed, the dinner prepared, and when the next one was struck
down there would be a coffin to select and a squabble about the will, but it would be all
in the daily routine and to take time off to grieve and sorrow was sinful because God, if
there was a God, had ordained it that way and we on earth had nothing to say about it. To
go beyond the ordained
82
limits of joy or grief was wicked. To threaten madness was the high
sin. They had a terrific animal sense of adjustment, marvellous to behold if it had been
truly animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more than dull
German torpor, insensirivity. And yet, somehow, I preferred these animated stomachs to the
hydra-headed sorrow of the Jew. At bottom I couldn't feel sorry for Kronski - I would have
to feel sorry for his whole tribe. The death of his wife was only an item, a trifle, in
the history of his calamities. As he himself had said, he was born unlucky. He was born to
see things go wrong - because for five thousand years things had been going wrong in the
blood of the race. They came into the world with that sunken, hopeless leer on their faces
and they would go out of the world the same way. They left a bad smell behind them - a
poison, a vomit of sorrow. The stink they were trying to take out of the world was the
stink they themselves had brought into the world. I reflected on all this as I listened to
him. I felt so well and dean inside that when we parted, after I had turned down a side
street, I began to whistle and hum. And then a terrible thirst came upon me and I says to
meself in me best Irish brogue - shure and it's a bit of a drink ye should be having now,
me lad - and saying it I stumbled into a hole in the wall and I ordered a big foaming
stein of beer and a thick hamburger sandwich with plenty of. onions. I had another mug of
beer and then a drop of brandy and I thought to myself in my callous way - if the poor
bastard hasn't got brains enough to enjoy his own wife's funeral then I'll enjoy it for
him. And the more I thought about it, the happier I grew, and if there was the least bit
of grief or envy it was only for the fact that I couldn't change places with her, the poor
dead Jewish soul, because death was something absolutely beyond the grip and comprehension
of a bum guy like myself arid it was a pity to waste it on the likes of them as knew all
about it and didn't need it anyway. I got so damned intoxicated with the idea of dying
that in my drunken stupor I was mumbling to the God above to kill me this night, kill me.
God, and let me know what it's all about. I tried my stinking best to imagine what it was
like, giving
83
up the ghost, but it was no go. The best I could do was to imitate a
death rattle, but on that I nearly choked, and then I got so damned frightened that I
almost shit in my pants. That wasn't death, anyway. That was just choking. Death was more
like what we went through in the park: two people walking side by side in the mist,
rubbing against trees and bushes, and not a word between them. It was something emptier
than the name itself and yet right and peaceful, dignified, if you like. It was not a
continuation of life, but a leap in the dark and no possibility of ever coming back, not
even as a grain of dust. And that was right and beautiful, I said to myself, because why
would one want to come back. To taste it once is to taste it forever - life or
death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes. Sure, it's
tough to choke on your own spittle - it's disagreeable more than anything else. And
besides, one doesn't always die choking to death. Sometimes one goes off in his
sleep, peaceful and quiet as a lamb. The Lord comes and gathers you up into the fold, as
they say. Anyway, you stop breathing. And why the hell should one want to go on breathing
forever? Anything that would have to be done interminably would be torture. The poor human
bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that somebody devised a way out. We don't
quibble about going to sleep. A third of our lives we snore away like drunken rats. What
about that? Is that tragic? Well then, say three-thirds of drunken rat-like sleep. Jesus,
if we had any sense we'd be dancing with glee at the thought of it! We could all die in
bed tomorrow, without pain, without suffering - if we had the sense to take advantage of
our remedies. We don't want to die, that's the trouble with us. That's why God and the
whole shooting match upstairs in our crazy dustbins. General Ivolgin! That got a cackle
out of him . .. and a few dry sobs. I might as well have said limburger cheese. But
General Ivolgin means something to him ... something crazy. Limburger cheese would be too
sober, too banal. It's all limburger cheese, however, including General Ivolgin, the poor
drunken sap. General Ivolgin was evolved out of Dostoievski's limburger cheese, his own
private brand. That
84
means a certain flavour, a certain label. So people recognize it when
they smell it, taste it. But what made this General Ivolgin limburger cheese? Why,
whatever made limburger cheese, which is x and therefore unknowable. And so
therefore? Therefore nothing... nothing at all. Full stop - or eke a leap in the dark and
no coming back.
As I was taking my pants off I suddenly remembered what the bastard had
told me. I looked at my cock and it looked just as innocent as ever. "Don't tell me
you've got the syph," I said, holding it in my hand and squeezing it a bit as though
I might see a bit of pus squirting out. No, I didn't think there was much chance of having
the syph. I wasn't born under that kind of star. The clap, yes, that was possible.
Everybody had the dap sometime or other. But not syph! I knew he'd wish it on me if he
could, just to make me realize what suffering was. But I couldn't be bothered obliging
him. I was born a dumb and lucky guy. I yawned. It was all so much god-damned limburger
cheese that syph or no syph, I thought to myself, if she's up to it I'll tear off another
piece and call it a day. But evidently she wasn't up to it. She was for turning her ass on
me. So I just lay there with a stiff prick up against her ass and I gave it to her by
mental telepathy. And by Jesus, she must have gotten the message sound asleep though she
was, because it wasn't any trouble going in by the stable door and besides I didn't have
to look at her face which was one hell of a relief. I thought to myself, as I gave her the
last hook and whistle - "me lad it's limburger cheese and now you can turn over and
snore ..."
It seemed as if it would go on forever, the sex and death chant. The
very next afternoon at the office I received a telephone call from my wife saying that her
friend Arline had just been taken to the insane asylum. They were friends from the convent
school in Canada where they had both studied music and the art of masturbation. I had met
the whole flock of them little by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and
who apparently was the high priestess of the cult of Fonanism. They had all had a crush on
Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the chocolate eclair
85
mug wasn't the first of the little group to go to the insane asylum. I
don't say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere of the
convent had something to do with it. They were all spoiled in the egg.
Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He
arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, though he was
hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to liven up a bit. He said he
always knew there was something wrong with her. Why? Because when he tried to force her
one night she began to weep hysterically. It wasn't the weeping so much as what she said.
She said she had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life
of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless way. "I said
to her -well you don't need to do it if you don't want... just hold it in your hand.
Jesus, when I said that I thought she'd go clean off her nut. She said I was trying to
soil her innocence - that's the way she put it. And at the same time she took it in her
hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And
still harping on the Holy Ghost and her 'innocence'. I remembered what you told me once
and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted down after a
bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever
fuck a crazy woman? It's something to experience. From the instant I got it in she started
talking a blue streak. I can't describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she
didn't know I was fucking her. Listen, I don't know whether you've ever had a woman eat an
apple while you were doing it... well, you can imagine how that affects you. This one was
a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so that I began to think I was a little queer
myself . . . And now here's something you'll hardly believe, but I'm telling you the
truth. You know what she did when we got through? She put her arms around me and she
thanked me ... Wait, that isn't all. Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and
offered up a prayer for my soul. Jesus, I remember that so well. 'Please make Mac a better
Christian,' she said. And me lying there with a limp cock
86 HENRYMILLER
listening to her. I didn't know whether I was dreaming or what. 'Please
make Mac a better Christian!' Can you beat that?
"What are you doing to-night?" he added cheerfully.
"Nothing special," I said.
"Then come along with me. I've got a gal I want you to meet... Paula,
I picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She's not crazy - she's just a
nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It'll be a treat... just to watch you.
Listen, if you don't shoot off in your pants when she starts wiggling, well then I'm a son
of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. What's the use of farting around in this
place?"
There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went
to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it was a French
joint; now it was a speak-easy run by a couple of wops. There was a tiny bar near the door
and in the back a little room with a sawdust floor and a slot machine for music. The idea
was that we were to have a couple of drinks and then eat. That was the idea.
Knowing him as I did, however, I wasn't at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland
together. If a woman should come along who pleased his fancy - and for that she didn't
have to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb - I knew he'd leave me in the lurch
and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, when I was with him, was to make sure in
advance that he had enough money to pay for the drinks we ordered. And, of course, never
to let him out of my sight until the drinks were paid for.
The first drink or two always plunged him into reminiscence.
Reminiscences of cunt to be sure. His reminiscences were reminiscent of a story he had
told me once and which made an indelible impression upon me. It was about a Scotchman on
his deathbed. Just as he was about to pass away his wife, seeing him struggling to say
something bends over him tenderly and says - "What is it. Jock, what is it ye're
trying to say?" And Jock, with a last effort, raises himself wearily and says:
"Just cunt... cunt... cunt."
That was always the opening theme, and the ending theme, with
MacGregor. It was his way of saying -futility. The leitmotif was disease, because
between fucks, as it were, he worried
87
his head off, or rather he worried the head off his cock. It was the
most natural thing in the world, at the end of an evening, for him to say - "come on
upstairs a minute, I want to show you my cock." From taking it out and looking at it
and washing it and scrubbing it a dozen times a day naturally his cock was always swollen
and inflamed. Every now and then he went to the doctor and he had it sounded. Or, just to
relieve him, the doctor would give him a little box of salve and tell him not to drink so
much. This would cause no end of debate, because as he would say to me, "if the salve
is any good why do I have to stop drinking?" Or, "if I stopped drinking
altogether do you think I would need to use the salve?" Of course, whatever I
recommended went in one ear and out the other. He had to worry about something and the
penis was certainly good food for worry. Sometimes he worried about his scalp. He had
dandruff, as most everybody has, and when his cock was in good condition he forgot about
that and he worried about his scalp. Or else his chest. The moment he thought about his
chest he would start to cough. And such coughing! As though he were in the last stages of
consumption. And when he was running after a woman he was as nervous and irritable as a
cat. He couldn't get her quickly enough. The moment he had her he was worrying about how
to get rid of her. They all had something wrong with them, some trivial little thing,
usually, which took the edge off his appetite.
He was rehearsing all this as we sat in the gloom of the back room.
After a couple of drinks he got up, as usual, to go to the toilet, and on his way he
dropped a coin in the slot machine and the jiggers began to jiggle and with that he perked
up and pointing to the glasses he said: "Order another round!" He came back from
the toilet looking extraordinarily complacent, whether because he had relieved his bladder
or because he had run into a girl in the hallway, I don't know. Anyhow, as he sat down, he
started in on another tack - very composed now and very serene, almost like a philosopher.
"You know, Henry, we're getting on in years. You and I oughtn't to be frittering our
time away like this. If we're ever going to amount to anything it's high time we started
in..." I had been hearing
88
this line for years now and I knew what the upshot would be. This was
just a little parenthesis while he calmly glanced about the room and decided which bimbo
was the least sottish-looking. While he discoursed about the miserable failure of our
lives his feet were dancing and his eyes were getting brighter and brighter. It would
happen as it always happened, that just as he was saying - "Now you take Woodruff,
for instance. He'll never get ahead because he's just a natural mean scrounging son of a
bitch..." - just at such a moment, as I say it would happen that some drunken cow in
passing the table would catch his eye and without the slightest pause he would interrupt
his narrative to say "hello kid, why don't you sit down and have a drink with
us?" And as a drunken bitch like that never travels alone, but always in pairs, why
she'd respond with a "Certainly, can I bring my friend over?" And MacGregor, as
though he were the most gallant chap in the world, would say "Why sure, why not?
What's her name?" And then, tugging at my sleeve, he'd bend over and whisper:
"Don't you beat it on me, do you hear? We'll give 'em one drink
and get rid of them, see?"
And, as it always happened, one drink led to another and the bill was
getting too high and he couldn't see why he should waste his money on a couple of bums so
you go out first, Henry, and pretend you're buying some medicine and I'll follow in a few
minutes ... but wait for me, you son of a bitch, don't leave me in the lurch like you did
the last time. And like I always did, when I got outside I walked away as fast as my legs
would carry me, laughing to myself and thanking my lucky stars that I had gotten away from
him as easily as I had. With all those drinks under my belt it didn't matter much where my
feet were dragging me. Broadway lit up just as crazy as ever and the crowd thick as
molasses. Just fling yourself into it like an ant and let yourself get pushed along.
Everybody doing it, some for a good reason and some for no reason at all. All this push
and movement representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes or fancy
shirts, the new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every other joint a food
emporium.
Every time I hit that runway towards dinner hour a fever of
89
expectancy seized me. It's only a stretch of a few blocks from Times
Square to Fiftieth Street, and when one says Broadway that's all that's really meant and
it's really nothing, just a chicken run and a lousy one at that, but at seven in the
evening when everybody's rushing for a table there's a sort of electric crackle in the air
and your hair stands on end like an antennae and if you're receptive you not only get
every bash and flicker but you get the statistical itch, the quid pro quo of the
interactive, interstitial, ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the
stars which compose the Milky Way, only this is the Gay White Way, the top of the world
with no roof and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through and say it's a
lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch of warm human delirium which
makes you run forward like a blind nag and wag your delirious ears. Every one is so
utterly, confoundedly not himself that you become automatically the personification of the
whole human race, shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand
different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating,
gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering,
pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up to
Moses, and beyond that you are a woman buying a hat, or a bird cage, or just a mouse trap.
You can lie in wait in a show-window, like a fourteen carat gold ring, or you can climb
the side of a building like a human fly, but nothing will stop the procession, not even
umbrellas flying at lightning speed, nor double-decked walruses marching calmly to the
oyster banks. Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a
ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant
originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the homed toad and the red heron, but
when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and
slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like
cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy
centre of Manhattan Island. From Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas
90
Aquinas forgot to include in his magnum opus is here included, which is
to say among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot
machines, grey bowlers, typewriter ribbons, oranges sticks, free toilets, sanitary
napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doylies, manholes, chewing
gum, sidecars and sour-balls, cellophane, cord tyres, magnetos, horse liniment, cough
drops, feenamint, and that feline opacity of the hysterically endowed eunuch who marches
to the soda fountain with a sawed off shotgun between his legs. The before-dinner
atmosphere, the blend of patchouli, warm pitchblende, iced electricity, sugared sweat and
powdered urine drives one on to a fever of delirious expectancy. Christ will never more
come down to earth nor will there be any law-giver, nor will murder cease nor theft, nor
rape, and yet... and yet one expects something, something terrifyingly marvellous and
absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an invention, like
the electric light, like television, only more devastating, more soul rending, an
invention unthinkable that will bring a shattering calm and void, not the calm and void of
death but of life such as the monks dreamed, such as is dreamed still in the Himalayas, in
Tibet, in Lahore, in the Aleutian Islands, in Polynesia, in Easter Island, the dream of
men before the flood, before the word was written, the dream of cave men and
anthropophagists, of those with double sex and short tails, of those who are said to be
crazy and have no way of defending themselves because they are outnumbered by those who
are not crazy. Cold energy trapped by cunning brutes and then set free like explosive
rockets, wheels, intricately interwheeled to give the illusion of force and speed some for
light, some for power, some for motion, words wired by maniacs and mounted like fake
teeth, perfect, and repulsive as lepers, ingratiating, soft, slippery, nonsensical
movement, vertical, horizontal, circular, between walls and through walls, for pleasure,
for barter, for crime; for sex;
all light, movement, power impersonally conceived, generated, and
distributed throughout a choked, cunt-like deft intended to dazzle and awe the savage, the
yokel, the alien, but nobody dazzled or awed, this one hungry, that one lecherous, all one
and
91
the same and no different from the savage, the yokel, the alien, except
for odds and ends, bric-a-brac, the soapsuds of thought, the sawdust of the mind. In the
same cunty deft, trapped and undazzled, millions have walked before me, among them one,
Blaise Cendrars, who afterwards flew to the moon, thence back to earth and up the Orinoco
impersonating a wild man but actually sound as a button, though no longer vulnerable, no
longer mortal, a splendiferous hulk of a poem dedicated to the archipelago of insomnia. Of
those with fever few hatched, among them myself still unhatched, but pervious and
maculate, knowing with quiet ferocity the ennui of ceaseless drift and movement. Before
dinner the slat and chink of sky light softly percolating through the boned grey dome, the
vagrant hemispheres spored with blue-egged nuclei coagulating, ramifying, in the one
basket lobsters, in the other the germination of a world antiseptically personal and
absolute. Out of the manholes, grey with the underground life, men of the future world
saturated with shit, the iced electricity biting into them like rats, the day done in and
darkness coming on like the cool, refreshing shadows of the sewers. Like a soft prick
slipping out of an overheated cunt I, the still unhatched, making a few abortive wriggles,
but either not dead and soft enough or else sperm-free and skating ad astra, for it is
still not dinner and a peristaltic frenzy takes possession of the upper colon, the
hypo-gastric region, the umbilical and the post-pineal lobe. Boiled alive, the lobsters
swim in ice, giving no quarter and asking no quarter, simply motionless and unmotivated in
the ice-watered ennui of death, life drifting by the show-window muffled in desolation, a
sorrowful scurvy eaten away by ptomaine, the frozen glass of the window cutting like a
jack-knife, dean and no remainder.
Life drifting by the show-window ... I too as much a part of life as
the lobster, the fourteen carat ring, the horse liniment, but very difficult to establish
the fact, the fact being that life is merchandise with a bill of lading attached, what I
choose to eat being more important than I the eater, each one eating the other and
consequently eating, the verb ruler of the roost. In the act of eating the host is
violated and justice defeated tempor-
92
arily. The plate and what's on it, through the predatory power of the
intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first hypnotizing it,
then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then absorbing it. The spiritual part of
the being passes off like a scum, leaves absolutely no evidence or trace of its passage,
vanishes, vanishes even more completely than a point in space after a mathematical
discourse. The fever, which may return tomorrow, bears the same relation to life as the
mercury in a thermometer bears to heat. Fever will not make life heat, which is what was
to have been proved and thus consecrates the meat balls and spaghetti. To chew while
thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, gives the necessary social cast from which you
look out the window and see that even human kind can be slaughtered justly, or maimed, or
starved, or tortured because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair with
clothes on, wiping the mouth with napkin, enables you to comprehend, what the wisest men
have never been able to comprehend, namely that there is no other way of life possible,
said wise men often, disdaining to use chair, clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying
through a cunty deft of a street called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of
this or that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of
mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact
and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts.
The meat balk devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor,
belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the 24 carat sparkle and
with the theatre pack. This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man
with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the
music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it
poignancy. The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a
part of life too like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera
House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added
together, still somehow it is not life. When is it
93
life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders
on and I remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten: the coffee was lousy,
the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid. The street is like a
bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next. At the comer the blind
man stops again and plays "Home to Our Mountains". I find a piece of chewing gum
in my pocket -1 chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing
better to do unless it were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is
comfortable and nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and
I belong and I don't belong.
I sit on the stoop for an hour or so, mooning. I come to the same
conclusions I always come to when I have a minute to think for myself. Either I must go
home immediately and start to write or I must run away and start a wholly new life. The
thought of beginning a book terrifies me: there is so much to tell that I don't know where
or how to begin. The thought of running away and beginning all over again is equally
terrifying: it means working like a nigger to keep body and soul together. For a man of my
temperament, the world being what it is, there is absolutely no hope, no solution. Even if
I could write the book I want to write nobody would take it -1 know my compatriots
only too well. Even if I could begin again it would be no use, because
fundamentally I have no desire to work and no desire to become a useful member of society.
I sit there staring at the house across the way. It seems not only ugly and senseless,
like all the other houses on the street, but from staring at it so intently, it has
suddenly become absurd. The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that particular way
strikes me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me as a piece of the highest
insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated lines, slot machines, newspapers,
telephones, cops, doorknobs, flop houses, screens, toilet paper, everything. Everything
could just as well not be and not only nothing lost by a whole universe gained. I look at
the people brushing by me to see if by chance one of them might agree with me. Supposing I
intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question. Supposing I just
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said to him suddenly: "Why do you go on living the way you
do?" He would probably call a cop. I ask myself - does any one ever talk to
himself the way I do? I ask myself if there isn't something wrong with me. The only
conclusion I can come to is that I am different. And that's a very grave matter,
view it how you will. Henry, I say to myself, rising slowly from the stoop, stretching
myself, brushing my trousers and spitting out the gum. Henry, I say to myself, you are
young yet, you are just a spring chicken and if you let them get you by the balls you're
an idiot because you're a better man than any of them only you need to get rid of your
false notions about humanity. You have to realize Henry me boy, that you're dealing with
cut-throats, with cannibals, only they're dressed-up, shaved, perfumed, but that's all
they are - cut-throats, cannibals. The best thing for you to do now. Henry, is to go and
get yourself a frosted chocolate and when you sit at the soda fountain keep your eyes
peeled and forget about the destiny of man because you might still find yourself a nice
lay and a good dean lay will dean your ballbearing out and leave a good taste in your
mouth whereas this only brings on dyspepsia, dandruff, halitosis, encephalitis. And while
I'm soothing myself thus a guy comes up to me to bum a dime and I hand him a quarter for
good measure thinking to myself that if I had had a little more sense I'd have had a juicy
pork chop with that instead of the lousy meat balls but what the difference now it's all
food and food makes energy and energy is what makes the world go round. Instead of the
frosted chocolate I keep walking and soon I'm exactly where I intended to be all the time,
which is front of the ticket window of the Roseland. And now. Henry, says I to myself, if
you're lucky your old pal MacGregor will be here and first hell bawl the shit out of you
for running away and then he'll lend you a five-spot, and if you just hold your breath
while climbing the stairs maybe you'll see the nymphomaniac too and you'll get a dry fuck.
Enter very calmly. Henry, and keep your eyes peeled! And I enter as per instructions on
velvet toes, checking my hat and urinating a little as a matter of course, then slowly
redescending the stairs and sizing up the taxi girls all diaphanously gowned, powdered,
perfumed, looking fresh and alert but probably
95
bored as hell and leg weary. Into each and every one of them, as I
shuffle about, I throw an imaginary fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck
and that's why I'm reasonably sure to find my old friend MacGregor here. The way I no
longer think about the condition of the world is marvellous. I mention it because for a
moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I almost went into a
trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe I ought to beat it and go home
and begin the book. A terrifying thought! Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair
and saw nothing and heard nothing. I must have written a good sized book before I woke up.
Better not to sit down. Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come
here some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it'll take you. I mean a hundred
or two hundred bucks, and spend it like water and say yes to everything. The haughty
looking one with the statuesque figure, I bet she'd squirm like an eel if her palm were
well greased. Supposing she said - twenty bucks! and you could say Sure!
Supposing you could say - Listen, I've got a car downstairs ... let's run down to Atlantic
City for a few days. Henry, there ain't no car and there ain't no twenty bucks. Don't
sit down ... keep moving.
At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing
around. This is no harmless recreation... this is serious business. At each end of the
floor there is a sign reading "No Improper Dancing Allowed". Well and good. No
harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompei they probably hung a phallus
up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn't think about Pompei or
I'll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving Henry. Keep your mind on the
music. I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have had if I had the
price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I'm
standing knee-deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn't the lava that
killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that predpitated the eruption. That's how the
lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were. If suddenly all
New York were caught that way - what a museum
96
it would make! My friend MacGregor standing at the sink scrubbing his
cock... the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed ... the nuns laying in bed and
masturbating one another ... the auctioneer with an alarm in his hand ... the telephone
girls at the switchboard ... J. P. Morganana sitting on the toilet bowl placidly wiping
his ass ... the dicks with rubber hoses giving the third degree ... strippers giving the
last strip and tease...
Standing knee-deep in the lava beds and my eyes choked with sperm; J.
P. Morganana is placidly wiping his ass while the telephone girls plug the switchboards,
while dicks with rubber hoses practice the third degree, while my old friend MacGregor
scrubs the germs out of his cock and sweetens it and examines it under the microscope.
Everybody is caught with his pants down, including the strip teasers who wear no pants, no
beards, no moustaches, just a little patch to cover their twinkling little cunts. Sister
Antolina lying in the convent bed, her guts trussed up, her arms akimbo and waiting for
the Resurrection, waiting, waiting for life without hernia, without intercourse, without
sin, without evil, meanwhile nibbling a few animal crackers, a pimento, some fancy olives,
a little head cheese. The Jew-boys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Carnarsie,
Bronville, opening and dosing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the
sausage machine, dogging up the drains, working like fury for cash down and if you let a
peep out of you out you go. With eleven hundred tickets in my pocket and a Rolls Royce
waiting for me downstairs I could have the most excruciatingly marvellous time, throwing a
fuck into each and everyone respectively regardless of age, sex, race, religion,
nationality, birth or breeding. There is no solution for a man like myself, I being what I
am and the world being what it is. The world is divided into three parts of which two
parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. The
haughty one with the statuesque figure is probably a cold turkey fuck, a sort of con
anonyme plastered with gold leaf and tin foil. Beyond despair and disillusionment
there is always the absence of worse things and the emoluments of ennui. Nothing is
lousier and emptier than the midst of bright
97
gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical epoch, life
maturating in a black box, a negative tickled with add and yielding a momentaneous
simulacrum of nothingness. At the outermost limit of this momentaneous nothingness my
friend MacGregor arrives and is standing by my side and with him is the one he was talking
about, the nymphomaniac called Paula. She has the loose, jaunty swing and perch of the
double-barrelled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium,
always ready to flow, to wind and twist, and clutch, the eyes going tic-toc, the toes
twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the
incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac's arms. I
watch the two of them as they move spasmodically inch by inch around the floor; they move
like an octopus working up a rut. Between the dangling tentacles the music shimmers and
flashes, now breaks in a cascade of sperm and rose water, forms again into an oily spout,
a column standing erect without feet, collapses again like chalk, leaving the upper part
of the leg phosphorescent, a zebra standing in a pool of golden marshmallow, one leg
striped, the other molten. A gold marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten
hooves, its sex undone and twisted into a knot. On the sea floor the oysters are doing the
St. Vitus dance, some with lockjaw, some with double-jointed knees. The music is sprinkled
with rat poison, with the rattlesnake's venom, with the fetid breath of the gardenia, the
spittle of the sacred yak, the bolloxed sweat of the musk-rat, the leper's sugar-coated
nostalgia. The music is a diarrhoea, a lake of gasolene, stagnant with cockroaches and
stale horse piss. The drooling notes are the foam and dribble of the epileptic, the night
sweat of the fornicating nigger frigged by the Jew. All America is in the trombone's
smear, that frazzled brokendown whinny of the gangrened sea cows stationed off Point Loma,
Pawtucket, Cape Hatteras, Labrador, Camarsie and intermediate points. The octopus is
dancing like a rubber dick - the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil inedit. Laura the nympho
is doing the rhumba, her sex exfoliated and twisted like a cow's tail. In the belly of the
trombone lies the American soul farting its contented heart
98
out. Nothing goes to waste - not the least spit of a fart. In the
golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance of sodden piss and gasolene, the great
soul of the American continent gallops like an octopus, all the sails unfurled, the
hatches down, the engine whirring like a dynamo. The great dynamic soul caught in the
click of the camera's eye, in the heat of rut, bloodless as a fish, slippery as mucus, the
soul of the people miscegenating on the sea floor, pop-eyed with longing, harrowed with
lust. The dance of Saturday night, of cantaloupes rotting in the garbage pail, of fresh
green snot and slimy unguents for the tender parts. The dance of the slot-machine and the
monsters who invent them. The dance of the gat and the slugs who use them. The dance of
the blackjack and the pricks who batter brains to a polypous pulp. The dance of the
magneto world, the spark that unsparks, the soft purr of the perfect mechanism, the
velocity race on a turntable, the dollar at par and the forests dead and mutilated. The
Saturday night of the soul's hollow dance, each jumping jigger a functional unit in the
St. Vitus' dance of the ringworm's dream. Laura the nympho brandishing her cunt,
her sweet rose-petal lips toothed with ballbearing clutches, her ass balled and socketed.
Inch by inch, millimetre by .millimetre they shove the copulating corpse around. And then
crash! Like pulling a switch the music suddenly stops and with the stoppage the dancers
come apart, arms and legs intact, like tea leaves dropping to the bottom of the cup. Now
the air is blue with words, a slow sizzle as of fish on the griddle. The chaff of the
empty soul rising like monkey chatter in the topmost branches of the trees. The air blue
with words passing out through the ventilators, coming back again in sleep through
corrugated funnels and smokestacks, winged like the antelope, striped like the zebra, now
lying quiet as the mollusc, now spitting flame. Laura the nympho cold as a statue, her
parts eaten away, her hair musically enraptured. On the brink of sleep Laura stands with
muted lips, her words falling like pollen through a fog. The Laura of Petrarque seated in
a taxi, each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then cauterized.
Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a
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mouth full of gum. Hunkydory is the word on her lips. The heavy fluted
Ups of the sea-shell. Laura's lips, the lips of lost Uranian love. All floating
shadow-ward through the slanting fog. Last murmuring dregs of shell-like lips slipping off
the Labrador coast, oozing eastward with the mud tides, easing starward in the iodine
drift. Lost Laura, last of the Petrarques, slowly fading on the brink of sleep. Not grey
the world, but lustlack, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed innocence.
And tins in the black frenzied nothingness of the hollow of absence
leaves a gloomy feeling of saturated despondency not unlike the topmost tip of desperation
which is only the gay juvenile maggot of death's exquisite rupture with life. From this
inverted cone of ecstasy life will rise again into prosaic skyscraper eminence, dragging
me by the hair and teeth, lousy with howling empty joy, the animated foetus of the unborn
death maggot lying in wait for rot and putrefaction.
Sunday morning the telephone wakes me up. It's my friend Maxie Schnadig
announcing the death of our friend Luke Ralston. Maxie has assumed a truly sorrowful tone
of voice which rubs me the wrong way. He says Luke was such a swell guy. That too sounds
the wrong note for me because while Luke was all right, he was only so-so, not precisely
what you might call a swell guy. Luke was an ingrown fairy and finally, when I got to know
him intimately, a big pain in the ass. I told Maxie that over the telephone: I could tell
from the way he answered me that he didn't like it very much. He said Luke had always been
a friend to me. It was true enough, but it wasn't enough. The truth was that I was really
glad Luke had kicked off at the opportune moment: it meant that I could forget about the
hundred and fifty dollars which I owed him In fact, as I hung up the receiver I really
felt joyous. It was a tremendous relief not to have to pay that debt. As for Luke's
demise, that didn't disturb me in the least. On the contrary, it would enable me to pay a
visit to his sister, Lottie, whom I always wanted to lay but never could for one reason or
another. Now I could see myself going up there in the middle of the day and offering her
my condolences. Her husband would be at the office and there
100
would be nothing to interfere. I saw myself putting my arms around her
and comforting her; nothing like tackling a woman when she is in sorrow. I could see her
opening her eyes wide -she had beautiful, large grey eyes - as I moved her towards the
couch. She was the sort of woman who would give you a fuck while pretending to be talking
music or some such thing. She didn't like the naked reality, the bare facts, so to speak.
At the same time she'd have enough presence of mind to slip a towel under her so as not to
stain the couch. I knew her inside out. I knew that the best time to get her was now, now
while she was running up a little fever of emotion over dear dead Luke -whom she didn't
think much of, by the way. Unfortunately it was Sunday and the husband would be sure to be
home. I went back to bed and I lay there thinking first about Luke and all that he
had done for me and then about her, Lottie. Lottie Somers was her name - it always seemed
a beautiful name to me. It matched her perfectly. Luke was stiff as a poker, with a sort
of skull and bones face, and impeccable and just beyond words. She was just the opposite -
soft, round, spoke with a drawl, caressed her words, moved languidly, used her eyes
effectively. One would never take them for brother and sister. I got so worked up thinking
about her that I tried to tackle the wife. But that poor bastard, with her Puritanical
complex, pretended to be horrified. She liked Luke. She wouldn't say that he was a swell
guy, because that wasn't like her, but she insisted that he was genuine, loyal, a true
friend, etc. I had so many loyal, genuine, true friends that that was all horse shit to
me. Finally we got into such an argument over Luke that she got an hysterical attack and
began to weep and sob - in bed, mind you. That made me hungry. The idea of weeping before
breakfast seemed monstrous to me. I went downstairs and I fixed myself a wonderful
breakfast, and as I put it away I was laughing to myself, about Luke, about the hundred
and fifty bucks that his sudden death had wiped off the slate, about Lottie and the way
she would look at me when the moment came . . . and finally, the most absurd of all, I
thought of Maxie, Maxie Schnadig, the faithful friend of Luke, standing at the grave with
a big wreath and perhaps throwing a handful of
101
earth on the coffin just as they were lowering it. Somehow that seemed
just too stupid for words. I don't know why it should seem so ridiculous, but it did.
Maxie was a simpleton. I tolerated him only because he was good for a touch now and then.
And then too there was his sister Rita. I used to let him invite me to his home
occasionally, pretending that I was interested in his brother who was deranged. It was
always a good meal and the halfwitted brother was real entertainment. He looked like a
chimpanzee and he talked like one too. Maxie was too simple to suspect that I was merely
enjoying myself; he thought I took a genuine interest in his brother.
It was a beautiful Sunday and I had as usual about a quarter in my
pocket. I walked along wondering where to go to make a touch. Not that it was difficult to
scrape up a little dough, no, but the thing was to get the dough and beat it without being
bored stiff. I could think of a dozen guys right in the neighbourhood, guys who would fork
it out without a murmur, but it would mean a long conversation afterwards - about art,
religion, politics. Another thing I could do, which I had done over and over again in a
pinch, was to visit the telegraph offices, pretending to pay a friendly visit of
inspection and then, at the last minute, suggesting that they rifle the till for a buck or
so until the morrow. That would involve time and even worse conversation. Thinking it over
coldly and calculatingly I decided that the best bet was my little friend Curley up in
Harlem. If Curley didn't have the money he would filch it from his mother's purse. I knew
I could rely on him. He would want to accompany me, of course, but I could always find a
way of ditching him before the evening was over. He was only a kid and I didn't have to be
too delicate with him.
What I liked about Curley was, that although only a kid of seventeen,
he had absolutely no moral sense, no scruples, no shame. He had come to me as a boy of
fourteen looking for a job as messenger. His parents, who were then in South America, had
shipped him to New York in care of an aunt who seduced him almost immediately. He had
never been to school because the parents were always travelling; they were carnival people
who worked "the griffs and the grinds", as he put it. The father
102 HENKY MILLER
had been in prison several times. He was not his real father, by the
way. Anyway, Curley came to me as a mere lad who was in need of help, in need of a friend
more than anything. At first I thought I could do something for him. Everybody took a
liking to hira immediately, especially the women. He became the pet of the office. Before
long, however, I realized that he was incomgible, that at the best he had the makings of a
clever criminal. I liked him, however, and I continued to do things for him, but I never
trusted him out of my sight. I think I liked him particularly because he had absolutely no
sense of honour. He would do anything in the world for me and at the same time betray me.
I couldn't reproach him for it... It was amusing to me. The more so because he was frank
about it. He just couldn't help it. His Aunt Sophie, for instance. He said she had seduced
him. True enough, but the curious thing was that he let himself be seduced while they were
reading the Bible together. Young as he was he seemed to realize that his Aunt Sophie had
need of him in that way. So he let himself be seduced, as he said, and then, after I had
known him a little while he offered to put me next to his Aunt Sophie. He even went so far
as to blackmail her. When he needed money badly he would go to the aunt and wheedle it out
of her - with sly threats of exposure. With an innocent face, to be sure. He looked
amazingly like an angel, with big liquid eyes that seemed so frank and sincere. So ready
to do things for you - almost like a faithful dog. And then cunning enough, once he had
gained your favour, to make you humour his little whims. Withal extremely intelligent. The
sly intelligence of a fox and - the utter heartlessness of a jackal.
It wasn't at all surprising to me, consequently, to learn that
afternoon that he had been tinkering with Valeska. After Valeska he tackled the cousin who
had already been deflowered and who was in need of some male whom she could rely upon. And
from her finally to the midget who had made herself a pretty little nest at Valeska's. The
midget interested him because she had a perfectly normal cant. He hadn't intended to do
anything with her because, as he said, she was a repulsive little Lesbian, but one day he
happened to walk in on her as she was taking a bath, and that started things off. It was
getting to be too much
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for him, he confessed, because the three of them were hot on bis trail.
He liked the cousin best because she had some dough and she wasn't reluctant to part with
it. Valeska was too cagey, and besides she smelled a little too strong. In fact, he was
getting sick of women. He said it was his Aunt Sophie's fault. She gave him a bad start.
While relating this he busies himself going through the bureau drawers. The father is a
mean son of a bitch who ought to be hanged, he says, not finding anything immediately. He
showed me a revolver with a pearl handle... what would it fetch? A gun was too good to use
on the old man ... he'd like to dynamite him. Trying to find out why he hated the
old man so it developed that the kid was really stuck on his mother. He couldn't bear the
thought of the old man going to bed with her. You don't mean to say that you're jealous of
your old man, I ask. Yes, he's jealous. If I wanted to know the truth it's that he
wouldn't mind sleeping with his mother. Why not? That's why he had permitted his Aunt
Sophie to seduce him... he was thinking of his mother all the time. But don't you feel bad
when you go through her pocketbook, I asked. He laughed. It's not her money he
said, it's his. And what have they done for me? They were always farming me out.
The first thing they taught me was how to cheat people. That's a hell of a way to raise a
kid...
There's not a red cent in the house. Curley's idea of a way out is to
go with me to the office where he works and while I engage the manager in conversation go
through the wardrobe and dean out all the loose change. Or, if I'm not afraid of taking a
chance, he will go through the cash drawer. They'll never suspect us, he says. Had
he ever done that before, I ask. Of course ... a dozen or more times, right under the
manager's nose. And wasn't there any stink about it? To be sure ... they had fired a few
clerks. Why don't you borrow something from your Aunt Sophie, I suggest. That's easy
enough, only it means a quick diddle and he doesn't want to diddle her any more. She
stinks. Aunt Sophie. What do you mean, she stinks? Just that ... she doesn't wash
herself regularly. Why, what's the matter with her? Nothing, just religious. And getting
fat and greasy at die same time. But she likes to be diddled just the same? Does
104
she? She's crazier than ever about it. It's disgusting. It's like
going to bed with a sow. What does your mother think about her? Her? She's as sore
as hell at her. She thinks Sophie's trying to seduce the old man. Well, maybe she is! No,
the old man's got something else. I caught him red-handed one night, in the movies,
mushing it up with a young girl. She's a manicurist from the Astor Hotel. He's probably
trying to squeeze a little dough out of her. That's the only reason he ever makes a woman.
He's a dirty, mean son of a bitch and I'd like to see him get the chair some day! You'll
get the chair yourself some day if you don't watch out. Who, me ? Not me ! I'm too
clever. You're clever enough but you've got a loose tongue. I'd be a little more
tight-lipped if I were you. You know, I added, to give him an extra jolt, O'Rourke is wise
to you; if you ever fall out with O'Rourke it's all up with you . . . Well, why doesn't he
say something if he's so wise? I don't believe you.
I explain to him at some length that O'Rourke is one of those people,
and there are damned few in the world, who prefer not to make trouble for another
person if they can help it. O'Rourke, I say, has the detective's instinct only in that he
likes to know what's going on around him: people's characters are plotted out in
his head, and filed there permanently, just as the enemy's terrain is fixed in the minds
of army leaders. People think that O'Rourke goes around snooping and spying, that he
derives a special pleasure in performing this dirty work for the company. Not so. O'Rourke
is a born student of human nature. He picks things up without effort, due, to be sure, to
his peculiar way of looking at the world. Now about you ... I have no doubt that he knows
everything about you. I never asked him, I admit, but I imagine so from the questions he
poses now and then. Perhaps he's just giving you plenty of rope. Some night he'll run into
you accidentally and perhaps he'll ask you to stop off somewhere and have a bite to eat
with him. And out of a dear sky he'll suddenly say - you remember, Curley, when you were
working up in SA office, the time that little Jewish clerk was fired for tapping the till?
I think you were working overtime that night, weren't you? An interesting case, that. You
know, they never discovered whether the clerk stole the money
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or not. They had to fire him, of course, for negligence, but we can't
say for certain that he really stole the money. I've been thinking about that little
affair now for quite some time. I have a hunch as to who took that money, but I'm not
absolutely sure . . . And then he'll probably give you a beady eye and abruptly change the
conversation to something else. He'll probably tell you a little story about a crook he
knew who thought he was very smart and getting away with it. He'll draw that story out for
you until you feel as though you were sitting on hot coals. By that time you'll be wanting
to beat it, but just when you're ready to go he'll suddenly be reminded of another very
interesting little case and he'll ask you to wait just a little longer while he orders
another dessert. And he'll go on like that for three or four hours at a stretch, never
making the least overt insinuation, but studying you closely all the time, and finally,
when you think you're free, just when you're shaking hands with him and breathing a sigh
of relief, he'll step in front of you and, planting his big square feet between your legs,
he'll grab you by the lapel and, looking straight through you, he'll say in a soft winsome
voice - now look here, my lad, don't you think you had better come clean? And if
you think he's only trying to browbeat you and that you can pretend innocence and walk
away, you're mistaken. Because at that point, when he asks you to come clean, he means
business and nothing on earth is going to stop him. When it gets to that point I'd
recommend you to make a clean sweep of it, down to the last penny. He won't ask me to fire
you and he won't threaten you with jail - he'll just quietly suggest that you put aside a
little bit each week and turn it over to him. Nobody will be the wiser. He probably won't
even tell me. No, he's very delicate about these things, you see."
"And supposing," says Curley suddenly, "that I tell him
I stole the money in order to help you out? What then?" He began to laugh
hysterically.
"I don't think O'Rourke would believe that," I said calmly.
"You can try it, of course, if you think it will help you to dear your own skirts.
But I rather think it will have a bad effect. O'Rourke knows me ... he knows I wouldn't
let you do a thing like that."
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"But you did let me do it!"
"I didn't tell you to do it. You did it without my knowledge.
That's quite different. Besides, can you prove that I accepted money from you? Won't it
seem a little ridiculous to accuse me, the one who befriended you, of putting you up to a
job like that? Who's going to believe you? Not O'Rourke. Besides, he hasn't trapped you
yet. Why worry about it in advance? Maybe you could begin to return the money little by
little before he gets after you. Do it anonymously."
By this time Curley was quite used up. There was a little schnapps in
the cupboard which his old man kept in reserve and I suggested that we take a little to
brace us up. As we were drinking the schnapps it suddenly occurred to me that Maxie had
said he would be at Luke's house to pay his respects. It was just the moment to get Maxie.
He would be full of slobbering sentiments and I could give him any old kind of
cock-and-bull story. I could say that the reason I had assumed such a hard-boiled air on
the phone was because I was harassed, because I didn't know where to turn for the ten
dollars which I needed so badly. At the same time I might be able to make a date with
Lottie. I began to smile thinking about it. If Luke could only see what a friend he had in
me! The most difficult thing would be to go up to the bier and take a sorrowful look at
Luke. Not to.laugh!
I explained the idea to Curley. He laughed so heartily that the tears
were rolling down his face. Which convinced me, by the way, that it would be safer to
leave Curley downstairs while I made the touch. Anyway, it was decided on.
They were just sitting down to dinner when I walked in, looking as sad
as I could possibly make myself look. Maxie was there and almost shocked by my sudden
appearance. Lottie had gone already. That helped me to keep up the sad look. I asked to be
alone with Luke a few minutes, but Maxie insisted on accompanying me. The others were
relieved, I imagine, as they had been conducting the mourners to the bier all afternoon.
And like the good Germans they were they didn't like having their dinner interrupted. As I
was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I became aware
of
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Maxie's eyes fixed on me inquisitively. I looked up and smiled at him
in my usual way. He seemed absolutely nonplussed at this. "Listen, Maxie," I
said, "are you sure they won't hear us?" He looked still more puzzled and
grieved, but nodded reassuringly. "It's like this, Maxie... I came up here purposely
to see you ... to borrow a few bucks. I know it seems lousy but you can imagine how
desperate I must be to do a thing like this." He was shaking his head solemnly as I
spit this out, his mouth forming a big 0 as if he were trying to frighten the spirits
away. "Listen, Maxie," I went on rapidly and trying to keep my voice down sad
and low, "this is no time to give me a sermon. If you want to do something for me
lend me ten bucks now, right away . .. slip it to me right here while I look at Luke. You
know, I really liked Luke. I didn't mean all that over the telephone. You got me at a bad
moment. The wife was tearing her hair out. We're in a mess, Maxie, and I'm counting on you
to do something. Come out with me if you can and I'll tell you more about it.. .*' Maxie,
as I had expected, couldn't come out with me. He wouldn't think of deserting them at such
a moment..." Well, give it to me now," I said, almost savagely. "I'll
explain the whole thing to you tomorrow. I'll have lunch with you downtown."
"Listen, Henry," says Maxie, fishing around in his pocket,
embarrassed at the idea of being caught with a wad in his hand at that moment,
"listen," he said, "I don't mind giving you the money, but couldn't you
have found another way of reaching me? It isn't because of Luke... it's..." He began
to hem and haw, not knowing really what he wanted to say.
"For Christ's sake," I muttered, bending over Luke more
closely so that if any one walked in on us they would never suspect what I was up to ...
"for Christ's sake, don't argue about it now... hand it over and be done with it...
I'm desperate, do you hear me?" Maxie was so confused and flustered that he couldn't
disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. Leaning over the coffin
reverendy I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket.
I couldn't tell whether it was a single or a ten-spot. I didn't stop to examine it but
tucked it away as rapidly as possible and
I08
straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to
the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but heartily. They wanted me to stay for
a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face
twitching now with hysterical laughter.
