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Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer
HENRY MILLER was born on December 26, 1891, in Manhattan and
grew up in Brooklyn. After a string of dreary jobs and a disastrous first
marriage, Miller left for Paris in 1930. Tropic of Cancer, published
when he was forty-three and immediately banned in all English-speaking
countries, is considered his most important book. Miller's works include
Black Spring (1936), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The
Cosmological Eye (1939), The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), The
Time of the Assassins (1946), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
(1945), and his autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion,
comprised of Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus
(1960). In 1940, Miller returned to America and settled in Big Sur,
California. A lusty romantic. Miller married five times, the last to
Japanese singer Hoki Tokuda. His courageous legal battle against the
censorship of Tropic of Cancer ended with a landmark 1964 Supreme
Court decision, which guaranteed a new freedom of expression to all American
writers. Generous and supportive of other artists throughout his life.
Henry Miller in his final years was surrounded by young admirers and old
friends. Writing, painting, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence
until the very end. Henry Miller died in June, 1980, in the arms of his
housekeeper.
HENRY MILLER
TROPIC OF CANCER
With an Introduction by Louise De Salvo
A SIGNET CLASSIC
SIGNET CLASSIC
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"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or
autobiographies -- captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among
what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how
to record truth truly."
--ralph waldo emerson
Introduction to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer by Louise DeSalvo
Henry Miller arrived in Paris on March 4, 1930, to try to become a
successful writer.1 He had ten dollars in his pocket (a loan from
his old friend Emil Schnellock), a trunkful of suits (from his tailor
father), which he knew he could pawn if he ran out of money, and carbon
copies of two novels he had written in New York and hoped to
revise -- Moloch (about his first marriage and his job at Western
Union), and Crazy Cock (about his second marriage to June Miller and
her lesbian love affair, which had tormented him).2 Though he had
been writing seriously for six years, and had published a few small pieces,
Miller hadn't yet published a novel, hadn't yet fulfilled his dream of
becoming a "working-class Proust," the Proust of Brooklyn.3 His
wife, June, had persuaded him that Paris might be where he could perfect his
craft and become financially successful.
What really motivated June to urge her husband to leave New York, though,
was that he had become a burden to her and she wanted him (temporarily) out
of her life while she pursued another of her schemes to make money for both
of them. She was involved in a relationship with an older, wealthy "sugar
daddy," who makes a brief appearance in Tropic of Cancer as the
"fetus with a cigar in its mouth" standing opposite Miller's apartment,
watching him leave for Europe.
Though June had persuaded Miller to quit his job at Western Union to become
a writer, and had supported him through a variety of jobs -- as a hostess, a
waitress, and a prostitute -- she had lost confidence in him. Despite her
efforts, he showed no signs of becoming what she believed he would become:
a writer who would immortalize her in his work, who would extol her
self-sacrifice, who
viii
would reveal her to the world as the semi-mythic femme fatale she
believed herself to be -- a Dostoyevsky heroine, who prowled the streets of
New York City in search of adventure.4
Miller's life with June formed the foundation of all his mature fiction. On
the night of May 21, 1927, in profound despair because June had tied to
Paris with her lover Jean Kronski, Miller outlined a magnum
ïòés that would recount the agony of his life with June. Though
June had kept in touch in her usual desultory way, with a few postcards of
the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame, she hadn't responded
to his letters begging her to come back to him, and he sensed that his
marriage. if not over, would never be the same again.
Desperate with loneliness, and crazy with jealousy. Miller sat at the
typewriter in the office of the Parks Department in Queens where he was
working, to outline a novel that would recount his life with June and her
betrayal. He was thirty-six years old, and living with his parents because
he couldn't afford to live alone. It had been June's idea that he could
become a writer. The truth was, though he had always wanted to become a
writer, he was "afraid"; he didn't think he had the ability. He wasn't rich
or privileged or college educated, though he was extremely well read: he
had attended the City College of New York briefly, but soon left, "disgusted
with the curriculum" after a "hopeless encounter" with Spenser's The
Fairie Queene. As a working-class man, the son of first generation
German-Americans,' who had been born in New York on December 26, 1891,
Miller often said to himself, "Who was I to say I am a
writer?"6
On that night. Miller began to type out his notes for what would become a
lifelong literary project. The notes came "without effort"; he would
deal with his and his wife's "battles royal, debauches," her lies and
betrayals. He wrote a catalog of the "events and crises" they had endured.
He listed the manuscripts in his possession he could cannibalize, letters he
had written that he could mine for details. Everything he had lived,
everything he had written, would become the source for his art. When he
finished, early the next morning, he had a stack of thirty-two closely typed
pages, which he labeled "June."
ix
He had sketched the basis for much of his life's work, for Crazy Cock,
portions of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy
Crucifixion. More importantly, he had fastened upon the intensely
autobiographical form that his life's work would take. From now on, he would
be both the author and subject of his life's work. He would live his life as
if it were the raw material for art; then he would turn the life he had lived
into art.7
When Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930, the city, like New York, was in
the midst of the Depression. His Paris was not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway
or of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller, because of his self-imposed poverty,
could describe a side of Paris that tourists (and even the expatriates who
lived there before him) never saw. It was a Paris not of exquisite meals,
but of hunger, of rancid butter and moldy cheese, of cheap hotels with
tattered wallpaper and bloodstained gray sheets crawling with bedbugs, of
old women sleeping in doorways, of whores with wooden stumps, of full slop
pails, of "angoisse and tristesse."
