or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving
sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was an 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 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 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 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" 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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 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 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- 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
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.
Su