At the comer, by the lamp post, Curley was waiting for me. By this time
I couldn't restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down
the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it
would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start explaining the incident I had an
attack. Finally I got frightened. I thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I
had managed to quiet down a bit, in the midst of a long silence. Cur-ley suddenly says: "Did
you get it?" That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before. I
had to lean against a rail and hold my guts. I had a terrific pain in the guts but a
pleasurable pain.
What relieved me more than anything was the sight of the bill I had
filched from Maxie's wad. It was a twenty dollar bill! That sobered me up at once. And at
the same time it enraged me a bit. It enraged me to think that in the pocket of that
idiot, Maxie, there were still more bills, probably more twenties, more tens, more fives.
If he had come out with me, as I suggested, and if I had taken a good look at that wad I
would have felt no remorse in blackjacking him. I don't know why it should have made me
feel so, but it enraged me. The most immediate thought was to get rid of Curley as quickly
as possible - a five-spot would fix him up - and then go on a little spree. What I
particularly wanted was to meet some low-down, filthy cunt who hadn't a spark of decency
in her. Where to meet one like that. . . just like that? Well, get rid of Curley
first. Curley, of course, is hurt. He had expected to stick with me. He pretends not to
want the five bucks, but when be sees that I'm willing to take it back, he quickly stows
it away.
Again the night, the incalculably barren, cold, mechanical night of New
York in which there is no peace, no refuge, no intimacy. The immense, frozen solitude of
the million-footed mob, the cold, waste fire of the electrical display, the over-
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whelming meaningless of the perfection of the female who through
perfection has crossed the frontier of sex and gone into the minus sign, gone into the
red, like the electricity, like the neutral energy of the males, like planets without
aspect, like peace programmes, like love over the radio. To have money in the pocket in
the midst of white, neutral energy, to walk meaningless and unfecundated through the
bright glitter of the calcimined streets, to think aloud in full solitude on the edge of
madness, to be of a city, a great city, to be of the last moment of time in the greatest
city in the world and feel no part of it, is to become oneself a city, a world of dead
stone, of waste light, of unintelligible motion, of imponderables and incalculables, of
the secret perfection of all that is minus. To walk in money through the night crowd,
protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath
money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and
still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but
money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that
counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money ?
Again the dance hall, the money rhythm, the love that comes over the
radio, the impersonal, wingless touch of the crowd. A despair that reaches down to the
very soles of the boots, an ennui, a desperation. In the midst of the highest mechanical
perfection to dance without joy, to be so desperately alone, to be almost inhuman because
you are human. If there were life on the moon what more nearly perfect, joyless evidence
of it could there be than this. If to travel away from the sun is to reach the chill
idiocy of the moon, then we have arrived at our goal and life is but the cold, lunar
incandescence of the sun. This is the dance of ice-cold life in the hollow of an atom, and
the more we dance the colder it gets.
So we dance, to an ice-cold frenzied rhythm, to short waves and long
waves, a dance on the inside of the cup of nothingness, each centimetre of lust running to
dollars and cents. We taxi from one perfect female to another seeking the vulnerable
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defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in the impeccable lunar
consistency. This is the icy white maidenhead of love's logic, the web of the ebbed tide,
the fringe of absolute vacuity. And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I
am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on
the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I
am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the centre of a satin-like
emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into
velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with
anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new
insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter
in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic
gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in
the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.
In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no
redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part,
organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly
great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to
saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim
through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a
region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the
still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye,
accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the
eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer
exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of
the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in
logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death,
spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows,
resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with
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many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows,
the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer
look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim
through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around
myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the wall
created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form,
no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the
dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.
Thus moments pass, veridic moments of time without space when I know
all, and knowing all I collapse beneath the vault of the selfless dream.
Between these moments, in the interstices of the dream, life vainly
tried to build up, but the scaffold of the city's mad logic is no support. As an
individual, as flesh and blood, I am levelled down each day to make the fleshless,
bloodless dty whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am
struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water
evaporating. To raise my own individual life but a fraction of an inch above this sinking
sea of death I must have a faith greater than Christ's, a wisdom deeper than that of the
greatest seer. I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained
in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My eyes are
useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a
constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never
looking back, never dwindling. The dty grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The
dty eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die
eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am
going to die as a dty in order to become again a man. Therefore I dose my ears, my eyes,
my mouth.
Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as
a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What
they say or do will be of
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little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom,
their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I
shall be a ventilator for removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect
that which is imperfecdble. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature as it is
projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection,
the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the
white billiard table of logic. I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall
be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. I shall say nothing until
the time comes again to be a man. I shall make no effort to preserve, no effort to
destroy. I shall make no judgments, no criticisms. Those who have had enough will come to
me for reflection and meditation; those who have not had enough will die as they lived, in
disorder, in desperation, in ignorance of the truth of redemption. If one says to me, you
must be religious, I shall make no answer. If one says to me, I have no time now, there's
a cunt waiting for me, I shall make no answer. Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I
shall make no answer. There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the comer, but
the mother who bore me turned many a comer and made no answer, and finally she turned
herself inside out and I am the answer.
Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have
expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is infinitely better,
while attending death, to live in a state of grace and natural bewilderment. Infinitely
better, as life moves towards a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a
stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently
and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make them while they are still frantically
rushing to turn the corner.
I'm thinking now about the rock fight one summer's afternoon long long
ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My Cousin Gene and I had
been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the park. We didn't know which
side we were fighting for but we were fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the
river bank. We had to
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show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of
being sissies. That's how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they
were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in the guts with a
handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and my rock caught him in the
temple and when he went down he lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few
minutes later the cops came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old,
about the same age as us. What they would have done to us if they caught us I don't know.
Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home: we had cleaned up a bit on the
way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when we had left
the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter
and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table listening to her with an
angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the
house, in the big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with
our little friend Joey Resselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and
ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute understanding.
Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so happy that he took us down to
his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dresses and show us what was underneath.
Weesie, they called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from
another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them that it was almost like coming
from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from them.
Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done
with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it any more for the other boys - we
were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight.
When I left my cousin at the end of the summer I didn't see him again
for twenty years or more. When we did meet what deeply impressed me was the look of
innocence he wore - the same expression as the day of the rock fight. When I spoke to him
about the fight I was still more amazed to discover that he
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had forgotten that it was we who had lolled the boy: he remembered the
boy's death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I had had any part in it. When I
mentioned Weesie's name he had difficulty in placing her. Don't you remember the cellar
next door.. .Joey Kesselbaum ? At this a faint smile passed over his face. He
thought it extraordinary that I should remember such things. He was already married, a
father, and working in a factory making fancy pipe cases. He considered it extraordinary
to remember events that had happened so far back in the past.
On leaving him that evening I felt terribly despondent. It was as
though he had attempted to eradicate a precious part of my life, and himself with it He
seemed more attached to the tropical fish which he was collecting than to the wonderful
past. As for me I recollect everything, everything that happened that summer, and
particularly the day of the rock fight. There are times, in fact, when the taste of that
big slice of sour rye which his mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth
than the food I am actually tasting. And the sight of Weesie's little bud almost stronger
than the actual feel of what is in my hand. The way the boy lay there, after we downed
him, far far more impressive than the history of the World War. The whole long summer, in
fact, seems like an idyll out of the Arthurian legends. I often wonder what it was about
this particular summer which makes it so vivid in my memory. I have only to close my eyes
a moment in order to relive each day. The death of the boy certainly caused me no anguish
- it was forgotten before a week had elapsed. The sight of Weesie standing in the gloom of
the cellar with her dress lifted up, that too passed easily away. Strangely enough, the
thick slice of rye bread which his mother handed me each day seems to possess more potency
than any other image of that period. I wonder about it... wonder deeply. Perhaps it is
that whenever she handed me the slice of bread it was with a tenderness and a sympathy
that I had never known before. She was a very homely woman, my Aunt Caroline. Her face was
marked by the pox, but it was a kind, winsome face which no disfigurement could mar. She
was enormously stout and she had a very soft, a very caressing voice. When she ad-
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dressed me she seemed to give me even more attention, more
consideration, than her own son. I would like to have stayed with her always; I would have
chosen her for my own mother had I been permitted. I remember distinctly how when my
mother arrived on a visit she seemed peeved that I was so contented with my new life. She
even remarked that I was ungrateful, a remark I never forgot, because then I realized for
the first time that to be ungrateful was perhaps necessary and good for one. If I dose my
eyes now and I think about it, about the slice of bread, I think almost at once that in
this house I never knew what it was to be scolded. I think if I had told my Aunt Caroline
that I had killed a boy in the lot, told her just how it happened, she would have put her
arm around me and forgiven me - instantly. That's why perhaps that summer is so precious
to me. It was a summer of tacit and complete absolution. That's why I can't forget Weesie
either. She was full of a natural goodness, a child who was in love with me and who made
no reproaches. She was the first of the other sex to admire me for being different.
After Weesie it was the other way round. I was loved, but I was hated too for being what I
was. Weesie made an effort to understand. The very fact that I came from a strange
country, that I spoke another language, drew her closer to me. The way her eyes shone when
she presented me to her little friends is something I will never forget. Her eyes seemed
to be bursting with love and admiration. Sometimes the three of us would walk to the
riverside in the evening and sitting on the bank we would talk as children talk when they
are out of sight of their elders. We talked then, I know it now so well, more sanely and
more profoundly than our parents. To give us that thick slice of bread each day the
parents had to pay a heavy penalty. The worst penalty was that they became estranged from
us. For, with each slice they fed us we became not only more indifferent to them, but we
became more and more superior to them. In our ungratefulness was our strength and our
beauty. Not being devoted we were innocent of all crime. The boy whom I saw drop dead, who
lay there motionless, without making the slightest sound or whimper, the killing of that
boy seems almost like a clean, healthy performance. The
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struggle for food, on the other hand, seems foul and degrading and when
we stood in the presence of our parents we sensed that they had come to us unclean and for
that we could never forgive them. The thick slice of bread in the afternoons, precisely
because it was not earned, tasted delicious to us. Never again will bread taste this way.
Never again will it be given this way. The day of the murder it was even tastier than
ever. It had a slight taste of terror in it which has been lacking ever since. And it was
received with Aunt Caroline's tacit but complete absolution.
There is something about the rye bread which I am trying to fathom -
something vaguely delicious, terrifying and liberating, something associated with first
discoveries. I am thinking of another slice of sour rye which was connected with a still
earlier period, when my little friend Stanley and I used to rifle the icebox. That was stolen
bread and consequently even more marvellous to the palate than the bread which was given
with love. But it was in the act of eating the rye bread, the walking around with it and
talking at the same time, that something in the nature of revelation occurred. It was like
a state of grace, a state of complete ignorance, of self-abnegation. Whatever was imparted
to me in these moments I seem to have retained intact and there is no fear that I shall
ever lose the knowledge that was gained. It was just the fact perhaps that it was no
knowledge as we ordinarily think of it. It was almost like receiving a truth, though truth
is almost too precise a word for it. The important thing about the sour rye discussions is
that they always took place away from home, away from the eyes of our parents whom we
feared but never respected. Left to ourselves there were no limits to what we might
imagine. Facts had little importance for us: what we demanded of a subject was that it
allow us opportunity to expand. What amazes me, when I look back on it, is how well we
understood one another, how well we penetrated to the essential character of each and
every one, young or old. At seven years of age we knew with dead certainty, for example,
that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a
good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much
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more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more
correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists. Alfie Betcha turned out to be an
absolute bum: Johnny Gerhardt went to the penitentiary: Bob Kunst became a work horse.
Infallible predictions. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From
the day we went to school we learned nothing: on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we
were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.
With the sour rye the world was what it is essentially, a primitive
world ruled by magic, a world in which fear played the most important role. The boy who
could inspire the most fear was the leader and he was respected as long as he could
maintain his power. There were other boys who were rebels, and they were admired, but they
never became the leader. The majority were clay in the hands of the fearless ones: a few
could be depended on, but the most not. The air was full of tension -nothing could be
predicted for the morrow. This loose, primitive nucleus of a society created sharp
appetites, sharp emotions, sharp curiosity. Nothing was taken for granted: each day
demanded a new test of power, a new sense of strength or of failure. And so, up until the
age of nine or ten, we had a real taste of life - we were on our own. That is, those of us
who were fortunate enough not to have been spoiled by our parents, those of us who were
free to roam the streets at night and to discover things with our own eyes.
What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is
that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe and
the life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm.
From the moment when one is put in school one is lost: one has the feeling of having a
halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life.
Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it Everything is calculated
and everything has a price upon it.
My cousin Gene became an absolute nonentity: Stanley became a
first-rate failure. Besides these two boys, for whom I had the greatest affection, there
was another, Joey, who has since become a letter carrier. I could weep when I think of
what life
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has made them. As boys they were perfect, Stanley least of all because
Stanley was more temperamental. Stanley went into violent rages now and then and there was
no telling how you stood with him from day to day. But Joey and Gene were the essence of
goodness: they were friends in the old meaning of the word. I think of Joey often when I
go out into the country because he was what is called a country boy. That meant, for one
thing, that he was more loyal, more sincere, more tender, than the boys we knew. I can see
Joey now coming to meet me:
he was always running with arms wide open and ready to embrace me,
always breathless with adventures that he was planning for my participation, always loaded
with gifts which he had saved for my coming. Joey received me like the monarchs of old
received their guests. Everything I looked at was mine. We had innumerable things to tell
each other and nothing was dull or boring. The difference between our respective worlds
was enormous. Though I was of the city too, still, when I visited my cousin Gene, I became
aware of an even greater city, a city of New York proper in which my sophistication was
negligible. Stanley knew no excursions from his own neighbourhood, but Stanley had come
from a strange land over the sea, Poland, and there was always between us the mark of the
voyage. The fact that he spoke another tongue also increased our admiration for him. Each
one was surrounded by a distinguishing aura, by a well-defined identity which was
preserved inviolate. With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away and
we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own selves. And it is
this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps unimportant individuality, which saddens me
and makes the rye bread stand out glowingly. The wonderful sour rye went into the making
of our individual selves: it was like the communion loaf in which all participate but from
which each one receives only according to his peculiar state of grace. Now we are eating
of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill
our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual. There
was another thing about the sour rye and that was that
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we often ate a raw onion with it. I remember standing with Stanley in
the late afternoons, a sandwich in hand, in front of the veterinary's which was just
opposite my home. It always seemed to be late afternoon when Dr. McKinney elected to
castrate a stallion, an operation which was done in public and which always gathered a
small crowd. I remember the smell of the hot iron and the quiver of the horse's legs. Dr.
McKinney's goatee, the taste of the raw onion and the smell of the sewer gas just behind
us where they were laying in a new gas main. It was an olfactory performance through and
through and, as Abelard so well describes it, practically painless. Not knowing the reason
for the operation we used to hold long discussions afterwards which usually ended in a
brawl. Nobody liked Dr. McKinney either: there was a smell of iodoform about him and of
stale horse piss. Sometimes the gutter in front of his own office was filled with blood
and in the winter time the blood froze into the ice and gave a strange look to his
sidewalk. Now and then the big two-wheeled cart came, an open cart which smelled like the
devil, and they whisked a dead horse into it. Rather it was hoisted in, the carcass, by a
long chain which made a creaking noise like the dropping of an anchor. The smell of a
bloated dead horse is a foul smell and our street was full of foul smells. On the comer
was Paul Sauer's place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in the street:
they stank frightfully too. And then the acrid odour coming from the tin factory behind
the house - like the smell of modem progress. The smell of a dead horse, which is almost
unbearable, is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals. And the
sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood
and his asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a better sight than
that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory
with a hand-truck loaded with bales of fresh-made tin. Fortunately for us there was a
bakery opposite the tin factory and from the back door of the bakery, which was only a
grill, we could watch the bakers at work and get the sweet, irresistible odour of bread
and cake. And if, as I say, the gas mains were being laid there was another
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strange medley of smells - the smell of earth just turned up, of rotted
iron pipes, of sewer gas, and of the onion sandwiches which the Italian labourers ate
whilst reclining against the mounds of upturned earth. There were other smells too, of
course, but less striking: such, for instance, as the smell of Silverstein's tailor shop
where there was always a great deal of pressing going on. This was a hot, fetid stench
which can be best apprehended by imagining that Silverstein, who was a lean, smelly Jew
himself, was cleaning out the farts which his customers had left behind in their pants.
Next door was the candy and stationery shop owned by two daffy old maids who were
religious: here there was the almost sickeningly sweet smell of taffy, of Spanish peanuts,
of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The stationery store was like a
beautiful cave, always cool, always full of intriguing objects: where the soda fountain
was, which gave off another distinct odour, ran a thick marble slab which turned sour in
the summer time and yet mingled pleasantly, the sourness, with the slightly ticklish, dry
smell of the carbonated water when it was fizzed into the glass of ice cream.
With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to
be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell - the
odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the fingers after playing with
a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before, this smell is even more enjoyable,
perhaps because it already carried with it the perfume of the past tense, than the odour
of the cunt itself. But this odour, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odour
compared with the odours attaching to childhood. It is an odour which evaporates, almost
as quickly in the mind's imagination, as in reality. One can remember many things about
the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt - with anything
like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman's wet hair, is much more
powerful and lasting - why, I don't know. I can remember even now, after almost forty
years, the smell of my Aunt Tillie's hair after she had taken a shampoo. This shampoo was
performed in the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a
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late Saturday afternoon, in preparation for a ball which meant again
another singular thing - that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful
yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far too gracious,
manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tulle. But anyway, there she sat on
a little stool by the kitchen table drying her hair with a towel. Beside her was a little
lamp with a smoked chimney and beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which
filled me with an inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on
the table: I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the blackheads
out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature with two enormous buck teeth
which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips drew back in a smile. She smelled sweaty,
too, even after a bath. But the smell of her hair - that smell I can never forget, because
somehow the smell is associated with my hatred and contempt for her. This smell, when the
hair was just drying, was like the smell that comes up from the bottom of a marsh. There
were two smells - one of the wet hair and another of the same hair when she threw it into
the stove and it burst into flame. There were always curled knots of hair which came from
her comb, and they were mixed with dandruff and the sweat of her scalp which was greasy
and dirty. I used to stand by her side and watch her, wondering what the ball would be
like and wondering how she would behave at the ball. When she was all primped up she would
ask me if she didn't look beautiful and if I didn't love her, and of course I would tell
her yes. But in the water closet later, which was in the hall just next to the kitchen, I
would sit in the flickering light of the burning taper which was placed on the window
ledge, and I would say to myself that she looked crazy. After she was gone I would pick up
the curling irons and smell them and squeeze them. They were revolting and fascinating -
like spiders. Everything about this kitchen was fascinating to me. Familiar as I was with
it I never conquered it. It was at once so public and so intimate. Here I was given my
bath, in the big tin tub, on Saturdays. Here the three sisters washed themselves and
primped themselves. Here my grandfather stood at the sink and washed him-
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self to the waist and later handed me his shoes to be shined. Here I
stood at the window in the winter time and watched the snow fall, watched it dully,
vacantly, as if I were in the womb and listening to the water running while my mother sat
on the toilet. It was in the kitchen where the secret confabulations were held,
frightening, odious sessions from which they always reappeared with long, grave faces or
eyes red with weeping. Why they ran to the kitchen I don't know. But it was often while
they stood thus in secret conference, haggling about a will or deciding how to dispense
with some poor relative, that the door was suddenly opened and a visitor would arrive,
whereupon the atmosphere immediately changed. Changed violently, I mean, as though they
were relieved that some outside force had intervened to spare them the horrors of a
protracted secret session. I remember now that, seeing that door open and the face of an
unexpected visitor peering in, my heart would leap with joy. Soon I would be given a big
glass pitcher and asked to run to the comer saloon where I would hand the pitcher in,
through the little window at the family entrance, and wait until it was returned brimming
with foamy suds. This little run to the comer for a pitcher of beer was an expedition of
absolutely incalculable proportions. First of all there was the barber shop just below us,
where Stanley's father practised his profession. Time and again, just as I was dashing out
for something, I would see the father giving Stanley a drubbing with the razor strop, a
sight that made my blood boil. Stanley was my best friend and his father was nothing but a
drunken Polak. One evening, however, as I was dashing out with the pitcher, I had the
intense pleasure of seeing another Polak go for Stanley's old man with a razor. I saw his
old man coming through the door backwards, the blood running down his neck, his face white
as a sheet He fell on the sidewalk in front of the shop, twitching and moaning, and I
remember looking at him for a minute or two and walking on feeling absolutely contented
and happy about it. Stanley had sneaked out during the scrimmage and was accompanying me
to the saloon door. He was glad too, though he was a bit frightened. When we got back the
ambulance was there in front of the door and they
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were lifting him on the stretcher, his face and neck covered with a
sheet. Sometimes it happened that Father Carroll's pet choir boy strolled by the house
just as I was hitting the air. This was an event of primary importance. The boy was older
than any of us and he was a sissy, a fairy in the making. His very walk used to enrage us.
As soon as he was spotted the news went out in every direction and before he had reached
the corner he was surrounded by a gang of boys all much smaller than himself who taunted
him and mimicked him until he burst into tears. Then we would pounce on him, like a pack
of wolves, pull him to the ground and tear the clothes off his back. It was a disgraceful
performance but it made us feel good. Nobody knew yet what a fairy was, but whatever it
was we were against it. In the same way we were against the Chinamen. There was one
Chinaman, from the laundry up the street, who used to pass frequently and, like the sissy
from Father Carroll's church, he too had to run the gauntlet. He looked exactly like the
picture of a coolie which one sees in the school books. He wore a sort of black alpaca
coat with braided button holes, slippers without heels, and a pig tail. Usually he walked
with his hands in his sleeves. It was his walk which I remember best, a sort of sly,
mincing, feminine walk which was utterly foreign and menacing to us. We were in mortal
dread of him and we hated him because he was absolutely indifferent to our gibes. We
thought he was too ignorant to notice our insults. Then one day when we entered the
laundry he gave us a little surprise. First he handed us the package of laundry: then he
reached down below the counter and gathered a handful of lichee nuts from the big bag. He
was smiling as he came from behind the counter to open the door. He was still smiling as
he caught hold of Alfie Betcha and pulled his ears: he caught hold of each of us in turn
and pulled our ears, still smiling. Then he made a ferocious grimace and, swift as a cat,
he ran behind the counter and picked up a long, ugly-looking knife which he brandished at
us. We fell over ourselves getting out of the place. When we got to the comer and looked
around we saw him standing in the doorway with an iron in his hand looking very calm and
peaceful. After this incident nobody
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would go to the laundry any more: we had to pay little Louis Pirossa a
nickel each week to collect the laundry for us. Louis's father owned the fruit stand on
the comer. He used to hand us the rotten bananas as a token of his affection. Stanley was
especially fond of the rotten bananas as his aunt used to fry them for him. The fried
bananas were considered a delicacy in Stanley's home. Once, on his birthday, there was a
party given for Stanley and the whole neighbourhood was invited. Everything went
beautifully until it came to the fried bananas. Somehow nobody wanted to touch the
bananas, as this was a dish known only to Polaks like Stanley's parents. It was considered
disgusting to eat fried bananas. In the midst of the embarrassment some bright youngster
suggested that crazy Willie Maine should be given the fried bananas. Willie Maine was
older than any of us but unable to talk. He said nothing but Bjark I Bjork! He said
this to everything. So when the bananas were passed to him he said Bjork! and he
reached for them with two hands. But his brother George was there and George felt insulted
that they should have palmed off the rotten bananas on his crazy brother. So George
started a fight and Willie, seeing his brother attacked, began to fight also, screaming Bjork!
Bjork I Not only did he strike out at the other boys but at the girls too, which
created a pandemonium. Finally Stanley's old man, hearing the noise, came up from the
barber shop with a strop in his hand. He took crazy Willie Maine by the scruff of the neck
and began to lambast him. Meanwhile his brother George had sneaked off to call Mr. Maine
senior. The latter, who was also a bit of a drunkard, arrived in his shirt sleeves and
seeing poor Willie being beaten by the drunken barber, he went for him with two stout
fists and beat him unmercifully. Willie, who had gotten free meanwhile, was on his hands
and knees, gobbling up the fried bananas which had fallen on the floor. He was stuffing
them away like a nannygoat, fast as he could find them. When the old man saw him there
chewing away like a goat he became furious and picking up the strop he went after Willie
with a vengeance. Now Willie began to howl - Bjork! Bjark I - and suddenly
everybody began to laugh. That took the steam out of
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Mr. Maine and he relented. Finally he sat down and Stanley's aunt
brought him a glass of wine. Hearing the racket some of the other neighbours came in and
there was more wine and then beer and then schnapps and soon everybody was happy and
singing and whistling and even the kids got drunk and then crazy Willie got drunk and
again he got down on the floor like a nannygoat and he yelled Bjork! Bjork! and
Alfie Betcha, who was very drunk though only eight years old, bit crazy Willie Maine in
the backside and then Willie bit him and then we all started biting each other and the
parents stood by laughing and screaming with glee and it was very very merry and there
were more fried bananas and everybody ate them this time and then there were speeches and
more bumpers downed and crazy Willie Maine tried to sing for us but he could only sing Bjork!
Bjark! It was a stupendous success, the birthday party, and for a week or more no one
talked of anything but the party and what good Polaks Stanley's people were. The fried
bananas, too, were a success and for a time it was hard to get any rotten bananas from
Louis Pirossa's old man because they were so much in demand. And then an event occurred
which cast a pall over the entire neighbourhood - the defeat of Joe Gerhardt at the hands
of Joey Silverstein. The latter was the tailor's son: he was a lad of fifteen or sixteen,
rather quiet and studious looking, who was shunned by the other older boys because he was
a Jew. One day as he was delivering a pair of pants on Fillmore Place he was accosted by
Joe Gerhardt who was about the same age and who considered himself a rather superior
being. There was an exchange of words and then Joe Gerhardt pulled the pants away from the
Silverstein boy and threw them in the gutter. Nobody had ever imagined that young
Silverstein would reply to such an insult by recourse to his fists and so when he struck
out at Joe Gerhardt and cracked him square in the jaw everybody was taken aback, most of
all Joe Gerhardt himself. There was a fight which lasted about twenty minutes and at the
end Joe Gerhardt lay on the sidewalk unable to get up. Whereupon the Silverstein boy
gathered up the pair of pants and walked quietly and proudly back to his father's shop.
Nobody said a
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word to him. The affair was regarded as a calamity. Who had ever heard
of a Jew beating up a Gentile? It was something inconceivable, and yet it had happened,
right before everyone's eyes. Night after night, sitting on the curb as we used to, the
situation was discussed from every angle, but without any solution until... well until Joe
Gerhardt's younger brother, Johnny, became so wrought up about it that he decided to
settle the matter himself. Johnny, though younger and smaller than his brother, was as
tough and invincible as a young puma. He was typical of the shanty Irish who made up the
neighbourhood. His idea of getting even with young Silverstein was to lie in wait for him
one evening as the latter was stepping out of the store and trip him up. When he tripped
him up that evening he had provided himself in advance with two little rocks which he
concealed in his fists and when poor Silverstein went down he pounced on him and then with
the two handsome little rocks he pounded poor Silverstein's temples. To his amazement
Silverstein offered no resistance: even when he got up and gave him a chance to get on his
feet Silverstein never so much as budged. Then Johnny got frightened and ran away. He must
have been thoroughly frightened because he never came back again: the next that was heard
of him was that he had been picked, up out West somewhere and sent to a reformatory. His
mother, who was a slatternly, jolly Irish bitch, said that it served him right and she
hoped to God she'd never lay eyes on him again. When the boy Silverstein recovered he was
not the same any more: people said the beating had affected his brain, that he was a
little daffy. Joe Gerhardt, on the other hand, rose to prominence again. It seems that he
had gone to see the Silverstein boy while he lay in bed and had made a deep apology to
him. This again was something that had never been heard of before. It was something so
strange, so unusual, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon almost as a knight errant. Nobody
had approved of the way Johnny behaved, and yet nobody would have thought of going to
young Silverstein and apologizing to him. That was an act of such delicacy, such elegance,
that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon as a real gentleman - the first and only gentleman in
the neighbourhood. It
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was a word that had never been used among us and now it was on
everybody's lips and it was considered a distinction to be a gentleman. This sudden
transformation of the defeated Joe Gerhardt into a gentleman I remember made a deep
impression upon me. A few years later, when I moved into another neighbourhood and
encountered Claude de Lorraine, a French boy, I was prepared to understand and accept
"a gentleman". This Claude was a boy such as I had never laid eyes on before. In
the old neighbourhood he would have been regarded as a sissy: for one thing he spoke too
well, too correctly, too politely, and for another thing he was too considerate, too
gentle, too gallant. And then, while playing with him, to hear him suddenly break into
French as his mother or father came along, provided us with something like a shock. German
we had heard and German was a permissible transgression, but French! Why to talk French,
or even to understand it, was to be thoroughly alien, thoroughly aristocratic, rotten,
distingue. And yet Claude was one of us, as good as us in every way, even a little bit
better, we had to admit secretly. But there was a blemish - his French! It antagonized us.
He had no right to be living in our neighbourhood, no right to be as capable and manly as
he was. Often, when his mother called him in and we had said good-bye to him, we got
together in the lot and we discussed the Lorraine family backwards and forwards. We
wondered what they ate, for example, because being French they must have different customs
than ours. No one had ever set foot in Claude de Lorraine's home either - that was another
suspicious and repugnant fact. Why? What were they concealing? Yet when they passed us in
the street they were always very cordial, always smiled, always spoke in English and a
most excellent English it was. They used to make us feel rather ashamed of ourselves -
they were superior, that's what it was. And there was still another baffling thing - with
the other boys a direct question brought a direct answer, but with Claude de Lorraine
there was never any direct answer. He always smiled very charmingly before replying and he
was very cool, collected, employing an irony and a mockery which was beyond us. He was a
thorn in our side, Claude de Lorraine, and when finally
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he moved out of the neighbourhood we all breathed a sigh of relief. As
for myself, it was only maybe ten or fifteen years later that I thought about this boy and
his strange elegant behaviour. And it was then that I felt I had made a bad blunder. For
suddenly one day it occurred to me that Claude de Lorraine had come up to me on a certain
occasion obviously to win my friendship and I had treated him rather cavalierly. At the
time I thought of this incident it suddenly dawned on me that Claude de Lorraine must have
seen something different in me and that he had meant to honour me by extending the hand of
friendship. But back in those days I bad a code of honour, such as it was, and that was to
run with the herd. Had I become a bosom friend of Claude de Lorraine I would have been
betraying the other boys. No matter what advantages lay in the wake of such a friendship
they were not for me, I was one of the gang and it was my duty to remain aloof from such
as Claude de Lorraine. I remembered this incident once again, I must say, after a still
greater interval - after I had been in France a few months and the word "raisomiable"
had come to acquire a wholly new significance for me. Suddenly one day, overhearing, I
thought of Claude de Lorraine's overtures on the street in front of his house. I recalled
vividly that he had used the word reasonable. He had probably asked me to be reasonable,
a word which then would never have crossed my lips as there was no need for it in my
vocabulary. It was a word, like gentleman, which was rarely brought out and then only with
great discretion and circumspection. It was a word which might cause others to laugh at
you. There were lots of words like that - really, for example. No one I knew had
ever used the word really - until Jack Lawson came along. He used it because his
parents were English and, though we made fun of him, we forgave him for it. Really
was a word which reminded me immediately of little Carl Ragner from the old neighbourhood.
Carl Ragner was the only son of a politician who lived on the rather distinguished little
street called Fillmore Place. He lived near the end of the street in a little red brick
house which was always beautifully kept. I remember the house because passing it on my way
to school I used to remark how
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beautifully the brass knobs on the door were polished. In fact, nobody
else had brass knobs on their doors. Anyway, little Carl Ragner was one of those boys who
was not allowed to associate with other boys. He was rarely seen, as a matter of fact.
Usually it was a Sunday that we caught a glimpse of him walking with his father. Had his
father not been a powerful figure in the neighbourhood Carl would have been stoned to
death. He was really impossible, in his Sunday garb. Not only did he wear long pants and
patent leather shoes, but he sported a derby and a cane. At six years of age a boy who
would allow himself to be dressed up in this fashion must be a ninny - that was the
consensus of opinion. Some said he was sickly, as though that were an excuse for his
eccentric dress. The strange thing is that I never once heard him speak. He was so
elegant, so refined, that perhaps he had imagined it was bad manners to speak in public.
At any rate, I used to lie in wait for him Sunday mornings just to see him pass with his
old man. I watched him with the same avid curiosity that I would watch the firemen
cleaning the engines in the fire house. Sometimes on the way home he would be carrying a
little box of ice cream, the smallest size they had, probably just enough for him, for his
dessert. Dessert was another word which had somehow become familiar to us and which we
used derogatorily when referring to the likes of little Carl Ragner and his family. We
could spend hours wondering what these people ate for dessert, our pleasure
consisting principally in bandying about this new-found word, dessert, which had
probably been smuggled out of the Ragner household. It must also have been about this time
that Santos Dumont came into fame. For us there was something grotesque about the name
Santos Dumont. About his exploits we were not much concerned - just the name. For most of
us it smelled of sugar, of Cuban plantations, of the strange Cuban flag which had a star
in the comer and which was always highly regarded by those who saved the little cards
which were given away with Sweet Caporal cigarettes and on which there were represented
either the flags of the different nations or the leading soubrettes of the stage or the
famous pugilists. Santos Dumont, then, was something delightfully foreign, in
contradistinction to the usual
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foreign person or object, such as the Chinese laundry, or Claude de
Lorraine's haughty French family. Santos Dumont was a magical word which suggested a
beautiful flowing moustache, a sombrero, spurs, something airy, delicate, humorous,
quixotic. Sometimes it brought up the aroma of coffee beans and of straw mats, or, because
it was so thoroughly outlandish and quixotic, it would entail a digression concerning the
life of the Hottentots. For there were among us older boys who were beginning to read and
who would entertain us by the hour with fantastic tales which they had gleaned from books
such as Ayesha or Ouida's Under Two Flags. The real flavour of knowledge is
most definitely associated in my mind with the vacant lot at the comer of the new
neighbourhood where I was transplanted at about the age often. Here, when the fall days
came on and we stood about the bonfire roasting chippies and raw potatoes in the little
cans which we carried, there ensued a new type of discussion which differed from the old
discussions I had known in that the origins were always bookish. Some one had just read a
book of adventure, or a book of science, and forthwith the whole street became animated by
the introduction of a hitherto unknown subject. It might be that one of these-boys had
just discovered that there was such a thing as the Japanese current and he would try to
explain to us how the Japanese current came into existence and what the purpose of it was.
This was the only way we learned things - against the fence, as it were, while roasting
chippies and raw potatoes. These bits of knowledge sunk deep - so deep, in fact, that
later, confronted with a more accurate knowledge it was often difficult to dislodge the
older knowledge. In this way it was explained to us one day by an older boy that the
Egyptians had known about the circulation of the blood, something which seemed so natural
to us that it was hard later to swallow the story of the discovery of the circulation of
the blood by an Englishman named Harvey. Nor does it seem strange to me now that in those
days most of our conversation was about remote places, such as China, Peru, Egypt, Africa,
Iceland, Greenland. We talked about ghosts, about God, about the transmigration of souls,
about Hell, about astronomy, about strange birds and fish, about the
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formation of precious stone, about rubber plantations, about methods of
torture, about the Aztecs and the Incas, about marine life, about volcanoes and
earthquakes, about burial rites and wedding ceremonies in various parts of the earth,
about languages, about the origin of the American Indian, about the buffaloes dying out,
about strange diseases, about cannibalism, about wizardry, about trips to the moon and
what it was like there, about murderers and highwaymen, about the miracles in the Bible,
about the manufacture of pottery, about a thousand and one subjects which were never
mentioned at home or in school and which were vital to us because we were starved and the
world was full of wonder and mystery and it was only when we stood shivering in the vacant
lot that we got to talking seriously and felt a need for communication which was at once
pleasurable and terrifying.
The wonder and the mystery of life - which is throttled in us as we
become responsible members of society! Until we were pushed out to work the world was very
small and we were living on the fringe of it, on the frontier, as it were, of the unknown.
A small Greek world which was nevertheless deep enough to provide all manner of variation,
all manner of adventure and speculation. Not so very small either, since it held in
reserve the most boundless potentialities. I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my
world: on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass
beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal
line of development, pass into a super-infantile realm of being which will be absolutely
crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an adult
and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my daily bread. I have
adapted myself to a world which never was mine. I want to break through this enlarged
world and stand again on the frontier of an unknown world which will throw this pale,
unilateral world into shadow. I want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to
the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled
nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the night-rider who, under the
spread of
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his black wings, eliminates both the beauty and the horror of the past:
I want to flee towards a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no
room for remorse, regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a
curse to an earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even
the strongest wings will enable me to traverse. Even if I must become a wild and natural
park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity
of responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison
with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was
strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which
the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than
the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched
arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other
world is meaningless to me, and alien and hostile. In retraversing the first bright world
which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter
world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not know, nor am I even
sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me.
The first glimpse, the first realization, of the bright new world came
through my meeting Roy Hamilton. I was in my twenty-first year, probably the worst year of
my whole life. I was in such a state of despair that I had decided to leave home but
thought and spoke only of the California where I had planned to go to start a new life. So
violently did I dream of this new promised land that later, when I had returned from
California, I scarcely remembered the California I had seen but thought and spoke only of
the California, which I had known in my dreams. It was just prior to my leave-taking that
I met Hamilton. He was a dubious half-brother to my old friend MacGregor: they had only
recently made each other's acquaintance, as Roy, who had lived most of his life in
California, had been under the impression all along that his real father was Mr. Hamilton
and not Mr. MacGregor. As a matter
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of fact it was in order to disentangle the mystery surrounding his
parentage that he had come East. Living with the MacGregors had apparently brought him no
nearer to a solution of the mystery. Indeed he seemed to be more perplexed than ever after
getting acquainted with the man whom he had concluded must be his legitimate father. He
was perplexed, as he later admitted to me, because in neither man could he find any
resemblance to the man he considered himself to be. It was probably this harassing problem
of deciding whom to take for a father which had stimulated the development of his own
character. I say this, because immediately upon being introduced to him, I felt that I was
in the presence of a being such as I had never known before. I had prepared, through
MacGregor's description of him, to meet a rather "strange" individual,
"strange" in MacGregor's mouth meaning slightly cracked. He was indeed strange,
but so sharply sane that I at once felt exalted. For the first time I was talking to a man
who got behind the meaning of words and went to the very essence of things. I felt that I
was talking to a philosopher, not a philosopher such as I had encountered through books,
but a man who philosophized constantly - and who lived this philosophy which he
expounded. That is to say, he had no theory at all, except to penetrate to the very
essence of things and, in the light of each fresh revelation to so live his life that
there would be a minimum of discord between the truths which were revealed to him and the
exemplification of these truths in action. Naturally his behaviour was strange to those
about him. It had not, however, been strange to those who knew him out on the Coast
where, as he said, he was in his own element. There apparently he was regarded as a
superior being and was listened to with the utmost respect, even with awe.
I came upon him in the midst of a struggle which I only appreciated
many years later. At the time I couldn't see the importance which he attached to finding
his real father: in fact, I used to joke about it because the role of the father meant
little to me, or the role of the mother, for that matter. In Roy Hamilton I saw the ironic
struggle of a man who had already emancipated himself and yet was seeking to establish a
solid
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biological link for which he had absolutely no need. This conflict over
the real father had, paradoxically, made him a superfather. He was a teacher and an
exemplar: he had only to open his mouth for me to realize that I was listening to a wisdom
which was utterly different from anything which I had heretofore associated with that
word. It would be easy to dismiss him as a mystic, for a mystic he undoubtedly was, but he
was the first mystic I had ever encountered who also knew how to keep his feet on the
ground. He was a mystic who knew how to invent practical things, among them a drill such
as was badly needed for the oil industry and from which he later made a fortune. Because
of his strange metaphysical talk, however, nobody at the time gave much heed to his very
practical invention. It was regarded as another one of his cracked ideas.
He was continually talking about himself and his relation to the world
about, a quality which created the unfortunate impression that he was simply a blatant
egotist. It was even said, which was true enough as far as it went, that he seemed more
concerned about the truth of Mr. MacGregor's fatherhood than about Mr. MacGregor, the
father. The implication was that he had no real love for his new-found father but was
simply deriving a strong personal gratification from the truth of the discovery, that he
was exploiting this discovery in his usual self-aggrandizing way. It was deeply true, of
course, because Mr. MacGregor in the flesh was infinitely less than Mr. MacGregor as
symbol of the lost father. But the MacGregors knew nothing about symbols and would never
have understood even had it been explained to them. They were making a contradictory
effort to at once embrace the long lost son and at the same time reduce him to an
understandable level on which they could seize him not as the "long lost" but
simply as the son. Whereas it was obvious to any one with the least intelligence that his
son was not a son at all but a sort of spiritual father, a sort of Christ, I might say,
who was making a most valiant effort to accept as blood and flesh what he had already all
too clearly freed himself from.
I was surprised and flattered, therefore, that this strange individual
whom I looked upon with the warmest admiration
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should elect to make me his confident. By comparison I was very
bookish, intellectual, and worldly in a wrong way. But almost immediately I discarded this
side of my nature and allowed myself to bask in the warm, immediate light which is
profound and natural intuition of things created. To come into his presence gave me the
sensation of being undressed, or rather peeled, for it was much more than mere nakedness
which he demanded of the person he was talking to. In talking to me he addressed himself
to a me whose existence I had only dimly suspected, the me, for example, which emerged
when, suddenly, reading a book I realized that I had been dreaming. Few books had this
faculty of putting me into a trance, this trance of utter lucidity in which, unknown to
oneself, one makes the deepest resolutions. Roy Hamilton's conversation partook of this
quality. It made me more than ever alert, preternaturally alert, without at the same time
crumbling the fabric of dream. He was appealing, in other words, to the germ of the self,
to the being who would eventually outgrow the naked personality, the synthetic
individuality, and leave me truly alone and solitary in order to work out my own proper
destiny.
Our talk was like a secret language in the midst of which the others
went to sleep or faded away like ghosts. For my friend MacGregor it was baffling and
irritating: he knew me more intimately than any of the other fellows but he had never
found anything in me to correspond to the character which I now presented him with. He
spoke of Roy Hamilton as a bad influence, which again was deeply true since this
unexpected meeting with his half-brother served more than anything else to alienate us.
Hamilton opened my eyes and gave me new values, and though later I was to lose the vision
which he had bequeathed me, nevertheless I could never again see the world, or my friends,
as I had seen them prior to his coming. Hamilton altered me profoundly, as only a rare
book, a rare personality, a rare experience, can alter one. For the first time in my life
I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and yet not to feel enslaved or
attached because of the experience. Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of
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his actual presence: he had given himself completely and I possessed
him without being possessed. It was the first dean, whole experience of friendship, and it
was never duplicated by any other friend. Hamilton was friendship itself, rather than a
friend. He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory hence no
longer necessary to me. He himself understood this thoroughly. Perhaps it was the fact of
having no father that pushed him along the road towards the discovery of the self, which
is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of
the useless-ness of ties. Certainly, as he stood then, in the full plenitude of
self-realization, no one was necessary to him, least of all the father of flesh and blood
whom he vainly sought in Mr. MacGregor. It must have been in the nature of a last test for
him, his coming East and seeking out his real father, for when he said good-bye, when he
renounced Air. MacGregor and Mr. Hamilton also, he was like a man who had purified himself
of all dross. Never have I seen a man look so single, so utterly alone and alive and
confident of the future as Roy Hamilton looked when he said good-bye. And never have I
seen such confusion and misunderstanding as he left behind with the MacGregor family. It
was as though he had died in their midst, had been resurrected, and was taking leave of
them as an utterly new, unknown individual. I can see them now standing in the areaway,
their hands sort of foolishly, helplessly empty, weeping they knew not why, unless it was
because they were bereft of something they had never possessed. I like to think of it in
just this way. They were bewildered and bereft, and vaguely, so very vaguely aware that
somehow a great opportunity had been offered them which they had not the strength or the
imagination to seize. It was this which the foolish, empty fluttering of the hands
indicated to me: it was a gesture more painful to witness than anything I can imagine. It
gave me the feeling of the horrible inadequacy of the world when brought face to face with
truth. It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the blood tie and of the love which is
not spiritually imbued. I look back rapidly and I see myself again in California. I am
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alone and I am working like a slave in the orange grove at Chula Vista.
Am I coming into my own? I think not. I am a very wretched, forlorn, miserable person. I
seem to have lost everything. In fact I am hardly a person -1 am more nearly an animal.
All day long I am standing or walking behind the two jackasses which are hitched to my
sledge. I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am
a nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive and healthy that I am like the luscious deceptive
fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. "Pourri
avant d'etre muri!"
Is it really me that is rotting in this bright California
sunshine? Is there nothing left of me, of all that I was up to this moment? Let me think a
bit... There was Arizona. I remember now that it was already night when I first set foot
on Arizona soil. Just light enough to catch the last glimpse of a fading mesa. I am
walking through the main street of a little town whose name is lost. What am I doing here
on this street, in this town? Why, I am in love with Arizona, an Arizona of the mind which
I search for in vain with my two good eyes. In the train there was still with me the
Arizona which I had brought from New York - even after we had crossed the state line. Was
there not a bridge over a canyon which had startled me out of my reverie? A bridge such as
I had never seen before, a natural bridge created by a cataclysmic eruption thousands of
years ago? And over this bridge I had seen a man crossing, a man who looked like an
Indian, and he was riding a horse and there was a long saddle-bag hanging beside the
stirrup. A natural millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked like
the youngest, newest bridge imaginable. And over that bridge so strong, so durable, there
passed, praise be to God, just a man and a horse, nothing more. This then was Arizona, and
Arizona was not a figment of the imagination but the imagination itself dressed as
a horse and rider. And this was even more than the imagination itself because there was no
aura of ambiguity but only sharply and dead isolate the thing itself which was the dream
and the dreamer himself seated on horseback. And as the train stops I put my foot down and
my
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foot has put a deep hole in the dream: I am in the Arizona town which
is listed in the timetable and it is only the geographical Arizona which anybody can visit
who has the money. I am walking along the main street with a valise and I see hamburger
sandwiches and real estate offices. I feel so terribly deceived and I begin to weep. It is
dark now and I stand at the end of a street, where the desert begins, and I weep like a
fool. Which me is this weeping? Why it is the new little me which had begun to germinate
back in Brooklyn and which is now in the midst of a vast desert and doomed to perish. Now,
Roy Hamilton, I need you! I need you for one moment, just one little moment, while I
am falling apart. I need you because I was not quite ready to do what I have done. And do
I not remember your telling me that it was unnecessary to make the trip, but to do it if I
must? Why didn't you persuade me not to go? Ah, to persuade was never his way. And to ask
advice was never my way. So here I am, bankrupt in the desert, and the bridge which was
real is behind me and what is unreal is before me and Christ only knows I am so puzzled
and bewildered that if I could sink into the earth and disappear I would do so.
I look back rapidly and I see another man who was left to perish
quietly in the bosom of his family - my father. I understand better what happened
to him if I go back very, very far and think of such streets as Maujer, Conselyea,
Humboldt... Humboldt particularly. These streets belonged to a neighbourhood which was not
far removed from our neighbourhood but which was different, more glamorous, more
mysterious. I had been on Humboldt Street only once as a child and I no longer remember
the reason for that excursion unless it was to visit some sick relative languishing in a
German hospital. But the street itself made a most lasting impression upon me: why I have
not the faintest idea. It remains in my memory as the most mysterious and the most
promising street that ever I have seen. Perhaps when we were making ready to go my mother
had, as usual, promised something spectacular as a reward for accompanying her. I was
always being promised things which never materialized. Perhaps then, when I got to
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Humboldt Street and looked upon this new world with astonishment,
perhaps I forgot completely what had been promised me and the street itself became the
reward. I remember that it was very wide and that there were high stoops, such as I had
never seen before, on either side of the street. I remember too that in a dressmaker's
shop on the first floor of one of these strange houses there was a bust in the window with
a tape measure slung around the neck and I know that I was greatly moved by this sight.
There was snow on the ground but the sun was out strong and I recall vividly how about the
bottoms of the ash barrels which had been frozen into the ice there was then a little pool
of water left by the melting snow. The whole street seemed to be melting in the radiant
winter's sun. On the bannisters of the high stoops the mounds of snow which had formed
such beautiful white pads were now beginning to slide, to disintegrate, leaving dark
patches of the brown stone which was then much in vogue. The little glass signs of the
dentists and physicians, tucked away in the comers of the windows, gleamed brilliantly in
the noonday sun and gave me the feeling for the first time that these offices were perhaps
not the torture chambers which I knew them to be. I imagined, in my childish way, that
here in this neighbourhood, in this street particularly, people were more friendly, more
expansive, and of course infinitely more wealthy. I must have expanded greatly myself
though only a tot, because for the first time I was looking upon a street which seemed
devoid of terror. It was the sort of street, ample, luxurious, gleaming, melting which
later, when I began reading Dostoievski, I associated with the thaws of St. Petersburg.
Even the churches here were of a different style of architecture; there was something
semi-Oriental about them, something grandiose and warm at the same time, which both
frightened me and intrigued me. On this broad, spacious street I saw that the houses were
set well back from the sidewalk, reposing in quiet and dignity, and unmarred by the
intercalation of shops and factories and veterinary stables. I saw a street composed of
nothing but residences and I was filled with awe and admiration. All this I remember and
no doubt it influenced me greatly, yet none of
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this is sufficient to account for the strange power and attraction
which the very mention of Humboldt Street still evokes in me. Some years later I went back
in the night to look at this street again, and I was even more stirred than when I had
looked upon it for the first time. The aspect of the street of course had changed, but it
was night and the night is always less cruel than the day. Again I experienced the strange
delight of spadousness of that luxuriousness which was now somewhat faded but still
redolent, still assertive in a patchy way as once the brown stone bannisters had asserted
themselves through the melting snow. Most distinct of all, however, was the almost
voluptuous sensation of being on the verge of a discovery. Again I was strongly aware of
my mother's presence, of the big puffy sleeves of her fur coat, of the cruel swiftness
with which she had whisked me through the street years ago and of the stubborn tenacity
with which I had feasted my eyes on all that was new and strange. On the occasion of this
second visit I seemed to dimly recall another character out of my childhood, the old
housekeeper whom they called by the outlandish name of Mrs. Kicking. I could not recall
her being taken ill but I did seem to recall the fact that we were paying her a visit at
the hospital where she was dying and that this hospital must have been near Humboldt
Street which was not dying but which was radiant in the melting snow of a winter's noon.
What then had my mother promised me that I have never since been able to recall? Capable
as she was of promising anything, perhaps that day, in a fit of abstraction, she had
promised something so preposterous that even I with all my childish credulence could not
quite swallow it. And yet, if she had promised me the moon, though I knew it was out of
the question, I would have struggled to invest her promise with a crumb of faith. I wanted
desperately everything that was promised me, and if, upon reflection I realized that it
was dearly impossible, I nevertheless tried in my own way to grope for a means of making
these promises realizable. That people could make promises without ever having the least
intention of fulfilling them was something unimaginable to me. Even when I was most
cruelly deceived I still believed; I found that something
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extraordinary and quite beyond the other person's power had intervened
to make the promise null and void.
This question of belief, this old promise that was never fulfilled, is
what makes me think of my father who was deserted at the moment of his greatest need. Up
to the time of his illness neither my father nor my mother had ever shown any religious
inclinations. Though always upholding the church to others, they themselves never set foot
in a church from the time that they were married. Those who attended church too regularly
they looked upon as being a bit daffy. The very way they said -"so and so is
religious" - was enough to convey the scorn and contempt, or else the pity, which
they felt for such individuals. If now and then, because of us children, the pastor called
at the house unexpectedly, he was treated as one to whom they were obliged to defer out of
ordinary politeness but whom they had nothing in common with, whom they were a little
suspicious of, in fact as representative of a species midway between a fool and a
charlatan. To us, for example, they would say "a lovely man", but when their
cronies came round and the gossip began to fly, then one would hear an entirely different
brand of comment, accompanied usually by peals of scornful laughter and sly mimicry.
My father fell mortally ill as a result of swearing off too abruptly.
All his life he had been a jolly hail fellow well met: he had put on a rather becoming
paunch, his cheeks were well filled out and red as a beet, his manners were easy and
indolent, and he seemed destined to live on into a ripe old age, sound and healthy as a
nut. But beneath this smooth and jolly exterior things were not at all well. His affairs
were in bad shape, the debts were piling up, and already some of his older friends were
beginning to drop him. My mother's attitude was what worried him most. She saw things in a
black light and she took no trouble to conceal it. Now and then she became hysterical and
went at him hammer and tongs, swearing at him in the vilest language and smashing the
dishes and threatening to run away for good. The upshot of it was that he arose one
morning determined never to touch another drop. Nobody believed that he meant it
seriously: there had been others in the family who
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swore off, who went on the water wagon, as they used to say, but who
quickly tumbled off again. No one in the family, and they had all tried at different
times, had ever become a successful teetotaler. But my old rnan was different. Where or
how he got the strength to maintain his resolution. God only knows. It seems incredible to
me, because had I been in his boots myself I would have drunk myself to death. Not the old
man, however. This was the first time in his life he had ever shown any resolution about
anything. My mother was so astounded that, idiot that she was, she began to make fun of
him, to quip him about his strength of will which had heretofore been so lamentably weak.
Still he stuck to his guns. His drinking pals faded away rather quickly. In short, he soon
found himself almost completely isolated. That must have cut him to the quick, for before
very many weeks had passed, he became deathly ill and a consultation was held. He
recovered a bit, enough to get out of bed and walk about, but still a very sick man. He
was supposed to be suffering from ulcers of the stomach, though nobody was quite sure
exactly what ailed him. Everybody understood, however, that he had made a mistake in
swearing off so abruptly. It was too late, however, to return to a temperate mode of
living. His stomach was so weak that it wouldn't even hold a plate of soup. In a couple of
months he was almost a skeleton. And old. He looked like Lazarus raised from the grave.
One day my mother took me aside and with tears in her eyes begged me to
go visit the family doctor and learn the truth about my father's condition. Dr. Rausch had
been the family physician for years. He was a typical "Dutchman" of the old
school, rather weary and crochety now after years of practising and yet unable to tear
himself completely away from his patients. In his stupid Teutonic way he tried to scare
the less serious patients away, tried to argue them into health, as it were. When you
walked into his office he didn't even bother to look up at you, but kept on writing or
whatever it might be that he was doing while firing random questions at you in a
perfunctory and insulting manner. He behaved so rudely, so suspiciously, that ridiculous
as it may sound, it almost appeared
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as though he expected his patients to bring with them not only their
ailments, but the proof of their ailments. He made one feel that there was not only
something wrong physically but that there was also something wrong mentally. "You
only imagine it," was his favourite phrase which he flung out with a nasty, leering
gibe. Knowing him as I did, and detesting him heartily, I came prepared, that is, with the
laboratory analysis of my father's stool. I had also analysis of his urine in my overcoat
pocket, should he demand further proof.
When I was a boy Dr. Rausch had shown some affection for me, but ever
since the day I went to him with a dose of clap he had lost confidence in me and always
showed a sour puss when I stuck my head through the door. Like father like son was his
motto, and I was therefore not at all surprised when, instead of giving me the information
which I demanded, he began to lecture me and the old man at the same time for our way of
living. "You can't go against Nature," he said with a wry, solemn face, not
looking at me as he uttered the words but making some useless notation in his big ledger.
I walked quietly up to his desk, stood beside him a moment without making a sound, and
then, when he looked up with his usual aggrieved, irritated expression, I said - "I
didn't come here for moral instruction ... I want to know what's the matter with my
father." At this he jumped up and turning to me with his most severe look, he said,
like the stupid, brutal Dutchman that he was: "Your father hasn't a chance of
recovering; he'll be dead in less than six months." I said "Thank you, that's
all I wanted to know," and I made for the door. Then, as though he felt that he had
committed a blunder, he strode after me heavily and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he
tried to modify the statement by hemming and hawing and saying I don't mean that it is
absolutely certain he will die, etc., which I cut short by opening the door and yelling at
him, at the top of my lungs, so that his patients in the anteroom would hear it - "I
think you're a goddamned old fart and I hope you croak, good-night!"
When I got home I modified the doctor's report somewhat by saying that
my father's condition was very serious but that
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if he took good care of himself he would pull through all right. This
seemed to cheer the old man up considerably. Of his own accord he took to a diet of milk
and Zwieback which, whether it was the best thing or not, certainly did him no
harm. He remained a sort of semi-invalid for about a year, becoming more and more calm
inwardly as time went on and apparently determined to let nothing, disturb his peace of
mind, nothing, no matter if everything went to hell. As he grew stronger he took to making
a daily promenade to the cemetery which was nearby. There he would sit on a bench in the
sun and watch the old people potter around the graves. The proximity to the grave, instead
of rendering him morbid, seemed to cheer him up. He seemed, if anything, to have become
reconciled to the idea of eventual death, a fact which no doubt he had heretofore refused
to look in the face. Often he came home with flowers which he had picked in the cemetery,
his face beaming with a quiet serene joy, and seating himself in the armchair he would
recount the conversation which he had had that morning with one of the other
valetudinarians who frequented the cemetery. It was obvious after a time that he was
really enjoying his sequestration, or rather not just enjoying it, but profiting deeply
from the experience in a way that was beyond my mother's intelligence to fathom. He was
getting lazy, was the way she expressed it. Sometimes she put it even more extremely,
tapping her head with her forefinger as she spoke of him, but not saying anything overfly
because of my sister who was without question a little wrong in the head.
And then one day, through the courtesy of an old widow who used to
visit her son's grave every day and was, as my mother would say, "religious" he
made the acquaintance of a minister belonging to one of the neighbouring churches. This
was a momentous event in the old man's life. Suddenly he blossomed forth and that little
sponge of a soul which had almost atrophied through lack of nourishment took on such
astounding proportions that he was almost unrecognizable. The man who was responsible for
this extraordinary change in the old man was in no way unusual himself; he was a
Congregationalist minister attached to a modest little parish which adjoined our
neighbour-
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hood. His one virtue was that he kept his religion in the background.
The old man quickly fell into a sort of boyish idolatry; he talked of nothing but this
minister whom he considered his friend. As he had never looked at the Bible in his life,
nor any other book for that matter, it was rather startling, to say the least, to hear him
say a little prayer before eating. He performed this little ceremony in a strange way,
much the way one takes a tonic, for example. If he recommended me to read a certain
chapter of the Bible he would add very seriously - "it will do you good." It was
a new medicine which he had discovered, a sort of quack remedy which was guaranteed to
cure all ills and which one might even take if he had no ills, because in any case it
could certainly do no harm. He attended all the services, all the functions which were
held at the church, and between times, when out for a stroll, for example, he would stop
off at the minister's home and have a little chat with him. If the minister said that the
president was a good soul and should be re-elected the old man would repeat to every one
exactly what the minister had said and urge them to vote for the president's re-election.
Whatever the minister said was right and just and nobody could gainsay him. There's no
doubt that it was an education for the old man. If the minister had mentioned the pyramids
in the course of his sermon the old man immediately began to inform himself about the
pyramids. He would talk about the pyramids as though every one owed it to himself to
become acquainted with the subject. The minister had said that the pyramids were one of
the crowning glories of man, ergo not to know about the pyramids was to be disgracefully
ignorant, almost sinful. Fortunately the minister didn't dwell much on the subject of sin:
he was of the modem type of preacher who prevailed on his flock more by arousing their
curiosity than by appealing to their conscience. His sermons were more like a night school
extension course and for such as the old man, therefore, highly entertaining and
stimulating. Every now and then the male members of the congregation were invited to a
little blow-out which was intended to demonstrate that the good pastor was just an
ordinary man like themselves and could, on occasion,
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enjoy a hearty meal and even a glass of beer. Moreover it was observed
that he even sang - not religious hymns, but jolly little songs of the popular variety.
Putting two and two together one might even infer from such jolly behaviour that now and
then he enjoyed getting a little piece of tail - always in moderation, to be sure. That
was the word that was balsam to the old man's lacerated soul - "moderation". It
was like discovering a new sign in the zodiac. And though he was still too ill to attempt
a return to even a moderate way of living, nevertheless it did his soul good. And so, when
Uncle Ned, who was continually going on the water-waggon and continually falling off it
again, came round to the house one evening the old man delivered him a little lecture on
the virtue of moderation. Uncle Ned was, at that moment, on the water-waggon and
so, when the old man, moved by his own words, suddenly went to the sideboard to fetch a
decanter of wine every one was shocked. No one had ever dared invite Uncle Ned to drink
when he had sworn off; to venture such a thing constituted a serious breach of loyalty.
But the old man did it with such conviction that no one could take offence, and the result
was that Uncle Ned took a small glass of wine and went home that evening without stopping
off at a saloon to quench his thirst. It was an extraordinary happening and there was much
talk about it for days after. In fact. Uncle Ned began to act a bit queer from that day
on. It seems that he went the next day to the wine store and bought a bottle of Sherry
which he emptied into the decanter. He placed the decanter on the sideboard, just as he
had seen the old man do, and, instead of polishing it off in one swoop, he contented
himself with a glassful at a time - "just a thimbleful", as he put it. His
behaviour was so remarkable that my aunt, who was unable to quite believe her eyes, came
one day to the house and held a long conversation with the old man. She asked him, among
other things, to invite the minister to the house some evening so that Uncle Ned might
have the opportunity of falling under his beneficient influence. The long and short of it
was ±at Ned was soon taken into the fold and, like the old man, seemed to be thriving
under the experience. Things went fine until the day of the picnic.
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That day, unfortunately, was an unusually warm day and, what with the
games, the excitement, the hilarity. Uncle Ned developed an extraordinary thirst. It was
not until he was three sheets to the wind that some one observed the regularity and the
frequency with which he was running to the beer keg. It was then too late. Once in that
condition he was unmanageable. Even the minister could do nothing with him. Ned broke away
from the picnic quietly and went on a little rampage which lasted for three days and
nights. Perhaps it would have lasted longer had he not gotten into a fist fight down at
the waterfront where he was found lying unconscious by the night watchman. He was taken to
the hospital with a concussion of the brain from which he never recovered. Returning from
the funeral the old man said with a dry eye - "Ned didn't know what it was to be
temperate. It was his own fault. Anyway, he's better off now ..."
And as though to prove to the minister that he was not made of the same
stuff as Uncle Ned he became even more assiduous in his churchly duties. He had gotten
himself promoted to the position of "elder", an office of which he was extremely
proud and by grace of which he was permitted during the Sunday services to aid in taking
up the collection. To think of my old man marching up the aisle of a Congregationalist
church with a collection box in his hand; to think of him standing reverently before the
altar with this collection box while the minister blessed the offering, seems to me now
something so incredible that I scarcely know what to say of it. I like to think, by
contrast, of the man he was when I was just a kid and I would meet him at the ferry house
of a Saturday noon. Surrounding the entrance to the ferry house there were then three
saloons which of a Saturday noon were filled with men who had stopped off for a little
bite at the free lunch counter and a schooner of beer. I can see the old man, as he stood
in his thirtieth year, a healthy, genial soul with a smile for every one and a pleasant
quip to pass the time of day, see him with his arm resting on the bar, his straw hat
tipped on the back of his head, his left hand raised to down the foaming suds. My eye was
then on about a level with his heavy gold chain which was spread
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cross-wise over his vest; I remember the shepherd plaid suit which he
wore in mid-summer and the distinction it gave him among the other men at the bar who were
not lucky enough to have been born tailors. I remember the way he would dip his hand into
the big glass bowl on the free lunch counter and hand me a few pretzels, saying at the
same time that I ought to go and have a look at the scoreboard in the window of the
Brooklyn Times nearby. And, perhaps, as I ran out of the saloon to see who was winning a
string of cyclists would pass close to the curb, holding to the little strip of asphalt
which had been laid down expressly for them. Perhaps the ferry-boat was just coming into
the dock and I would stop a moment to watch the men in uniform as they pulled away at the
big wooden wheels to which the chains were attached. As the gates were thrown open and the
planks laid down a mob would rush through the shed and make for the saloons which adorned
the nearest comers. Those were the days when the old man knew the meaning of
"moderation", when he drank because he was truly thirsty, and to down a schooner
of beer by the ferry house was a man's prerogative. Then it was as Melville has so well
said: "Feed all things with food convenient for them - that is, if the food be
procurable. The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But
the food of the body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and
so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be." Yes, then it seems
to me that the old man's soul had not yet shrivelled up, that it was endlessly bounded by
light and space and that his body, heedless of the resurrection, was feeding on all that
was convenient and procurable - if not champagne and oysters, at least good lager beer and
pretzels. Then his body had not been condemned, nor his way of living, nor his absence of
faith. Nor was he yet surrounded by vultures, but only by good comrades, ordinary mortals
like himself who looked neither high nor low but straight ahead, the eye always fixed on
the horizon and content with the sight thereof.
And now, as a battered wreck, he has made himself into an elder of the
church and he stands before the altar, grey and bent
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and withered, while the minister gives his blessing to the measly
collection which will go to make a new bowling alley. Perhaps it was necessary for him to
experience the birth of the soul, to feed this sponge-like growth with that light and
space which the Congregational church offered. But what a poor substitute for a man who
had known the joys of that food which the body craved and which, without the pangs of
conscience, had flooded even his sponge-like soul with a light and space that was ungodly
but radiant and terrestrial. I think again of his seemly little "corporation"
over which the thick gold chain was strung and I think that with that death of his paunch
there was left to survive only the sponge of a soul, a sort of appendix to his own bodily
death. I think of the minister who had swallowed him up as a sort of inhuman sponge-eater,
the keeper of a wigwam hung with spiritual scalps. I think of what subsequently ensued as
a kind of tragedy in sponges, for though he promised light and space, no sooner had he
passed out of my father's life than the whole airy edifice came tumbling down.
It all came about in the most ordinary lifelike way. One evening, after
the customary men's meeting, the old man came home with a sorrowful countenance. They had
been informed that evening that the minister was taking leave of them. He had been offered
a more advantageous position in the township of New Rochelle and, despite his great
reluctance to desert his flock, he had decided to accept the oner. He had of course
accepted it only after much meditation - as a duty, in other words. It would mean a better
income, to be sure, but that was nothing compared to the grave responsibilities which he
was about to assume. They had need of him in New Rochelle and he was obeying the voice of
his conscience. All this the old man related with the same unctuousness that the minister
had given to his words. But it was immediately apparent that the old man was hurt. He
couldn't see why New Rochelle could not find another minister. He said it wasn't fair to
tempt the minister with a bigger salary. We need him here, he said ruefully, with
such sadness that I almost felt like weeping. He added, that he was going to have a heart
to heart talk with the minister
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that if anybody could persuade him to remain it was he. In the days
that followed he certainly did his best, no doubt much to the minister's discomfiture. It
was distressing to see the blank look in his face when he returned from these conferences.
He had the expression of a man who was trying to grasp at a straw to keep from drowning.
Naturally the minister remained adamant. Even when the old man broke down and wept before
him he could not be moved to change his mind. That was the turning point. From that moment
on the old man underwent a radical change. He seemed to grow bitter and querulous. He not
only forgot to say grace at the table but he abstained from going to church. He resumed
his old habit of going to the cemetery and basking on a bench. He became morose, then
melancholy, and finally there grew into his face an expression of permanent sadness, a
sadness encrusted with disillusionment, with despair, with futility. He never again
mentioned the man's name, nor the church, nor any of the elders with whom he had once
associated. If he happened to pass them in the street he bade them the time of day without
stopping to shake hands. He read the newspapers diligently, from back to front, without
comment. Even the ads he read, every one, as though trying to block up a huge hole which
was constantly before his eyes. I never heard him laugh again. At the most he would give
us a sort of weary, hopeless smile, a smile which faded instantly and left us with the
spectacle of a life extinct. He was dead as a crater, dead beyond all hope of
resurrection. And not even had he been given a new stomach, or a tough new intestinal
tract, would it have been possible to restore him to life again. He had passed beyond the
lure of champagne and oysters, beyond the need of light and space. He was like the dodo
which buries its head in the sand and whistles out of its ass-hole. When he went to sleep
in the Morris-chair his lower jaw dropped like a hinge that has become unloosened; he had
always been a good snorer but now he snored louder than ever, like a man who was in truth
dead to the world. His snores, in fact, were very much like the death rattle, except that
they were punctuated by an intermittent long-drawn-out whistling of the peanut stand
variety. He
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seemed, when he snored, to be chopping the whole universe to bits so
that we who succeeded him would have enough kindling wood to last a lifetime. It was the
most horrible and fascinating snoring that I have ever listened to: it was sterterous and
stentorian, morbid and grotesque; at times it was like an accordion collapsing, at other
times like a frog croaking in the swamps; after a prolonged whistle there sometimes
followed a frightful wheeze as if he were giving up the ghost, then it would settle back
again into a regular rise and fall, a steady hollow chopping as though he stood stripped
to the waist, with axe in hand, before the accumulated madness of all the bric-a-brac of
this world. What gave these performances a slightly crazy quality was the mummy-like
expression of the face in which the big blubber lips alone came to life; they were like
the gills of a shark snoozing on the surface of the still ocean. Blissfully he snored away
on the bosom of the deep, never disturbed by a dream or a draught, never fitful, never
plagued by an unsatisfied desire; when he closed his eyes and collapsed, the light of the
world went out and he was alone as before birth, a cosmos gnashing itself to bits. He sat
there in his Morris-chair as Jonah must have sat in the body of the whale, secure in the
last refuge of a black hole, expecting nothing, desiring nothing, not dead but buried
alive, swallowed whole and unscathed, the big blubber lips gently flapping with the flux
and reflux of the white breath of emptiness. He was in the land of Nod searching for Cain
and Abel but encountering no living soul, no word, no sign. He dove with the whale and
scraped the icy black bottom; he covered furlongs at top speed, guided only by the fleecy
manes of undersea beasts. He was the smoke that curled out of the chimney-tops, the heavy
layers of cloud that obscured the moon, the thick slime that made the slippery linoleum
floor of the ocean depths. He was deader than dead because alive and empty, beyond all
hope of resurrection in that he had travelled beyond the limits of light and space and
securely nestled himself in the black hole of nothingness. He was more to be envied than
pitied, for his sleep was not a lull or an interval but sleep itself which is the deep and
hence sleeping ever deepening, deeper and deeper
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in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the
nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep's sweet sleep. He was
asleep. He is asleep. He will be asleep. Sleep. Sleep. Father, sleep, I
beg you, for we who are awake are boiling in horror . . .
With the world fluttering away on the last wings of a hollow snore I
see the door opening to admit Grover Watrous. "Christ be with you!" he says,
dragging his club foot along. He is quite a young man now and he has found God. There is
only one God and Grover Watrous has found Him and so there is nothing more to say except
that everything has to be said over again in Grover Watrous' new God-language. This bright
new language which God invented especially for Grover Watrous intrigues me enormously,
first because I had always considered Grover to be a hopeless dunce, second because I
notice that there are no longer any tobacco stains on his agile fingers. When we were boys
Grover lived next door to us. He would visit me from time to time in order to practise a
duet with me. Though he was only fourteen or fifteen he smoked like a trooper. His mother
could do nothing against it because Grover was a genius and a genius had to have a little
liberty, particularly when he was also unfortunate enough to have been born with a club
foot. Grover was the kind of genius who thrives on dirt. He not only had nicotine stains
on his fingers but he had filthy black nails which would break under hours of practising,
imposing upon young Grover the ravishing obligation of tearing them off with his teeth.
Grover used to spit out broken nails along with bits of tobacco which got caught in his
teeth. It was delightful and stimulating. The cigarettes burned holes into the piano and,
as my mother critically observed, also tarnished the keys. When Grover took leave
the parlour stank like the backroom of an undertaker's establishment. It stank of dead
cigarettes, sweat, dirty linen, Grover's oaths and the dry heat left by the dying notes of
Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. It stank too of Grover's running ear and of his decaying
teeth. It stank of his mother's pampering and whimpering. His own home was a stable
divinely suited to his genius, but the parlour of our home was like the waiting room of a
mortician's
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office and Grover was a lout who didn't even know enough to wipe his
feet. In the winter time his nose ran like a sewer and Grover, being too engrossed in his
music to bother wiping his nose, the cold snot was left to trickle down until it reached
his lips where it was sucked in by a very long white tongue. To the flatulent music of
Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. it added a piquant sauce which made those empty devils
palatable. Every other word from Grover's lips was an oath, his favourite expression being
- "I can't get the fucking thing right!" Sometimes he grew so annoyed that he
would take his fists and pound the piano like a madman. It was his genius coming out the
wrong way. His mother, in fact, used to attach a great deal of importance to these fits of
anger; they convinced her that he had something in him. Other people simply said that
Grover was impossible. Much was forgiven, however, because of his club foot. Grover was
sly enough to exploit this bad foot; whenever he wanted anything badly he developed pains
in the foot. Only the piano seemed to have no respect for this maimed member. The piano
therefore was an object to be cursed and kicked and pounded to bits. If he were in good
form, on the other hand, Grover would remain at the piano for hours on end; in fact, you
couldn't drag him away. On such occasions his mother would go stand in the grass plot in
front of the house and waylay the neighbours in order to squeeze a few words of praise out
of them. She would be so carried away by her son's "divine" playing that she
would forget to cook the evening meal. The old man, who worked in the sewers, usually came
home grumpy and famished. Sometimes he would march directly upstairs to the parlour and
yank Grover off the piano stool. He had a rather foul vocabulary himself and when he let
loose on his genius of a son there wasn't much left for Grover to say. In the old man's
opinion Grover was just a lazy son of a bitch who could make a lot of noise. Now and then
he threatened to chuck the fucking piano out of the window - and Grover with it. If the
mother were rash enough to interfere during these scenes he would give her a clout and
tell her to go piss up the end of a rope. He had his moments of weakness too, of course,
and in such a mood he might ask Grover what the hell
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he was rattling away at, and if the latter said, for example, "why
the Sonata Pathetique", the old buzzard would say - "what the hell does that
mean? Why, in Christ's name don't they put it down in plain English?" The old man's
ignorance was even harder for Grover to bear than his brutality. He was heartily ashamed
of his old man and when the latter was out of sight he would ridicule him unmercifully.
When he got a little older he used to insinuate that he wouldn't have been born with a
club foot if the old man hadn't been such a mean bastard. He said that the old man must
have kicked his mother in the belly when she was pregnant. This alleged kick in the belly
must have affected Grover in diverse ways, for when he had grown up to be quite a young
man, as I was saying, he suddenly took to God with such a passion that there was no
blowing your nose before him without first asking God's permission.
Grover's conversion followed right upon the old man's deflation, which
is why I am reminded of it. Nobody had seen the Watrouses for a number of years and then,
right in the midst of a bloody snore, you might say, in pranced Grover scattering
benedictions and calling upon God as his witness as he rolled up his sleeves to deliver us
from evil. What I noted first in him was the change in his personal appearance; he had
been washed dean in the blood of the Lamb. He was so immaculate, indeed, that there was
almost a perfume emanating from him. His speech too had been cleaned up, instead of wild
oaths there were now nothing but blessings and invocations. It was not a conversation
which he held with us but a monologue in which, if there were any questions, he answered
them himself. As he took the chair which was offered him he said with the
nimbleness of a jack-rabbit that God had given his only beloved Son in order that we might
enjoy life everlasting. Did we really want this life everlasting - or were we simply going
to wallow in the joys of the flesh and die without knowing salvation? The incongruity of
mentioning the "joys of the flesh" to an aged couple, one of whom was sound
asleep and snoring, never struck him, to be sure. He was so alive and jubilant in the
first flush of God's merciful grace that he must have forgotten that my sister was dippy,
for, without even
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inquiring how she had been, he began to harangue her in this new-found
spiritual palaver to which she was entirely impervious because, as I say, she was minus so
many buttons that if he had been talking about chopped spinach it would have been just as
meaningful to her. A phrase like "the pleasures of the flesh" meant to her
something like a beautiful day with a red parasol. I could see by the way she sat on the
edge of her chair and bobbed her head that she was only waiting for him to catch his
breath in order to inform him that the pastor - her pastor, who was an Episcopalian
- had just returned from Europe and that they were going to have a fair in the basement of
the church where she would have a little booth fitted up with doylies from the
five-and-ten cent store. In fact, no sooner had he paused a moment than she let loose -
about the canals of Venice, the snow in the Alps, the dog carts in Brussels, the beautiful
Uverwurst in Munich. She was not only religious, my sister, but she was clean daffy.
Grover had just slipped in something about having seen a new heaven and a new earth... for
the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, he said, mumbling the words in
a sort of hysterical glissando in order to unburden himself of an oracular message about
the New Jerusalem which God had established on earth and in which he, Grover Watrous, once
foul of speech and marred by a twisted foot, had found the peace and the calm of the
righteous. "There shall be no more death ..." he started to shout when my
sister leaned forward and asked him very innocently if he liked to bowl because the pastor
had just installed a beautiful new bowling alley in the basement of the church and she
knew he would be pleased to see Grover because he was a lovely man and he was kind to the
poor. Grover said that it was a sin to bowl and that he belonged to no church because the
churches were godless: he had even given up playing the piano because God needed him for
higher things. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things," he added
"and I will be his God, and he shall be my son." He paused again to blow his
nose in a beautiful white handkerchief, whereupon my sister took the occasion to remind
him that in the old days he always had a running nose but that he never wiped it. Grover
listened
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to her very solemnly and then remarked that he had been cured of many
evil ways. At this point the old man woke up and, seeing Grover sitting beside him large
as life, he was quite startled and for a moment or two he was not sure, it seemed, whether
Grover was a morbid phenomenon of dream or an hallucination, but the sight of the clean
handkerchief brought him quickly to his wits. "Oh, it's you!" he exclaimed.
"The Watrous boy, what? Well, what in the name of all that's holy are you doing
here?"
"I came in the name of the Holy of Holies," said Grover
unabashed. "I have been purified by the death on Calvary and I am here in Christ's
sweet name that ye maybe redeemed and walk in light and power and glory."
The old man looked dazed. "Well, what's come over you?" he
said, giving Grover a feeble, consolatory smile. My mother had just come in from the
kitchen and had taken a stand behind Grover's chair. By making a wry grimace with her
mouth she was trying to convey to the old man that Grover was cracked. Even my sister
seemed to realize that there was something wrong with him, especially when he had refused
to visit the new bowling alley which her lovely pastor had expressly installed for young
men such as Grover and his likes.
What was the matter with Grover? Nothing, except that his feet were
solidly planted on the fifth foundation of the great wall of the Holy City of Jerusalem,
the fifth foundation made entirely of sardonyx, whence he commanded a view of a pure river
of water of life issuing from the throne of God. And the sight of this river of life was
to Grover like the bite of a thousand fleas in his lower colon. Not until he had run at
least seven times around the earth would he be able to sit quietly on his ass and observe
the blindness and the indifference of men with something like equanimity. He was alive and
purged, and though to the eyes of the sluggish, sluttish spirits who are sane he was
"cracked", to me he seemed infinitely better off this way than before. He was a
pest who could do you no harm. If you listened to him long enough you became somewhat
purged yourself, though perhaps unconvinced. Grover's bright new language always caught me
in the midriff and through inordi-
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nate laughter cleansed me of the dross accumulated by the sluggish
sanity about me. He was alive as Ponce de Leon had hoped to be alive; alive as only a few
men have ever been. And being unnaturally alive he didn't mind in the least if you laughed
in his face, nor would he have minded if you had stolen the few possessions which were
his. He was alive and empty, which is so close to Godhood that it is crazy.
With his feet solidly planted on the great wall of the New Jerusalem
Grover knew a joy which is incommensurable. Perhaps if he had not been born with a club
foot he would not have known this incredible joy. Perhaps it was well that his father had
kicked the mother in the belly while Grover was still in the womb. Perhaps it was that
kick in the belly which had sent Grover soaring, which made him so thoroughly alive and
awake that even in his sleep he was delivering God's messages. The harder he laboured the
less he was fatigued. He had no more worries, no regrets, no clawing memories. He
recognized no duties, no obligations, except to God. And what did God expect of him?
Nothing, nothing ... except to sing His praises. God only asked of Grover Watrous that he
reveal himself alive in the flesh. He only asked of him to be more and more alive. And
when fully alive Grover was a voice and this voice was a flood which made all dead things
into chaos and this chaos in turn became the mouth of the world in the very centre of
which was the verb to be. In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. So God; was this strange little infinitive which is all
there is - and is it not enough? For Grover it was more than enough: it was everything.
Starting from this Verb what difference did it make which road he travelled? To leave the
Verb was to travel away from the centre, to erect a Babel. Perhaps God had deliberately
maimed Grover Watrous in order to hold him to the centre, to the Verb. By an invisible
cord God held Grover Watrous to his stake which ran through the heart of the world and
Grover became the fat goose which laid a golden egg every day . . .
Why do I write of Grover Watrous? Because I have met thousands of
people and none of them were alive in the way that Grover was. Most of them were more
intelligent, many of
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them were brilliant, some of them were even famous, but none were alive
and empty as Grover was. Grover was inexhaustible. He was like a bit of radium which, even
if buried under a mountain does not lose its power to give off energy. I had seen plenty
of so-called energetic people before - is not America filled with them? - but
never, in the shape of a human being, a reservoir of energy. And what created this
inexhaustible reservoir of energy? An illumination. Yes, it happened in the twinkling of
an eye, which is the only way that anything important ever does happen. Overnight all
Grover's preconceived values were thrown overboard. Suddenly, just like that, he ceased
moving as other people move. He put the brakes on and he kept the motor running. If once,
like other people, he had thought it was necessary to get somewhere now he knew that
somewhere was anywhere and therefore right here and so why move? Why not park the car and
keep the motor running? Meanwhile the earth itself is turning and Grover knew it was
turning and knew that he was turning with it. Is the earth getting anywhere? Grover must
undoubtedly have asked himself this question and must undoubtedly have satisfied himself
that it was not getting anywhere. Who, then, had said that we must get somewhere?
Grover would inquire of this one and that where they were heading for and the strange
thing was that although they were all heading for their individual destinations none of
them ever stopped to reflect that the one inevitable destination for all alike was the
grave. This puzzled Grover because nobody could convince him that death was not a
certainty, whereas nobody could convince anybody else that any other destination was an
uncertainty. Convinced of the dead certainty of death Grover suddenly became tremendously
and overwhelmingly alive. For the first time in his life he began to live, and at the same
time the dub foot dropped completely out of his consciousness. This is a strange thing,
too, when you come to think of it, because the dub foot, just like death, was another
ineluctable fact. Yet the dub foot dropped out of mind, or, what is more important, all
that had been attached to the club foot. In the same way, having accepted death, death too
dropped out of Grover's mind. Having seized on the single certainty of death all the
uncertain-
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ties vanished. The rest of the world was now limping along with
dub-footed uncertainties and Grover Watrous alone was free and unimpeded. Grover Watrous
was the personification of certainty. He may have been wrong, but he was certain. And
what good does it do to be right if one has to limp along with a club foot? Only a few
men have ever realized the truth of this and their names have become very great names.
Grover Watrous will probably never be known, but he is very great just the same. This is
probably the reason why I write about him - just the fact that I had enough sense to
realize that Grover had achieved greatness even though nobody else will admit it. At the
time I simply thought that Grover was a harmless fanatic, yes, a little
"cracked", as my mother insinuated. But every man who has caught the truth of
certitude was a little cracked and it is only these men who have accomplished anything for
the world. Other men, other great men, have destroyed a little here and there, but
these few whom I speak of, and among whom I include Grover Watrous, were capable of
destroying everything in order that the truth might live. Usually these men were born with
an impediment, with a dub foot, so to speak, and by a strange irony it is only the club
foot which men remember. If a man like Grover becomes depossessed of his club foot, the
world says that he has become "possessed". This is the logic of incertitude and
its fruit is misery. Grover was the only truly joyous being I ever met in my life and
this, therefore, is a little monument which I am erecting in his memory, in the memory of
his joyous certitude. It is a pity that he had to use Christ for a crutch, but then what
does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
AN INTERLUDE
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not
understood. I like to dwell on this period when things were taking shape because the
order, if it were understood, must have been dazzling. In the first place there was Hymie,
Hymie the bull-frog, and there were also his wife's ovaries which had been
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rotting away for a considerable time. Hymie was completely wrapped up
in his wife's rotting ovaries. It was the daily topic of conversation; it took precedence
now over the cathartic pills and the coated tongue. Hymie dealt in "sexual
proverbs", as he called them. Everything he said began from or led up to the ovaries.
Despite everything he was still nicking it off with the wife - prolonged snake-life
copulations in which he would smoke a cigarette or two before un-cunting. He would
endeavour to explain to me how the pus from the rotting ovaries put her in heat. She had
always been a good fuck, but now she was better than ever. Once the ovaries were ripped
out there'd be no telling how she'd take it. She seemed to realize that too. Ergo, fuck
away! Every night, after the dishes were cleared away, they'd strip down in their little
bird-like apartment and lay together like a couple of snakes. He tried to describe it to
me on a number of occasions - the ways she fucked. It was like an oyster inside, an oyster
with soft teeth that nibbled away at him. Sometimes it felt as though he were right inside
her womb, so soft and fluffy it was, and those soft teeth biting away at his pecker and
making him delirious. They used to lie scissors-fashion and look up at the ceiling. To
keep from coming he would think about the office, about the little worries which plagued
him and kept his bowels tied up in a knot. In between orgasms he would let his mind dwell
on some one else, so that when she'd start working on him again he might imagine he was
having a brand new fuck with a brand new cunt. He used to arrange it so that he could look
out of the window while it was going on. He was getting so adept at it that he could
undress a woman on the boulevard there under his window and transport her to the bed; not
only that, but he could actually make her change places with his wife, all without
un-cunting. Sometimes he'd fuck away like that for a couple of hours and never bother to
shoot off. Why waste it! he would say.
Steve Romero, on the other hand, had a hell of a time holding it in.
Steve was built like a bull and he scattered his seed freely. We used to compare notes
sometimes sitting in the Chop Suey joint around the comer from the office. It was a
strange atmosphere. Maybe it was because there was no wine. Maybe it
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was the funny little black mushrooms they served us. Anyway it wasn't
difficult to get started on the subject. By the time Steve met us he would already have
had his workout, a shower and a rubdown. He was dean inside and out. Almost a perfect
specimen of a man. Not very bright, to be sure, but a good egg, a companion. Hymie, on the
other hand, was like a toad. He seemed to come to the table direct from the swamps where
he had passed a mucky day. Filth rolled off his lips like honey. In fact, you couldn't
call it filth, in his case, because there wasn't any other ingredient with which you might
compare it. It was all one fluid, a slimy, sticky substance made entirely of sex. When he
looked at his food he saw it as potential sperm; if the weather were warm he would say it
was good for the balls; if he took a trolley ride he knew in advance that the rhythmic
movement of the trolley would stimulate his appetite, would give him a slow,
"personal" hard-on, as he put it. Why "personal" I never found out,
but that was his expression. He liked to go out with us because we were always reasonably
sure of picking up something decent. Left to himself he didn't always fare so well. With
us he got a change of meat - Gentile cunt, as he put it He liked Gentile cunt. Smelled
sweeter, he said. Laughed easier too... Sometimes in the very midst of things. The one
thing he couldn't tolerate was dark meat. It amazed and disgusted him to see me travelling
around with Valeska. Once he asked me if she didn't smell kind of extra strong like. I
told him I liked it that way - strong and smelly, with lots of gravy around it. He almost
blushed at that. Amazing how delicate he could be about some things. Food, for example.
Very finicky about his food. Perhaps a racial trait. Immaculate about his person, too.
Couldn't stand the sight of a spot on his dean cuffs. Constantly brushing himself off,
constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there were any food between his teeth.
If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the napkin and extract it with his
pearlhandled toothpick. The ovaries of course he couldn't see. Nor could he smell them
either, because his wife too was an immaculate bitch. Douching herself all day long in
preparation for the evening nuptials. It was tragic, the importance she gave to her
ovaries.
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Up until the day she was taken to the hospital she was a regular
fucking block. The thought of never being able to fuck again frightened the wits out of
her. Hymie of course told her it wouldn't make any difference to him one way or the other.
Glued to her like a snake, a cigarette in his mouth, the girls passing below on the
boulevard, it was hard for him to imagine a woman not being able to fuck any more. He was
sure the operation would be successful. Successful! That's to say that she'd fuck
even better than before. He used to tell her that, lying on his back looking up at the
ceiling. "You know I'll always love you," he would say. "Move over just a
little bit, will you ... there, like that... that's it. What was I saying? Oh yes... why
sure, why should you worry about things like that? Of course I'll be true to you. Listen,
pull away just a little bit... yeah, that's it... that's fine." He used to tell us
about it in the Chop Suey joint. Steve would laugh like hell. Steve couldn't do a thing
like that. He was too honest - especially with women. That's why he never had any luck.
Little Curiey, for example -Steve hated Curiey - would always get what he wanted... He was
a born liar, a born deceiver. Hymie didn't like Curiey much either. He said he was
dishonest, meaning of course dishonest in money matters. About such things Hymie was
scrupulous. What he disliked especially was the way Curiey talked about his aunt. It was
bad enough, in Hymie's opinion, that he should be screwing the sister of his own mother,
but to make her out to be nothing but a piece of stale cheese, that was too much for
Hymie. One ought to have a bit of respect for a woman, provided she's not a whore. If
she's a whore that's different. Whores are not women. Whores are whores. That was how
Hymie looked at things.
The real reason for his dislike, however, was that whenever they went
out together Curiey always got the best choice. And not only that, but it was usually with
Hymie's money that Curiey managed it. Even the way Curiey asked for money irritated Hymie
- it was like extortion, he said. He thought it was partly my fault, that I was too
lenient with the kid. "He's got no moral character," Hymie would say. "And
what about you, your moral character?" I would ask. "Oh me I Shit,
I'm too old
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to have any moral character. But Curley's only a kid."
"You're jealous, that's what," Steve would say. "Me ? Me jealous of
him ?" And he'd try to smother the idea with a scornful little laugh. It made him
wince, a jab like that "Listen," he would say, turning to me, "did I ever
act jealous towards you? Didn't I always turn a girl over to you if you asked me? What
about that redhaired girl in S.U. office... yon remember ... the one with the big teats?
Wasn't that a nice piece of ass to turn over to a friend? But I did it, didn't I? I did it
because you said you liked big teats. But I wouldn't do it for Curiey. He's a little
crook. Let him do his own digging."
As a matter of fact, Curley was digging away very industriously. He
must have had five or six on the string at one time, from what I could gather. There was
Valeska, for example - he had made himself pretty solid with her. She was so damned
pleased to have some one fuck her without blushing that when it came to sharing him with
her cousin and then with the midget she didn't put up the least objection. What she liked
best was to get in the tub and let him fuck her under water. It was fine until the midget
got wise to it. Then there was a nice rumpus which was finally ironed out on the parlour
floor. To listen to Curiey talk he did everything but climb the chandeliers. And always
plenty of pocket money to boot. Valeska was generous, but the cousin was a softy. If she
came within a foot of a stiff prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to
put her in a trance. It was almost shameful the things Curiey made her do. He took
pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim,
priggish bitch in her street clothes. You'd almost swear she didn't own a cunt, the way
she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he got her alone he made her pay for
her high-falutin' ways. He went at it cold-bloodedly. "Pish 'it out!" he'd say
opening his fly a little. "Fish it out with your tongue!" (He had it in for the
whole bunch because, as he put it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.)
Anyway, once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her.
Sometimes he'd stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a
wheelbarrow. Or else he'd do it dog fashion, and while she
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groaned and squirmed he'd nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the
smoke between her legs. Once he played her a dirty little trick doing it that way. He had
worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost
polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to
cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big long carrot up her
twat. "That, Miss Abercrombie," he said, "is a sort of Doppelganger to my
regular cock," and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin
Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the
carrot. At least, that's how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be
sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yam, but there's no denying that he had
a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways,
well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a
purist. Somehow Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got
a personal hard-on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He meant that
Nature was asserting itself - through his, Hymie Laubscher's fat, circumcised dick. It was
the same with his wife's cunt. It was something she wore between her legs, like an
ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but it wasn't Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you
get what I mean.
Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual
confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the Land of Fuck. The
girl upstairs, for instance... she used to come down now and then, when the wife was
giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn't
give her any notice at first. But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of
impersonal personal cunt which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came
down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the
bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of
things. I decided to take a peep through the key-hole and see for myself what was what. Lo
and behold, if she isn't standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little
pussy. Almost talking
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to it, she was. I was so excited I didn't know what to do first. I went
back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her
to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt others and the fingers
strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark,
I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize
her. "Come here, you bitch," I kept saying to myself, "come here and spread
that cunt over me." She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she
had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn't say a
word, I didn't make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the
dark like a crab. Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn't say a word either.
She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her legs she moved one foot a little
to open her crotch a bit more. I don't think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch
in all my life. It was like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any
billboards handy I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as
naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in her mouth. I
had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a froth. Her mouth was stuffed
full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of
quiet maniacs working away in the dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I
knew it, and I was ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably
the best fuck I ever had. She never once opened her trap - not diat night, nor the next
night, nor any night. She'd steal down like diat in the dark, soon as she smelted me there
alone, and plaster her cunt all over me. It was an enormous cunt, too, when I think back
on it. A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up widi divans and cosy comers and rubber
teedi and syringeas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in
like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent,
and so soft and restful diat I lay like a dolphin on the oyster-banks. A slight twitch and
I'd be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy
round cobblestones
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and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes
it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling
sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against
me like harmonica stops. In the immense black grotto there was a silk-and-soap organ
playing a predaceous black music. When she pitched herself high, when she turned the juice
on full, it made a violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventiloqual
twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate. It made me think of
cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amok, of wild unicorns rutting in
rhododendron beds. Everything was anonymous and unformulated, John Doe and his wife Emmy
Doe: above us the gas tanks and below the marine life. Above the belt, as I say, she was
batty. Yes, absolutely cuckoo, though still abroad and afloat. Perhaps that was what made
her cunt so marvellously impersonal. It was one cunt out of a million, a regular Pearl of
the Antilles, such as Dick Osborn discovered when reading Joseph Conrad. In the broad
Pacific of sex she lay, a gleaming silver reef surrounded with human anemones, human
starfish, human madrepores. Only an Osborn could have discovered her, given the proper
latitude and longitude of cunt. Meeting her in the daytime, watching her slowly going
daft, it was like trapping a weasel when night came on. All I had to do was to lie down in
the dark with my fly open and wait. She was like Ophelia suddenly resurrected among the
Kaffirs. Not a word of any language could she remember, especially not English. She was a
deaf-mute who had lost her memory, and with the loss of memory she had lost her
frigidaire, her curling-irons, her tweezers and handbag. She was even more naked than a
fish, except for the tuft of hair between her legs. And she was even slippier than a fish
because after all a fish has scales and she had none. It was dubious at times whether I
was in her or she in me. It was open warfare, the new-fangled Pancrace, with each one
biting his own ass. Love among the newts and the cut-out wide open. Love without gender
and without lysol. Incubational love, such as the wolverines practise above the tree line.
On the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other the Gulf of Mexico. And though
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we never referred to it openly there was always with us King Kong, King
Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of
millionaires and lampreys. No logic could drive King Kong away. He was the giant truss
that supports the soul's fleeting anguish. He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and
arms a mile long. He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away. He was the
muzzle of the revolver that never went on, the leper armed with sawed-off gonococci.
It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via
the penis. There was first of all the binomial theorem, a phrase which had always puzzled
me; I put it under the magnifying glass and studied it from X to Z, There was Logos, which
somehow I had always identified with breath; I found that on the contrary it was a sort of
obsessional stasis, a machine which went on grinding corn long after the granaries had
been filled and the Jews driven out of Egypt. There was Bucephalus, more fascinating to me
perhaps than any word in my whole vocabulary: I would trot it out whenever I was in a
quandary, and with it of course Alexander and his entire purple retinue. What a horse!
Sired in the Indian Ocean, the last of the line, and never once mated, except to the Queen
of the Amazons during the Mesopotamian adventure. There was the Scotch Gambit! An amazing
expression which had nothing to do with chess. It came to me always in the shape of a man
on stilts, page 2498 of Punk and Wagnall's Unabridged Dictionary. A gambit was a sort of
leap in the dark with mechanical legs. A leap for no purpose - hence gambit! Clear
as a bell and perfectly simple, once you grasped it. Then there was Andromeda, and the
Gorgon Medusa, and Castor and Pollux of heavenly origin, mythological twins eternally
fixed in the ephemeral stardust. There was lucubration, a word distinctly sexual and yet
suggesting such cerebral connotations as to make me uneasy. Always "midnight
lucubrations", the midnight being ominously significant. And then arras. Somebody
some time or other had been stabbed "behind the arras". I saw an altar-cloth
made of asbestos and in it was a grievous rent such as Caesar himself might have made.
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It was very quiet thinking, as I say, the kind that the men of the Old
Stone Age must have indulged in. Things were neither absurd nor explicable. It was a
jig-saw puzzle which, when you grew tired of, you could push away with two feet. Anything
could be put aside with ease, even the Himalaya Mountains. It was just the opposite kind
of thinking from Mahomet's. It led absolutely nowhere and was hence enjoyable. The grand
edifice which you might construct throughout the course of a long fuck could be toppled
over in the twinkling of an eye. It was the fuck that counted and not the construction
work. It was like living in the Ark during the Flood, everything provided for down to a
screw-driver. What need to commit murder, rape or incest when all that was demanded of you
was to kill time? Rain, rain, rain, but inside the Ark everything dry and toasty, a pair
of every kind and in the larder fine Westphalian hams, fresh eggs, olives, pickled onions,
Worcestershire Sauce and other delicacies. God had chosen me, Noah, to establish a new
heaven and a new earth. He had given me a stout boat with all seams caulked and properly
dried. He had given me also the knowledge to sail the stormy seas. Maybe when it stopped
raining there would be other kinds of knowledge to acquire, but for the present a nautical
knowledge sufficed. The rest was chess in the Cafe Royal, Second Avenue, except that I had
to imagine a partner, a clever Jewish mind that would make the game last until the rains
ceased. But, as I said before, I had no time to be bored: there were my old friends.
Logos, Bucephalus, arras, lucubration and so on. Why play chess?
Locked up like that for days and nights on end I began to realize that
thinking, when it is not masturbative, is lenitive, healing, pleasurable. The thinking
that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere: all other thinking is done on tracks and no
matter how long the stretch, in the end there is always the depot or the round-house. In
the end there is always a red lantern which says STOP! But when the penis gets to thinking
there is no stop and no let: it is a perpetual holiday, the bait fresh and the fish always
nibbling at the line. Which reminds me of another cunt, Veronica something or other, who
always got me thinking the wrong way. With Veronica it was always a tussle in the
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vestibule. On the dance floor you'd think she was going to make you a
permanent present of her ovaries, but as soon as she hit the air she'd start thinking,
thinking other hat, of her purse, of her aunt who was waiting up for her, of the letter
she forgot to mail, of the job she was going to lose - all kinds of crazy, irrelevant
thoughts which had nothing to do with the thing in hand. It was like she had suddenly
switched her brain to her cunt - the most alert and canny cunt imaginable. It was almost a
metaphysical cunt, so to speak. It was a cunt which thought out problems, and not only
that, but a special kind of thinking it was, with a metronome going. For this species of
displaced rhythmic lucubration a peculiar dim light was essential. It had to be just about
dark enough for a bat and yet light enough to find a button if one happened to come undone
and roll on the floor of the vestibule. You can see what I mean. A vague yet meticulous
precision, a steely awareness that simulated absent-mindedness. And fluttery and fluky at
the same time, so that you could never determine whether it was fish or fowl. What is
this I hold in my hand? Fine or super-fine? The answer was always duck soup. If you
grabbed her by the boobies she would squawk like a parrot; if you got under her dress she
would wriggle like an eel: if you held her too tight she would bite like a ferret. She
lingered and lingered and lingered. Why? What was she after? Would she give in after an
hour or two? Not a chance in a million. She was like a pigeon trying to fly with its legs
caught in a steel trap. She pretended she had no legs. But if you made a move to set her
free she would threaten to moult on you.
Because she had such a marvellous ass and because it was also so damned
inaccessible I used to think of her as the Pons Asinorum. Every schoolboy knows that the
Pons Asinorum is not to be crossed except by two white donkeys led by a blind man. I don't
know why it is so, but that's the rule as it was laid down by old Euclid. He was so full
of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day -1 suppose purely to amuse himself - he built
a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum because
he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these
don-
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keys that he would let nobody take possession of them. And so he
conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the
bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the
same boat. She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn't part with it
for anything. She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her
cunt, which by the way she never referred to it all - as for her cunt, I say, well that
was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever
referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow made you uncomfortably aware of them.
That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or
a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not
felt. It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you
an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your examinations, you got your
diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and
your cunt to make water with. Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an
intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labelled fuck. You might
diddle and piddle, but you must not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the sun
never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat. And just that
little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the look-out, as it were,
for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera. You couldn't really think because your mind
was already engaged. The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theatre on
which the owner had left his opera hat.
Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole
function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing
cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at meal
times to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman
I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff
prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a
stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal. The
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only way I can describe it is to say that when she got hot and
bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual act with her cunt. You'd be ready to slip it
in when suddenly the dummy between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it
would reach out for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too,
this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal.
Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the
trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up
with iron thongs. She could break down the most "personal" hard-on in the world.
Break it down with laughter. At the same time it wasn't quite as humiliating as one might
be inclined to imagine. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The
whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You
could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was something on
the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could see the ventriloquist in
you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a
white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with her legs spread open
offering a bright green leaf to the first-comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the
cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus
H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world
would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ
Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does it's volcanic. When the female
laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that
vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once
aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wild-cat. Now and then one hears it
at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that everything goes. It
means that she will forage for herself- and watch out that you don't get your balls cut
off! It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs
that will flay the living hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick
and Harry, but
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with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy: it means that she will lay herself
down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost. It
means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten
thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull it down in a night. She will pull
it down and pee on it, and nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest. And
when I said about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most "personal"
hard-on imaginable I meant it; she would break down the personal erection and hand
you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod. You might not get very far with
Veronica herself, but with what she had to give you could travel far and no mistake about
it. Once you came within earshot of her it was like you had gotten an overdose of Spanish
fly. Nothing on earth could bring it down again, unless you put it under a sledge-hammer.
It was going on this way all the time, even though every word I say is
a lie. It was a personal tour in the impersonal world, a man with a tiny trowel in his
hand digging a tunnel through the earth to get to the other side. The idea was to tunnel
through and find at last the Culebra Cut, the nec plus ultra, of the honeymoon of flesh.
And of course there was no end to the digging. The best I might hope for was to get stuck
in the dead centre of the earth, where the pressure was strongest and most even all
around, and stay stuck there forever. That would give me the feeling of Ixion on the
wheel, which is one sort of salvation and not entirely to be sneezed at. On the other hand
I was a metaphysician of the instinctivist sort; it was impossible for me to stay stuck
anywhere, even in the dead centre of the earth. It was most imperative to find and enjoy
the metaphysical fuck, and for that I would be obliged to come out on to a wholly new
tableland, a mesa of sweet alfalfa and polished monoliths, where the eagles and the
vultures flew at random.
Sometimes sitting in a park of an evening, especially a park littered
with papers and bits of food, I would see one pass by, one that seemed to be going towards
Tibet, and I would follow her with the round eye, hoping that suddenly she would begin to
fly, for if she did that, if she would begin to fly, I knew I
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would be able to fly also, and that would mean an end to the digging
and the wallowing. Sometimes, probably because of twilight or other disturbances, it
seemed as though she actually did fly on rounding a comer. That is, she would suddenly be
lifted from the ground for the space of a few feet, like a plane too heavily loaded; but
just that sudden involuntary lift, whether real or imaginary it didn't matter, gave me
hope, gave me courage to keep the still round eye riveted on the spot.
There were megaphones inside which yelled "Go on, keep going,
stick it out," and all that nonsense. But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would
set the alarm dock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up and about?
Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was working like a galley
slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved. Were I to continue straight on I
would dig the deepest hole any man had ever dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted
to get to the other side of the earth, wouldn't it have been much simpler to throw away
the trowel and just board an aeroplane for China? But the body follows after the
mind. The simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it gels
particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two start going in
opposite directions.
Labouring with the trowel was bliss; it left the mind completely free
and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If the she-animal
suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal suddenly began to throw a
pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like old shoe laces, the chest wheezing and
the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the
collapse of joy and overexasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that,
the promised tableland would hove in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog and there
would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and claim it in the name of
Uncle Sam and all that's holy. These misadventures happened so frequently that it was
impossible not to believe in the reality of a realm which was called Fuck, because that
was the only name which might be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking
one only began to approach it Everybody had at
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one time or another planted the flag in this territory, and yet nobody
was able to lay claim to it permanently. It disappeared overnight - sometimes in the
twinkling of an eye. It was No Man's Land and it stank with the Utter of invisible deaths.
If a truce were declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But
the truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency was the
"zone between" idea. Here the bullet flew and the corpses piled up:
then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a
stench.
This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable.
What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt; it must be mentioned only in de luxe
editions, otherwise the world will fall apart What holds the world together, as I have
learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. But fuck, the real thing, cunt,
the real thing, seems to contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous
than nitroglycerine. To get an idea of the real thing you must consult a Sears-Roebuck
catalogue endorsed by the Anglican Church. On page 23 you will find a picture of Priapus
juggling a corkscrew on the end of his weeny; he is standing in the shadow of the
Parthenon by mistake; he is naked except for a perforated jock-strap which was loaned for
the occasion by the Holy Rollers of Oregon and Saskatchewan. Long distance is on the wire
demanding to know if they should sell short or long. He says go fuck yourself and
hangs up the receiver. In the background Rembrandt is studying the anatomy of our Lord
Jesus Christ who, if you remember, was crucified by the Jews and then taken to Abysinnia
to be pounded with quoits and other objects. The weather seems to be fair and warmer, as
usual, except for a slight mist rising up out of the Ionian; this is the sweat of
Neptune's balls which were castrated by the early monks, or perhaps it was by the
Manicheans in the time of the Pentecostal plague. Long strips of horse meat are hanging
out to dry and the flies are everywhere, just as Homer describes it in ancient times. Hard
by is a McCormick threshing machine, a reaper and binder with a thirty-six horse-power
engine and no cutout. The harvest is in and the workers are counting their wages in the
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distant fields. This is the flush of dawn on the first day of sexual
intercourse in the old Hellenistic world, now faithfully reproduced for us in colour
thanks to the Zeiss Brothers and other patient zealots of industry. But this is not the
way it looked to the men of Homer's time who were on the spot. Nobody knows how the god
Priapus looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the end of
his weeny. Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he undoubtedly fell a-dreaming
of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness of the corkscrew and the threshing and
reaping machine; he must have grown very silent within himself and finally he must have
lost even the desire to dream. It is my idea, and of course I am willing to be corrected
if I am wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the Angelus peal
and lo and behold there appeared before his very eyes a gorgeous green marshland in which
the Chocktaws were making merry with the Navajos: in the air above were the white condors,
their ruffs festooned with marigolds. He saw also a huge slate on which was written the
body of Christ, the body of Absalom and the evil which is lust. He saw the sponge soaked
with frogs' blood, the eyes which Augustine had sewn into his skin, the vest which was not
big enough to cover out iniquities. He saw these things in the whilomst moment when the
Navajos were making merry with the Chocktaws and he was so taken by surprise that suddenly
a voice issued from between his legs, from the long thinking reed which he had lost in
dreaming, and it was the most inspired, the most shrill and piercing, the most jubilant
and ferocious cacchinating sort of voice that had ever wongled up from the depths. He
began to sing through that long cock of his with such divine grace and elegance that the
white condors came down out of the sky and shat huge purple eggs all over the green
marshland. Our Lord Christ got up from his stone bed and, marked by the quoit though he
was, he danced like a mountain goat. The fellaheen came out of Egypt in their chains,
followed by the warlike Igorotes and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar.
This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the
old Hellenistic world. Since then things have changed a
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great deal. It is no longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is
it permitted even to condors to shit purple eggs all over the place. All this is
scatological, eschatological and ecumenical. It is forbidden. Verboten. And so the
Land of Puck becomes ever more receding; it becomes mythological. Therefore am I
constrained to speak mythologically. I speak with extreme unction, and with precious
unguents too. I put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white marigolds, the
oleanders and the rhododendrons. Up with the thorns and the manacles! Christ is dead and
mangled with quoits. The fellaheen are bleaching in the sands of Egyptis, their wrists
loosely shackled. The vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh. All is
quiet, a million golden mice nibbling at the unseen cheese. The moon is up and the Nile
ruminates on her riparian ravages. The earth belches silently, the stars twitch and bleat,
the rivers slip their banks. It's like this ... There are cunts which laugh and cunts
which talk: there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are
planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap: there are
cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive: there
are also masochistic cunts which dose up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps
a pearl or two inside: there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the
penis and go wet all over in ecstasy: there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their
quills and wave little flags at Christmas time: there are telegraphic cunts which practise
the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political
cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are
vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there
are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads,
worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried breadcrumbs; there are the
mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter:
there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and
epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a
flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you
stumble
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on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded;
there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent
and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?
And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the
super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country to which we
were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and the tall reeds bend with
the wind. It is here that great father of fornication dwells. Father Apis, the mantic bull
who gored his way to heaven and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis
sprang the race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow
lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages was derived the
late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the dead cock of this sad specimen
arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers. We are the
last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate
of straw. Now for the aluminium wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright
country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes forward like oiled
docks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless docks which tick off the
rinds of time. We are travelling faster than the lightning calculator, faster than
starlight, faster than the magician can think. Each second is a universe of time. And each
universe of time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed. When speed comes to its
end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully undenominated. We shall shed our
wings, our docks and our mantelpieces to lean on. We will rise up feathery and jubilant,
like a column of blood, and there will be no memory to drag us down again. This time I
call the realm of the super-cunt, for it defies speed, calculation or imagery. Nor has the
penis itself a known size or weight. There is only the sustained fed of fuck, the fugitive
in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar. Little Nemo walks around with a
seven day hard-on and a wonderful pair of blue balls bequeathed by Lady Bountiful. It is
Sunday morning around the corner from Evergreen Cemetery.
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It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to the world on my
bed of ferro-concrete. Around the comer is the cemetery, which is to say - the world of
sexual intercourse. My balls ache with the fucking that is going on, but it is all
going on beneath my window, on the boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest. I am
thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is
I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go
out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing
happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My
mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten
caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there
on the farthest rim of the universe. She thought it was sheer laziness that kept me
riveted to the bed. She threw the bucket of water over me: I squirmed and shivered a bit,
but I continued to lie there on my ferro-concrete bed. I was immovable. I was a burned-out
meteor adrift somewhere in the neighbourhood of Vega.
And now I'm on the same bed and the light that's in me refuses to be
extinguished. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They
are having sexual intercourse. God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck. It
seems to me that I hear the clanking of a great machine, the linotype bracelets passing
through the wringer of sex. Hymie and his nymphomaniac of a wife are lying on the same
level with me, only they are across the river. The river is called Death and it has a
bitter taste. I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I have
neither been petrified nor immortalized. I am still burning brightly inside, though
outwardly dead as a planet. From this bed I have gotten up to dance, not once but
hundreds, thousands of times. Each time I came away I had the conviction that I had danced
the skeleton dance on a terrain vague. Perhaps I had wasted too much of my
substance on suffering; perhaps I had the crazy idea that I would be the first
metallurgical bloom of the human species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was
both a sub-
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gorilla and a super-god. On this bed of ferro-concrete I remember
everything and everything is in rock crystal. There are never any animals, only thousands
and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they utter I have an
answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of their mouths. There is plenty of
killing, but no blood. The murders arc perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in
silence. But even if every one were killed there would still be conversation, and the
conversation would be at once intricate and easy to follow. Because it is I who create it!
I know it, and that is why it never drives me mad. I have conversations which may take
place only twenty years hence, when I meet the right person, the one whom I shall create,
let us say, when the proper time comes. All these talks take place in a vacant lot which
is attached to my bed like a mattress. Once I gave it a name, this terrain vague: I
called it Ubiguchi, but somehow Ubiguchi never satisfied me, it was too intelligible, too
full of meaning. It would be better to keep it just "terrain vague",
which is what I intend to do. People think that vacuity is nothingness, but it is not so.
Vacuity is a discordant fulness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes
reconnoitering. As a boy I remember standing in the vacant lot as if I were a very lively
soul standing naked in a pair of shoes. The body had been stolen from me because I had no
particular need of it. I could exist with or without a body then. If I killed a little
bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because
I wanted to know about Timbuctoo or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot and
eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would
inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate things of this place, but I
was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one could go in a state of complete deadness,
and then by a law, which must be the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and
began to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable. Here began the real
cannibalistic excursions which have meant so much to me; no more dead chippies picked from
the bonfire, but live human meat, tender, succulent human flesh, secrets like fresh bloody
livers, confidences like swollen tumors that have been kept on
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ice. I learned not to wait for my victim to die, but to eat into him
while talking to me. Often when I walked away from an unfinished meal I discovered that it
was nothing more than an old friend minus an arm or a leg. I sometimes left him standing
there - a trunk full of stinking intestines.
Being of the city, of the only city in the world and no place like
Broadway anywhere, I used to walk up and down staring at the floodlit hams and other
delicacies. I was a schizerino from the sole of my boots to the tips of my hair. I lived
exclusively in the gerundive, which I understood only in Latin. Long before I had read
other in the Black Book I was cohabiting with Hilda, the giant cauliflower of my
dreams. We traversed all the morganatic diseases together and a few which were ex
cathedra. We dwelt in the carcass of the instincts and were nourished by ganglionic
memories. There was never a universe, but millions and billions of universes, all
of them put together no bigger than a pinhead. It was a vegetal sleep in the wilderness of
the mind. It was the past, which alone comprises eternity. Amidst the fauna and flora of
my dreams I would hear long distance calling. Messages were dropped on my table by the
deformed and the epileptic. Hans Castorp would call sometimes and together we would commit
innocent crimes. Or, if it were a bright freezing day. I would do a turn in the velodrome
with my Presto bike from Chemnitz, Bohemia.
Best of all was the skeleton dance. I would first wash all my parts at
the sink, change my linen, shave, powder, comb my hair, don my dancing pumps. Feeling
abnormally light inside and out I would wind in and out of the crowd for a time to get the
proper human rhythm, the weight and substance of flesh. Then I would make a beeline for
the dance floor, grab a hunk of giddy flesh and begin the autumnal pirouette. It was like
that I walked into the hairy Greek's place one night and ran smack into her. She seemed
blue-black, white as chalk, ageless. There was not just the flow to and from, but the
endless chute, the voluptuousness of intrinsic restlessness. She was mercurial and at the
same time of a savoury weight. She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in lava. The
time has come, I thought, to wander back from the periphery. I made
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a move towards the centre, only to find the ground shifting from under
my feet. The earth slid rapidly beneath my bewildered feet. I moved again out of the earth
belt and behold, my hands were full of meteoric flowers. I reached for her with two
flaming hands but she was more elusive than sand. I thought of my favourite nightmares,
but she was unlike anything which had made me sweat and gibber. In my delirium I began to
prance and neigh. I bought frogs and mated them with toads. I thought of the easiest thing
to do, which is to die, but I did nothing. I stood still and began to petrify at the
extremities. That was so wonderful, so healing, so eminently sensible, that I began to
laugh way down inside the viscera, like a hyena crazed with rut. Maybe I would turn into a
rosetta stone! I just stood still and waited. Spring came and Fall, and then Winter. I
renewed my insurance policy automatically. I ate grass and the roots of deciduous trees. I
sat for days on end looking at the same film. Now and then I brushed my teeth. If you
fired an automatic at me the bullets glanced off and made a queer tat-a-tat ricocheting
against the walls. Once up a dark street, felled by a thug, I felt a knife go clean
through me. It felt like a spritz bath. Strange to say, the knife left no holes in my
skin. The experience was so novel that I went home and stuck knives into all parts of my
body. More needle baths. I sat down, pulled all the knives out, and again I marvelled that
there was no trace of blood, no holes, no pain. I was just about to bite into my arm when
the telephone rang. It was long distance calling. I never knew who put in the calls
because no one ever came to the phone. However the skeleton dance ...
Life is drifting by the show-window. I lie there like a flood-lit ham
waiting for the axe to fall. As a matter of fact, there is nothing to fear, because
everything is cut neatly into fine little slices and wrapped in cellophane. Suddenly all
the lights of the city are extinguished and the sirens sound their warning. The city is
enveloped in poison gas, bombs are bursting, mangled bodies flying through the air. There
is electricity everywhere, and blood and splinters and loud-speakers. The men in the air
are full of glee; those below are screaming and
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bellowing. When the gas and the flames have eaten all the flesh away
the skeleton dance begins. I watch from the show-window which is now dark. It is better
than the sack of Rome because there is more to destroy.
Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder. Is it the fall of
the world? Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded? To see millions of
skeletons dancing in the snow while the city founders is an awesome sight. Will anything
ever grow again? Will babes come out of the womb? Will there be food and wine? There are
the men in the air, to be sure. They will come down to plunder. There will be cholera and
dysentery and those who were above and triumphant will perish like the rest. I have the
sure feeling that I will be the last man on earth. I will emerge from the show-window when
it is all over and walk calmly amidst the ruins. I will have the whole earth myself.
Long distance calling! To inform me that I am not utterly alone. Then
the destruction was not complete? It's discouraging. Man is not even able to destroy
himself; he can only destroy others. I am disgusted. What a malicious cripple! What cruel
delusions! So there are more of the species about and they will tidy up the mess and begin
again. God will come down again in flesh and blood and take up the burden of guilt. They
will make music and build things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui!
What blind tenacity, what clumsy ambitions!
I am on the bed again. The old Greek world, the dawn of sexual
intercourse - and Hymie! Hymie Laubscher always on the same level, looking down on the
boulevard across the river. There is a lull in the nuptial feast and the clam fritters are
brought in. Move over just a little, he says. There, like that, that's it 11
hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside my window. Big cemetery frogs nourished by the
dead. They are all huddled together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual
glee.
I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being. Hymie the
bullfrog! His mother was at the bottom of the pack and Hymie, then an embryo, was hidden
away in her
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sac. It was in the early days of sexual intercourse and there were no
Marquis of Queensbury rules to hinder. It was fuck and be fucked - and the devil take the
hindmost. It had been that way ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck in the mud and then a
quick spawn and then death. People are fucking on different levels but it's always in a
swamp and the litter is always destined for the same end. When the house is torn down the
bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar.
I was polluting the bed with dreams. Stretched out taut on the
ferro-concrete my soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on a little
trolley such as is used in department stores for making change. I made ideological changes
and excursions; I was a vagabond in the country of the brain. Everything was absolutely
clear to me because done in rock crystal; at every egress there was written in big letters
ANNIHILATION. The fright of extinction solidified me;
the body became itself a piece of ferro-concrete. It was ornamented by
a permanent erection in the best taste. I had achieved that state of vacuum so earnestly
desired by certain devout members of esoteric cults. I was no more. I was not
even a personal hard-on.
It was about this time, adopting the pseudonym Samson Lackawanna, that
I began my depredations. The criminal instinct in me had gotten the upper hand. Whereas
heretofore I had been only an errant soul, a sort of Gentile Dybbuk, now I became a
flesh-filled ghost. I had taken the name which pleased me and I had only to act
instinctively. In Hong Kong, for instance, I made my entry as a book-agent. I carried a
leather purse filled with Mexican dollars and I visited religiously all those Chinese who
were in need of further education. At the hotel I rang for women like you would ring for
whiskey and soda. Morning I studied Tibetan in order to prepare for the journey to Lhasa.
I already spoke Jewish fluently, and Hebrew too. I could count two rows of figures at
once. It was so easy to swindle the Chinese that I went back to Manila in disgust. There I
took a Mr. Rico in hand and taught him the art of selling books with no handling charges.
All the profit came from ocean freight rates, but it was sufficient
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to keep me in luxury while it lasted.
The breath had become as much a trick as breathing. Things were not
dual merely, but multiple. I had become a cage of mirrors reflecting vacuity. But vacuity
once stoutly posited I was at home and what is called creation was merely a job of filling
up holes. The trolley conveniently carried me about from place to place and in each little
side pocket of the great vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of
annihilation. I had ever before me boundless vistas. I began to live in the vista, like a
microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope. There was no night in which to rest.
It was perpetual starlight on the arid surface of dead planets. Now and then a lake black
as marble in which I saw myself walking amidst brilliant orbs of lights. So low hung the
stars and so dazzling was the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only
about to be born. What rendered the impression stronger was that I was alone; not only
were there no animals, no trees, no other beings, but there was not even a blade of grass,
not even a dead root. In that violet incandescent light witihout even the suggestion of a
shadow motion itself seemed to be absent. It was like a blaze of pure consciousness,
thought become God. And God, for the first time in my knowledge, was dean-shaven. I was
also clean-shaven, flawless, deadly accurate. I saw my image in the marble black lakes and
it was diapered with stars. Stars, stars... like a clout between the eyes and all
remembrance fast run out. I was Samson and I was Lackawanna and I was dying as one being
in the ecstasy of full consciousness.
And now here I am, sailing down the river in my little canoe. Anything
you would like to have me do I will do for you - gratis. This is the Land of Fuck, in
which there are no animals, no trees, no stars, no problems. Here the spermatazoon reigns
supreme. Nothing is determined in advance, the future is absolutely uncertain, the past is
non-existent. For every million born 999,999 are doomed to die and never again be born.
But the one that makes a home run is assured of life eternal. Life is squeezed into a
seed, which is a soul. Everything has soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains,
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rocks. Everything is sentient, even at the lowest stage of
consciousness.
Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very
bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss as at the
top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa come to full consciousness.
Between the bottom and the top there is no stop, no halfway station. The river starts
somewhere in the mountains and flows on into the sea. On this river that leads to God the
canoe is as serviceable as the dreadnought. From the very start the journey is homeward.
Sailing down the river... Slow as the hook-worm, but tiny enough to
make every bend. And slippery as an eel withal. What is your name? shouts some one. My
name? Why just call me God - God the embryo, I go sailing on. Somebody would like to
buy me a hat. What size do you wear, imbecile! he shouts. What size? Why size X!
(And why do they always shout at me? Am I supposed to be deaf?) The hat is lost at the
next cataract. Tant pis - for the hat. Does God need a hat? God needs only to
become God, more and more God. All this voyaging, all these pitfalls, the time that
passes, the scenery, and against the scenery man, trillions and trillions of things called
man, like mustard seeds. Even in embryo God has no memory. The backdrop of consciousness
is made up of infinitesimally minute ganglia, a coat of hair soft as wool. The mountain
goat stands alone amidst the Himalayas; he doesn't question how he got to the summit. He
grazes quietly amidst the decor; when the time comes he will travel down again. He
keeps his muzzle to the ground, grubbing for the sparse nourishment which the mountain
peaks afford. In this strange capricornian condition of embryosis God the he-goat
ruminates in stolid bliss among the mountain peaks. The high altitudes nourish the germ of
separation which will one day estrange him completely from the soul of man, which will
make him a desolate, rock-like father dwelling forever apart in a void which is
unthinkable. But first come the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak...
There is a condition of misery which is irremediable -
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because its origin is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale's, for example,
can bring about this condition. All department stores are symbols of sickness and
emptiness, but Bloomingdale's is my special sickness, my incurable obscure malady. In the
chaos of Bloomingdale's there is an order, but this order is absolutely crazy to me, it is
the order which I would find on the head of a pin if I were to put it under the
microscope. It is the order of an accidental series of accidents accidentally conceived.
This order has, above all, an odour - and it is the odour of Bloomingdale's which strikes
terror into my heart. In Bloomingdale's I fall apart completely: I dribble on to the
floor, a helpless mess of guts and bones and cartilage. There is the smell, not of
decomposition, but of mis-alliance. Man, the miserable alchemist, has welded together in a
million forms and shapes, substances and essences which have nothing in common. Because in
his mind there is a tumor which is eating him away insatiably; he has left the little
canoe which was taking him blissfully down the river in order to construct a bigger, safer
boat in which there may be room for every one. His labours take him so far afield that he
has lost all remembrance of why he left the little canoe. The ark is so full of
bric-a-brac that it has become a stationary building above a subway in which the smell of
linoleum prevails and predominates. Gather together all the significance hidden away in
the interstital miscellany of Bloomingdale's and put it on the head of a pin and you will
have left a universe in which the grand constellations move without the slightest danger
of collision. It is this microscopic chaos which brings on my morganatic ailments. In the
street I begin to stab horses at random, or I lift a skirt here and there looking for a
letter-box, or I put a postage stamp across a mouth, an eye, a vagina. Or I suddenly
decide to climb a tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly
with real wings and I fly and fly and fly, covering towns like Weehawken, Hoboken,
Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye. Once you become a real
schizerino flying is the easiest thing in the world; the trick is to fly with the etheric
body, to leave behind in Bloomingdale's your sack of bones, guts,
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blood and cartilage; to fly only with your immutable self which, if you
stop a moment to reflect, is always equipped with wings. Flying this way, in full
daylight, has advantages over the ordinary night-flying which everybody indulges in. You
can leave off from moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there
is no difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave off, you are
your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self. Only, as the Blooming-dale
experience goes to prove, this whole self, about which so much boasting has been done,
falls apart very easily. The smell of linoleum, for some strange reason, will always make
me fall apart and collapse on the floor. It is the smell of all the unnatural things which
were glued together in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative consent.
It is only after the third meal that the morning gifts, bequeathed by
the phony alliances of the ancestors, begin to drop away and the true rock of the self,
the happy rock sheers up out of the muck of the soul. With nightfall the pinhead universe
begins to expand. It expands organically, from an infinitesimal nuclear speck, in the way
that minerals or star-dusters form. It eats into the surrounding chaos like a rat boring
through store cheese. All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, but the self,
microscopical at the start, works up to a universe from any point in space. This is not
the self about which books are written, but the ageless self whith has been fanned out
through millenary ages to men with names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a
worm, which is the worm in the cheese called the world. Just as the slightest
breeze can set a vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the
rock-like self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against it. It's
like Jack Frost at work, and the whole world a window-pane. No hint of labour, no sound,
no struggle, no rest;
relentless, remorseless, unremitting, the growth of the self goes on.
Only two items on the bill of fare: the self and the not-self. And an eternity in which to
work it out. In this eternity, which has nothing to do with time or space, there are
interludes in which something like a thaw sets in. The form
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of the self breaks down, but the self, like climate, remains. In the
night the amorphous matter of the self assumes the most fugitive forms: error seeps in
through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched from his door. This door which the
body wears, if opened out on to the world, leads to annihilation. It is the door in every
fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through
the selfsame door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no
horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each couche is a
halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years. The doors have no
handles and they never wear out. Most important to note - there is no end in sight. All
these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth. One can
feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home.
But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel
"established" the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the
constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including
the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and
unconcerned, towards an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem to be opening at
once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the
skeleton bursts asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have
experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a
core, a dead centre from which time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, for here
it is seen to be divine.
All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving door of
the Amarillo dance hall one night some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great event took
place. The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a realm of time more than of
space, is for me the equivalent of that Purgatory which Dante has described in nice
detail. As I put my hand on the brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo
Dance Hall, all that I had previously been, was, and about to be, foundered. There was
nothing unreal about it; the very time
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in which I was born passed away, carried off by a mightier stream. Just
as I had previously been bundled out of the womb, so now I was shunted back to some
timeless vector where the process of growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world
of effects. There was no fear, only a feeling of fatality. My spine was socketed to the
node; I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the skeleton
blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse.
If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning.
If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no avail. It is zero
hour and the moon is at nadir...
Why I think of Maxie Schnadig I don't know, unless it is because of
Dostoievski. The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most
important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first
deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the
world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the
first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I
know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that
Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me? Maybe I have been a bit queer
before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I dipped into Dostoievski I
was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer. The ordinary waking, work-a-day world was
finished for me. Any ambition of desire I had to write was also killed - for a long time
to come. I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire.
Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions - it was just
so much shit to me.
I can visualize best my condition when I think of my relations with
Maxie and his sister Rita. At the time Maxie and I were both interested in sport. We used
to go swimming together a great deal, that I remember well. Often we passed the whole day
and night at the beach. I had only met Maxie's sister once or twice; whenever I brought up
her name Maxie would rather frantically begin to talk about something else.
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That annoyed me because I was really bored to death with Maxie's
company, tolerating him only because he loaned me money readily and bought me things which
I needed. Every time we started for the beach I was in hopes his sister would turn up
unexpectedly. But no, he always managed to keep her out of reach. Well, one day as we were
undressing in the bath house and he was showing me what a fine tight scrotum he had, I
said to him right out of the blue - "listen, Maxie, that's all right about your nuts,
they're fine and dandy, and there's nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all
the time, why don't you bring her along some time and let me take a good look at her
quim... yes, quim, you know what I mean." Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had
never heard the word quim before. He was deeply shocked by my words and yet at the same
time intrigued by this new word. In a sort of daze he said to me - "Jesus, Henry, you
oughtn't to say a thing like that to me!" "Why not?" I answered.
"She's got a cunt, your sister, hasn't she?" I was about to add something else
when he broke into a terrific fit of laughter. That saved the situation, for the time
being. But Maxie didn't like the idea at all deep down. All day long it bothered him,
though he never referred to our conversation again. No, he was very silent that day. The
only form of revenge he could think of was to urge me to swim far beyond the safety zone
in the hope of tiring me out and letting me drown. I could see so clearly what was in his
mind that I was possessed with the strength of ten men. Damned if I would go drown myself
just because his sister like all other women happened to have a cunt.
It was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and
eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very abruptly, at the
comer of a street. I shook hands and said good-bye. And there I was! Almost
instantaneously I felt alone in the world, alone as one feels only in moments of extreme
anguish. I think I was picking my teeth absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me
full on, like a tornado. I stood there on the street comer and sort of felt myself all
over to see if I had been hit by something. It was inexplicable, and at the same time it
was very wonderful,
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very exhilarating, like a double tonic, I might say. When I say that I
was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end of the earth, at a place called
Xanthos, if there be such a place, and surely there ought to be a word like this to
express no place at all. If Rita had come along then I don't think I would have recognized
her. I had become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people. They
looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunbumed faces and their flannel trousers
and their dock-work stockings. They had been bathing like myself because it was a
pleasant, healthy recreation and now like myself they were full of sun and food and a
little heavy with fatigue. Up until this loneliness hit me I too was a bit weary, but
suddenly, standing there completely shut off from the world, I woke up with a start I
became so electrified that I didn't dare move for fear I would charge like a bull or start
to climb the wall of a building or else dance and scream. Suddenly I realized that all
this was because I was really a brother to Dostoievski, that perhaps I was the only man in
all America who knew what he meant in writing those books. Not only that, but I felt all
the books I would one day write myself germinating inside me: they were bursting inside
like ripe cocoons. And since up to this time I had written nothing but fiendishly long
letters about everything and nothing, it was difficult for me to realize that there must
come a time when I should begin, when I should put down the first word, the first-real
word. And this time was now! That was what dawned on me.
I used the word Xanthos a moment ago. I don't know whether there is a
Xanthos or not, and I really don't care one way or another, but there must be a place in
the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you come to the end of the known world
and you are thoroughly alone and yet you are not frightened of it but rejoice, because at
this dropping off place you can feel the old ancestral world which is eternally young and
new and fecundating. You stand there, wherever the place is, like a newly hatched chick
beside its eggshell. This place is Xanthos, or as it happened in my case. Far Rockaway.
There I was! It grew dark, a wind came up, the streets
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became deserted, and finally it began to pour cats and dogs. Jesus,
that finished me! When the rain came down, and I got it smack in the face staring at the
sky, I suddenly began to bellow with joy. I laughed and laughed and laughed, exactly like
an insane man. Nor did I know what I was laughing about. I wasn't thinking of a thing. I
was just overwhelmed with joy, just crazy with delight in finding myself absolutely alone.
If then and there a nice juicy quim had been handed me on a platter, if all the quims in
the world had been afforded me for to make my choice, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash. I
had what no quim could give me. And just about at that point, thoroughly drenched but
still exultant, I thought of the most irrelevant thing in the world - carfare!
Jesus, the bastard Maxie had walked off without leaving me a sou. There I was with my fine
budding antique world and not a penny in my jeans. Herr Dostoievski Junior had now to
begin to walk here and there peering into friendly and un-friendly faces to see if he
could pry loose a dime. He walked from one end of Far Rockaway to the other but nobody
seemed to give a fuck about handing out carfare in the rain. Walking about in that heavy
animal stupor which comes with begging I got to thinking of Maxie the window-trimmer and
how the first time I spied him he was standing in the show-window dressing a mannikin. And
from that in a few minutes to Dostoievski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a
great rose bush opening in the night, his sister Rita's warm, velvety flesh.
Now this what is rather strange ... A few minutes after I thought of
Rita, her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train bound for New York and dozing
off with a marvellous languid erection. And stranger still, when I got out of the train,
when I had walked but a block or two from the station, whom should I bump into rounding a
comer but Rita herself. And as though she had been informed telepathically of what was
going on in my brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers. Soon we were sitting in a chop
suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a pair of rabbits
in rut. On the dance floor we hardly moved. We were wedged in tight and we stayed that
way, letting them jog and jostle us
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about as they might. I could have taken her home to my place, as I was
alone at the time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her up
in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie's nose - which I did. In the midst
of it I thought again of the mannikin in the show window and of the way he had laughed
that afternoon when I let drop the word quim. I was on the point of laughing aloud when
suddenly I felt that she was coming, one of those long drawn-out orgasms such as you get
now and then in a Jewish cunt. I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers
just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I lifted her from
the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of my cock. I thought she would go
off her nut completely, the way she began to carry on. She must have had four or five
orgasms like that in the air, before I put her feet down on the ground. I took it out
without spilling a drop and made her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off
into a corner and her bag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out. I note this
because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket a few
coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had said to Maxie in
the bath house that I would like to take a look at his sister's quim, and here it was now
smack, up against me, sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another. If she had
been fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that's a cinch. And I myself was
never in such a fine cool collected scientific frame of mind as now lying on the floor of
the vestibule right under Maxie's nose, pumping it into the private, sacred, and
extraordinary quim of his sister Rita. I could have held it in indefinitely - it was
incredible how detached I was and yet thoroughly aware of every quiver and jolt she made.
But somebody had to pay for making me walk around in the rain grubbing a dime. Somebody
had to pay for the ecstasy produced by the germination of all those unwritten books inside
me. Somebody had to verify the authenticity of this private, concealed cunt which had been
plaguing me for weeks and months. Who better qualified than I? I thought so hard and fast
between orgasms
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that my cock must have grown another inch or two. Finally I decided to
make an end of it by turning her over and back-scuttling her. She balked a bit at first,
but when she felt the thing slipping out of her she nearly went crazy. "Oh yes, oh
yes, do it, do it!" she gibbered, and with that I really got excited, I had hardly
slipped it into her when I felt it coming, one of those long agonizing spurts from the tip
of the spinal column. I shoved it in so deep that I felt as if something had given way. We
fell over, exhausted, the both of us, and panted like dogs. At the same time, however, I
had the presence of mind to feel around for a few coins. Not that it was necessary,
because she had already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up for the carfare which I
was lacking in Far Rockaway. Even then, by Jesus, it Wasn't finished. Soon I felt her
groping about, first with her hands, then with her mouth. I had still a sort of semi
hard-on. She got it into her mouth and she began to caress it with her tongue. I saw
stars. The next thing I knew her feet were around my neck and my tongue up her twat. And
then I had to get over her again and shove it in, up to the hilt. She squirmed around like
an eel, so help me God. And then she began to come again, long, drawn-out, agonizing
orgasms, with a whimpering and gibbering that was hallucinating. Finally I had to pull it
out and tell her to stop. What a quim! And I had only asked to take a look at it!
Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I had lost as a
child. Though I had never a very dear picture of Odessa the aura of it was like the little
neighbourhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from which I had been torn away
too soon. I get a very definite feeling of it every time I see an Italian painting without
perspective: if it is a picture of a funeral procession, for example, it is exactly the
sort of experience which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy. If it is a picture
of the open street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting on the street and
not above it and away from it. Everything that happens is known immediately by everybody,
just as among primitive people. Murder is in the air, chance rules.
Just as in the Italian primitives this perspective is lacking, so
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in the little old neighbourhood from which I was uprooted as a child
there were these parallel vertical planes on which everything took place and through
which, from layer to layer, everything was communicated, as if by osmosis. The frontiers
were sharp, dearly defined, but they were not impassable. I lived then, as a boy, dose to
the boundary between the north and the south side. I was just a little bit over on the
north side, just a few steps from a broad thoroughfare called North Second Street, which
was for me the real boundary line between the north and the south side. The actual
boundary was Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant nothing to
me, except that it was already beginning to be filled with Jews. No, North Second Street
was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds. I was living, therefore, between
two boundaries, the one real, the other imaginary - as I have lived all my life. There was
a little street, just a block long which lay between Grand Street and North Second Street,
called Fillmore Place. This little street was obliquely opposite the house my grandfather
owned and in which we lived. It was the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my
life. It was the ideal street - for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a
lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In
fact this was just the sort of street it was, containing just such representatives of the
human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together harmoniously and
inharmoniously, but together, a solid corporation, a dose-knit human spore which
could not disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated.
So it seemed, at least. Until the Williamsburg Bridge was opened,
whereupon there followed the invasion of the Jews from Delancey Street, New York. This
brought about the disintegration of our little world, of the little street called Fillmore
Place, which like the name itself was a street of value, of dignity, of light, of
surprises. The Jews came, as I say, and like moths they began to eat into the fabric of
our lives until there was nothing left by this moth-like presence which they brought with
them everywhere. Soon the street began to smell bad, soon the real people moved away, soon
the houses
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began to deteriorate and even the stoops fell away, like the paint.
Soon the street looked like a dirty mouth with all the prominent teeth missing, with ugly
charred stumps gaping here and there, the lips rotting, the palate gone. Soon the garbage
was knee deep in the gutter and the fire escapes filled with bloated bedding, with
cockroaches, with dried blood. Soon the Kosher sign appeared on the shop windows and there
was poultry everywhere and lax and sour pickles and enormous loaves of bread. Soon there
were baby-carriages in every areaway and on the stoops and in the little yards and before
the shop fronts. And with the change the English language also disappeared; one heard
nothing but Yiddish, nothing but this sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which God and
rotten vegetables sound alike and mean alike.
We were among the first families to move away, following the invasion.
Two or three times a year I came back to the old neighbourhood, for a birthday or for
Christmas or Thanksgiving. With each visit I marked the loss of something I had loved and
cherished. It was like a bad dream. It got worse and worse. The house in which my
relatives still lived was like an old fortress going to ruin; they were stranded in one of
the wings of the fortress, maintaining a forlorn, island life, beginning themselves to
look sheepish, hunted, degraded. They even began to make distinctions between their Jewish
neighbours, finding some of them quite human, quite decent, dean, kind, sympathetic,
charitable, etc. etc. To me it was heartrending. I could have taken a machine gun and
mowed the whole neighbourhood down, Jew and Gentile together.
It was about the time of the invasion that the authorities decided to
change the name of North Second Street to Metropolitan Avenue. This highway, which to the
Gentiles had been the road to the cemeteries, now became what is called an artery of
traffic, a link between two ghettoes. On the New York side the riverfront was rapidly
being transformed owing to the erection of the skyscrapers. On our side, the Brooklyn
side, the warehouses were piling up and the approaches to the various new bridges created
plazas, comfort stations, pool rooms, stationery shops, ice cream parlours, restaurants,
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clothing stores, hock shops, etc. In short everything was becoming metropolitan,
in the odious sense of the word.
As long as we lived in the old neighbourhood we never referred to
Metropolitan Avenue: it was always North Second Street, despite the official change of
name. Perhaps it was eight or ten years later, when I stood one winter's day at the corner
of the street facing the river and noticed for the first time the great tower of the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, that I realized that North Second Street was no
more. The imaginary boundary of my world had changed. My lance travelled now far beyond
the cemeteries, far beyond the rivers, far beyond the city of New York or the State of New
York, beyond the whole United States indeed. At Point Loma, California, I had looked out
upon the broad Pacific and I had felt something there which kept my face permanently
screwed in another direction. I came back to the old neighbourhood, I remember, one night
with my old friend Stanley who had just come out of the army, and we walked the streets
sadly and wistfully. A European can scarcely know what this feeling is like. Even when a
town becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges of the old. In America,
though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped out of the consciousness, trampled
upon, obliterated, nullified by the new. The new is, from day to day, a moth which eats
into the fabric of life, leaving nothing finally but a great hole. Stanley and I, we were
walking through this terrifying hole. Even a war does not bring this kind of desolation
and destruction. Through war a town may be reduced to ashes and the entire population
wiped out, but what springs up again resembles the old. Death is fecundating, for the soil
as well as for the spirit. In America the destruction is completely annihilating. There is
no rebirth only a cancerous growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each one
uglier than the previous one.
We were walking through this enormous hole, as I say, and it was a
winter's night, dear, frosty, sparkling, and as we came through the south side towards the
boundary line we saluted all the old relics or the spots where things had once stood and
where there had been once something of ourselves. And as we
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approached North Second Street, between Fillmore Place and North Second
Street - a distance of only a few yards and yet such a rich, full area of the globe -
before Mrs. O'Melio's shanty I stopped and looked up at the house where I had known what
it was to really have a being. Everything had shrunk now to diminutive proportions,
including the world which lay beyond the boundary line, the world which had been so
mysterious to me and so terrifyingly grand, so delimited. Standing there in a trance I
suddenly recalled a dream which I have had over and over, which I still dream now and
then, and which I hope to dream as long as I live. It was the dream of passing the
boundary line. As in all dreams the remarkable thing is the vividness of the reality, the
fad that one is in reality and not dreaming. Across the line I am unknown and
absolutely alone. Even the language has changed. In fact, I am always regarded as a
stranger, a foreigner. I have unlimited time on my hands and I am absolutely content in
sauntering through the streets. There is only one street, I must say - the
continuation of the street on which I lived. I come finally to an iron bridge over the
railroad yards. It is always nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short
distance from the boundary line. Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight
stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this duster of strange
moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes place, just as in a dream. With
the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream which I have
dreamed so often. I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will
wake up shortly, just at the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to
walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance for me. Just as I
go towards this house the lot on which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to
dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of
course the house which I never succeed in entering.
There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream
I know to the heart of a book called Creative
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Evolution. In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as
naturally as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a
foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a
peculiar metamorphosis without and within. If this book had not fallen into my hands at
the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad. It came at a moment when another
huge world was crumbling on my hands. If I had never understood a thing which was written
in this book, if I had preserved only the memory of one word, creative, it is quite
sufficient. This word was my talisman. With it I was able to defy the whole world, and
especially my friends.
There are times when one must break with one's friends in order to
understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but the discovery of
this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an implement, wherewith I might lop
off all the friends who surrounded me and who no longer meant anything to me. This book
became my friend because it taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the
courage to stand alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never
understood the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I never
really did understand. It was more important for me not to understand. With this book in
my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made
clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not
understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very
clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference
between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another
created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.
Everything which before I thought I had understood crumbled, and I was left with a dean
slate. My friends, on the other hand, entrenched themselves more solidly in the little
ditch of understanding which they had dug for themselves. They died comfortably in their
little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in
short order.
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I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.
What was there then in this book which could mean so much to me and yet
remain obscure? I come back to the word creative. 1 am sure that the whole mystery
lies in the realization of the meaning of this word. When I think of the book now, and the
way I approached it, I think of a man going through the rites of initiation. The
disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the
most wonderful experience which it is possible to have. Everything which the brain has
laboured for a lifetime to assimilate, categorize and synthesize has to be taken apart and
reordered. Moving day for the soul! And of course it's not for a day, but for weeks and
months that this goes on. You meet a friend on the street by chance, one whom you haven't
seen for several weeks, and he has become an absolute stranger to you. You give him a few
signals from your new perch and if he doesn't cotton you pass him up - for good. It's
exactly like mopping up a battlefield: all those who are hopelessly disabled and agonizing
you dispatch with one swift blow of your dub. You move on, to new fields of battle, to new
triumphs or defeats. But you move! And as yon move the world moves with you, with
terrifying exactitude. You seek out new fields of operation, new specimens of the human
race whom you patiently instruct and equip with the new symbols. You choose sometimes
those you would never have looked at before. You try everybody and everything within
range, provided they are ignorant of the revelation.
It was in this fashion that I found myself sitting in the busheling
room of my father's establishment, reading aloud to the Jews who were working there.
Reading to them from this new Bible in the way that Paul must have talked to the
disciples. With the added disadvantage, to be sure, that these poor Jew bastards could not
read the English language. Primarily I was directing myself towards Bunchek the cutter,
who had a rabbinical mind. Opening the book I would pick a passage at random and read it
to them in a transposed English almost as primitive as pidgin English. Then I would
attempt to explain, choosing for example and analogy the
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things they were familiar with. It was amazing to me how well they
understood, how much better they understood, let me say, than a college professor or a
literary man or any educated man. Naturally what they understood had nothing to do finally
with Bergson's book, as a book, but was not that the purpose of such a book as this? My
understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that
it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in
turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world. It was a great communion feast which we
shared in the reading of this book and the outstanding feature of it was the chapter on
Disorder which, having penetrated me through and through, has endowed me with such a
marvellous sense of order that if a comet suddenly struck the earth and jarred everything
out of place, stood everything upside down, turned everything inside out, I could orient
myself to the new order in the twinkling of an eye. I have no fear or illusions about
disorder any more than I have of death. The labyrinth is my happy hunting ground and the
deeper I burrow into the maze the more oriented I become.
With Creative Evolution under my arm I board the elevated line
at the Brooklyn Bridge after work and I commence the journey homeward towards the
cemetery. Sometimes I get on at Delancey Street, the very heart of the ghetto, after a
long walk through the crowded streets. I enter the elevated line below the ground, like a
worm being pushed through the intestines. I know each time I take my place in the crowd
which mills about the platform that I am the most unique individual down there. I look
upon everything which is happening about me like a spectator from another planet. My
language, my world, is under my arm. I am the guardian of a great secret; if I were to
open my mouth and talk I would tie up traffic. What I have to say, and what I am holding
in every night of my life on this journey to and from the office, is absolute dynamite. I
am not ready yet to throw my stick of dynamite. I nibble at it meditatively, ruminatively,
cogently. Five more years, ten more years perhaps, and I will wipe these people out
utterly. If the train in making a curve gives a violent
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lurch I say to myself fine! jump the track, annihilate them! I
never think of myself as being endangered should the train jump the track. We're wedged in
like sardines and all the hot flesh pressed against me diverts my thoughts. I become
conscious of a pair of legs wrapped around mine. I look down at the girl sitting in front
of me, I look her right in the eye, and I press my knees still further into her crotch.
She grows uneasy, fidgets about in her seat, and finally she turns to the girl next to her
and complains that I am molesting her. The people about look at me hostilely. I look out
of the window blandly and pretend I have heard nothing. Even if I wished to I can't remove
my legs. Little by little though, the girl, by a violent pushing and squiggling, manages
to unwrap her legs from mine. I find myself almost in the same situation with the girl
next to her, the one she was addressing her complaints to. Almost at once I feel a
sympathetic touch and then, to my surprise, I hear her tell the other girl that one can't
help these things, that it is really not the man's fault but the fault of the company for
packing us in like sheep. And again I feel the quiver of her legs against mine, a warm,
human pressure, like squeezing one's hand. With my one free hand I manage to open my book.
My object is twofold: first I want her to see the kind of book I read, second, I want to
be able to carry on the leg language without attracting attention. It works beautifully.
By the time the train empties a bit I am able to take a seat beside her and converse with
her - about the book, naturally. She's a voluptuous Jewess with enormous liquid eyes and
the frankness which come from sensuality. When it comes time to get off we walk arm in arm
through the streets, towards her home. I am almost on the confines of the old
neighbourhood. Everything is familiar to me and yet repulsively strange. I have not walked
these streets for years and now I am walking with a Jew girl from the ghetto, a beautiful
girl with a strong Jewish accent. I look incongruous walking beside her. I can sense that
people are staring at us behind our backs. I am the intruder, the Goy who has come down
into the neighbourhood to pick off a nice ripe cunt. She on the other hand seems to be
proud of her conquest; she's showing me off to her friends. This
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is what I picked up in the train, an educated Goy, a refined Goy! I can
almost hear her think it. Walking slowly I'm getting the lay of the land, all the
practical details which will decide whether I call for her after dinner or not. There's no
thought of asking her t6 dinner. It's a question of what time and where to meet and how
will we go about it, because as she lets drop just before we reach the door, she's got a
husband who's a travelling salesman and she's got to be careful. I agree to come back and
to meet her at the comer in front of the candy store at a certain hour. If I want to bring
a friend along she'll bring her girl friend. No, I decide to see her alone. It's agreed.
She squeezes my hand and darts off into a dirty hallway. I beat it quickly back to the
elevated station and hasten home to gulp down the meal.
It's a Summer's night and everything flung wide open. Riding back to
meet her the whole past rushes up kaleidoscopically. This time I've left the book at home.
It's cunt I'm out for now and no thought of the book is in my head. I am back again this
side of the boundary line, each station whizzing past making my world grow more
diminutive. I am almost a child by the time I reach the destination. I am a child who is
horrified by the metamorphosis which has taken place. What has happened to me, a man of
the 14th Ward, to be jumping off at this station in search of a Jewish cunt? Supposing I
do give her a fuck, what then? What have I got to say to a girl like that? What's a fuck
when what I want is love? Yes, suddenly it comes over me like a tornado... Una, the girl I
loved, the girl who lived here in this neighbourhood, Una with big blue eyes and flaxen
hair, Una who made me tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even
to touch her hand. Where is Una? Yes, suddenly, that's the burning question: where
is Una ? In two seconds I am completely unnerved, completely lost, desolate, in the
most horrible anguish and despair. How did I ever let her go? Why? What happened? When
did it happen? I thought of her like a maniac night and day, year in and year out, and
then, without even noticing it, she drops out of my mind, like that, like a penny falling
through a hole in your pocket. Incredible,
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monstrous, mad. Why all I had to do was to ask her to marry me, ask her
hand - that's all. If I had done that she would have said yes immediately. She loved me,
she loved me desperately. Why yes, I remember now, I remember how she looked at me the
last time we met. I was saying good-bye because I was leaving that night for California,
leaving everybody to begin a new life. And I never had any intention of leading a new
life. I intended to ask her to marry me, but the story I had framed like a dope came out
of my lips so naturally that I believed it myself, and so I said good-bye and I walked
off, arid she stood there looking after me and I felt her eyes pierce me through and
through. I heard her howling inside, but like an automaton I kept on walking and finally I
turned the comer and that was the end of it. Good-bye! Like that. Like in a coma. And I
meant to say come to me! Come to me because I can't live any more without you!
I am so weak, so rocky, that I can scarcely climb down the L steps. Now
I know what's happened - I've crossed the boundary line! This Bible that I've been
carrying around with me is to instruct me, initiate me into a new way of life. The world I
knew is no more, it is dead, finished, cleaned up. And everything that I was is cleaned up
with it. I am a carcass getting an injection of new life. I am bright and glittery, rabid
with new discoveries, but in the centre it is still leaden, still slag. I begin to weep -
right there on the L stairs. I sob aloud, like a child. Now it dawns on me with full
clarity: you are alone in the world! You are alone . . . alone . . . alone. It is
bitter to be alone . .. bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. There is no end to it, it is
unfathomable, and it is the lot of every man on earth, but especially mine . . .
especially mine. Again the metamorphosis. Again everything totters, and careens. I am in
the dream again, the painful, delirious, pleasurable, maddening dream of beyond the
boundary. I am standing in the centre of the vacant lot, but my home I do not see. I have
no home. The dream was a mirage. There never was a house in the midst of the vacant lot.
That's why I was never able to enter it. My home is not in this world, nor in the next I
am a man without a home, without a friend, without a wife.
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I am a monster who belongs to a reality which does not exist yet. Ah,
but it does exist, it will exist, I am sure of it. I walk now rapidly, head down,
muttering to myself. I've forgotten about my rendezvous so completely that I never even
noticed whether I walked past her or not. Probably I did. Probably I looked right at her
and didn't recognize her. Probably she didn't recognize me either. I am mad, mad with
pain, mad with anguish. I am desperate. But I am not lost. No, there is a reality
to which I belong. It's far away, very far away. I may walk from now till doomsday with
head down and never find her. But it is there, I am sure of it. I look at people
murderously. If I could throw a bomb and blow the whole neighbourhood to smithereens I
would do it. I would be happy seeing them fly in the air, mangled, shrieking, torn apart,
annihilated. I want to annihilate the whole earth. I am not a part of it. It's mad from
start to finish. The whole shooting match. It's a huge piece of stale cheese with maggots
festering inside it. Fuck it! Blow it to hell! Kill, kill, kill: Kill them all, Jews and
Gentiles, young and old, good and bad ...
I grow light, light as a feather, and my pace becomes more steady, more
calm, more even. What a beautiful night it is! The stars shining so brightly, so serenely,
so remotely. Not mocking me precisely, but reminding me of the futility of it all. Who are
you, young man, to be talking of the earth, of blowing things to smithereens? Young man,
we have been hanging here for millions and billions of years. We have seen it all,
everything, and still we shine peacefully every night, we light the way, we still the
heart. Look around you, young man, see how still and beautiful everything is. Do you see,
even the garbage lying in the gutter looks beautiful in this light. Pick up the little
cabbage leaf, hold it gently in your hand. I bend down and pick up the cabbage leaf lying
in the gutter. It looks absolutely new to me, a whole universe in itself. I break a little
piece off and examine that. Still a universe. Still unspeakably beautiful and mysterious.
I am almost ashamed to throw it back in the gutter. I bend down and deposit it gently with
the other refuse. I become very thoughtful, very, very calm. I love everybody in the
world. I know that somewhere at this
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very moment there is a woman waiting for me and if only I proceed very
calmly, very gently, very slowly, I will come to her. She will be standing on a comer
perhaps and when I come in sight she will recognize me - immediately. I believe this, so
help me God! I believe that everything is just and ordained. My home? Why it is the world
- the whole world! I am at home everywhere, only I did not know it before. But I know now.
There is no boundary line any more. There never was a boundary line: it was I who made it.
I walk slowly and blissfully through the streets. The beloved streets. Where everybody
walks and everybody suffers without showing it. When I stand and lean against a lamp post
to light my cigarette even the lamp post feels friendly. It is not a thing of iron - it is
a creation of the human mind, shaped a certain way, twisted and formed by human hands,
blown on with human breath, placed by human hands and feet. I turn round and rub my hand
over the iron surface. It almost seems to speak to me. It is a human lamp post. It belongs,
like the cabbage leaf, like the torn socks, like the mattress, like the kitchen sink.
Everything stands in a certain way in a certain place, as our mind stands in relation to
God. The world, in its visible, tangible substance, is a map of our love. Not God but life
is love. Love, love, love. And in the midmost midst of it walks this young man, myself,
who is none other than Gotdieb Leberecht Muller.
Gotdieb Leberecht Miiller! This is the name of a man who lost his
identity. Nobody could tell him who he was, where he came from or what had happened to
him. In the movies, where I first made the acquaintance of this individual it was assumed
that he had met with an accident in the war. But when I recognized myself on the screen,
knowing that I had never been to the war, I realized that the author had invented this
little piece of fiction in order not to expose me. Often I forget which is the real me.
Often in my dreams I take the draught of forgetfulness, as it is called, and I wander
forlorn and desperate, seeking the body and the name which is mine. And sometimes between
the dream and reality there is only
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the thinnest line. Sometimes while a person is talking to me I step out
of my shoes, and, like a plant drifting with the current, I begin the voyage, of my
rootless self. In this condition I am quite capable of fulfilling the ordinary demands of
life - of finding a wife, of becoming a father, of supporting the household, of
entertaining friends, of reading books, of paying taxes, of performing military services,
and so on and so forth. In this condition I am capable if needs be, of killing in cold
blood, for the sake of my family or to protect my country, or whatever it may be. I am the
ordinary, routine citizen who answers to a name and who is given a number in his passport.
I am thoroughly irresponsible for my fate.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking
about me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me, neither my own
behaviour nor that of my neighbours, nor do I understand why the governments are at war or
at peace, whichever the case may be. At such moments I am born anew, born and baptized by
my right name: Gotdieb Leberecht Miiller! Everything I do in my right name is looked upon
as crazy. People make furtive signs behind my back, sometimes to my face even. I am forced
to break with friends and family and loved ones. I am obliged to break camp. And so, just
as naturally as in dream, I find myself once again drifting with the current,
usually walking along a highway, my face set towards the sinking sun. Now all my faculties
become alert. I am the most suave silky, cunning animal - and I am at the same time what
might be called a holy man. I know how to fend for myself. I know how to avoid work, how
to avoid entangling relationships, how to avoid pity, sympathy, bravery, and all the other
pitfalls. I stay in place or widi a person just long enough to obtain what I need, and
then I'm off again. I have no goal: the aimless wandering is sufficient unto itself. I am
free as a bird, sure as an equilibrist. Manna falls from the sky; I have only to hold out
my hands and receive. And everywhere I leave the most pleasant feeling behind me, as
though, in accepting the gifts that are showered upon me, I am doing a real favour to
others. Even my dirty linen is
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taken care of by loving hands. Because everybody loves a right-living
man! Gottlieb! What a beautiful name it is! Gotdieb! I say to myself over and over.
Gottlieb Leberecht Muller.
In this condition I have always fallen in with thieves and rogues and
murderers, and how .kind and gentle they have been with me! As though they were my
brothers. And are they not, indeed? Have I not been guilty of every crime, and suffered
for it? And is it not just because of my crimes that I am united so closely to my
fellowman? Always, when I see a light of recognition in the other person's eyes, I am
aware of this secret bond. It is only the just whose eyes never light up. It is the just
who have never known the secret of human fellowship. It is the just who are committing the
crimes against man, the just who are the real monsters. It is the just who demand our
fingerprints, who prove to us that we have died even when we stand before them in the
flesh. It is the just who impose upon us arbitrary names, false names, who put false dates
in the register and bury us alive. I prefer the thieves, the rogues, the murderers unless
I can find a man of my own stature, my own quality.
I have never found such a man! I have never found a man as generous as
myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at heart. I forgive
myself for every crime I have committed. I do it in the name of humanity. I know what it
means to be human, the weakness and the strength of it. I suffer from this knowledge and I
revel in it also. If I had the chance to be God I would reject it. If I had the chance to
be a star I would reject it. The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be
human. It embraces the whole universe. It includes the knowledge of death, which not even
God enjoys.
At the point from which this book is written I am the man who baptized
himself anew. It is many years since this happened and so much has come in between that it
is difficult to get back to that moment and retrace the journey of Gottlieb Leberecht
Muller. However, perhaps I can give the clue if I say that the man which I now am was born
out of a wound. That wound went to the heart. By all man-made logic I should have
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been dead. I was in fact given up for dead by all who once knew me; I
walked about like a ghost in their midst. They used the past tense in referring to me,
they pitied me, they shovelled me under deeper and deeper. Yet I remembered how I used to
laugh then, as always, how I made love to other women, how I enjoyed my food and drink,
and the soft bed which I dung to like a fiend. Something had killed me, and yet I was
alive. But I was live without a memory, without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as
from remorse or regret. I had no past and I would probably have no future;
I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt
me. I was the wound itself.
I have a friend who talks to me from time to time about the Miracle of
Golgotha of which I understand nothing. But I do know something about the miraculous wound
which I received, the wound which killed me in the eyes of the world and out of which I
was born anew and rebaptized. I know something of the miracle of this wound which I lived
and which healed with my death. I tell it as of something long past, but it is with me
always. Everything is long past and seemingly invisible, like a constellation which has
sunk forever beneath the horizon.
What fascinates me is that anything so dead and buried as I was could
be resuscitated, and not just once, but innumerable times. And not only that, but each
time I faded out I plunged deeper than ever into the void, so that with each resuscitation
the miracle becomes greater. And never any stigmata! The man who is reborn is always the
same man, more and more himself with each rebirth. He is only shedding his skin each time,
and with his skin his sins. The man whom God loves is truly a right living man. The man
whom God loves is the onion with a million skins. To shed the first layer is painful
beyond words; the next layer is less painful, the next still less, until finally the pain
becomes pleasurable, more and more pleasurable, a delight, an ecstasy. And then there is
neither pleasure not pain, but simply darkness yielding before the light. And as the
darkness falls away the wound comes out of its hiding place: the wound which is man, man's
love, is bathed in light.
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The identity which was lost is recovered. Man walks forth from his open
wound, from the grave which he had carried about with him so long.
In the tomb which is my memory I see her buried now, the one I loved
better than all else, better than the world, better than God, better than my own flesh and
blood. I see her festering there in that bloody wound of love, so dose to me that I could
not distinguish her from the wound itself. I see her struggling to free herself, to make
herself clean of love pain, and with each struggle sinking back again into the wound,
mired, suffocated, writhing in blood. I see the terrible look in her eyes, the mute
piteous agony, the look of the beast that is trapped. I see her opening her legs for
deliverance and each orgasm a groan of anguish. I hear the walls falling, the walls caving
in on us and the house going up in flames. I hear them calling us from the street, the
summons to work, the summons to arms, but we are nailed to the floor and the rats are
biting into us. The grave and womb of love entombing us, the night filling our bowels and
the stars shimmering over the black bottomless lake. I lose the memory of words, of her
name even which I pronounced like a monomaniac. I forgot what she looked like, what she
felt like, what she smelt like, what she fucked like, piercing deeper and deeper into the
night of the fathomless cavern. I followed her to the deepest hole of her being, to the
charnel house of her soul, to the breath which had not yet expired from her lips. I sought
relentlessly for her whose name was not written anywhere, I penetrated to the very altar
and found - nothing. I wrapped myself around this hollow shell of nothingness like a
serpent with fiery coils; I lay still for six centuries without breathing as world events
sieved through to the bottom forming a slimy bed of mucus. I saw the constellations
wheeling about the huge hole in the ceiling of the universe: I saw the outer planets and
the black star which was to deliver me. I saw the Dragon shaking itself free of dharma and
karma, saw the new race of man stewing in the yolk of futurity. I saw through to the last
sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining
through, huge, fleshy-like luminous breasts, as though I were swim-
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ming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.
How had she come to expand thus beyond all grip of consciousness? By
what monstrous law had she spread herself thus over the face of the world, revealing
everything and yet concealing herself? She was hidden in the face of the sun, like the
moon in eclipse; she was a mirror which had lost its quicksilver, the mirror which yields
both the image and the horror. Looking into the backs of her eyes, into the pulpy
translucent flesh, I saw the brain structure of all formations, all relations, all
evanescence. I saw the brain within the brain, the endless machine endlessly turning, the
word Hope revolving on a spit, roasting, dripping with fat, revolving ceaselessly in the
cavity of the third eye. I heard her dreams mumbled in lost tongues, the stifled screams
reverberating in minute crevices, the gasps, the groans, the pleasurable sighs, the swish
of lashing whips. I heard her call my own name which I had not yet uttered, I heard her
curse and shriek with rage. I heard everything magnified a thousand times, like a
homunculus imprisoned in the belly organ. I caught the muffled breathing of the world, as
if fixed in the very crossroads of sound.
Thus we walked and slept and ate together, the Siamese twins whom Love
had joined and whom Death alone could separate.
We walked upside down, hand in hand, at the neck of the Bottle. She
dressed in black almost exclusively, except for patches of purple now and then. She wore
no underclothes, just a simple sheet of black velvet saturated with a diabolical perfume.
We went to bed at dawn and got up just as it was darkling. We lived in black holes with
drawn curtains, we ate from black plates, we read from black books. We looked out of the
black hole of our life into the black hole of the world. The sun was permanently blacked
out, as though to aid us in continuous internecine strife. For sun we had Mars, for moon
Saturn: we lived permanently in the zenith of the underworld. The earth had ceased to
revolve and through the hole in the sky above us there hung the black star which never
twinkled. Now and then we had fits of laughter, crazy, batrachian laughter
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which made the neighbours shudder. Now and then we sang, delirious,
on-key, full tremolo. We were locked in throughout the long dark night of the soul, a
period of incommensurable time which began and ended in the manner of an eclipse. We
revolved about our own egos, like phantom satellites. We were drunk with our own image
which we saw when we looked into each other's eyes. How then did we look to others ? As
the beast looks to the plant, as the stars look to the beast. Or as God would look to man
if the devil had given him wings. And with it all, in the fixed, dose intimacy of a night
without end she was radiant, jubilant, an ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a
steady flow of sperm from the Mithraic Bull. She was double-barrelled, like a shot-gun, a
female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she focussed on the grand
cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-saliva. In the blind hole of
sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, her jaws unhinged like a snake's, her skin
horripilating in barbed plumes. She had the insatiable lust of a unicorn, the itch that
laid the Egyptians low. Even the hole in the sky through which the lacklustre star shone
down was swallowed up in her fury.
We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot, rancid fume of the everyday
life steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow of human
flesh warming the snake-like coils in which we were locked. We lived riveted to the
nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the colour of a grey cigar by the fumes of worldly
passion. Like two heads carried on the pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and
fixedly over the heads and shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth
to us who were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin snakes of
Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a perpetual black fuck about a
fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury,
conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn, conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction
quicksilver, laudanum, radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night,
Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great
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malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The
great curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye.
The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too
much. I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist. It
seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted connubial solstice I sat on her lap
(even when she was standing) and spoke the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that
she must have commanded God's chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the
hole in the ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the
crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind becomes a
twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I only imagine that she
talked incessantly, or had I become such a marvellously trained dummy that I intercepted
the thought before it reached the lips? The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a
thick paste of dark blood: I watched them open and dose with the utmost fascination,
whether they hissed a viper's hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were always close-up,
as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every pore, and when the hysterical
salivating began I watched the spittle fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking
chair under Niagara Falls. I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her
organism; I was better than a ventriloquist's dummy because I could act without being
violently jerked by strings. Now and then I did things impromptu like, which sometimes
pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to notice these interruptions,
but I could always tell when she was pleased by the way she preened herself. She had the
gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to
the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the
flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a
ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits - the
heart, the liver, or the ovaries -and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did
someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her
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eyes not quite dosed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk.
Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals
and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvellously I learned to
take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird
lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to
tip, feather to feather, the yolk in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a
tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus,
Saturn, Uranus, et cetera, love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, dutch this, dutch
that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food
time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep,
blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit
voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic
predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love!
Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole
of Calcutta.
Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the
cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the
spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men, lulled, exhausted by centuries of
incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity
took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the
heaven with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to
bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no
scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard bums, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating
hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there - like a fissure
in the bladder - and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off
with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the
silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the poom of the "other" world? Eat
a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow -
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but finally, what then? Finally ? What was finally?
A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the
vault... what ? what ? I'll tell you - sitting in her lap, petrified by the still,
pronged beams of the black star, homed, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic
acuity of your interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was
outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth. I
thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel
Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist's dummy could reproduce. I thought
out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cock-eyed
system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pin point with gnostic decimals to
boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day-race. But everything
was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day -perhaps.
We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck had
been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction.
I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never
expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I was a dope
fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she tried to commit suicide
and then I tried and then she tried again, and nothing worked except to bring us closer
together, so close indeed that we interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name,
identity, religion, father, mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change,
not once but several times. At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that
silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the pounce; then
she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate almost like a cornflower, and with each change
thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations - of skin, muscle, colour, posture,
odour, gait, gesture, et cetera. She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she
really was like because with each one she was an entirely different person. After a time
she didn't even know herself what she was like. She had begun this process of
metamorphosis before I met her, as I later dis-
2l6
covered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to
make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her
name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With
all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, other
charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe
were nonexistent. She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every
gesture, every slightest grimace. She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her
intonation, her accent, her phraseology. She conducted herself so skilfully that it was
impossible even to broach the subject of origins. She was constantly on her guard, even in
her sleep. And, like a good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defence
is attack. She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her
sentinels were stationed everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never
dimmed.
Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say
nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers towards the fabrication of a
mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither man nor woman would be able to
resist. Automatically, without the slightest knowledge of legend, she began to create
little by little the ontological background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the
conscious birth. She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions - she had only to bear
in mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her adopted role
she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have to invent a past: she remembered
the past which belonged to her. She was never outflanked by a direct question since she
never presented herself to an adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of
the everturning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving.
She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the mechanism
itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would reflect the myth she had
created. She had no poise what soever; she was eternally poised above her multiple
identities
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in the vacuum of the self. She had not intended to make herself a
legendary figure, she had merely wanted her beauty to be recognized. But, in the pursuit
of beauty, she soon forgot her quest entirely, became the victim of her own creation. She
became so stunningly beautiful that at times she was frightening, at times positively
uglier than the ugliest woman in the world. She could inspire horror and dread, especially
when her charm was at its height. It was as though the will, blind and uncontrollable,
shone through the creation, exposing the monster which it is.
In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no
adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit, gave her a
molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching
ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to
reintegrate and repose for a few moments. It was like a frantic long distance message, an
S.O.S. from a sinking ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by
flesh rubbing against flesh. I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I
never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of
impotence. Now I think of that black star gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that
fixed star which hung above our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute,
and I know it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without
aspect. I know that we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck
through an iron grate. I said that in the frantic grappling in the dark I sometimes forgot
her name, what she looked like, who she was. It's true. I overeached myself in the dark. I
slid off the flesh rails into the endless space of sex, into the channel-orbits
established by this one and that one; Georgiana, for instance, of only a brief afternoon,
Telma, the Egyptian whore, Carlotta, Alannah, Una, Mona, Magda, girls of six or seven;
waifs, will'o'-the-wisps, faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a dream, a memory, a
desire, a longing. I could start with Georgiana of a Sunday afternoon near the railroad
tracks, her dotted Swiss dress, her swaying haunch, her Southern drawl,
2l8
her lascivious mouth, her molten breasts, I could start with Georgiana,
the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work outwards and upwards through the
ramification of cunt into the nth dimension of sex, world without end. Georgiana was like
the membrane of the tiny little ear of an unfinished monster called sex. She was
transparently alive and breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the
avenue, the first tangible odour and substance of the world of fuck which is in itself a
being limitless and undefinable, like our world the world. The whole world of fuck like
unto the ever-increasing membrane of the animal we call sex, which is like another being
growing into our own being and gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world
will be only a dim memory of this new, all-inclusive, all-procreative being which is
giving birth to itself.
It was precisely this snake-like copulation in the dark, this
double-jointed, double-barrelled hook-up, which put me in the strait-jacket of doubt,
jealousy, fear, loneliness. If I began my hem-stitching with Georgiana and the
myriad-branched candelabra of sex I was certain that she too was at work building
membrane, making ears, eyes, toes, scalp and what-not of sex. She would begin with the
monster who had raped her, assuming there was truth in the story; in any case she too
began somewhere on a parallel track, working upwards and outwards through this multiform,
uncreated being through whose body we were both striving desperately to meet. Knowing only
a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, of inventions, of imaginings, of
obsessions and delusions, putting together tag-ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished
sentences, jumbled dream talk, hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid
desires, meeting now and then a name become flesh, overhearing stray bits of conversation,
observing smuggled glances, half-arrested gestures, I could well credit her with a
pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too vivid flesh and blood creatures, men
of perhaps that very afternoon, of perhaps only an hour ago, her cunt perhaps still choked
with the sperm of the last fuck. The more submissive she was, the more passionately she
behaved, the more abandoned she looked, the
219
more uncertain I became. There was no beginning, no personal,
individual starting point; we met like experienced swordsmen on the field of honour now
crowded with the ghosts of victory and defeat We were alert and responsible to the least
thrust, as only the practiced can be.
We came together under cover of dark with our armies and from opposite
sides we forced the gates of the citadel. There was no resisting our bloody work; we asked
for no quarter and we gave none. We came together swimming in blood, a gory, glaucous
reunion in the night with all the stars extinguished save the fixed black star hanging
like a scalp above the hole in the ceiling. If she were properly coked she would vomit it
forth like an oracle, everything that had happened to her during the day, yesterday, the
day before, the year before last, everything, down to the day she was born. And not
a word of it was true, not a single detail. Not a moment did she stop, for if she had, the
vacuum she created in her flight would have brought about an explosion fit to sunder the
world. She was the world's lying machine in microcosm, geared to the same unending,
devastating fear which enables men to throw all their energies into creation of the death
apparatus. To look at her one would think her fearless, one would think her the
personification of courage and she was, so long as she was not obliged to turn in
her traces. Behind her lay the calm fact of reality, a colossus which dogged her every
step. Every day this colossal reality took on new proportions, every day it became more
terrifying, more paralysing. Every day she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more
piercing, hypnotic eyes. It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost
from the start, and no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, ready in one
lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground. It was so simple and obvious that it
drove her frantic. Marshal a thousand personalities, commandeer the biggest guns, deceive
the greatest minds, make the longest detour - still the end would be defeat. In the final
meeting everything was destined to fall apart - the cunning, the skill, the power,
everything. She would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse
than anything, she would resemble
220
each and every other grain of sand on that ocean's shore. She would be
condemned to recognize her unique self everywhere until the end of time. What a fate she
had chosen for herself! That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the universal! That her
power should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity! It was maddening, hallucinating.
It could not be! It must not be! Onward! Like the black legions. Onward! Through
every degree of the everwidening circle. Onward and away from the self, until the last
substantial particle of the soul be stretched to infinity. In her panic-stricken flight
she seemed to bear the whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines
of the universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being rushed
to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a mad witches' revel.
In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face. Not a line
in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms of the
Creator. Who killed Cock Robin ? Who massacred the Iroquois? Not I, my lovely angel
could say, and by God, who gazing at that pure, blameless face could deny her? Who could
see in that sleep of innocence that one half of the face belonged to God and the other
half to Satan? The mask was smooth as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like
a petal open to the faintest breeze. So alluringly still and guileless was it that one
could drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and nevermore
return. Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like that, thoroughly
extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the moon itself. In her death-like
trance of innocence she fascinated even more; her crimes dissolved, exuded through the
pores, she lay coiled like a sleeping serpent riveted to the earth. The body, strong,
lithe, muscular, seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human
gravity, the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse. She was like one might
imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years of
mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh preserved from mortal
decay. She lay coiled at the base of a hollow pyra-
221
mid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of
the past. Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber. She had dropped
below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the vegetative sphere even: she had
sunk down to the level of the mineral world where animation is just a notch above death.
She had so mastered the art of deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her.
She had learned how to not dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched
off the current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one would have
found it absolutely void. She kept no disturbing secrets; everything was killed off which
could be humanly killed. She might live on endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet,
radiating an hypnotic effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in
madness, discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. Sowing her
own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the heinous stillness of her
sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the cold magma of the lifeless
planetary worlds. She was magically intact. Her gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing
fixity: it was the moon gaze through which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire.
The one eye was a warm brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, the
magnetic eye which flickered a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye continued to nicker
under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her.
The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake. She awoke with a
violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were a shock.
Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great python. What annoyed her
was the light! She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the glare of reality. The room had to be
darkened, the candles lit, the the windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the
street from penetrating the room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the
comer of her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling
details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe. She was like an
athlete preparing for the great event of the day.
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From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to
the shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected
before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more
like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight. Once she slipped on her dress
she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or
Teheran. She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast
was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and
lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered if she would ever take on,
one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each
day. Perhaps she was dreaming other itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but
simply allowing time for the functional processes of her marvellous machine so that once
embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this hour
of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily
surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly
swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take
off slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor.
All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image
of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the abnormal span of her
wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the take-on, one sensed the terror which
motivated the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same time
frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from
some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight towards some uncharted region
into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to
carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave
dignity, like one about to go down into the grave. Never once did she circle about the
flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward towards those whom she was
abandon-
223
ing. Nor did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her;
she took to the air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which
might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn't even leave the breath of a sigh
behind, not even a toe-nail. A clean exit, such as the Devil himself might make for
reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on his hands. One was deserted, and not
only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to
call her back; one was left with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened
the whole day. Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling
like the worm, one gathered rumours of her spectacular flight; she had been seen rounding
a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason no one knew, she had done a
tailspin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet, she had written letters of smoke in the
sky, and so on and so forth. Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done
apparently without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life, on
the behaviour of the ant-like creature man, viewed from another dimension.
Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the
life of a full blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed, because somehow
eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is something man-made, something
earned: no, I experienced an entr'acte in which every hair turns white to the roots, in
which every millimetre of skin itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running
sore. I see myself sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous,
as though elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood rushing up to the
brain and pounding at the ear-drums like Himalayan devils with sledge hammers; I hear her
flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk, and I know she is pushing on and on, ever
further away, ever further beyond reach. It is so quiet in the room and so frightfully
empty that I shriek and howl just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to
lift myself from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the
shapeless feet of the rhinoceros. The
224
heavier my body becomes the lighter the atmosphere of the room; I am
going to spread and spread until I fill the room with one solid mass of stiff jelly. I
shall fill up even the cracks in the wall; I shall grow through the wall like a parasitic
plant, spreading and spreading until the whole house is an indescribable mass of flesh and
hair and nails. I know that this is death, but I am powerless to kill the knowledge of it,
or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive, some speck of consciousness persists,
and, as the inert carcass expands, this flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and
gleams inside me like the cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so
that I am like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some slender
hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the surface of the deep, but it
is so far away, the upper world, and the weight of the corpse so great that, even if it
were possible, it would take years to reach the surface. I move around in my own dead
body, exploring every nook and cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless
exploration, for with the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and
drifting like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra firma, never
for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it is a growth without
landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes with every least move or shudder. It
is this interminable filling of space which kills all sense of space or time; the more the
body expands the tinier becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is
concentrated on the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous dead mass
which I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out of which it grows, is no
bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, in the very heart and gizzard of death,
as it were, I sense the seed, the miraculous, infinitesimal lever which balances the
world. I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but
there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which
roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass.
When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will
find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I,
225
the imperishable schizerino, a blazing seed hidden in the heart of
death. Every day she thinks to find another means of sustenance, but there is no other,
only this eternal seed of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. Fly, 0
devouring bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your nourishment glowing in the
sickening emptiness you have created! You will come back to perish once more in the black
hole; you will come back again and again, for you have not the wings to carry you out of
the world. This is the only world you can inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness
reigns.
And suddenly for no reason at all, when I think of her returning to her
nest, I remember Sunday mornings in the little old house near the cemetery. I remember
sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the pedals with bare feet, and the
folks lying in bed toasting themselves in the next room. The rooms opened one on the
other, telescope fashion, as in the good old American railroad flats. Sunday mornings one
lay in bed until one was ready to screech with well-being. Towards eleven or so the folks
used to rap on the wall of my bedroom for me to come and play for them. I would dance into
the room like the Fratellini Brothers, so full of flame and feathers that I could hoist
myself like a derrick to the topmost limb of the tree of heaven. I could do anything and
everything singlehanded, being double-jointed at the same time. The old man called me
"Sunny Jim", because I was full of "Force", full of vim and vigour.
First I would do a few handsprings for them on the carpet before the bed; then I would
sing falsetto, trying to imitate a ventriloquist's dummy; then I would dance a few light
fantastic steps to show which way the wind lay, and zoom! Like a breeze I was on the piano
stool and doing a velocity exercise. I always began with Czemy, in order to limber up for
the performance. The old man hated Czemy, and so did I, but Czemy was the plat du jour on
the bill of fare then, and so Czemy it was until my joints were rubber. In some vague way
Czemy reminds me of the great emptiness which came upon me later. What a velocity I would
work up, riveted to the piano stool! It was like swallowing a bottle of tonic at one gulp
and then having someone strap you to the bed. After I had played
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about ninety-eight exercises I was ready to do a little improvising. I
used to take a fist-full of chords and crash the piano from one end to the other, then
sullenly modulate into "The Burning of Rome" or the "Ben Hur Chariot
Race" which everybody liked because it was intelligible noise. Long before I read
Wittgenstein's Tractatvs Logico-Philosophicus I was composing the music to it, in
the key of sassafras. I was learned then in science and philosophy, in the history of
religions, in inductive and deductive logic, in liver mantic, in the shape and weight of
skulls, in pharmacopeia and metallurgy, in all the useless branches of learning which
gives you indigestion and melancholia before your time. This vomit of learned truck was
stewing in my guts the whole week long, waiting for it to come Sunday to be set to music.
In between "The Midnight Fire Alarm" and "Marche Militaire" I would
get my inspiration, which was to destroy all the existent forms of harmony and create my
own cacophony. Imagine Uranus well aspected to Mars, to Mercury, to the Moon, to Jupiter,
to Venus. It's hard to imagine because Uranus functions best when it is badly aspected,
when it is "afflicted", so to speak. Yet that music which I gave off Sunday
mornings, a music of well-being and of well-nourished desperation, was born of an
illogically well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the 7th House. I didn't know it then,
I didn't know that Uranus existed, and lucky it was that I was ignorant. But I can see it
now, because it was a fluky joy, a phony well-being, a destructive sort of fiery creation.
The greater my euphoria the more tranquil the folks became. Even my sister who was dippy
became calm and composed. The neighbours used to stand outside the window and listen, and
now and then I would hear a burst of applause, and then bang, zip! like a rocket I was off
again - Velocity Exercise No. 9471/2. If I happened to espy a cockroach
crawling up the wall I was in bliss: that would lead me without the slightest modulation
to Opus Izzi of my sadly corrugated clavichord. One Sunday, just like that, I composed one
of the loveliest scherzos imaginable - to a louse. It was Spring and we were all getting
the sulphur treatment; I had been pouring all week over Dante's Inferno in
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English. Sunday came like a thaw, the birds driven so crazy by the
sudden heat that they flew in and out of the window, immune to the music. One of the
German relatives had just arrived from Hamburg, or Bremen, a maiden aunt who looked like a
bull-dyker. Just to be near her was sufficient to throw roe into a fit of rage. She used
to pat me on the head and tell me I would be another Mozart. I hated Mozart, and I hate
him still, and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the sour notes I knew.
And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real louse which had gotten buried in
my winter underwear. I got him out and I put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then
I began to do a little gigue around him with my right hand, the noise had probably
deafened him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble
pyrotechnic. This trance-like immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided to introduce
a chromatic scale coming down on him full force with my third finger. I caught him fair
and square, but with such force that he was glued to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus'
Dance in me. From then on the scherzo commenced. It was a pot-pourri of forgotten melodies
spiced with aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once and
pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception. Later, when I went
to hear Prokofief, I understood what was happening to him; I understood Whitehead and
Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I
understood why, if there had never been a binomial theorem, man would have invented it; I
understood why electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of sprudel baths and fango
packs. I understood very dearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in his blood, and
that when you're handed a symphony or a fresco or a high explosive you're really getting
an ipecac reaction which was not included in the predestined bill of fare. I understood
too why I had failed to become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in
my head, all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St.
Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were written for an
age to come, an age with less
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instruments and stronger antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different
kind of suffering has to be experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven
staked out the new territory - one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks
down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations - to us only a
misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of suffering. We have yet
to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an
incredible music lying prone and indifferent to the Sorrow about me. I heard the gestation
of a new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars
grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is still governed
by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz. Music is
still the antidote for the nameless, but this is not yet music. Music is planetary
fire, an irreducible which is all-sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods, the
abracadabra which the learned and the ignorant alike muff because the axle has been
unhooked. Look to the bowels, to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is determined,
nothing is settled or solved. All this that is going on, all music, all architecture, all
law, all government, all invention, all discovery - all this is velocity exercises in the
dark, Czemy with a capital Zed riding a crazy white horse in a bottle of mucilage.
One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is
that it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song the cunts were
around me like flies. To begin with, it was largely Lola's fault. Lola was my first piano
teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous name and typical of the neighbourhood we were
living in then. It sounded like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth,
Lola was not exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with
sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens, not to speak of
the moustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness; she had wonderful long fine
black hair which she arranged in ascending and descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At
the nape of the neck she curled it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late
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in coming, being a conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I
was always a bit enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me,
however, I became exdted again, what with the stinking perfume she soused her armpits
with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the tufts'of hair under her
arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her as having hair all over, even in her
navel. And what I wanted to do was to roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten
Lola's hair as a delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was
hairy, that's what I want to say and being hairy as a gorilla she got my mind off the the
music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that cunt of hers that finally one
day I bribed her little brother to let me have a peep at her while she was in the bath. It
was even more wonderful than I had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to
the crotch, an enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went
over it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for the
lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn't seem to notice anything
amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This time she caught on. She said,
"I think you've forgotten something. Henry." I looked at her, red as a beet, and
I asked her blandly what ? She pretended to look away while pointing to it with her
left hand. Her hand came so close that I couldn't resist grabbing it and pushing it in my
fly. She got up. quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my
fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under her dress to get
at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole. Suddenly I got a sound box on the
ears, and then another and she took me by the ear and leading me to a comer of the room
she turned my face to the wall and said, "Now button up your fly, you silly
boy!" We went back to the piano in a few moments - back to Czemy and the velocity
exercises. I couldn't see a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I
was afraid she might tell my mother about the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy
thing to tell one's mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided
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change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she
would be severe with me, but on the contrary; she seemed to have dolled herself up, to
have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a bit gay, which was unusual
for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn type. I didn't dare to open my fly again, but
I would get an erection and hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed
because she was always stealing sidelong glances in that direction. I was only fifteen at
the time, and she was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult for me to know
what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one day while my mother was out.
For a time I actually shadowed her at night, when she went out alone. She had a habit of
going out for long walks alone in the evening. I used to dog her steps, hoping she would
get to some deserted spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had a
feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed it. I think she
was waiting for me to waylay her - I think that was what she wanted. Anyway, one night I
was lying in the grass near the railroad tracks; it was a sweltering summer's night and
people were lying about anywhere and everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn't thinking of
Lola at all - I was just mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I see a
woman coming along the narrow cinderpath. I'm lying sprawled out on the embankment and
nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming along slowly, head down, as though
she were dreaming. As she gets close I recognize her. "Lola!" I call.
"Lola!" She seems to be really astonished to see me there. "Why, what are
you doing here?" she says, and with that she sits down beside me on the embankment. I
didn't bother to answer her, I didn't say a word -1 just crawled over her and flattened
her. "Not here, please," she begged, but I paid no attention. I got my hand
between her legs, all tangled up in that thick sporran others, and she was sopping wet,
like a horse salivating. It was my first fuck, be Jesus, and it had to be that a train
would come along and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck
too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks
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she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare.
I couldn't keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, shook herclothes
down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck. "You must go home," she
says. "I'm not going home," I said, and with that I took her by the arm and
started walking. We walked along in dead silence for quite a distance. Neither of us
seemed to be noticing where we were going. Finally we were out on the highway and up above
us were the reservoirs and near the reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed towards
the pond. We had to pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was helping
Lola to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her. She made no effort to
get up; instead, she caught hold of me and pressed me to her, and to my complete amazement
I also felt her slip her hand in my fly. She caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I
came in her hand. Then she took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back
completely relaxed and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her
cunt; I put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my head between
her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She was moaning now and
clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come completely undone and was lying over
her bare abdomen. To make it short, I got it in again, and I held it a long time, for
which she must have been damned grateful because she came I don't know how many times - it
was like a pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into me,
bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I was branded like a
steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the mirror.
It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn't last long. A month
later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung her
sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I began the Czemy stuff
I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the grass, thinking of her long black
hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out
of her. Playing the piano was just one long vicarious fuck for me. I
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had to wait another two years before I would get my end in again, as
they say, and then it wasn't so good because I got a beautiful dose with it, and besides
it wasn't in the grass and it wasn't summer, and there was no heat in it but just a cold
mechanical fuck for a buck in a dirty little hotel room, the bastard trying to pretend she
was coming and not coming any more than Christmas was coming. And maybe it wasn't her that
gave me the clap, but her pal in the next room who was lying up with my friend Simmons. It
was like this - I had finished so quick with my mechanical fuck that I thought I'd go in
and see how it was going with my friend Simmons. Lo and behold, they were still at it, and
they were going strong. She was a Czech, his girl, and a bit sappy; she hadn't been at it
very long, apparently, and she used to forget herself and enjoy the act. Watching her hand
it out, I decided to wait and have a go at her myself. And so I did. And before the week
was out I had a discharge, and after that I figured it would be blueballs or rocks in the
groin.
Another year or so and I was giving lessons myself, and as luck would
have it, the mother of the girl I'm teaching is a slut, a tramp and a trollop if ever
there was one. She was living with a nigger, as I later found out. Seems she couldn't get
a prick big enough to satisfy her. Anyway, every time I started to go home she'd hold me
up at the door and rub it up against me. I was afraid of starting in with her because
rumour had it that she was full of syph, but what the hell are you going to do when a hot
bitch like that plasters her cunt up against you and slips her tongue halfway down your
throat. I used to fuck her standing up in the vestibule, which wasn't so difficult because
she was light and I could hold her in my hand like a doll. And like that I'm holding her
one night when suddenly I hear a key being fitted into the lock, and she hears it too and
she's frightened stiff. There's nowhere to go. Fortunately there's a portiere hanging at
the doorway and I hide behind that. Then I heard her black buck kissing her and saying how
are yer, honey ? and she's saying how she had been waiting up for him and better come
right upstairs because she can't wait and so on. And when the stairs stop squeaking I
gently open the door and
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sally out, and then by God I have a real fright because if that black
buck ever finds out I'll have my throat slit and no mistake about it. And so I stop giving
lessons at that joint, but soon the daughter is after me - just turning sixteen - and
won't I come and give her lessons at a friend's house? We begin the Czerny exercises all
over again, sparks and everything. It's the first smell of fresh cunt I've had, and it's
wonderful, like new-mown hay. We fuck our way through one lesson after another and in
between lessons we do a little extra fucking. And then one day it's the sad story - she's
knocked up and what to do about it? I have to get a Jewboy to help me out, and he wants
twenty-five bucks for the job and I've never seen twenty-five bucks in my life. Besides,
she's under age. Besides, she might have blood-poisoning. I give him five bucks on account
and beat it to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. In the Adirondacks I meet a
schoolteacher who's dying to take lessons. More velocity exercises, more condoms and
conundrums. Every time I touched the piano I seemed to shake a cunt loose.
If there was a party I had to bring the fucking music roll along; to me
it was just like wrapping my penis in a handkerchief and slinging it under my arm. In
vacation time, at a farmhouse or an inn, where there was always a surplus of cunt, the
music had an extraordinary effect. Vacation rime was a period I looked forward to the
whole year, not because of the cunts so much as because it meant no work. Once out of
harness I became a down. I was so chock-full of energy that I wanted to jump out of my
skin. I remember one summer in the Catskills meeting a girl named Francie. She was
beautiful and lascivious, with strong Scotch teats and a row of white even teeth that was
dazzling. It began in the river where we were swimming. We were holding on to the boat and
one of her boobies had slipped out of bounds. I slipped the other one out for her and then
I undid the shoulder straps. She ducked under the boat coyly and I followed and as she was
coming up for air I wriggled the bloody bathing suit off her and there she was floating
like a mermaid with her big strong teats bobbing up and down like bloated corks. I
wriggled out of my tights and we began playing like dolphins under the side of the
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boat. In a little while her girl friend came along in a canoe. She was
a rather hefty girl a sort of strawberry blonde with agate-coloured eyes and full of
freckles. She was rather shocked to find us in the raw, but we soon tumbled her out of the
canoe and stripped her. And then the three of us began to play tag under the water, but it
was hard to get anywhere with them because they were slippery as eels. After we had had
enough of it we ran to a little bath-house which was standing in the field like an
abandoned sentry box. We had brought our clothes along and we were going to get dressed,
the three of us, in this little box. It was frightfully hot and sultry and the clouds were
gathering for a storm. Agnes - that was Francie's friend - was in a hurry to get dressed.
She was beginning to be ashamed of herself standing there naked in front of us. Francie,
on the other hand seemed to be perfectly at ease. She was sitting on the bench with her
legs crossed and smoking a cigarette. Anyway, just as Agnes was pulling on her chemise
there came a flash of lightning and a terrifying clap of thunder right on the heels of it.
Agnes screamed and dropped her chemise. There came another flash in a few seconds and
again a peal of thunder, dangerously dose. The air got blue all around us and the flies
began to bite and we felt nervous and itchy and a bit panicky too. Especially Agnes who
was afraid of the lightning and even more afraid of being found dead and three of us stark
naked. She wanted to get her things on and run for the house, she said. And just as she
got that off her chest the rain came down, in bucketsful. We thought it would stop in a
few minutes and so we stood there naked looking out at the steaming river through the
partly opened door. It seemed to be raining rocks and the lightning kept playing around us
incessantly. We were all thoroughly frightened now and in a quandary as to what to do.
Agnes was wringing her hands and praying out loud; she looked like a George Grosz idiot,
one of those lopsided bitches with a rosary around the neck and yellow jaundice to boot. I
thought she was going to faint on us or something. Suddenly I got the bright idea of doing
a war-dance in the rain - to distract them. Just as I jump out to commence my shindig a
streak of lightning flashes and splits
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open a tree not far off. I'm so damned scared that I lose my wits.
Always when I'm frightened I laugh. So I laughed a wild, blood-curdling laugh which made
the girls scream. When I heard them scream, I don't know why, but I thought of the
velocity exercises and with that I felt that I was standing in the void and it was blue
all around and the rain was beating a bot-and-cold tattoo on my tender flesh. All my
sensations had gathered on the surface of the skin and underneath the outermost layer of
skin I was empty, light as a feather, lighter than air or smoke or talcum or magnesium or
any goddamned thing you want. Suddenly I was a Chippewa and it was the key of sassafras
again and I didn't give a fuck whether the girls were screaming or fainting or shitting in
their pants, which they were minus anyway. Looking at crazy Agnes with the rosary around
her neck and her big bread-basket blue with fright I got the notion to do a sacrilegious
dance, with one hand cupping my balls and the other hand thumbing my nose at the thunder
and lightning. The rain was hot and cold and the grass seemed full of dragonflies. I
hopped about like a kangaroo and I yelled at the top of my lungs - "0 Father, you
wormy old son of a bitch, pull in that fucking lightning or Agnes won't believe in you any
more! Do you hear me, you old prick up there, stop the shenanigans . . . you're driving
Agnes nutty. Hey you, are you deaf, you old futzer?" And with a continuous rattle of
this defiant nonsense on my lips I danced around the bath-house leaping and bounding like
a gazelle and using the most frightful oaths I could summon. When the lightning cracked I
jumped higher and when the thunder clapped I roared like a lion and then I did a
handspring and then I rolled in the grass like a cub and I chewed the grass and spit it
out for them and I pounded my chest like a gorilla and all the time I could see the Czerny
exercises resting on the piano, the white page full of sharps and flats, and the fucking
idiot, think I to myself, imagining that that's the way to learn how to manipulate the
well-tempered clavichord. And suddenly I thought that Czemy might be in heaven by now and
looking down on me and so I spat at him high as I could spit and when the thunder rolled
again I yelled with
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all my might - "You bastard, Czerny, you up there, may the
lightning twist your balls off. .. may you swallow your own crooked tail and strangle
yourself... do you hear me, you crazy prick?"
But in spite of all my good efforts Agnes was getting more delirious.
She was a dumb Irish Catholic and she had never heard God spoken to that way before.
Suddenly, while 1 was dancing about in the rear of the bath-house she bolted for the
river. I heard Francie scream - "Bring her back, she'll drown herself! Bring her
back!" I started after her, the rain still coming down like pitchforks, and yelling
to her to come back, but she ran on blindly as though possessed of the devil, and when she
got to the water's edge she dove straight in and made for the boat. I swam after her and
as we got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got hold of her
round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her calmly and soothingly, as
though I were talking to a child. "Go away from me," she said, "you're an
atheist!" Jesus, you could have knocked me over with a feather, so astonished I was
to hear that. So that was it? All that hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty.
I felt like batting her one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over
our heads and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat over our
heads if I didn't handle her right. So I pretended that I was terribly sorry and I said I
didn't mean a word of it, that I had been scared to death, and so on and so forth, and as
I talked to her gently, soothingly, I slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently
stroked her ass. That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly
about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so
wrapped up in what she was saying that she didn't know what I was doing, but just the same
when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful things I could think of, about
God, about love, about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have
felt something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them around like
drunken bobbins. "Put your arms around me Agnes," I said softly, slipping my
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band out and pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between
hers... "There, that's the girl... take it easy now... it'll stop soon." And
still talking about the church, the confessional. God love, and the whole bloody mess I
managed to get it inside her. "You're very good to me," she said, just as though
she didn't know my prick was in her, "and I'm sorry I acted like a fool."
"I know, Agnes," I said, "it's all right... listen, grab me tighter...
yeah, that's it." "I'm afraid the boat's going to tip over," she says,
trying her best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand. "Yes,
let's get back to the shore," I said, and I start to pull away from her. "Oh
don't leave me," she says, clutching me tighter. "Don't leave me, I'll
drown." Just then Francie comes running down to the water. "Hurry," says
Agnes, "hurry ... I'll drown."
Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn't a Catholic
and if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of those girls who
are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed no jealousy, held no
grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all unintelligent. At nights when we were
sitting on the porch in the dark talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my
lap with nothing on underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and
talked to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if she had
been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her home, she pulled the
same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight, fortunately, was growing dim. If we
went dancing and she got too hot in the pants she would drag me to a telephone booth and,
queer girl that she was, she'd actually talk to some one, some one like Agnes for example,
while pulling off the trick. She seemed to get a special pleasure out of doing it under
people's noses; she said there was more fun in it if you didn't think about it too hard.
In the crowded subway coming home from the beach, say, she'd slip her dress around so that
the slit was in the middle and take my hand and put it right on her cunt. If the train was
tightly packed and we were safely wedged in a comer she'd take my cock out of my fly and
hold it in her two
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hands, as though it were a bird. Sometimes she'd get playful and hang
her bag on it, as though to prove that there wasn't the least danger. Another thing about
her was that she didn't pretend that I was the only guy she had on the string. Whether she
told me everything I don't know, but she certainly told me plenty. She told me about her
affairs laughingly, while she was climbing over me or when I had it in her, or just when I
was about to come. She would tell me how they went about it, how big they were or how
small, what they said when they got excited and so on and so forth giving me every
possible detail, just as though I were going to write a textbook on the subject. She
didn't seem to have the least feeling of sacredness about her own body or her feelings or
anything connected with herself. "Francie, you bloody fucker," I used to say,
"you've got the morals of a clam." "But you like me, don't you?" she'd
answer. "Men like to fuck, and so do women. It doesn't harm anybody and it doesn't
mean you have to love every one you fuck does it? I wouldn't want to be in love; it must
be terrible to have to fuck the same man all the time, don't you think? Listen, if you
didn't fuck anybody but me all the time you'd get tired of me quick, wouldn't you?
Sometimes it's nice to be fucked by someone you don't know at all. Yes, I think that's the
best of all," she added - "there's no complications, no telephone numbers, no
love letters, no scraps, what? Listen, do you think this is very bad? Once I tried to get
my brother to fuck me; you know what a sissy he is - he gives everybody a pain. I don't
remember exactly how it was any more, but anyway we were in the house alone and I was
passionate that day. He came into my bedroom to ask me for something. I was lying there
with my dress up, thinking about it and wanting it terribly, and when he came in I didn't
give a damn about his being my brother, I just thought of him as a man, and so I lay there
with my skirt up and I told him I wasn't feeling well, that I had a pain in my stomach. He
wanted to run right out and get something for me but I told him no, just to rub my stomach
a bit, that would do it good. I opened my waist and made him rub my bare skin. He was
trying to keep his eyes on the wall, the big idiot, and rubbing me as
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though I were a piece of wood. 'It's not there, you chump,' I said,
'it's lower down . . . what are you afraid of?' And I pretended that I was in agony.
Finally he touched me accidentally. "There! that's it!' I shouted. 'Oh do rub it, it
feels so good!' Do you know, the big sap actually massaged me for five minutes without
realizing that it was all a game? I was so exasperated that I told him to get the hell out
and leave me alone. 'You're a eunuch,' I said, but he was such a sap I don't think he knew
what the word meant." She laughed, thinking what a ninny her brother was. She said he
probably still had his maiden. What did I think about it - was it so terribly bad? Of
course she knew I wouldn't think anything of the kind. "Listen Francie," I said,
"did you ever tell that story to the cop you're going with?" She guessed she
hadn't. "I guess so too," I said. "He'd beat the piss out of you if ever he
heard that yam." "He's socked me already," she answered promptly. "What?"
I said, "you let him beat you up?" "I don't ask him to," she said,
"but you know how quick-tempered he is. I don't let anybody else sock me but somehow
coming from him I don't mind so much. Sometimes it makes me feel good inside ... I don't
know, maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in a while. It doesn't hurt so much, if
you really like a guy. And afterwards he's so damned gentle - I almost feel ashamed of
myself..."
It isn't often you get a cunt who'll admit such things - I mean a
regular cunt and not a moron. There was Trix Miranda, for example, and her sister, Mrs.
Costello. A fine pair of birds they were. Trix, who was going with my friend MacGregor,
tried to pretend to her own sister, with whom she was living, that she had no sexual
relations with MacGregor. And the sister was pretending to all and sundry that she was
frigid, that she couldn't have any relations with a man even if she wanted to, because she
was "built too small". And meanwhile my friend MacGregor was fucking them silly,
both of them, and they both knew about each other but still they lied like that to each
other. Why? I couldn't make it out. The Costello bitch was hysterical; whenever she felt
that she wasn't getting a fair percentage of the lays that MacGregor was handing out she'd
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throw a pseudo-epileptic fit. That meant throwing towels over her,
patting her wrists, opening her bosom, chafing her legs and finally hoisting her upstairs
to bed where my friend MacGregor would look after her as soon as he had put the other one
to sleep. Sometimes the two sisters would lie down together to take a nap of an afternoon;
if MacGregor were around he would go upstairs and lie between them. And he explained it to
me laughingly, the trick was for him to pretend to go to sleep. He would lie there
breathing heavily, opening now one eye, now the other, to see which one was really dozing
off. As soon as he was convinced that one of them was asleep he'd tackle the other.
On such occasions he seemed to prefer the hysterical sister, Mrs. Costello, whose husband
visited her about once every six months. The more risk he ran, the more thrill he got out
of it, he said. If it were with the other sister, Trix, whom he was supposed to be
courting, he had to pretend that it would be terrible if the other one were to catch them
like that, and at the same time, he admitted to me, he was always hoping that the other
one would wake up and catch them. But the married sister, the one who was
"built too small", as she used to say, was a wily bitch and besides she felt
guilty toward her sister and if her sister had ever caught her in the act she'd probably
have pretended that she was having a fit and didn't know what she was doing. Nothing on
earth could make her admit that she was actually permitting herself the pleasure of being
fucked by a man.
I knew her quite well because I was giving her lessons for a time, and
I used to do my damnedest to make her admit that she had a normal cunt and that she'd
enjoy a good fuck if she could get it now and then. I used to tell her wild stories, which
were really thinly disguised accounts of her own doings, and yet she remained adamant. I
had even gotten her to the point one day - and this beats everything - where she let me
put my finger inside her. I thought sure it was settled. It's true she was dry and a bit
tight, but I put that down to her hysteria. But imagine getting that far with a cunt and
then having her say to your face, as she yanks her dress down violently - "you see, I
told you I wasn't built right!" "I don't see anything of
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the kind," I said angrily. "What do you expect me to do - use
a microscope on you?"
"I like that," she said, pretending to get on her high horse.
"What a way of talking to me!" 242
putting my hand under her dress and resting it lightly on her knee . .
. "maybe if you sat a moment like this, you'd feel better... there, that's it, just
snuggle back in my arms... are you feeling better?" She didn't answer, but she didn't
resist either; she just lay back limply and closed her eyes. Gradually and very gently and
smoothly I moved my hand up her leg, talking to her in a low, soothing voice all the time.
When I got my fingers into her crotch and parted the little lips she was as moist as a
dish-rag. I massaged it gently, opening it up more and more, and still handing out a
telepathic line about women sometimes being mistaken about themselves and how sometimes
they think they're very small when really they're quite normal, and the longer I kept it
up the juicier she got and the more she opened up. I had four fingers inside her and there
was room inside for more if I had had more to put in. She had an enormous cunt and it had
been well reamed out, I could feel. I looked at her to see if she was still keeping her
eyes shut. Her mouth was open and she was gasping but her eyes were tight shut, as though
she were pretending to herself that it was all a dream. I could move her about roughly now
- no danger of the slightest protest. And maliciously perhaps, I jostled her about
unnecessarily, just to see if she would come to. She was as limp as a feather pillow and
even when her head struck the arm of the sofa she showed no sign of irritation. It was as
though she had anaesthetized herself for a gratuitous fuck. I pulled all her clothes off
and threw them on the floor, and after I had given her a bit of a work-out on the sofa I
slipped it out and laid her on the floor, on her clothes; and then I slipped it in again
and she held it tight with that suction valve she used so skilfully, despite the outward
appearance of coma.
It seems strange to me that the music always passed off into sex.
Nights, if I went out for a walk, I was sure to pick up some one - a nurse, a girl coming
out of a dance hall; a sales girl, anything with a skirt on. If I went out with my friend
MacGregor in his car - just a little spin to the beach, he would say -1 would find myself
by midnight sitting in some
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strange parlour in some queer neighbourhood with a girl on my lap,
usually one I didn't give a damn about because MacGregor was even less selective than I.
Often, stepping in his car I'd say to him - "listen, no cunts tonight, what?"
And he'd say - "Jesus, no, I'm fed up ... just a little drive somewhere . . . maybe
to Sheepshead Bay, what do you say?" We wouldn't have gone more than a mile when
suddenly he'd pull the car up to the curb and nudge me. "Get a look at that,"
he'd say, pointing to a girl strolling along the sidewalk. "Jesus, what a leg!"
Or else - "Listen what do you say we ask her to come along? Maybe she can dig up a
friend." And before I could say another word he'd be hailing her and handing out his
usual patter, which was the same for every one. And nine times out often the girl came
along. And before we'd gone very far, feeling her up with his free hand, he'd ask her if
she didn't have a friend she could dig up to keep us company. And if she put up a fuss, if
she didn't like being pawed over that way too quickly, he'd say - "All right, get the
hell out then ... we can't waste any time on the likes of you!" And with that he'd
slow up and shove her out. "We can't be bothered with cunts like that, can we
Henry?" he'd say, chuckling softly. "You wait, I promised you something good
before the night's over." And if I reminded him that we were going to lay off for one
night he'd answer; "Well, just as you like ... I was only thinking it might make it
more pleasant for you." And then suddenly the brakes would pull us up and he'd be
saying to some silky silhouette looming out of the dark: - "hello sister, what yer
doing - taking a little stroll?" And maybe this time it would be something exciting,
a dithery little bitch with nothing else to do but pull up her skirt and hand it to you.
Maybe we wouldn't even have to buy her a drink, just hail up somewhere on a side road and
go at it, one after the other, in the car. And if she was an emptyheaded bimbo, as they
usually were, he wouldn't even bother to drive her home. "We're not going that
way," he'd say, the bastard that he was. "You'd better jump out here," and
with that he'd open the door and out with her. His next thought was, of course, was she
dean? That would occupy his mind all the
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way back. "Jesus, we ought to be more careful," he'd say.
"You don't know what you're getting yourself into picking them up like that. Ever
since that last one - you remember, the one we picked up on the Drive - I've been itchy as
hell. Maybe it's just nervousness ... I think about it too much. Why can't a guy stick to
one cunt, tell me that. Henry. You take Trix, now, she's a good kid, you know that. And I
like her too, in a way, but... shit, what's the use of talking about it? You know me - I'm
a glutton. You know, I'm getting so bad that sometimes when I'm on my way to a date - mind
you, with a girl I want to fuck, and everything fixed too - as I say, sometimes I'm
rolling along and maybe out of the comer of my eye I catch a flash of a leg crossing the
street and before I know it I've got her in the car and the hell with the other girl. I
must be cunt-struck, I guess ... what do you think? Don't tell me," he would add
quickly. "I know you, you bugger . . . you'll be sure to tell me the worst." And
then, after a pause - "you're a funny guy, do you know that? I never notice you
refusing anything, but somehow you don't seem to be worrying about it all the time.
Sometimes you strike me as though you didn't give a damn one way or the other. And you're
a steady bastard too - almost a monogamist, I'd say. How you can keep it up so long with
one woman beats me. Don't you get bored with them? Jesus, I know so well what they're
going to say. Sometimes I feel like saying . . . you know, just breeze in on 'em and say;
'listen, kid, don't say a word .. . just fish it out and open your legs wide.' " He
laughed heartily. "Can you imagine the expression on Trix's face if I pulled a line
like that on her? I'll tell you, once I came pretty near doing it. I kept my hat and coat
on. Was she sore! She didn't mind my keeping the coat on so much, but the hat! I
told her I was afraid of a draught... of course there wasn't any draught. The truth is, I
was so damned impatient to get away that I thought if I kept my hat on I'd be off quicker.
Instead I was there all night with her. She put up such a row that I couldn't get her
quiet. . . But listen, that's nothing. Once I had a drunken Irish bitch and this one had
some queer ideas. In the first place, she never wanted it in bed . . . always on the
table. You know, that's
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all right once in a while, but if you do it often it wears you out. So
one night - I was a little tight, I guess - I says to her, no, nothing doing, you drunken
bastard . . . you're gonna go to bed with me to-night. I want a real fuck - in bed.
You know, I had to argue with that son of a bitch for an hour almost before I could
persuade her to go to bed with me, and then only on the agreement that I was to keep my
hat on. Listen, can you picture me getting over that stupid bitch with my hat on? And
stark naked to boot! I asked her ... 'Why do you want me to keep my hat on?' You know what
she said? She said it seemed more genteel. Can you imagine what a mind that cunt had? I
used to hate myself for going with that bitch. I never went to her sober, that's one
thing. I'd have to be tanked up first and kind of blind and batty - you know how I get
sometimes . . ."
I knew very well what he meant. He was one of my oldest friends and one
of the most cantankerous bastards I ever knew. Stubborn wasn't the word for it. He was
like a mule - a pigheaded Scotchman. And his old man was even worse. When the two of them
got into a rage it was a pretty sight. The old man used to dance positively dance
with rage. If the old lady got between she'd get a sock in the eye. They used to put him
out of the house regularly. Out he'd go, with all his belongings, including the furniture,
including the piano too. In a month or so he'd be back again - because they always gave
him credit at home. And then he'd come home drunk some night with a woman he'd picked up
somewhere and the rumpus would start all over again. It seems they didn't mind so much his
coming home with a girl and keeping her all night, but what they did object to was the
cheek of him asking his mother to serve them breakfast in bed. If his mother tried to bawl
him out he'd shut her up by saying - "What are you trying to tell me? You wouldn't
have been married yet if you hadn't been knocked up." The old lady would wring her
hands and say - "What a son! What a son! God help me, what have I done to deserve
this?" To which he'd remark, "Aw forget it! You're just an old prune!"
Often as not his sister would come up to try and smooth matters out. "Jesus,
Wallie," she'd say,
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"it's none of my business what you do, but can't you talk to your
mother more respectfully?" Whereupon MacGregor would make his sister sit on the bed
and start coaxing her to bring up the breakfast. Usually he'd have to ask his bed-mate
what her name was in order to present her to his sister. "She's not a bad kid,"
he'd say, referring to his sister. "She's the only decent one in the family ... Now
listen, sis, bring up some grub, will yer? Some nice bacon and eggs, eh, what do you say?
Listen, is the old man around? What's his mood to-day? I'd like to borrow a couple of
bucks. You try to worm it out of him, will you? I'll get you something nice for
Christmas." Then, as though everything were settled, he'd pull back the covers to
expose the wench beside him. "Look at her, sis, ain't she beautiful? Look at that
leg! Listen, you ought to get yourself a man . . . you're too skinny. Patsy here, I bet
she doesn't go begging for it, eh Patsy?" and with that a sound slap on the rump for
Patsy. "Now scram, sis, I want some coffee . . . and don't forget, make the bacon
crisp! Don't get any of that lousy store bacon ... get something extra. And be quick about
it!"
What I liked about him were his weaknesses; like all men who practise
will-power he was absolutely flabby inside. There wasn't a thing he wouldn't do - out of
weakness. He was always very busy and he was never really doing anything. And always
boning up on something, always trying to improve his mind. For example, he would take the
unabridged dictionary and, tearing out a page each day, would read it through religiously
on his way back and forth from the office. He was full of facts, and the more absurd and
incongruous the facts, the more pleasure he derived from them. He seemed to be bent on
proving to all and sundry that life was a farce, that it wasn't worth the game, that one
thing cancelled out another, and so on. He was brought up on the North Side, not very far
from the neighbourhood in which I had spent my childhood. He was very much a product of
the North Side, too, and that was one of the reasons why I liked him. The way he talked,
out of the comer of his mouth, for instance, the tough air he put on when talking to a
cop, the way he spat in disgust, the
247
peculiar curse words he used, the sentimentality, the limited horizon,
the passion for playing pool or shooting crap, the staying up all night swapping yams, the
contempt for the rich, the hobnobbing with politicians, the curiosity about worthless
things, the respect for learning, the fascination of the dance hall, the saloon, the
burlesque, talking about seeing the world and never budging out of the city, idolizing no
matter whom so long as the person showed "spunk", a thousand and one little
traits or peculiarities of this sort endeared him to me because it was precisely such
idiosyncrasies which marked the fellows I had known as a child. The neighbourhood was
composed of nothing, it seemed, but lovable failures. The grown-ups behaved like children
and the children were incorrigible. Nobody could rise very far above his neighbour or he'd
be lynched. It was amazing that any one ever became a doctor or a lawyer. Even so, he had
to be a good fellow, had to pretend to talk like every one else, and he had to vote the
Democratic ticket. To hear MacGregor talk about Plato or Nietzsche, for instance, to his
buddies was something to remember. In the first place, to even get permission to talk
about such things as Plato or Nietzsche to his companions, he had to pretend that it was
only by accident that he had run across their names; or perhaps he'd say that he had met
an interesting drunk one night in the back room of a saloon and this drunk had started
talking about these guys Nietzsche and Plato. He would even pretend he didn't quite know
how the names were pronounced. Plato wasn't such a dumb bastard, he would say
apologetically. Plato had an idea or two in his bean, yes sir, yes siree. He'd like to see
one of those dumb politicians at Washington trying to lock horns with a guy like Plato.
And he'd go on, in this roundabout, matter of fact fashion to explain to his crap-shooting
friends just what kind of a bright bird Plato was in his time and how he measured up
against other men in other times. Of course, he was probably a eunuch, he would add, by
way of throwing a little cold water on all this erudition. In those days, as he nimbly
explained, the big guys, the philosophers, often had their nuts cut off - a fact! - so as
to be out of all temptation. The other guy, Nietzsche, he was a real case,
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a case for the bug-house. He was supposed to be in love with his
sister. Hypersensitive like. Had to live in a special climate - in Nice, he thought it
was. As a rule he didn't care much for the Germans, but this guy Nietzsche was different.
As a matter of fact, he hated the Germans, this Nietzsche. He claimed he was a Pole or
something like that. He had them dead right, too. He said they were stupid and swinish,
and by God, he knew what he was talking about. Anyway he showed them up. He said they were
full of shit, to make it brief, and by God, wasn't he right though? Did you see the way
those bastards turned tail when they got a dose of their own medicine? "Listen, I
know a guy who cleaned out a nestful of them in the Argonne region - he said they were so
god-damned low he wouldn't shit on them. He said he wouldn't even waste a bullet on them -
he just bashed their brains in with a dub. I forget this guy's name now, but anyway he
told me he saw aplenty in the few months he was there. He said the best fun he got out of
the whole fucking business was to pop off his own major. Not that he had any special
grievance against him - he just didn't like his mug. He didn't like the way the guy gave
orders. Most of the officers that were killed got it in the back, he said. Served them
right, too, the pricks! He was just a lad from the North Side. I think he runs a pool room
now down near Wallabout Market. A quiet fellow, minds his own business. But if you start
talking to him about the war he goes off the handle. He says he'd assassinate the
President of the United States if they ever tried to start another war. Yeah, and he'd do
it too, I'm telling you ... But shit, what was that I wanted to tell you about Plato? Oh
yeah . .."
When the others were gone he'd suddenly shift gears. "You don't
believe in talking like that, do you?" he'd begin. I had to admit I didn't.
"You're wrong," he'd continue. "You've got to keep in with people, you
don't know when you may need one of these guys. You act on the assumption that you're
free, independent! You act as though you were superior to these people. Well, that's where
you make a big mistake. How do you know where you'll be five years from now, or even six
months from now? You might be blind, you might be
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run over by a truck, you might be put in the bug-house; you can't tell
what's going to happen to you. Nobody can. You might be as helpless as a baby..."
"So what?" I would say.
"Well, don't you think it would be good to have a friend when you
need one? You might be so god-damned helpless you'd be glad to have some one help you
across the street. You think these guys are worthless; you think I'm wasting my time with
them. Listen, you never know what a man might do for you some day. Nobody gets anywhere
alone..."
He was touchy about my independence, what he called my indifference. If
I was obliged to ask him for a little dough he was delighted. That gave him a chance to
deliver a little sermon on friendship. "So you have to have money, too?" he'd
say, with a big satisfied grin spreading all over his face. "So the poet has to eat
too? Well, well... It's lucky you came to me. Henry me boy, because I'm easy with you, I
know you, you heartless son of a bitch. Sure, what do you want? I haven't got very much,
but I'll split it with you. That's fair enough, isn't it? Or do you think, you bastard,
that maybe I ought to give you it all and go out and borrow something for myself? I
suppose you want a good meal, eh? Ham and Eggs wouldn't be good enough, would it? I
suppose you'd like me to drive you to the restaurant too, eh? Listen, get up from that
chair a minute - I want to put a cushion under your ass. Well, well, so you're broke!
Jesus, you're always broke -1 never remember seeing you with money in your pocket. Listen,
don't you ever feel ashamed of yourself? You talk about those bums I hang out with . . .
well listen, mister, those guys never come and bum me for a dime like you do. They've got
more pride - they'd rather steal it than come and grub it off me. But you, shit,
you're full of high-falutin' ideas, you want to reform the world and all that crap - you
don't want to work for money, no, not you . . . you expect somebody to hand it to you on a
silver platter. Huh! Lucky there's guys like me around that understand you. You need to
get wise to yourself. Henry. You're dreaming. Everybody wants to eat, don't you know that?
Most people are willing to work for it - they don't lie in bed
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all day like you and then suddenly pull on their pants and run to the
first friend at hand. Supposing I wasn't here, what would you have done? Don't answer... I
know what you're going to say. But listen, you can't go on all your life like that. Sure
you talk fine - it's a pleasure to listen to you. You're the only guy I know that I really
enjoy talking to, but where's it going to get you? One of these days they'll lock you up
for vagrancy. You're just a bum, don't you know that? You're not even as good as those
other bums you preach about. Where are you when I'm in a jam? You can't be found. You
don't answer my letters, you don't answer the telephone, you even hide sometimes when I
come to see you. Listen, I know - you don't have to explain to me. I know you don't want
to hear my stories all the time. But shit, sometimes I really have to talk to you. A
fucking lot you care though. So long as you're out of the rain and putting another meal
under your belt you're happy. You don't think about your friends - until you're desperate.
That's no way to behave, is it ? Say no and I'll give you a buck. God-damn it.
Henry, you're the only real friend I've got but you're a son of a bitch of a mucker if I
know what I'm talking about. You're just a born good for nothing son of a bitch. You'd
rather starve than turn your hand to something useful..."
Naturally I'd laugh and hold my hand out for the buck he had promised
me. That would irritate him afresh. "You're ready to say anything aren't you, if only
I give you the buck I promised you? What a guy! Talk about morals - Jesus, you've got the
ethics of a rattlesnake. No, I'm not giving it to you yet, by Christ. I'm going to
torture you a little more first. I'm going to make you earn this money, if I can.
Listen what about shining my shoes - do that for me, will you? They'll never get shined if
you don't do it now." I pick up the shoes and ask him for the brush. I don't mind
shining his shoes, not in the least. But that too seems to incense him. "You're going
to shine them, are you? Well by Jesus, that beats all hell. Listen, where's your pride -
didn't you ever have any? And you're the guy that knows everything. It's amazing. You know
so god-damned much that you have to shine your
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friend's shoes to worm a meal out of him. A fine pickle! Here, you
bastard, here's the brush! Shine the other pair too while you're at it."
A pause. He's washing himself at the sink and humming a bit. Suddenly,
in a bright, cheerful tone - "How is it out today, Henry? Is it sunny? Listen, I've
got just the place for you. What do you say to scallops and bacon with a little tartare
sauce on the side? It's a little joint down near the inlet. A day like today is just the
day for scallops and bacon, eh what, Henry? Don't tell me you've got something to do ...
if I haul you down there you've got to spend a little time with me, you know that, don't
you? Jesus, I wish I had your disposition. You just drift along, from minute to minute.
Sometimes I think you're a damned sight better off than any of us, even if you are a
stinking son of a bitch and a traitor and a thief. When I'm with you the day seems to pass
like a dream. Listen, don't you see what I mean when I say I've got to see you sometimes?
I go nuts being all by myself all the time. Why do I go chasing around after cunt so much?
Why do I play cards all night? Why do I hang out with those bums from the Point? I need to
talk to some one, that's what."
A little later at the bay, sitting out over the water, with a shot of
rye in him and waiting for the sea food to be served up ... "Life's not so bad if you
can do what you want, eh Henry? If I make a little dough I'm going to take a trip around
the world - and you're coming along with me. Yes, though you don't deserve it, I'm going
to spend some real money on you one day. I want to see how you'd act if I gave you plenty
of rope. I'm going to give you the money, see... I won't pretend to lend it
to you. We'll see what'll happen to your fine ideas when you have some dough in your
pocket. Listen, when I was talking about Plato the other day I meant to ask you something:
I meant to ask you if you ever read that yam of his about Atlands. Did you? You did?
Well, what do you think of it? Do you think it was just a yam, or do you think there might
have been a place like that once?"
I didn't dare to tell him that I suspected there were hundreds and
thousands of continents whose existence past or future we
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hadn't even begun to dream about, so I simply said I thought it quite
possible indeed that such a place as Atlanris might once have been.
"Well, it doesn't matter much one way or the other, I
suppose," he went on, "but I'll tell you what I think. I think there must have
been a time like that once, a time when men were different. I can't believe that they
always were the pigs they are now and have been for the last few thousand years. I think
it's just possible that there was a time when men knew how to live, when they knew how to
take it easy and to enjoy life. Do you know what drives me crazy? It's looking at my old
man. Ever since he's retired he sits in front of the fire all day long and mopes. To sit
there like a broken-down gorilla, that's what he slaved for all his life. Well shit, if I
thought that was going to happen to me I'd blow my brains out now. Look around you ...
look at the people we know ... do you know one that's worth while? What's all the fuss
about, I'd like to know? We've got to live, they say. Why ? that's what I want to
know. They'd all be a damned sight better off dead. They're all just so much manure. When
the war broke out and I saw them go off to the trenches I said to myself good,
maybe they'll come back with a little sense! A lot of them didn't come back, of
course. But the others! - listen, do you suppose they got more human, more
considerate? Not at all! They're all butchers at heart, and when they're up against it
they squeal. They make me sick, the whole fucking lot of 'em. I see what they're like,
bailing them out every day. I see it from both sides of the fence. On the other side it
stinks even worse. Why, if I told you some of the things I knew about the judges who
condemn these poor bastards you'd want to slug them. All you have to do is look at their
faces. Yes sir. Henry, I'd like to think there was once a time when things were different.
We haven't seen any real life - and we're not going to see any. This thing is going to
last another few thousand years, if I know anything about it. You think I'm mercenary. You
think I'm cuckoo to want to earn a lot of money, don't you? Well I'll tell you, I want to
earn a little pile so that I can get my feet out of this muck. I'd go off and live with a
nigger wench if I
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could get away from this atmosphere. I've worked my balls off trying to
get where I am, which isn't very far. I don't believe in work any more than you do -1 -was
trained that way, that's all. If I could put over a deal, if I could swindle a pile out of
one of these dirty bastards I'm dealing with, I'd do it with a dear conscience. I know a
little too much about the law, that's the trouble. But I'll fool them yet, you'll see. And
when I put it over I'll put it over big..."
Another shot of rye as the sea food's coming along and he starts in
again. "I meant that about taking you on a trip with me. I'm thinking about it
seriously. I suppose you'll tell me you've got a wife and a kid to look after. Listen when
are you going to break off with that battle-axe of yours? Don't you know that you've got
to ditch her?" He begins to laugh softly. "Ho! Ho! To think that I was the one
who picked her out for you! Did I ever think you'd be chump enough to get hitched up to
her? I thought I was recommending you a nice piece of tail and you, you poor slob, you
marry her. Ho ho! Listen to me. Henry, while you've got a little sense left: don't let
that sour-balled puss muck up your life for you, do you get me? I don't care what you do
or where you go. I'd hate to see you leave town ... I'd miss you, I'm telling you that
frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to Africa, beat it, get out of her clutches, she's
no good for you. Sometimes when I get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now
there's something nice for Henry - and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and then of
course I forget. But Jesus, man, there's thousands of cunts in the world you get along
with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch like that .. . Do you want more
bacon? You'd better eat what you want now, you know there won't be any dough later. Have
another drink, eh? Listen, if you try to run away from me to-day I swear I'll never
lend you a cent... What was I saying? Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married.
Listen, are you going to do it or not? Every time I see you you tell me you're going to
run away, but you never do it. You don't think you're supporting her, I hope? She don't need
you, you sap, don't you see that? She just wants to torture you. As for the kid... well,
shit, if I were in your
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boots I'd drown it. That sounds kind of mean, doesn't it, but you know
what I mean. You're not a father. I don't know what the hell you are... I just know you're
too god-damned good a fellow to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don't you try to
make something of yourself? You're young yet and you make a good appearance. Go off
somewhere, way the hell on, and start all over again. If you need a little money I'll
raise it for you. It's like throwing it down a sewer, I know, but I'll do it for you just
the same. The truth is. Henry, I like you a hell of a lot. I've taken more from you than I
would from anybody in the world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old
neighbourhood. Funny I didn't know you in those days. Shit, I'm getting
sentimental..."
The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out
strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the beach studying
the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too - one of many, many days I
spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that really seemed to make the wheel stop. On
the surface it was jolly and happy go lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But
underneath it was fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless. I
knew very well I'd have to make a break some day; I knew very well I was pissing my time
away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do about it - yet. Something
had to happen, something big, something that would sweep me off my feet. All I needed was
a push, but it had to be some force outside my world that could give me the right push,
that I was certain of. I couldn't eat my heart out, because it wasn't in my nature. All my
life things had worked out all right - in the end. It wasn't in the cards for me to
exert myself. Something had to be left to Providence - in my case a whole lot. Despite all
the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew that I was born with a
silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown too. The external situation was bad,
admitted - but what bothered me more was the internal situation. I was really afraid of
myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my
geniality, my powers of adaptation. No
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situation in itself could frighten me: I somehow always saw myself
sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup, as it were and sipping the honey. Even if I
were flung in jail I had a hunch I'd enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I
suppose. Other people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy
was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn't bother me nearly so much as what
they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so damned well off inside that I
had to take on the problems of the world. And that's why I was in a mess all the time. I
wasn't synchronized with my own destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world
destiny. If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house,
not even for the kid, I would turn right around and go looking for the food. But what I
noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and
hustling for the grub than I was back at the Weltanschauung again. I didn't think of food
for us exclusively, I thought of food in general, food in all its stages,
everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and
what people did if they didn't have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that
everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such an idiotically
simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but also felt sorry for the
Hottentots and the Australian Bushmen, not to mention the starving Belgians and the Turks
and the Armenians. I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack
of imagination. Missing a meal wasn't so terrible - it was the ghastly emptiness of the
street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so
empty and cheerless-looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of
the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy
could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a
crust of bread. That's what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out
with a dinner bell and yell "Listen, listen, people, I'm a guy what's hungry. Who
wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants
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the drainpipes cleaned out?" If you could only go out in the
street and put it to them dear like that. But no, you don't dare to open your trap. If you
tell a guy in the street you're hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell.
That's something I never understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so
simple - you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can
take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform
and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That's
what I think about, more than about whose trap it's going down or how much it costs. Why
should I give a fuck about what anything costs ? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And
that's just what the bastards don't want you to do - to live! They want you to
spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable.
That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but
it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe
there wouldn't be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a
million-billion varieties, maybe there wouldn't even be glass in the windows, maybe you'd
have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn't be French cooking and Italian cooking
and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted
and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn't be any jails or any cops or
judges, and there certainly wouldn't be any cabinet ministers or legislatures
because-there wouldn't be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take
months and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn't need a visa or a passport
or a carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you wouldn't bear a
number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it
wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own anything except what you could carry
around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?
During this period when I was drifting from door to door,
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job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I did try nevertheless to
rope off a little space for myself which might be an anchorage; it was more like a
lifebuoy in the midst of a swift channel. To get within a mile of me was to hear a huge
dolorous bell tolling. Nobody could see the anchorage - it was buried deep in the bottom
of the channel. One saw me bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or
else swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly. What held me down safely was the big
pigeon-holed desk which I put in the parlour. This was the desk which had been in the old
man's tailoring establishment for the last fifty years, which had given birth to many
bills and many groans, which had housed strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which
finally I had filched from him when he was ill and away from the establishment; and
now it stood in the middle of the floor in our lugubrious parlour on the third floor of a
respectable brown-stone house in the dead centre of the most respectable neighbourhood in
Brooklyn. I had to fight a tough battle to install it there, but I insisted that it be
there in the midmost midst of the shebang. It was like putting a mastodon in the centre of
a dentist's office. But since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends
didn't give a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlour and
I put all the extra chairs we bad around it in a big circle and then I sat down
comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I would write if I could
write. I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big brass one from the same
establishment, and I would spit in it now and then to remind myself that it was there. All
the pigeon-holes were empty and all the drawers were empty; there wasn't a thing on the
desk or in it except a sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much
as a pothook.
When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava
which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to bring the
funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably of the
men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years, three hundred
thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith.
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A phantom struggle, because they weren't dreaming of such a thing as
the paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except
that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they don't happen, that's
all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life
is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know
how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we
struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.
I think if I had been crazy I couldn't have hit upon a better scheme to
consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the middle of the
parlour. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and my spinal column snugly
socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam
which was whirling about me, and which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my
friends were trying to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with
reality that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had
written, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to me - crude ciphers
from the old stone age - because the contact was through the head and the head is a
useless appendage unless you're anchored in mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had
written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that's why it
doesn't catch fire, doesn't inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the ancestral
race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry
Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of
the lifebuoy, was a Herculean task. I didn't lack thoughts nor words nor the power of
expression - I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the
juice. The bloody machine wouldn't stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the
middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it
whatever.
I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the
other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I had made with my
own hands and
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my own blood slowly began to function. I had gone to the theatre nearby
to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing
on line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as
though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like
the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which is a
very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow its foul breath in my mouth - it
wouldn't matter. I might bend over and kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm
could possibly come to me. There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between
health and disease, which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus
integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was completely
routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one would never again be ill
or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this conclusion is to make a jump which would take
one back farther than the old stone age. At that moment I wasn't even dreaming of taking
root;
I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the
miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to die
then and there for the privilege of the experience.
What happened was this ... As I passed the doorman holding the torn
stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtains sent up. I stood a moment slightly
dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that throughout
the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled by this brief moment which preludes the
spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising in man. And immediately I also realized
that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if
he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have
mounted the boards. I didn't think this thought - it was a realization, as I say, and so
simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was
standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the
stage and beheld the marble
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staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a
man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have
been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn't
take in the entire staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing
in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his
hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and for
another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man
suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a
dream which is being enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as
the bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life
joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! the rest faded out in a penumbra. And
it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the
performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable.
It was just about this time that the Dadaists were in full swing, to be
followed shortly by the Surrealists. I never heard of either group until some ten years
later; I never read a French book and I never had a French idea. I was perhaps the unique
Dadaist in America, and I didn't know it. I might just as well have been living in the
jungles of the Amazon for all the contact I had with the outside world. Nobody understood
what I was writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was
daffy. I was describing the New World - unfortunately a little too soon because it had not
yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that it existed. It was an ovarian
world, still hidden away in the Fallopian tubes. Naturally nothing was dearly formulated:
there was only the faint suggestion of a backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs,
no hair, no nails, no teeth. Sex was the last thing to be dreamed of; it was the world of
Chronos and his ovicular progeny. It was the world of the iota, each iota being
indispensable, frighteningly logical, and absolutely unpredictable.
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There was no such thing as a thing, because the concept
"thing" was missing.
I say it was a New World I was describing, but like the New World which
Columbus discovered it turned out to be a far older world than any we have known. I saw
beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the indestructible world which man
has always carried within him; it was neither old nor new, really, but the eternally true
world which changes from moment to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there
was no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an
evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian Bushmen or to the
Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the Igorotes in the Philippines. I had to
write English, naturally, because it was the only language I spoke, but between my
language and the telegraphic code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of
difference. Any primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would
have understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million
people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for them I would have been
obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to arrest time. I had just made the
realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the
present. Did they expect me to deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a
glimpse of? They most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was
that life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of
the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents had been
violated; both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious - in
things. No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to
Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land
was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold-diggers. I
blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no
let-up to the slaughter and the pillage, as I discovered at first hand travelling
throughout
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the length and breadth of the land. Down to the closest friend every
man is a potential murderer. Often it wasn't necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso
or the branding iron - they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and
killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word annihilated
before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter experience, to hold my tongue; I
learned to sit in silence, and even smile, when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I
learned to shake hands and say how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were
only waiting for me to sit down in order to suck my blood.
How was it possible, when I sat down in the parlour at my prehistoric
desk, to use this code language of rape and murder? I was alone in this great hemisphere
of violence, but I was not alone as far as the human race was concerned. I was lonely
amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was
delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and
futility. I could not begin with a full statement - it would have meant the strait-jacket
or the electric chair. I was like a man who had been too long incarcerated in a dungeon -
I had to feel my way slowly, falteringly, lest I stumble and be run over. I had to
accustom myself gradually to the penalties which freedom involves. I had to grow a new
epidermis which would protect me from this burning light in the sky.
The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child
is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the
death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life
rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep alive at any
price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive,
out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who
has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world
with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of
life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing:
it is often a sign of death. By
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simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the
very climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death machine,
such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of peace, of reality? What
does any individual American dynamo know of the wisdom and energy, of the life abundant
and eternal possessed by a ragged beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation?
What is energy? What is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the
scientific and philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of
these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horsepower fiends;
in order to break their insane rhythm, their death rhythm, I had to resort to a wavelength
which, until I found the proper sustenance in my own bowels, would at least nullify the
rhythm they had set up. Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian
desk which I had installed in the parlour; certainly I didn't need twelve empty chairs
placed around in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth
chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond
heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he
finds that he still has some resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find
such a man acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become
stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practiser of magic. Such
a man is beyond religion - it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man
becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell
which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants
to stop reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth, wants the
act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins
to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so utterly
unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this man has found his way
back to the womb and source of life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object
of ridicule which you have
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made of him, he will stand forth as a mm in his own right and
all the powers of the world will be of no avail against him.
Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric
desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts through the
death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There is no magic in this
wavelength any more than there is magic in the womb. Men are lonely and out of
communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is
the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth.
Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too - after life.
Only one like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes,
Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death as a reward,
yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown and shield, yes! But not
death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving
them fruitless energy, filling them with a will which can only say No! The first word any
man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm is Yes!
Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes - Yes in a thousand million ways. No
dynamo, no matter how huge - not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead souls - can
combat one man saying Yes!
The war was on and men were being slaughtered, one million, two
million, five million, ten million, twenty million, finally a hundred million, then a
billion, everybody, man, woman and child, down to the last one. "No!"
they were shouting, "No! they shall not pass!" And yet everybody passed;
everybody got a free pass, whether he shouted Yes or No. In the midst of this triumphant
demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I sat with my feet planted on the big
desk trying to communicate with Zeus the Father of Atlantis and with his lost progeny,
ignorant of the fact that Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a
military hospital, ignorant of the fact that in his "new writing" he had penned
these indelible lines,
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"Be forbearing when you compare us Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins." I was
ignorant of the fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of
Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vache, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Rene Crevel, Henri de
Montherlant, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, George Grosz; ignorant of the fact that on July,
14,1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada Manifesto had been proclaimed
-"manifesto by monsieur antipyrine" - that in this strange document it was
stated "Dada is life without slippers or parallel . . . severe necessity without
discipline or morality and we spit on humanity." Ignorant of the fact that the Dada
Manifesto of 1918 contained these lines. "I am writing a manifesto and I want
nothing, yet I say certain things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle,
as I am also against principles ... I write this manifesto to show that one may perform
opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration, I am against action; for
continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not
explain for I hate good sense .. . There is a literature which does not reach the
voracious mass. The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the
author, and for himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away . .
. Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind,
dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for
principles or with the mode of typography. On the one hand a staggering fleeing world,
affianced to the jingle-bells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings..."
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Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes! Yes, Monsieur
Antipyrine! Yes,Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara! Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt! Yes!
Monsieur Rene Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is crazy, you were
right. Yes, Monsieur Blaise Cendrars, you were right to kill. Was it the day of the
Armistice that you brought out your little book -J'ai tue? Yes, "keep on my
lads, humanity..." Yes, Jacques Vache, quite right - "Art ought to be something
funny and a trifle boring." Yes, my dear dead Vache, how right you were and how funny
and how boring the touching and tender and true: "It is of the essence of symbols to
be symbolic." Say it again, from the other world! Have you a megaphone up there? Have
you found all the arms and legs that were blown off during the melee? Can you put them
together again? Do you remember the meeting at Nantes in 1916 with Andre Breton? Did you
celebrate the birth of hysteria together? Had he told you, Breton, that there was only the
marvellous and nothing but the marvellous and that the marvellous is always marvellous -
and isn't it marvellous to hear it again, even though your ears are stopped? I want to
include here, before passing on, a little portrait of you by Emile Bouvier for the benefit
of my Brooklyn friends who may not have recognized me then but who will now, I am sure...
". . . he was not all crazy, and could explain his conduct when
occasion required. His actions, none the less, were as disconcerting as Jarry's worst
eccentricities. For example, he was barely out of hospital when he hired himself out as a
stevedore, and he thereafter passed his afternoons in unloading coal on the quays along
the Loire. In the evening, on the other hand he would make the rounds of the cafes and
cinemas, dressed in the height of fashion and with many variations of costume. What was
more, in time of war, he would strut forth sometimes in the uniform of a lieutenant of
Hussars, sometimes in that of an English officer, of an aviator or of a surgeon. In civil
life, he was quite as free and easy, thinking nothing of introducing Breton under the name
of Andre Salmon, while he took unto himself, but quite without vanity, the most wonderful
titles and adventures. He never said good morning
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nor good evening nor good-bye, and never took any notice of letters,
except those from his mother, when he had to ask for money. He did not recognize his best
friends from one day to another..."
Do you recognize me, lads? Just a Brooklyn boy communicating with the
red-haired albinos of the Zuni region. Making ready, with feet on the desk, to write
"strong works, works forever incomprehensible", as my dead comrades were
promising. These "strong works" - would you recognize them if you saw them? Do
you know that of the millions who were killed not one death was necessary to produce
"the strong work"? New beings, yes! We have need of new beings still. We
can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high-class bombers - but
we can't do without new beings. If Atlantis was submerged beneath the sea, if the Sphinx
and the Pyramids remain an eternal riddle, it is because there were no more new beings
being born. Stop the machine a moment! Plash back! Flash back to 1914, to the Kaiser
sitting on his horse. Keep him sitting there a moment with his withered arm clutching the
bridle rein. Look at his moustache! Look at his haughty air of pride and arrogance! Look
at his cannon-fodder lined up in strictest discipline, all ready to obey the word, to get
shot, to get disembowelled, to be burned in quicklime. Hold it a moment, now, and look at
the other side: the defenders of our great and glorious civilization, the men who will war
to end war. Change their clothes, change uniforms, change horses, change flags, change
terrain. My, is that the Kaiser I see on a white horse? Are those the terrible Huns? And
where is Big Bertha? Oh, I see -1 thought it was pointing towards Notre Dame? Humanity, me
lads, humanity always marching in the van . . . And the strong works we were speaking of?
Where are the strong works? Call up the Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of
foot - not a cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one! Ask him to find the great work
and bring it back. We need it. We have a brand new museum ready waiting to house it - and
cellophane and the Dewey Decimal system to file it. All we need is the name of the author.
Even if he has no name, even if it is anonymous work,
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we won't kick. Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we won't mind.
Bring it back dead or alive - there's a $25,000 reward for the man who fetches it.
And if they tell you that these things had to be, that things could not
have happened otherwise, that France did her best and Germany her best and that little
Liberia and little Ecuador and all the other allies also did their best, and that since
the war everybody has been doing his best to patch things up or to forget, tell them that
their best is not good enough, that we don't want to hear any more this logic of
"doing the best one can", tell them we don't want the best of a bad bargain, we
don't believe in bargains good or bad, nor in war memorials. We don't want to hear about
the logic of events - or any kind of logic. "Je ne parle pas logique,"
said Montherlant, "je parle generosite." I don't think you heard it very
well, since it was in French. I'll repeat it for you, in the Queen's own language;
"I'm not talking logic, I'm talking generosity." That's bad English, as the
Queen herself might speak it, but it's clear. Generosity - do you hear? You never
practise it, any of you, either in peace or in war. You don't know the meaning of the
word. You think to supply guns and ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think
sending Red Cross nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity. You think a
bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a wheel chair is
generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back it's generosity. You don't know
what the fucking war means, you bastards! To be generous is to say Yes before the man even
opens his mouth. To say Yes you have to first be a Surrealist or a Dadaist, because you
have understood what it means to say No. You can even say Yes and No at the same time,
provided you do more than is expected of you. Be a stevedore in the day time and a Beau
Brummel in the night-time. Wear any uniform so long as it's not yours. When you write your
mother ask her to cough up a little dough so that you may have a clean rag to wipe your
ass with. Don't be disturbed if you see your neighbour going after his wife with a knife:
he probably has good reason to go after her, and if he kills her you may be sure he has
the satisfaction of knowing
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why he did it. If you're trying to improve your mind, stop it I
There's no improving the mind. Look at your heart and gizzard - the brain is in the heart.
Ah yes, if I had known then that these birds existed -Cendrars, Vache,
Grosz, Ernst, Apollinaire - if I had known that then, if I had known that in their own way
they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I think I'd have blown up. Yes, I
think I'd have gone off like a bomb. But I was ignorant. Ignorant of the fact that almost
fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly
marvellous phrases as "doubt's duck with the vermouth lips" or "I have seen
a fig eat an onager" - that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was
saying: "Find flowers that are chairs" . . . "my hunger is the black air's
bits" . . . "his heart, amber and spunk". Maybe at the same time, or
thereabouts, while Jarry was saying "in eating the sound of moths", and
Apollinaire repeating after him "near a gentleman swallowing himself", and
Breton murmuring softly "night's pedals move uninterruptedly", perhaps "in
the air beautiful and black" which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross
another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on
paper these memorable words: "I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for
my exile from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro) which I am fond of
referring to as my unheavening ... At present, I think that the best way of writing this
novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of
creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo." Had I known he was going to add this,
this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb... "By being crazy is
understood losing one's reason. Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak
truths while others keep silent. . ." Speaking of these things, speaking of the war
and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran
across this in French by a Frenchman. 0 miracles of miracles! "Il faut le
dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu'a moitie" Yes, yes, and again
yes! O, let us do some rash things - for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something
live
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and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: "All
things are generated oat of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another.
Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate."
Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet
also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, the gynecological manifestoes,
parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While
into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the
future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, 0 profound and perplexing
riddle, other men were saying: "Won't you please come and take a job in our
ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic
conditions. The work is so easy that even a child could do it" And if you had a
sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could manipulate her hands, as long as
she could prove that she had no bad habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to
the ammunition works. If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very
gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when
they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage because... et ipso facto e
pluribus unum. The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so
much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something
into my guts), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you
were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and
if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the
municipality, was precious to them, the killers. Standing knee-deep in the muck, the
lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried
reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for
a catholic work. "Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz. into its own
lubet.. ." Lubet! If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how
peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting! How sweet, in the
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night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and
slime, to take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means "lust" and in
Latin 'lubitum" or the divine beneplacitum. Standing knee-deep in the garbage
I said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: "I truly have
need of God, but God has need of me too." There was a job waiting for me in the
slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting entrails, but I couldn't raise the fare to
get to Chicago. I remained in Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and
round on the plinth of the labyrinth. I remained at home seeking the "germinal
vesicle", "the dragon castle on the floor of the sea", "the Heavenly
Harp", "the field of the square inch", "the house of the square
foot", "the dark pass", "the space of former Heaven". I remained
locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of
Limentius, god of the threshold. I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses
called Fear, Pallor and Fever. I saw no "Asian luxury", as had St. Augustine, or
as he imagined he had. Nor did I see "the two twins born, so near together, that the
second held the first by the heel". But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which
runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else
it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any
species of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it
squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it. For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone
for twenty years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable bridlepaths ridden by
iron monsters which lead to the heart of America's emptiness. If you have only seen Essen
or Manchester or Chicago or Levallois-Perret or Glasgow or Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne
you have seen nothing of the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment. Dear
reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize how far into the
future Dante saw. You must believe me that on this street, neither in the houses which
line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, nor the elevated structure which cuts it
atwain, neither in any creature that bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any
animal, bird or insect
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passing through it to slaughter or already slaughtered, is there hope
of "lubet", "sublimate" or "abominate". It is a street not
of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is
emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a vacuum, emptier than the word God in
the mouth of an unbeliever.
I said I did not know a word of French then, and it is true, but I was
just on the brink of making a great discovery, a discovery which would compensate for the
emptiness of Myrtle Avenue and the whole American continent. I had almost reached the
shore of that great French ocean which goes by the name of Elie Faure, an ocean which the
French themselves had hardly navigated and which they had mistaken, it seems, for an
inland sea. Reading him even in such a withered language as English has become, I
could see that this man who had described the glory of the human race on his cuff was
Father Zeus of Atlantis, whom I had been searching for. An ocean I called him, but he was
also a world symphony. He was the first musician the French have produced; he was exalted
and controlled, an anomaly, a Gallic Beethoven, a great physician of the soul, a giant
lightning-rod. He was also a sunflower turning with the sun, always drinking in the light,
always radiant and blazing with vitality. He was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, any
more than one can say that the ocean is beneficient or malevolent. He was a believer in
the human race. He added a cubit to the race, by giving it back its dignity, its strength,
its need of creation. He saw everything as creation, as solar joy. He didn't record it in
orderly fashion, he recorded it musically. He was indifferent to the fact that the French
have a tin ear - he was orchestrating for the whole world simultaneously. What was my
amazement then, when some years later I arrived in France, to find that there were no
monuments erected to him, no streets named after him. Worse, during eight whole years I
never once beard a Frenchman mention his name. He had to die in order to be put in the
pantheon of French deities - and how sickly must they look, his deific contemporaries, in
the presence of this radiant sun! If he had not been a physician, and thus permitted to
earn a
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livelihood, what might not have happened to him! Perhaps another able
hand for the garbage trucks! The man who made the Egyptian frescoes come alive in all
their flaming colours, this man could just as well have starved to death for all the
public cared. But he was an ocean and the critics drowned in this ocean, and the editors
and the publishers and the public too. It will take aeons for him to dry up, to evaporate.
It will take about as long as for the French to acquire a musical ear.
If there had been no music I would have gone to the madhouse like
Nijinsky. (It was just about this time that they discovered that Nijinsky was mad.) He had
been found giving his money away to the poor - always a bad sign! My mind was filled with
wonderful treasures, my taste was sharp and exigent, my muscles were in excellent
condition, my appetite was strong, my wind sound. I had nothing to do except to improve
myself, and I was going crazy with the improvements I made every day. Even if there were a
job for me to fill I couldn't accept it, because what I needed was not work but a life
more abundant. I couldn't waste time being a teacher, a lawyer, a physician, a politician
or anything else that society had to offer. It was easier to accept menial jobs because it
left my mind free. After I was fired from the garbage trucks I remember taking up with an
Evangelist who seemed to have great confidence in me. I was a sort of usher, collector and
private secretary. He brought to my attention the whole world of Indian philosophy.
Evenings when I was free I would meet with my friends at the home of Ed Bauries who lived
in an aristocratic section of Brooklyn. Ed Bauries was an eccentric pianist who couldn't
read a note. He had a bosom pal called George Neumiller with whom he often played duets.
Of the dozen or so who congregated at Ed Bauries' home nearly every one of us could play
the piano. We were all between twenty-one and twenty-five at the time; we never brought
any women along and we hardly ever mentioned the subject of women during these sessions.
We had plenty of beer to drink and a whole big house at our disposal, for it was in the
Summer time, when his folks were away, that we held our gatherings. Though there were a
dozen other homes like this which I could speak of, I mention Ed Bauries' place because it
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was typical of something I have never encountered elsewhere in the
world. Neither Ed Bauries himself nor any of his friends suspected the sort of books I was
reading nor the things which were occupying my mind. When I blew in I was greeted
enthusiastically - as a clown. It was expected, of me to start things going. There were
about four pianos scattered throughout the big house to say nothing of the celesta, the
organ, guitars, mandolins, fiddles and what not. Ed Bauries was a nut, a very affable,
sympathetic and generous one too. The sandwiches were always of the best, the beer
plentiful, and if you wanted to stay the night he could fix you up on a divan just as
pretty as you liked. Coming down the street - a big, wide street, somnolent, luxurious, a
street altogether out of the world - I could hear the tinkle of the piano in the big
parlour on the first floor. The windows were wide open and as I got into range I could see
Al Burger or Connie Grimm sprawling in their big easy chairs, their feet on the window
sill, and big beer mugs in their hands. Probably George Neumiller was at the piano,
improvising, his shirt peeled off and a big cigar in his mouth. They were talking and
laughing while George fooled around, searching for an opening. Soon as he hit a theme he
would call for Ed and Ed would sit beside him, studying it out in his unprofessional way,
then suddenly pouncing on the keys and giving tit for tat. Maybe when I'd walk in somebody
would be trying to stand on his hands in the next room - there were three big rooms on the
first floor which opened one on to the other and back of them was a garden, an enormous
garden, with flowers, fruit trees, grape vines, statues, fountains an<f everything.
Sometimes when it was too hot they brought the celesta or the little organ into the garden
(and a keg of beer, naturally) and we'd sit around in the dark laughing and singing -
until the neighbours forced us to stop. Sometimes the music was going on all through the
house at once, on every floor. It was really crazy then, intoxicating, and if there had
been women around it would have spoiled it. Sometimes it was like watching an endurance
contest - Ed Bauries and George Neumiller at the grand piano, each trying to wear the
other out, changing places without stopping, crossing hands, sometimes
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felling away to plain chopsticks, sometimes going like a Wurlitzer. And
always something to laugh about all the time. Nobody asked what you did, what you thought
about, and so forth. When you arrived at Ed Bauries' place you checked your identification
marks. Nobody gave a fuck what size hat you wore or how much you paid for it. It was
entertainment from the word go - and the sandwiches and the drinks were on the house. And
when things got going, three or four pianos at once, the celesta, the organ, the
mandolins, the guitars, beer running through the halls, the mantelpieces full of
sandwiches and cigars, a breeze coming through from the garden, George Neumiller stripped
to the waist and modulating like a fiend, it was better than any show I've ever seen put
on and it didn't cost a cent. In fact, with the dressing and undressing that went on, I
always came away with a little extra change and a pocketful of good cigars. I never saw
any of them between time - only Monday nights throughout the Summer, when Ed held open
house.
Standing in the garden listening to the din I could scarcely believe
that it was the same city. And if I had ever opened my trap and exposed my guts it would
have been all over. Not one of these bozos amounted to anything, as the world reckons.
They were just good eggs, children, fellows who liked music and who liked a good time.
They liked it so much that sometimes we had to call the ambulance. Like the night Al
Burger twisted his knee while showing us one of his stunts. Everybody so happy, so full of
music, so lit up, that it took him an hour to persuade us he was really hurt. We try to
carry him to a hospital but it's too far away and besides, it's such a good joke, that we
drop him now and then and that makes him yell like a maniac. So finally we telephone for
help from a police box, and the ambulance comes and the patrol wagon too. They take Al to
the hospital and the rest of us to the hoose-gow. And on the way we sing at the top of our
lungs. And after we're bailed out we're still feeling good and the cops are feeling good
too, and so we all adjourn to the basement where there's a cracked piano and we go on
singing and playing. All this is like some period B.C. in history which ends not because
there's a war but
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because even a joint like Ed Bauries' is not immune to the poison
seeping in from the periphery. Because every street is becoming Myrtle Avenue, because
emptiness is filling the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Because, after
a certain time, you can't enter a single house throughout the length and breadth of the
land and find a man standing on his hands singing. It just ain't done any more. And there
ain't two pianos going at once anywhere, nor are there two men anywhere willing to play
all night just for the fun of it. Two men who can play like Ed Bauries and George
Neumiller are hired by the radio or the movies and only a thimbleful of their talent is
used and the rest is thrown into the garbage can. Nobody knows, judging from public
spectacles, what talent is disposable in the great American continent. Later on, and
that's why I used to sit around on doorsteps in Tin Pan Alley, I would while away the
afternoons listening to the professionals mugging it out. That was good too, but it was
different. There was no fun in it, it was a perpetual rehearsal to bring in dollars and
cents. Any man in America who had an ounce of humour in him was saving it up to put
himself across. There were some wonderful nuts among them too, men I'll never forget, men
who left no name behind them, and they were the best we produced. I remember an anonymous
performer on the Keith circuit who was probably the craziest man in America, and perhaps
he got fifty dollars a week for it. Three times a day, every day in the week, he came out
and held the audience spell-bound. He didn't have an act - he just improvised. He never
repeated his jokes or his stunts. He gave himself prodigally, and I don't think he was a
hot fiend either. He was one of those guys who are born in the corncrakes and the energy
and the joy in him was so fierce that nothing could contain it. He could play any
instrument and dance any step and he could invent a story on the spot and string it out
till the bell rang. He was not only satisfied to do his own act but he would help the
others out. He would stand in the wings and wait for the right moment to break into the
other guy's act. He was the whole show and it was a show that contained more therapy than
the whole arsenal of modem science. They ought to have paid
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a man like this the wages which the President of the United States
receives. They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole Supreme
Court and set up a man like this as ruler. This man could cure any disease on the
calendar. He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it for nothing, if you asked him
to. This is the type of man which empties the insane asylums. He doesn't propose a cure -
he makes everybody crazy. Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is
civilization, there is only one other way out - and that is the road we will all take
eventually because everything else is doomed to failure. The type that represents this one
and only way bears a head with six faces and eight eyes, the head is a revolving
lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at the top, as there might well be, there is a
hole which ventilates what few brains there are. There is very little brain, as I say,
because there is very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness,
the grey matter passes off into light. This is the only type of man one can place above
the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond suffering. We don't recognize him
yet because he is too dose to us, right under the skin, as a matter of fact. When the
comedian catches us in the guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to
use a name, speaks up. When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so
hard that it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment
everybody can just as well be God as anything else. In that moment you have the
annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, which is what makes
the grey matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the skull. At that moment you can
really feel the hole in the top of the head; you know that you once had an eye there and
that this eye was capable of taking in everything at once. The eye is gone now, but when
you laugh until the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight
andventilating the brains. Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill
your enemy; neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the
metaphysical truths of the world and read it. If you know what freedom means, absolute
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freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this
is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the condition of the world it is
not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is
one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God.
My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why
it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic
for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can-opener of the soul.
It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and
disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with
them and finally they become tame again ... no, it is more like being in a hotel room in
Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal. You are in a
city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your
hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There
must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread.
There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places. The people are of
the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the
same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same
currency, the same newspapers - and yet they are absolutely different from the other
people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and
the tension is different. It's almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation. You
know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics,
not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else,
something you're trying to throtde all the time and which is really throttling you,
because otherwise you wouldn't be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going
to escape. Some cities you don't even have to pass a night in - just an hour or two is
enough to unnerve you. I
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think of Bayonne that way. I came on it in the night with a few
addresses that had been given me. I had a briefcase under my arm with a prospectus of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was supposed to go under cover of dark and sell the bloody
encyclopaedia to some poor devils who wanted to improve themselves. If I had been dropped
off at Helsingfors I couldn't have felt more ill at ease than walking the streets of
Bayonne. It wasn't an American city to me. It wasn't a city at all, but a huge octopus
wriggling in the dark. The first door I came to looked so forbidding I didn't even bother
to knock; I went like that to several addresses before I could summon the courage to
knock. The first face I took a look at frightened the shit out of me. I don't mean
timidity or embarrassment - I mean fear. It was the face of a hod-carrier, an ignorant
mick who would as lief fell you with an axe as spit in your eye. I pretended I had the
wrong name and hurried on to the next address. Each time the door opened I saw another
monster. And then I came at last to a poor simp who really wanted to improve himself and
that broke me down. I felt truly ashamed of myself, of my country, my race, my epoch. I
had a devil of a time persuading him not to buy the damned encyclopaedia. He asked me
innocently what then had brought me to his home - and without a minute's hesitation I told
him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only
pretending to sell the encyclopaedia in order to meet people and write about them. That
interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopaedia. He wanted to know what I
would write about him, if I could say. It's taken me twenty years to answer that question,
but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the City of Bayonne, this is
it... I owe you a great deal because after that lie I told you I left your house and I
tore up the prospectus furnished me by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the
gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretences even if it
is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to
starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. And if
anybody knocks at my door to sell me something
"You know damned well you're lying," I continued. "Why do you lie like
that? Don't you think it's human to have a cunt and to use it once in a while? Do you want
it to dry up on you?"
"Such language!" she said, biting her under lip and reddening like a beet
"I always thought you were a gentleman."
"Well, you're no lady," I retorted, "because even a lady admits to a fuck
now and then, and besides ladies don't ask gentlemen to stick their fingers up inside them
and see how small they're built."
"I never asked you to touch me," she said. "I wouldn't think of asking you
to put your hand on me, on my private parts anyway."
"Maybe you thought I was going to swab your ear for you, is that it?"
"I thought of you like a doctor at that moment, that's all I can say," she said
stiffly, trying to freeze me out.
"Listen," I said, taking a wild chance, "let's pretend that it was all a
mistake, that nothing happened, nothing at all. I know you too well to think of insulting
you like that. I wouldn't think of doing a thing like that to you - no, damned if I would.
I was just wondering if maybe you weren't right in what you said, if maybe you aren't
built rather small. You know, it all went so quick I couldn't tell what I felt... I don't
think I even put my finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside - that's about
all. Listen sit down here on the couch ... let's be friends again." I pulled her down
beside me - she was melting visibly - and I put my arm around her waist, as though to
console her more tenderly. "Has it always been like that?" I asked innocently,
and I almost laughed the next moment, realizing what an idiotic question it was. She hung
her head coyly, as though we were touching on an unmentionable tragedy. "Listen,
maybe if you sat on my lap . . ." and I hoisted her gently on to my lap, at the same
time delicately
With those who were the perfection of order.
We who everywhere seek adventure,
We are not your enemies.
We would give you vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it."
Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written:
"Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the boundless
future,
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I will invite him in and say "why are you doing this?" And if
he says it is because he has to make a living I will oner him what money I have and beg
him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from
pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not
true. One can starve to death - it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves
to death throws another cog into the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a
gun and kill his neighbour, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic
process by pretending that he has to cam a living. That's what I want to say, Mr. John
Doe.
I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but
the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul's atavistic struggle. A bridge in
North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Coming out of lush tobacco fields, low cabins
everywhere and the smell of fresh wood burning. The day passed in a thick lake of waving
green. Hardly a soul in sight. Then suddenly a clearing and I'm over a big gulch spanned
by a rickety wooden bridge. This is the end of the world! How in God's name I got here and
why I'm here I don't know. How am I going to eat? And if I ate the biggest meal
imaginable I would still be sad, frightfully sad. I don't know where to go from here. This
bridge is the end, the end of me, the end of my known world. This bridge is insanity;
there is no reason why it should stand there and no reason why people should cross it. I
refuse to budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge. Nearby is a low wall
which I lie against trying to think what to do and where to go. I realize quietly what a
terribly civilized person I am - the need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre,
music, cafes, drinks, and so forth. It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come
to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be
civilized is to have complicated needs. And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn't need a
thing. All day I had been moving through tobacco fields, and growing more and more uneasy.
What have I to do with all this tobacco? What am I heading into? People everywhere are
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producing crops and goods for other people - and I am like a ghost
sliding between all this unintelligible activity. I want to find some kind of work, but I
don't want to be a part of this thing, this infernal automatic process. I pass through a
town and I look at the newspaper telling what is happening in that town and its environs.
It seems to me that nothing is happening, that the dock has stopped but that these
poor devils are unaware of it. I have a strong intuition, moreover, that there is murder
in the air. I can smell it. A few days back I passed the imaginary line which divides the
North from the South. I wasn't aware of it until a darkie came along driving a team; when
he gets alongside of me he stands up in his seat and doffs his hat most respectfully. He
had snow-white hair and a face of great dignity. That made me feel horrible: it made me
realize that there are still slaves. This man had to tip his hat to me -because I was of
the white race. Whereas I should have ripped my hat to him! I should have saluted him as a
survivor of all the vile tortures the white men have inflicted on the black. I should have
tipped my hat first, to let him know that I am not a part of this system, that I am
begging forgiveness for all my white brethren who are too ignorant and cruel to make an
honest overt gesture. To-day I feel their eyes on me all the time; they watch from behind
doors, from behind trees. All very quiet, very peaceful, seemingly. Nigger never say
nuthin'. Nigger he hum all time- White man think nigger learn his place. Nigger leam
nuthin'. Nigger wait. Nigger watch everything white man do. Nigger no say nuthin', no sir,
no siree. But JUST THE SAME THE nigger IS KILLING THE WHITE MAN OFF!
Every time the nigger looks at a white man he's putting a dagger
through him. It's not the heat, ifs not the hook worm, it's not the bad crops that's
killing the South off - it's the nigger 1 The nigger is giving off a poison, whether he
means to or not. The South is coked and doped with nigger poison.
Pass on... Sitting outside a barber shop by the James River. I'll be
here just ten minutes, while I take a load off my feet. There's a hotel and a few stores
opposite me; it all tails off quickly, ends like it began - for no reason. From the bottom
of my soul I pity the poor devils who are born and die here. There
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is no earthly reason why this place should exist. There is no reason
why anybody should cross the street and get himself a shave and haircut, or even a sirloin
steak. Men, buy yourselves a gun and kill each other off! Wipe this street out of my mind
for ever - it hasn't an ounce of meaning in it.
The same day, after nightfall. Still plugging on, digging deeper and
deeper into the South. I'm coming away from a little town by a short road leading to the
highway. Suddenly I hear footsteps behind me and soon a young man passes me on the trot,
breathing heavily and cursing with all his might. I stand there a moment, wondering what
it's all about. I hear another man coming on the trot; he's an older man and he's carrying
a gun. He breathes fairly easy, and not a word out of his trap. Just as he comes in view
the moon breaks through the clouds and I catch a good look at his face. He's a man hunter.
I stand back as the others come up behind him. I'm trembling with fear. It's the sheriff,
I hear a man say, and he's going to get him. Horrible. I move on towards the highway
waiting to hear the shot that will end it all. I hear nothing - just this heavy breathing
of the young man and the quick eager steps of the mob following behind the sheriff. Just
as I get near the main road a man steps out of the darkness and comes over to me very
quietly. "Where yer goin', son," he says, quiet like and almost tenderly. I
stammer out something about the next town. "Better stay right here, son," he
says. I didn't say another word. I let him take me back into town and hand me over like a
thief. I lay on the floor with about fifty other blokes. I had a marvellous sexual dream
which ended with the guillotine.
I plug on ... It's just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don't
have the feeling of being an American citizen any more. The part of America I came from,
where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it's beginning
to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though some one's got a gun against my back all the
time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear. If a man talks to me I try not to seem too
intelligent. I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather,
in the elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks - they look me
through and through as though I were
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juicy and edible. I've got to walk another thousand miles or so as
though I had a deep purpose, as though I were really going somewhere. I've got to look
sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It's depressing and
exhilarating at the same time. You're a marked man - and nobody pulls the trigger. They
let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself.
Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and
drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corpse out they found it was marked
F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I was asked later why I had
killed myself I could only think to say - because I wanted to electrify the cosmos!
I meant by that a very simple thing -The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been
electrified, the Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in
the covered wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very
naturally - what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else was taking it
seriously. I was the only man in the community who was truly civilized. There was no place
for me - as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me, that there were
other men in the world like myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in
order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse
myself of my spiritual body, as it were.
When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I
was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of
responsibility. And if it weren't for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me
money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. The world was like a museum
to me: I saw nothing to do but eat into this marvellous chocolate layer cake which the men
of the past had dumped on our hands. It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself.
Their logic was that art was very beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a
living and then you will find that you are too tired to think about art. But it was when I
threatened to add a layer or two on my own account to this marvellous chocolate layer cake
that they blew up on me. That
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was the finishing touch. That meant I was definitely crazy. First I was
considered to be a useless member of society; then for a time I was found to be a
reckless, happy-go-lucky corpse with a tremendous appetite; now I had become crazy. (Listen,
you bastard, you find yourself a job... we're through with you!) In a way it
was refreshing this change of front. I could feel the wind blowing through the corridors.
At least "we" were no longer becalmed. It was war, and as a corpse I was just
fresh enough to have a little fight left in me. War is revivifying. War stirs the blood.
It was in the midst of the world war, which I had forgotten about, that this change of
heart took place. I got myself married overnight, to demonstrate to all and sundry that I
didn't give a fuck one way or the other. Getting married was O.K. in their minds. I
remember that, on the strength of the announcement, I raised five bucks immediately. My
friend MacGregor paid for the licence and even paid for the shave and haircut which he
insisted I go through with in order to get married. They said you couldn't go without
being shaved; I didn't see any reason why you couldn't get hitched up without a shave and
haircut, but since it didn't cost me anything I submitted to it. It was interesting to see
how everybody was eager to contribute something to our maintenance. All of a sudden, just
because I had shown a bit of sense, they came flocking around us - and couldn't they do
this and couldn't they do that for us? Of course the assumption was that now I would
surely be going to work, now I would see that life is serious business. It never occurred
to them that I might let my wife work for me. I was really very decent to her in the
beginning. I wasn't a slave driver. All I asked for was carfare -to hunt for the mythical
job - and a little pin money for cigarettes, movies, et cetera. The important things, such
as books, music albums, gramophones, porterhouse steaks and such like I found we could get
on credit, now that we were married. The instalment plan had been invented expressly for
guys like me. The down payment was easy - the rest I left to Providence. One has to live,
they were always saying. Now, by God, that's what I said to myself - One has to live I
Live first andpay afterwards. If I saw an overcoat I liked I went in and
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bought it. I would buy it a little in advance of the season too, to
show that I was a serious-minded chap. Shit, I was a married man and soon I would probably
be a father - I was entitled to a winter overcoat at least, no? And when I had the
overcoat I thought of stout shoes to go with it - a pair of thick cordevans such as I had
wanted all my life but never could afford. And when it grew bitter cold and I was out
looking for the job I used to get terribly hungry sometimes - it's really healthy going
out like that day after day prowling about the city in rain and snow and wind and hail -
and so now and then I'd drop in to a cosy tavern and order myself a juicy porterhouse
steak with onions and French fried potatoes. I took out life insurance and accident
insurance too - it's important, when you're married, to do things like that, so they told
me. Supposing I should drop dead one day - what then? I remember the guy telling me that,
in order to clinch his argument. I had already told him I would sign up, but he must have
forgotten it. I had said, yes, immediately, out of force of habit, but as I say, he had
evidently overlooked it - or else it was against the code to sign a man up until you had
delivered the full sales talk. Anyway, I was just getting ready to ask him how long it
would take before you could make a loan on the policy when he popped the hypothetical
question: Supposing you should drop dead one day - what then? I guess he thought I
was a little off my nut the way I laughed at that. I laughed until the tears rolled down
my face. Finally he said - "I don't see that I said anything so funny."
"Well," I said, getting serious for a moment, "take a good look at me. Now
tell me, do you think I'm the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he's
dead?" He was quite taken aback by this, apparently, because the next thing he said
was: "I don't think that's a very ethical attitude. Mr. Miller. I'm sure you wouldn't
want your wife to ..." "Listen," I said, "supposing I told you I don't
give a fuck what happens to my wife when I die - what then?" And since this seemed to
injure his ethical susceptibilities still more I added for good measure - "As far as
I'm concerned you don't have to pay the insurance when I croak - I'm only doing this to
make you feel good. I'm trying to help the world along,
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don't you see? You've got to live, haven't you? Well, I'm just putting
a little food in your mouth, that's all. If you have anything else to sell, trot it out. I
buy anything that sounds good. I'm a buyer not a seller. I like to see people looking
happy - that's why I buy things. Now listen, how much did you say that would come to per
week? Fifty-seven cents? Fine. What's fifty-seven cents? You see that piano - that comes
to about 39 cents a week, I think. Look around you ... everything you see costs so much a
week. You say, if I should die, what then ? Do you suppose I'm going to die on all
these people? That would be a hell of a joke. No, I'd rather have them come and take the
things away - if I can't pay for them, I mean..." He was fidgeting about and there
was a rather glassy stare in his eye, I thought. "Excuse me," I said,
interrupting myself, "but wouldn't you like to have a little drink - to wet the
policy?" He said he thought not, but I insisted, and besides, I hadn't signed the
papers yet and my urine would have to be examined and approved of and all sorts of stamps
and seals would have to be affixed -1 knew all that crap by heart - so I thought we might
have a little snifter first and in that way protract the serious business, because
honestly, buying insurance or buying anything was a real pleasure to me and gave me the
feeling that I was just like every other citizen, a man, what! and not a monkey. So
I got out a bottle of sherry (which is all that was allowed me), and I poured out a
generous glassful for him, thinking to myself that it was fine to see the sherry going
because maybe the next time they'd buy something better for me. "I used to sell
insurance too once upon a time," I said, raising the glass to my lips. "Sure, I
can sell anything. The only thing is - I'm lazy. Take a day like to-day - isn't it nicer
to be indoors, reading a book or listening to the phonograph? Why should I go out and
hustle for an insurance company? If I had been working to-day you wouldn't have caught me
in -isn't that so? No, I think it's better to take it easy and help people out when they
come along... like with you, for instance. It's much nicer to buy things than to sell
them, don't you think? If you have the money, of course! In this house we don't
need much money. As I was saying, the piano comes to about
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39 cents a week, or forty-two maybe, and the ..."
"Excuse me, Mr Miller," he interrupted, "but don't you
think we ought to get down to signing these papers?"
"Why, of course," I said cheerfully. "Did you bring them
all with you? Which one do you think we ought to sign first? By the way, you haven't got a
fountain pen you'd like to sell me, have you?"
"Just sign right here," he said, pretending to ignore my
remarks. "And here, that's it. Now then, Mr. Miller, I think I'll say good day - and
you'll be hearing from the company in a few days."
"Better make it sooner," I remarked, leading him to the door,
"because I might change my mind and commit suicide."
"Why, of course, why yes, Mr. Miller, certainly we will. Good day
now, good day!"
Of course the instalment plan breaks down eventually, even if you're an
assiduous buyer such as I was. I certainly did my best to keep the manufacturers and the
advertising men of America busy, but they were disappointed in me it seems. Everybody was
disappointed in me. .But there was one man in particular who was more disappointed in me
than any one and that was a man who had really made an effort to befriend me and whom I
had let down. I think of him and the way he took me on as his assistant - so readily and
graciously - because later, when I was hiring and firing like a 42 horse calibre revolver,
I was betrayed right and left myself, but by that time I had become so inoculated that it
didn't matter a damn. But this man had gone out of his way to show me that he believed in
me. He was the editor of a catalogue for a great mail order house. It was an enormous
compendium of horse-shit which was put out once a year and which took the whole year to
make ready. I hadn't the slightest idea what it was all about and why I dropped into his
office that day I don't know, unless it was because I wanted to get warm, as I had been
knocking about the docks all day trying to get a job as a checker or some damned thing. It
was cosy in his office and I made him a long speech so as to get thawed out. I didn't know
what job to ask for - just a job, I said. He was a sensitive man and very kind-
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hearted. He seemed to guess that I was a writer, or wanted to be a
writer, because soon he was asking me what I liked to read and what was my opinion of this
writer and that writer. It just happened that I had a list of books in my pocket - books I
was searching for at the public library - and so I brought it out and showed it to him.
"Great Scott!" he exclaimed, "do you really read these books?" I
modestly shook my head in the affirmative, and then as often happened to me when I was
touched off by some silly remark like that, I began to talk about Hamsun's Mysteries
which I had just been reading. From then on the man was like putty in my hands. When he
asked me if I would like to be his assistant he apologized for offering me such a lowly
position; he said I could take my time learning the ins-and-outs of the job, he was sure
it would be a cach(?) for me. And then he asked me if he couldn't lend me some
money, out of his own pocket until I got paid. Before I could say yes or no he had fished
out a twenty dollar bill and thrust it in my hand. Naturally I was touched. I was ready to
work like a son of a bitch for him. Assistant editor - it sounded quite good, especially
to the creditors in the neighbourhood. And for a while I was so happy to be eating roast
beef and chicken and tenderloins of pork that I pretended I liked the job. Actually it was
difficult for me to keep awake. What I had to learn I had learned in a week's time. And
after that? After that I saw myself doing penal servitude for life. In order to make the
best of it I whiled away the time writing stories and essays and long letters to my
friends. Perhaps they thought I was writing up new ideas for the company, because for
quite a while nobody paid any attention to me. I thought it was a wonderful job. I had
almost the whole day to myself, for my writing, having learned to dispose of the company's
work in about an hour's time. I was so enthusiastic about my own private work that I gave
orders to my underlings not to disturb me except at stipulated moments. I was sailing
along like a breeze, the company paying me regularly and the slave-drivers doing the work
I had mapped out for them, when one day, just when I am in the midst of an important essay
on The Anti-Christ, a man whom I had never seen before walks up to my desk,
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bends over my shoulder, and in a sarcastic tone of voice begins to read
aloud what I had just written. I didn't need to inquire who he was or what he was up to -
the only thought in my head was, and that I repeated to myself frantically - Will I get
an extra week's pay ? When it came time to bid good-bye to my benefactor I felt a
little ashamed of myself, particularly when he said, right off the bat like - "I
tried to get you an extra week's pay but they wouldn't hear of it. I wish there was
something I could do for you - you're only standing in your own way, you know. To tell the
truth, I still have the greatest faith in you - but I'm afraid you're going to have a hard
time of it, for a while. You don't fit in anywhere. Some day you'll make a great writer, I
feel sure of it. Well, excuse me," he added, shaking hands with me warmly, "I've
got to see the boss. Good luck to you!"
I felt a bit cut up about the incident. I.wished it had been possible
to prove to him then and there that his faith was justified. I wished I could have
justified myself before the whole world at that moment: I would have jumped off the
Brooklyn Bridge if it would have convinced people that I wasn't a heartless son of a
bitch. I had a heart as big as a whale, as I was soon to prove, but nobody was examining
into my heart. Everybody was being let down hard - not only the instalment companies, but
the landlord, the butcher, the baker, the gas, water and electricity devils, everybody.
If only I could get to believe in this business of work! To save my life I couldn't see
it. I could only see that people were working their balls off because they didn't know any
better. I thought of the speech I had made which won me the job. In some ways I was very
much like Herr Nagel myself. No telling from minute to minute what I would do. No knowing
whether I was a monster or a saint Like so many wonderful men of our time. Herr Nagel was
a desperate man - and it was this very desperation which made him such a likeable chap.
Hamsun didn't know what to make of this character himself: he knew he existed, and he knew
that there was something more to him than a mere buffoon and a mysrifier. I think he loved
Herr Nagel more than any other character he created. And why?
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Because Herr Nagel was the unacknowledged saint which every artist is -
the man who is ridiculed because his solutions, which are truly profound, seem too simple
for the world. No man wants to be an artist - he is driven to it because the world
refuses to recognize his proper leadership. Work meant nothing to me, because the real
work to be done was being evaded. People regarded me as lazy and shiftless, but on the
contrary I was an exceedingly active individual. Even if it was just hunting for a piece
of tail, that was something, and well worth while, especially if compared to other forms
of activity -such as making buttons or turning screws, or even removing appendixes. And
why did people listen to me so readily when I applied for a job? Why did they find me
entertaining? For the reason, no doubt, that I had always spent my time profitably. I
brought them gifts - from my hours at the public library, from my idle ramblings through
the streets, from my intimate experiences with women, from my afternoons at the burlesque,
from my visits to the museum and the art galleries. Had I been a dud, just a poor honest
bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn't have offered me
the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or loaned me
money as they frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly
they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn't know myself what it was,
because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues I was dear, but
confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same
bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about Ordinary men
are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the
demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be. But
a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a
colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically
non-existent. Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his
existence was a mystery, to himself and to every one else. I couldn't afford to leave
things hanging in suspense that way -
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the mystery was too intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat
against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long
enough and hard enough and the spark will come!
The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practised by certain
low forms of life, the marvellous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly
behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual,
the mystic's union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the
artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to
the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from
one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the
physical, racial scheme of things. His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe
and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience
which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which
he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for
twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as
though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is
"life" to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round. The
eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the
automatism of life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep,
waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth. This is the big issue, and
this was always dear to me, even when I denied it. The dissatisfaction which drives one on
from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the
futility of postponement. The more awake one becomes, an artistic microbe, the less desire
one has to do anything. Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out
of the trance. Action, as expressed in creating a work of art, is a concession to the
automatic principle of death. Drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico I was able to partake
of an active life which would permit the real self to hibernate a until I was ripe to be
born. I understood it perfectly, though I
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acted blindly and confusedly. I swam back to the stream of human
activity until I got to the source of all action and there muscled in, calling myself
personnel director of a telegraph company, and allowed the tide of humanity to wash over
me like great white-capped breakers. All this active life, preceding the final act of
desperation, led me from doubt to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which,
like a continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, had
already sunk beneath the surface of the sea. The colossal ego was submerged, and what
people observed moving frantically above the surface was the periscope of the soul
searching for its target. Everything that came within range had to be destroyed, if I were
ever to rise again and ride the waves. This monster which rose now and then to fix its
target with deadly aim, which dove again and roved and plundered ceaselessly would, when
the time came, rise for the last time to reveal itself as an ark, would gather unto itself
a pair of each kind and at last, when the floods abated, would settle down on the summit
of a lofty mountain peak thence to open wide its doors and return to the world what had
been preserved from the catastrophe.
If I shudder now and then, when I think of my active life, if I have
nightmares, possibly it is because I think of all the men I robbed and murdered in my day
sleep. I did everything which my nature bade me to do. Nature is eternally whispering in
one's ear - "if you would survive you must kill!" Being human, you kill not like
the animal but automatically, and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are
endless, so that you kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need. The men
who are the most honoured are the greatest killers. They believe that they are serving
their fellowmen, and they are sincere in believing so, but they are heartless murderers
and at moments, when they come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic,
quixotic acts of goodness in order to expiate their guilt. The goodness of man stinks more
than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, not an
affirmation of the conscious self. Being pushed over the precipice, it is easy at the last
moment to surrender all one's
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possessions, to turn and extend a last embrace to all who are left
behind. How are we to stop the blind rush? How are we to stop the automatic process, each
one pushing the other over the precipice?
As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading "Do
not abandon all hope ye who enter here!" - as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, No, I
realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was a puppet in whose
hands society had placed a gatling gun. If I performed a good deed it was no different,
ultimately, than if I had performed a bad deed. I was like an equals sign through which
the algebraic swarm of humanity was passing. I was a rather important, active equals sign,
like a general in time of war, but no matter how competent I were to become I could never
change into a plus or a minus sign. Nor could any one else, as far as I could determine.
Our whole life was built up on this principle of equation. The integers had become symbols
which were shuffled about in the interests of death. Pity, despair, passion, hope, courage
- these were the temporal refractions caused by looking at equations from varying angles.
To stop the endless juggling by turning one's back on it, or by facing it squarely and
writing about it, would be no help either. In a hall of mirrors there is no way to turn
your back on yourself. I will not do this... I will do some other thing I
Very good. But can you do nothing at all? Can you stop thinking about not doing anything?
Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know? That was the
idea which lodged in the back of my head and which burned and burned, and perhaps when I
was most expansive most radiant with energy, most sympathetic, most willing, helpful,
sincere, good, it was this fixed idea which was shining through, and automatically I was
saying - "why, don't mention it ... nothing at all, I assure you ... no, please don't
thank me. it's nothing," etc. etc. From firing the gun so many hundreds of times a
day perhaps I didn't even notice the detonations any more; perhaps I thought I was opening
pigeon traps and filling the sky with milky white fowl. Did you ever see a synthetic
monster on the screen, a Frankenstein realized in
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flesh and blood? Can you imagine how he might be trained to pull a
trigger and see pigeons flying at the same time? Frankenstein is not a myth: Frankenstein
is a very real creation born of the personal experience of a sensitive human being. The
monster is always more real when it does not assume the proportions of flesh and blood.
The monster of the screen is nothing compared to the monster of the imagination; even the
existent pathologic monsters who find their way into the police station are but feeble
demonstrations of the monstrous reality which the pathologist lives with. But to be the
monster and the pathologist at the same time - that is reserved for certain species of men
who, disguised as artists, are supremely aware that sleep is an even greater danger than
insomnia. In order not to fall asleep, in order not to become victims of that insomnia
which is called "living", they resort to the drug of putting words together
endlessly. This is not an automatic process, they say, because there is always
present the illusion that they can stop it at will. But they cannot stop; they have only
succeeded in creating an illusion, which is perhaps a feeble something, but it is far from
being wide awake and neither active nor inactive. I wanted to be wide awake
without talking or writing about it, in order to accept life absolutely. I mentioned
the archaic men in the remote places of the world with who, I was communicating
frequently. Why did I think these "savages" more capable of understanding me
than the men and women who surrounded me? Was I crazy to believe such a thing? I don't
think so in the least. These "savages" are the degenerate remnants of earlier
races of man who, I believe, must have had a greater hold on reality. The immortality of
the race is constantly before oar eyes in these specimens of the past who linger on in
withered splendour. Whether the human race is immortal or not is not my concern, but the
vitality of the race does mean something to me, and that it should be active or dormant
means even more. As the vitality of the new race banks down the vitality of the old races
manifests itself to the waking mind with greater and greater significance. The vitality of
the old races lingers on even in death, but the vitality of the new race which is about to
die seems already non-
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existent. If a man were taking a swarming hive of bees to the river
to drown them... That was the image I carried about in me. If only I were the man, and
not the bee! In some vague, inexplicable way I knew that I was the man, that I
would not be drowned in the hive, like the others. Always, when we came forwards in a
group I was signalled to stand apart; from birth I was favoured that way, and, no matter
what tribulations I went through, I knew they were not fatal or lasting. Also, another
strange thing took place in me whenever I was called to stand forth. I knew that I was
superior to the man who was summoning me! The tremendous humility which I practised was
not hypocritical but a condition provoked by the realization of the fateful character of
the situation. The intelligence which I possessed, even as a stripling, frightened me; it
was the intelligence of a "savage", which is always superior to that of
civilized men in that it is more adequate to the exigencies of circumstance. It is a life
intelligence, even though life has seemingly passed them by. I felt almost as if I had
been shot forward into a round of existence which for the rest of mankind had not yet
attained its full rhythm. I was obliged to mark time if I were to remain with them and not
be shunted off to another sphere of existence. On the other hand, I was in many ways lower
than the human beings about me. It was as though I had come out of the fires of hell not
entirely purged. I had still a tail and a pair of horns, and when my passions were aroused
I breathed a sulphurous poison which was annihilating. I was always called a "lucky
devil". The good that happened to me was called "luck", and the evil was
always regarded as a result of my shortcomings. Rather, as the fruit of my blindness.
Rarely did any one ever spot the evil in me! I was as adroit, in this respect, as the
devil himself. But that I was frequently blind, everybody could see that. And at such
times I was left alone, shunned, like the devil himself. Then I left the world, returned
to the fires of hell - voluntarily. These comings and goings are as real to me, more real,
in fact, than anything that happened in between. The friends who think they know me know
nothing about me for the reason that the real me changed hands countless times. Neither
the men who thanked
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me, nor the men who cursed me, knew with whom they were dealing. Nobody
ever got on to a solid footing with me, because I was constantly liquidating my
personality. I was keeping what is called the "personality" in abeyance for the
moment when, leaving it to coagulate, it would adopt a proper human rhythm. I was hiding
my face until the moment when I would find myself in step with the world. All this was, of
course, a mistake. Even the role of artist is worth adopting, while marking time. Action
is important, even if it entails futile activity. One should not say Yes, No, Yes, No,
even seated in the highest place. One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even
for the sake of becoming a Master. One must beat with his own rhythm - at any price. I
accumulated thousands of years of experience in a few short years, but the experience was
wasted because I had no need of it. I had already been crucified and marked by the cross;
I had been born free of the need to suffer - and yet I knew no other way to struggle
forward than to repeat the drama. All my intelligence was against it. Suffering is futile,
my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.
Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it
is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability. The whole
drama which the man of today is acting out through suffering does not exist for me: it
never did, actually. All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the
fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.
Another thing ... the mystery which enveloped my behaviour grew deeper
the nearer I came to the circle of uterine relatives. The mother from whose loins I sprang
was a complete stranger to me. To begin with, after giving birth to me she gave birth to
my sister, whom I usually refer to as my brother. My sister was a sort of harmless
monster, an angel who had been given the body of an idiot. It gave me a strange feeling,
as a boy, to be growing up and developing side by side with this being who was doomed to
remain all her life a mental dwarf. It was impossible to be a brother to her because it
was impossible to regard this atavistic hulk of a body as a "sister".
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She would have functioned perfectly, I imagine, among the Australian
primitives. She might even have been raised to power and eminence among them, for, as I
said, she was the essence of goodness, she knew no evil. But so far as living the
civilized life goes she was helpless; she not only had no desire to kill but she had no
desire to thrive at the expense of others. She was incapacitated for work, because even if
they had been able to train her to make caps for high explosives, for example, she might
absent-mindedly throw her wages in the river on the way home or she might give them to a
beggar in the street. Often in my presence she was whipped like a dog for having performed
some beautiful act of grace in her absent-mindedness, as they called it. Nothing was
worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed without reason. I had received the
same punishment as my sister, in the beginning, because I too had a habit of giving things
away, especially new things which had just been given me. I had even received a bearing
once, at the age of five, for having advised my mother to cut a wart off her finger. She
had asked me what to do about it one day and, with my limited knowledge of medicine, I
told her to cut it off with scissors, which she did, like an idiot. A few days later she
got blood poisoning and then she got hold of me and she said - "you told me to cut it
off, didn't you?" and she gave me a sound thrashing. From that day on I knew that I
was born in the wrong household. From that day on I learned like lightning. Talk about
adaptation! By the time I was ten I had lived out the whole theory of evolution. And there
I was, evolving through all the phases of animal life and yet chained to this creature
called my "sister" who was evidently a primitive being and who would never, even
at the age of ninety, arrive at a comprehension of the alphabet Instead of growing up like
a stalwart tree I began to lean to one side, in complete defiance of the law of gravity.
Instead of shooting out limbs and leaves I grew windows and turrets. The whole being, as
it grew, was turning into stone, and the higher I shot up the more I defied the law of
gravity. I was a phenomenon in the midst of the landscape, but one which attracted people
and elicited praise. If the mother who bore us had only made another effort perhaps
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a marvellous white buffalo might have been born and the three of us
might have been permanently installed in a museum and protected for life. The
conversations which took place between the leaning tower of Pisa, the whipping post, the
snorting machine and the pterodactyl in human flesh were, to say the least, a bit queer.
Anything might be the subject of conversation - a bread crumb which the "sister"
had overlooked in brushing the tablecloth or Joseph's coat of many colours which, in the
old man's tailoring brain, might have been either double-breasted or cutaway or frock. If
I came from the ice pond, where I had been skating all afternoon, the important thing was
not the ozone which I had breathed free of charge, nor the geometric convolutions which
were strengthening my muscles, but the little spot of rust under the clamps which, if not
rubbed off immediately, might deteriorate the whole skate and bring about the dissolution
of some pragmatic value which was incomprehensible to my prodigal turn of thought. This
little rust spot, to take a trifling example, might entrain the most hallucinating
results. Perhaps the "sister", in searching for the kerosene can, might overturn
the jar of prunes which were being stewed and thus endanger all our lives by robbing us of
the required calories in the morrow's meal. A severe beating would have to be given, not
in anger, because that would disturb the digestive apparatus, but silently and
efficiently, as a chemist would beat up the white of an egg in preparation for a minor
analysis. But the "sister", not understanding the prophylactic nature of the
punishment, would give vent to the most bloodcurdling screams and this would so affect the
old man that he would .go out for a walk and return two or three hours later blind drunk
and, what was worse, scratching a little paint off the rolling doors in his blind
staggers. The little piece of paint that had been chipped off would bring on a battle
royal which was very bad for my dream life, because in my dream life I frequently changed
places with my sister, accepting the tortures inflicted upon her and nourishing them with
my supersensitive brain. It was in these dreams, always accompanied by the sound of glass
breaking, of shrieks, curses, groans and sobs, that I gathered an
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unformulated knowledge of the ancient mysteries, of the rites of
initiation, of the transmigration of souls and so on. It might begin with a scene from
real life - the sister standing by the blackboard in the kitchen, the mother towering over
her with a ruler, saying two and two makes how much? and the sister screaming five.
Bang! no, seven. Bang! no, thirteen, eighteen as twenty! I would be
sitting at the table, doing my lessons, just in real life during these scenes, when by a
slight twist or squirm, perhaps as I saw the ruler come down on the sister's face,
suddenly I would be in another realm where glass was unknown, as it was unknown to the
Kickapoos or the Lenni-Lenapi. The faces of those about me were familiar - they were my
uterine relatives who, for some mysterious reason, failed to recognize me in this new
ambiance. They were garbed in black and the colour of their skin was ash grey, like that
of the Tibetan devils. They were all fitted out with knives and other instruments of
torture; they belonged to the caste of sacrificial butchers. I seemed to have absolute
liberty and the authority of a god, and yet by some capricious turn of events the end
would be that I'd be lying on the sacrificial block and one of my charming uterine
relatives would be bending over me with a gleaming knife to cut out my heart. In sweat and
terror I would begin to recite "my lessons" in a high, screaming voice, faster
and faster, as I felt the knife searching for my heart. Two and two is four, five and five
is ten, earth, air, fire, water, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,
Meocene, Pleocene, Eocene, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, Asia, Africa, Europe,
Australia, red, blue, yellow, the sorrel, the persimmon, the pawpaw, the catalpa .. .faster
and faster... Odin, Wotan, Parsifal, King Alfred, Frederick the Great, the Hanseatic
League, the Battle of Hastings, Thermopylae, 1492,1786, 18l2, Admiral Farragut, Pickett's
charge. The Light Brigade, we are gathered here today, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall
not, one and indivisible, no, 16, no, 27, help! murder! police! - and yelling louder and
louder and going faster and faster I go completely off my nut and there is no more pain,
no more terror, even though they are piercing me everywhere with knives. Suddenly I am
absolutely calm and
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the body which is lying on the block, which they are still gouging with
glee and ecstasy, feels nothing because I, the owner of it, have escaped. I have become a
tower of stone which leans over the scene and watches with scientific interest. I have
only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on them and obliterate them. But I
do not succumb to the law of gravity because I am too fascinated by the horror of it all.
I am so fascinated, in fact, that I grow more and more windows. And as the light
penetrates the stone interior of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the
earth, are alive and that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this
trance in which I am fixed.
So much for the dream, in which I am helplessly rooted. But in
actuality, when the dear uterine relatives come, I am as free as a bird and darting to and
fro like a magnetic needle. If they ask me a question I give them five answers, each of
which is better than the other; if they ask me to play a waltz I play a double-breasted
sonata for the left hand; if they ask me to help myself to another leg of chicken I dean
up the plate, dressing and all; if they urge me to go out and play in the street I go out
and in my enthusiasm I cut my cousin's head open with a tin can: if they threaten to give
me a thrashing I say go to it, I don't mind! If they pat me on the head for my good
progress at school I spit on the floor to show that I have still something to learn. I do
everything they wish me to do plus. If they wish me to be quiet and say nothing I
become as quiet as a rock: I don't hear when they speak to me, I don't move when I'm
touched, I don't cry when I'm pinched, I don't budge when I'm pushed. If they complain
that I'm stubborn I become as pliant and yielding as rubber. If they wish me to get
fatigued so that I will not display too much energy I let them give me all kinds of work
to do and I do the jobs so thoroughly that I collapse on the floor finally like a sack of
wheat. If they wish me to be reasonable I become ultra-reasonable, which drives them
crazy. If they wish me to obey I obey to the letter, which causes endless confusion. And
all this because the molecular life of brother-and-sister is incompatible with the atomic
weights which have been allotted us. Because she doesn't
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grow at all I grow like a mushroom; because she has no personality I
become a colossus; because she is free of evil I become a thirty-two branched candelabra
of evil; because she demands nothing of any one I demand everything; because she inspires
ridicule everywhere I inspire fear and respect; because she is humiliated and tortured I
wreak vengeance upon every one, friend and foe alike; because she is helpless I make
myself all-powerful. The gigantism from which I suffered was simply the result of an
effort to wipe out the little stain of rust which had attached itself to the family skate,
so to speak. That little stain of rust under the clamps made me a champion skater. It made
me skate so fast and furiously that even when the ice had melted I was still skating,
skating through the mud, through asphalt, through brooks and rivers and melon patches and
theories of economics and so forth. I could skate through hell, I was that fast and
nimble.
But all this fancy skating was of no use - Father Coxcox, the
pan-American Noah, was always calling me back to the Ark. Every time I stopped skating
there was a cataclysm - the earth opened up and swallowed me. I was a brother to every man
and at the same time a traitor to myself. I made the most astounding sacrifices, only to
find that they were of no value. Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was
expected of me when I did not want to be any of these things? Every time you come to the
limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to be yourself!
And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus
nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim. There is no suffering any more because
there is nothing which can threaten your security. And there is no desire to be of help to
others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out
from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you
suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be
anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of your action and
your action is the harvest of your thought. Thought and action are one, because swimming
you are in it and of it, and it is
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everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke counts
for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from
Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don't become ecstatic and you are not plunged
into violent grief; you don't pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a
happy rock in the midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in
turbulent motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is
fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly dissolved and
fluid as the ocean from which it was born.
This is the musical life which I was approaching by first skating like
a maniac through all the vestibules and corridors which lead from the outer to the inner.
My struggles never brought me near it, nor did my furious activity, nor my rubbing elbows
with humanity. All that was simply a movement from vector to vector in a circle which
however the perimeter expanded, remained withal parallel to the realm I speak of. The
wheel of destiny can be transcended at any moment because at every point of its surface it
touches the real world and only a spark of illumination is necessary to bring about the
miraculous, to transform the skater to a swimmer and the swimmer to a rock. The rock is
merely an image of the act which stops the futile rotation of the wheel and plunges the
being into full consciousness. And full consciousness is indeed like an inexhaustible
ocean which gives itself to sun and moon and also includes the sun and moon.
Everything which is is born out of the limitless ocean of light - even the night.
Sometimes, in the ceaseless revolutions of the wheel, I caught a
glimpse of the nature of the jump which it was necessary to make. To jump dear of the
clockwork - that was the liberating thought. To be something more, something different,
than the most brilliant maniac of the earth 1 The story of man on earth bored me.
Conquest, even the conquest of evil, bored me. To radiate goodness is marvellous, because
it is tonic, invigorating, vitalizing. But just to be is still more marvellous,
because it is endless and requires no demonstration. To be is music, which is a
profanation of silence in the interests
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of silence, and therefore beyond good and evil. Music is the
manifestation of action without activity. It is the pure act of creation swimming on its
own bosom. Music neither goads nor defends, neither seeks nor explains. Music is the
noisdess sound made by the swimmer in the ocean of consdousness. It is a reward which can
only be given by oneself. It is the gift of the god which one is because he has ceased
thinking about god. It is an augur of the God which every one will become in due time,
when all that is will be beyond imagination.
coda
Not long ago I was walking the streets of New York. Dear old Broadway. It was night and the sky was an Oriental blue, as blue as the gold in the ceiling of the Pagode, rue de Babylone, when the machine starts clicking. I was passing exactly below the place where we first met. I stood there a moment looking up at the red lights in the windows. The music sounded as it always sounded - light, peppery, enchanting. I was alone and there were millions of people around me. It came over me, as I stood there, that I wasn't thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I wrestled with this question of "truth". For years I have been trying to tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.
I remember the first time we were ever separated this idea of totality seized me by the hair. She pretended, when she left me, or maybe she believed it herself, that it was necessary for our welfare. I knew in my heart that she was trying to be free of me,
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but I was too cowardly to admit it to myself. But when I realized that she could do without me, even for a limited time, the truth which I had tried to shut out began to grow with alarming rapidity. It was more painful than anything I had ever experienced before, but it was also healing. When I was completely emptied, when the loneliness had reached such a point that it could not be sharpened any further, I suddenly felt that, to go on living, this intolerable truth had to be incorporated into something greater than the frame of personal misfortune. I felt that I had made an imperceptible switch into another realm, a realm of tougher, more elastic fibre, which the most horrible truth was powerless to destroy. I sat down to write her a letter telling her that I was so miserable over the thought of losing her that I had decided to begin a book about her, a book which would immortalize her. It would be a book, I said, such as no one had ever seen before. I rambled on ecstatically, and in the midst of it I suddenly broke off to ask myself why I was so happy.
Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me.
Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and remorseless. We can know the truth and accept it, or we can refuse the knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again. In this manner it is possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom. And if we pursue this road far enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe itself fall apart.
For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have started out I have chosen a different route. I am like an explorer who, wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it
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unnecessary to carry even a compass. Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over, am outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too exhausted to enter. And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story is situated eludes me perpetually. Always in sight it nevertheless remains unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds. From the soaring, crenellated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in steady, wedge-shaped formation. With the tips of their blue-white wings they brush the dreams that dazzle my vision. My feet move confusedly; no sooner do I gain a foothold than I am lost again. I wander aimlessly, trying to gain a solid, unshakeable foothold whence I can command a view of my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a groping, confused encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just been lopped off.
Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think inevitably of the girl I first loved. It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair. A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous and tragic at the same time. Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess. Perhaps I saw her alone several times. Certainly she could never have dreamed that for over a year I walked past her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the window. Every night after dinner I would get up from the table and take the long route which led to her home. She was never at the window when I passed and I never had the courage to stand in front of the house and wait. Back and forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of her. Why didn't I write her? Why didn't I call her up? Once I remember summoning enough pluck to invite her to the theatre. I arrived at her home with a bunch of violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a woman. As we were leaving the theatre the violets dropped from her corsage, and in my confusion I stepped on them. I begged her to leave them there, but she insisted on
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gathering them up. I was thinking how awkward I was - it was only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she stooped down to pick up the violets.
It was a complete fiasco. In the end I ran away. Actually I was running away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see her once again. It was midaftemoon and she came out to talk to me in the street, in the little areaway which was fenced on". She was already engaged to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind as I was, that she wasn't as happy as she pretended to be. If I had only said the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps she would even have gone away with me. I preferred to punish myslef. I said goodbye nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man. The next morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life.
The new life was also a fiasco. I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista, the most miserable man that ever walked the earth. There was this girl I loved and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity. I had been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like a lifetime. I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six. Every time I looked at her I said to myself - when I am thirty she will be forty-five, when I am forty she will be fifty-five, when I am fifty she will be sixty-five. She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but wrinkles just the same. When I kissed her they magnified a dozen times. She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad. They were Armenian eyes. Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde. Otherwise she was adorable - a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal lovable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was fifteen years older. The fifteen years difference drove me crazy. When I went out with her I thought only - how will it be ten years hence? Or else, what age does she seem to have now? Do I look old enough for her? Once we got back to the house it was all right. Climbing the stairs I would run my fingers up her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse. If her son, who was almost my
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age, were in bed we would dose the doors and lock ourselves in the kitchen. She'd lie on the narrow kitchen table and I'd slough it into her. It was marvellous. And what made it more marvellous was that with each performance I would say to myself - This is the last time ... tomorrow I will beat it! And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the cellar and roll the ash barrels out for her. In the morning, when the son had left for work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding. Both she and the son had T.B.... Sometimes there were no table bouts. Sometimes the hopelessness of it all got me by the throat and I would put on my things and go for a walk. Now and then I forgot to return. And when I did that I was more miserable than ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for me with those large sorrowful eyes. I'd go back to her like a man who had a sacred duty to perform. I'd lie down on the bed and let her caress me; I'd study the wrinkles under her eyes and the roots of her hair which were turning red. Lying there like that, I would often think about the other one, the one I loved, would wonder if she were lying down for it too, or... Those long walks I took 365 days of the year! -1 would go over them in my mind lying beside the other woman. How many times since have I relived these walks! The dreariest, bleakest, ugliest streets man ever created. In anguish I relive these walks, these streets, these first smashed hopes. The window is there, but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold. Pass and repass, the window always vacant. The evening star hangs low; Tristan appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon. The hydra-headed dog barks with all his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking everywhere. Same houses, same car-lines, same everything. She is hiding behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or doing that... but she is not there, never, never, never. Is it a grand opera or is it a hurdygurdy playing? It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is the Rubaiyat, it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at dawn, it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa, it is fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the
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throat, in the soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of Christ, just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the window-pane, something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to stop this walking up and down ... Walking homeward. Same houses, same lamp posts, same everything. I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past the gas tanks, past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open country. I sit beside the road with my head in my hands and sob. Poor bugger that I am, I can't contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.
Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for. me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was that brought me back, but now as I walk towards her and see the look in her eyes I don't know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know. I don't love you! Can't she hear me screaming it? I don't love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can't do it ... Time, time, endless time on our hands and nothing to fill it but lies.
Well, I don't want to rehearse the whole of my life leading up to the fatal moment - it is too long and too painful. Besides, did my life really lead up to this culminating moment? I doubt it. I think there were innumerable moments when I had the chance to make a beginning, but I lacked the strength and the faith. On the night in question I deliberately walked out on myself: I walked right out of the old life and into the new. There wasn't the slightest effort involved. I was thirty then. I had a wife and child and what is called a "responsible" position. These are the facts and facts mean nothing. The truth is my desire was so
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great it became a reality. At such a moment what a man does is of no great importance, it's what he is that counts. It's at such a moment that a man becomes an angel. That is precisely what happened to me: I became an angel. It is not the purity of an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will. The night in question I understood it perfectly. I was pure and inhuman, I was detached, I had wings. I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern about the future. I was beyond ecstasy. When I left the office I folded my wings and hid them beneath my coat.
The dance hall was just opposite the side entrance of the theatre where I used to sit in the afternoons instead of looking for work. It was a street of theatres and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most violent dreams. The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in that one street, so it seemed. It was Broadway, it was success, fame, glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain. Sitting on the steps of the theatre I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at the string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up. In every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the music into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic. Opposite the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here too I used to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a touch. Above the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with foreign papers and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the strange languages in which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate me for the day.
Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the Greek, sat with a roll of tickets in front of him. Like the urinal below and the steps of the theatre, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a separate and detached thing - the enormous, hairy hand of an ogre borrowed from some horrible Scandinavian fairy-tale. It was the hand which spoke to me
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always, the hand which said "Miss Mara will not be here tonight," or "Yes, Miss Mara is coming late tonight." It was this hand which I dreamt of as a child when I slept in the bedroom with the barred window. In my fevered sleep suddenly this window would light up, to reveal the ogre clutching at the bars. Night after night the hairy monster visited me, clutching at the bars and gnashing its teeth, I would awake in a cold sweat, the house dark, the room absolutely silent
Standing at the edge of the dance floor I notice her coming towards me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar neck. I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty, with blue-black hair and a large white face, a full white face in which the eyes shine brilliantly. She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen. I remember distinctly now the fulness other body, and that her hair was fine and straight, parted on the side, like a man's. I remember the smile she gave me - knowing, mysterious, fugitive - a smile that sprang up suddenly, like a puff of wind.
The whole being was concentrated in the face. I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them. There was an illumination which came from some unknown source, from a centre hidden deep in the earth. I could think of nothing but the face, the strange, womb-like quality of the smile, the engulfing immediacy of it. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swan-like neck of the medium -and of the lost and the damned.
I stand on the comer under the red lights, waiting for her to come down. It is about two in the morning and she is signing off. I am standing on Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and alone. Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, about a character of his named Henriette. I listened with such tense alertness that I fell into a trance. It was as if, with the opening
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phrase, we had started on a race - in opposite directions. Henriette! Almost immediately the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself without ever quite losing hold of Henriette. Henriette was attached to her by a long, invisible string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger, like the street-hawker who stands a little removed from the black doth, on the sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is jiggling on the doth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of the little finger to which the black thread is attached. Henriette is me, my real self, she seemed to be saying. She wanted me to believe that Henriette was really the incarnation of evil. She said it so naturally, so innocendy, with an almost subhuman candour - how was I to believe that she meant it? I could only smile, as though to show her I was convinced.
Suddenly I fed her coming. I turn my head. Yes, there she is coming full on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing. For the first time I see now what a carriage she has. She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped in a big soft fur. The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give a blast that will make the whole world cock its ears. What a walk! It's not a walk, it's a glide. Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the slippery Babylonian whores. On the comer of Broadway just opposite the comfort station, this is happening. Broadway - it's her realm. This is Broadway, this is New York, this is America. She's America on foot, winged and sexed. She is the lubet, the abominate and the sublimate - with a dash of hydrochloric add, nitto-glycerine, laudanum and powdered onyx. Opulence she has, and magnificence: it's America right or wrong, and the ocean on other side. For the first time in my life the whole continent hits me full force, hits me between the eyes. This is America, buffaloes or no buffaloes, America the emery wheel of hope and disillusionment. Whatever made America made her, bone, blood, muscle, eyeball, gait, rhythm; poise; confidence; brass and hollow gut. She's almost on top of me, the full face gleaming like calcium. The big soft fur is slipping from her shoulder. She doesn't notice it. She doesn't
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seem to care if her clothes should drop off. She doesn't give a fuck about anything. It's America moving like a streak of lightning towards the glass warehouse of red-blooded hysteria. Amurrica, fur or no fur, shoes or no shoes. Amurrica C.O.D. And scram, you bastards, before we plug you! It's got me in the guts, I'm quaking. Something's coming to me and there's no dodging it. She's coming head on, through the plate-glass window. If she would only stop a second, if she would only let me be for just one moment. But no, not a single moment does she grant me. Swift, ruthless, imperious, like Fate itself she is on me, a sword cutting me through and through...
She has me by the hand, she holds it tight. I walk beside her without fear. Inside me the stars are twinkling; inside me a great blue vault where a moment ago the engines were pounding furiously.
One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you, and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about. But strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the dream too might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life: REALITY.
We arc seated in a little booth in the Chinese restaurant across the way. Out of the comer of my eye I catch the flicker of the illuminated letters running up and down the sky. She is still talking about Henriette, or maybe it is about herself. Her little black bonnet, her bag and fur are lying beside her on the bench. Every few minutes she lights a fresh cigarette which bums away as she talks. There is no beginning nor end; it spurts out other like a flame and consumes everything within reach. No knowing how or where she began. Suddenly she is in the midst of a long narrative, a fresh one, but it is always the same. Her talk is as formless as dream: there are no grooves, no walls, no exits, no stops. I have the feeling of being drowned
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in a deep mesh of words, of crawling painfully back to the top of the net, of looking into her eyes and trying to find there some reflection of the significance of her words - but I can find nothing, nothing except my own image wavering in a bottomless well. Though she speaks of nothing but herself I am unable to form the slightest image of her being. She leans forward, with elbows on the table, and her words inundate me; wave after wave rolling over me and yet nothing builds up inside me, nothing that I can seize with my mind.''She's telling me about her father, about the strange life they led at the edge of Sherwood Forest where she was born, or at least she was telling me about this, but now it's about Henriette again, or is it Dostoievski? - I'm not sure - but anyway, suddenly I realize that she's not talking about any of these any more but about a man who took her home one night and as they stood on the stoop saying goodnight he suddenly reached down and pulled up her dress. She pauses a moment as though to reassure me that this is what she means to talk about. I look at her bewilderingly. I can't imagine by what route we got to this point. What man? What had he been saying to her? I let her continue, thinking that she will probably come back to it, but no, she's ahead of me again and now it seems the man, this man, is already dead; a suicide, and she is trying to make me understand that it was an awful blow to her, but what she really seems to convey is that she is proud of the fact that she drove a man to suicide. I can't picture the man as dead; I can only think of him as he stood on her stoop lifting her dress, a man without a name but alive and perpetually fixed in the act of bending down to lift up her dress. There is another man who was her father and I see him with a string of race horses, or sometimes in a little inn just outside Vienna; rather I see him on the roof of the inn flying kites to while the time away. And between this man who was her father and the man with whom she was madly in love, I can make no separation. He is some one in her life about whom she would rather not talk, but just the same she comes back to him all the time, and though I'm not sure that it was not the man who lifted up her dress neither am I sure that it wasn't the man who committed suidde. Per-
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haps it's the man whom she started to talk about when we sat down to eat. Just as we were sitting down I remember now that she began to talk rather hectically about a man whom she had just seen entering the cafeteria. She even mentioned his name, but I forgot it immediately. But I remember her saying that she had lived with him and that he had done something which she didn't like - she didn't say what - and so she had walked out on him, left him flat, without a word of explanation. And then, just as we were entering the Chop Suey joint, they ran into each other and she was still trembling over it as we sat down in the little booth ... For one long moment I have the most uneasy sensation. Maybe every word she uttered was a lie! Not an ordinary lie, no, something worse, something indescribable. Only sometimes the truth comes out like that too, especially if you think you're never going to see the person again. Sometimes you can tell a perfect stranger what you would never dare reveal to your most intimate friend. It's like going to sleep in the midst of a party; you become so interested in yourself that you go to sleep. And when you're sound asleep you begin to talk to some one, some one who was in the same room with you all the time and therefore understands everything even though you begin in the middle of a sentence. And perhaps this other person goes to sleep also, or was always asleep, and that's why it was so easy to encounter him, and if he doesn't say anything to disturb you then you know that what you are saying is real and true and that you are wide-awake and there is no other reality except this being wide-awake asleep. Never before have I been so wide-awake and so sound asleep at the same time. If the ogre in my dreams had really pushed the bars aside and taken me by the hand I would have been frightened to death and consequently now dead, that is, forever asleep and therefore always at large, and nothing would be strange any more, nor untrue, even if what happened did not happen. What happened must have happened long ago, in the night undoubtedly. And what is now happening is also happening long ago, in the night, and this is no more true than the dream of the ogre and the bars which would not give, except that now the bars are broken and she
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whom I feared has me by the hand and there is no difference between that which I feared and what is, because I was asleep and now I am wide-awake asleep and there is nothing more to fear, nor to expect, nor to hope for, but just this which is and which knows no end.
She wants to go. To go... Again her haunch, that slippery glide as when she came down from the dance hall and moved into me. Again her words ... "suddenly, for no reason at all, he bent down and lifted up my dress". She's slipping the fur around her neck; the little black bonnet sets her face off like a cameo. The round, full face, with Slavic cheek-bones. How could I dream this, never having seen it? How could I know that she would rise like this, dose and full, the face full white and blooming like a magnolia? I tremble as the fullness ot her thigh brushes me. She seems even a little taller than I, though she is not. It's the way she holds her chin. She doesn't notice where she's walking. She walks over things, on, on, with eyes wide open and staring into space. No past, no future. Even the present seems dubious. The self seems to have left her, and the body rushes forward, the neck full and taut, white as the face, full like the face. The talk goes on, in that low, throaty voice. No beginning, no end. I'm aware not of time nor the passing of time, but of timelessness. She's got the little womb in the throat hooked up to the big womb in the pelvis. The cab is at the curb and she is still chewing the cosmological chaff of the outer ego. I pick up the speaking tube and connect with the double uterus. Hello, hello, are yon there? Let's go! Let's get on with it - cabs, boats, trains, naptha launches; beaches, bedbugs, highways, byways, ruins; relics; old world, new world, pier, jetty; the high forceps; the swinging trapeze, the ditch, the delta, the alligators, the crocodiles, talk, talk; and more talk, then roads again and more dust in the eyes, more rainbows, more cloudbursts, more breakfast foods, more creams, more lotions. And when all the roads have been traversed and there is left only the dust of our frantic feet there will still remain the memory of your large full face so white, and the wide mouth with fresh lips parted, the teeth chalk white and each one perfect, and in this remembrance
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nothing can possibly change because this, like your teeth, is perfect...
It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All this expressly for me, what? If only you had a million suns in you! If only I could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks!
I lie suspended over the surface of the moon. The world is in a womb-like trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium. You promised me so much that if I never come out of this it will make no difference. It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many. But at any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I shall tip the scales. Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever find it again it will be in the blood and not in the stars. It is well that you promise me so much. I need to be promised nearly everything, for I have lived in the shadow of the sun too long. I want light and chastity - and a solar fire in the guts. I want to be deceived and disillusioned so that I may complete the upper triangle and not be continually flying off the planet into space. I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will all turn out differently. I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip the scales, as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a path to walk, as a cross and an arrow. Up to the present I travelled the opposite way of the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon. Henceforth I take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of everything. Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed. Everything that happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall
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neither serve nor be served. I shall seek the end in myself.
I look out again at the sun - my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on the roof-tops. Everything above the horizon is dear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal - the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendour while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the Maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow...
September 1938 Villa Seurat, Paris.
MODERN CLASSIC
Henry Miller
Crazy Cock
With a foreword by Erica Jong
In 1930 Henry Miller moved from New York to Paris, leaving behind (at least temporarily) his tempestuous marriage to June Smith and a novel he fully expected to be his masterpiece. Begun in 1927, and originally titled Lovely Lesbians, Crazy Cock sprang from his anguish over June's love affair with a mysterious woman called Jean Kronski. Purging himself of this pain through the writing of Crazy Cock helped Miller to discover his true voice a few years later in Tropic of Cancer.
'It is a shame that Miller is not around to report on the War of the Hormones. Crazy Cock is a dispatch from the front. His critics will use the novel's sexual and political incorrectness to disguise the reality that he understood the ever-present prejudices and confusions of women and men better than any of the talk-show munchkins. Crazy Cock is full of the sheer force of Miller's language and the sexual pitch and youthful literary eagerness which start cafe brawls and outrage high-school librarians.'
London Review of Books
'Miller's account of the writer's misery is vivid and affecting and he tells his story with feeling. At times it is so raw it hurts, at other times the rawness manifests itself in an exhilarating spontaneity.' Sunday Telegraph
MODERN CLASSIC
Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer
With an introduction by Robert Nye
A penniless and as yet unpublished writer. Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930. Leaving behind a disintegrating marriage and an unhappy career in America, he threw himself into the low-life of Bohemian Paris with unwavering gusto. A fictional account of Miller's adventures amongst the prostitutes and pimps, the penniless painters and writers of Montparnasse, Tropic of Cancer is an extravagant and rhapsodic hymn to a world of unrivalled eroticism and freedom.
'A rhapsody deriving from Whitman, Joyce, Lawrence and Celine, Tropic of Cancer is a ranting, randy book carried along by a deep, sensual enjoyment of living. ' Sunday Times
'Tropic of Cancer is a great prophetic book, a warning of what deadens life, an affirmation that it can yet be lived, though with extreme difficulty, in an age whose sterile non-cultures seek to thwart all mainsprings of fertility. Miller reveals himself as a battered faun, a crafty innocent, a lonely, lazy, sometimes fearful, always steadfast, worshipper of life. ' Colin Maclnnes, Spectator
MODERN CLASSIC
Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
With an introduction by John Pilger
'The best war novel to come out of the United States.' The Times
The Naked and the Dead traces the story of a platoon of young American soldiers as they pick their way, through treacherous terrain, across the Japanese-held Pacific island of Anopopei. Caught up in the confusion of close-armed combat, preyed upon by snipers, the men are pushed to the limit of human endurance. Held together only by the raw will to survive and barely sustained dreams of life beyond the maelstrom, each man finds his innermost hopes and deepest fears laid bare by the unrelenting stress of battle.
In his early twenties Mailer was himself a Second World War combatant in the Far-Eastern theatre. Published three years after the war ended. The Naked and the Dead, a shattering masterpiece of nightmarish realism, catapulted Mailer to instant fame.
'Mailer recorded every foul thought and word of his characters, wrote about ignorant, savage, primitive men . . . For maturity of viewpoint, for technical competence, and for stark dramatic power. The Naked and the Dead is an incredibly finished performance. ' New York Times
'Mailer writes like an angel - a master of small surprises that are
precursors of seismic shocks.' London Review of Books
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