Tropic of Cancer recounts the story of Henry Miller's first two years
in Paris. It is perhaps the first novel that redefines the creative process
for the working-class writer. It is an (un)American, ungenteel, uneducated
(but not unlettered), no-holds-barred, middle-aged-man's version of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (a writer whom
Miller despised, calling him a "pedagogic sadist,"8 but whom he
consciously emulated), or of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel
Proust (a writer whom Miller adored). It is a meditation on both the profane
and divine aspects of an art that has its source in both lust and longing.
Many critics have commented upon the precedent-shattering descriptions of
sexuality in the novel. Yet another subject of Tropic of Cancer is
even more revolutionary: It shows what a working-class man must go through
to live the creative life, and how he must redefine himself to develop the
courage to write a novel about his own experiences in his own voice. "A year
ago, six months ago," the narrator tells us, "I thought that I was an
artist. I no longer think about it, I am." It is a work
xii
work-in-progrcss to remind himself of what still had to be written. Or he
consulted the lists of words he had copied from his dictionary that he
wanted to include in his novel He could work even when other people were
present. Of ten, he typed and talked simultaneously. (It is likely that at
limes he typed these conversations into the novel.) Sometimes "in the middle
of his work he would put on a record and listen to a piece of music. Or he
would burst into song himself. His work was done singing."13
After, he would go on long walks, taking his notebook with him. He would
find new streets to describe, new sights to incorporate, new denizens of the
street to include in his work. The "more squalid parts of Paris''14
fascinated him -- the Cite Nortier, for example, near the Place du
Combat, with a courtyard bordered by rotting buildings, its flagstones
slippery with slime, a "human dump-heap" filled with garbage. Or he would
take a bicycle ride to the outlying parts of Paris.
After dinner (again, at the expense of friends). Miller would often go back
to work.
Though he was still married to June Miller throughout the composition of
Tropic of Cancer, this period was also the heyday of Miller's love
affair with Anais Nin, who was married to the banker Hugh Guiler. Miller was
introduced to AnaTs Nin in December 1931 through his friend Richard
Osbom.15
Miller came into Nin's life when she was ripe for sexual experimentation,
soon after she had published a book on D. H. Lawrence. Miller himself had
just published a review of Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or, and was working
on yet another revision of his novel Crazy Cock, about the adverse
effect of his wife's lesbian love affair upon his sanity.16 When
they met, Nin wrote into her diary: "I saw a man I liked. In his writing he
is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes
drunk, I thought. He is like me."17
At first, the two met to talk about their work, and to exchange ideas. But
when Nin met Miller's wife, June. the relationship became immediately
complicated. Nin fell in love with June, replicating the love triangle that
had caused Miller so much pain.
xiii
After June returned to the United States, Nin and Miller became lovers.
According to Nin's testimony, he was a wonderful lover, who awakened her
sensuality; he was passionate yet considerate, and he satisfied her in ways
she had never imagined possible. According to his testimony, she supported
him financially, and gave him the peace of mind and the courage to begin
Tropic of Cancer, the most important novel of his life. She
convinced him that his work was more important than Joyce's, and that he
should be as explosive and provocative in his work as he was in his talk.
She provided the secure base from which Miller felt free to experiment.
Nin and Miller remained lovers for years, spoke of marriage, shared a studio
apartment at the Villa Seurat, and conceived a child together (which Nin
aborted). Yet Nin never seriously considered leaving her husband for Miller,
though she urged Miller to leave June, and helped end his marriage by
letting June know that she and Miller were lovers. For one thing, it was
Nin's husband's money that financed her freewheeling lifestyle. She realized
that Miller could not be counted upon to support a wife. For another,
neither Nin nor Miller was inclined to monogamy. During their affair, Nin
was sexually involved, not only with Miller, but with her husband, her
cousin Eduardo Sanchez, and two of her analysts (Rene Allendy and Otto
Rank); Miller continued his dalliances with prostitutes. Though Miller
seemed accepting of Nin's behavior, Nin was often angry with Miller for
his.
Reading Nin's descriptions of Miller's behavior as a lover and as a man, in
her unexpurgated diaries (published as Henry and June and
Incest), and in her fiction (in Cities of the Interior)
against Miller's description of himself in Tropic of Cancer is
instructive. It illuminates the distance between the "real" Henry Miller,
and the persona Miller created for himself in his work. In Miller's
self-portrait, he presents himself as sexually rapacious, rough, tough,
woman hating, though he longs for his wife, Mona. In Nin's work, though.
Miller is a passionate and tender lover, respectful of her womanhood, though
timid, weak, and vulnerable as a man. Her portrait is nothing like the
tough-minded persona of Cancer, and suggests that Miller's creation
was largely compensatory.
xiv
Miller was, as Nin put it, "a child in need, ... a victim [of women] seeking
solace, ... a weakling seeking sustenance."18
Henry Miller developed the narrative of Tropic of Cancer from his
letters from Paris to his friend Emil Schnellock and those to Anais Nin
(especially the ones from Dijon describing his wretched teaching
experience),19 from the notes he made as he prowled the streets
of Paris, and from his conversations with friends about literature,
psychoanalysis (with Anai's Nin), sex (with Wambly Bald, the Parisian
columnist, who appears in the novel as the sex-obsessed Van Norden), death
(with Michael Fraenkel), and war. For the first time in his fiction, he
used what he called the "first person spectacular."20 It was a
point of view he had studiously avoided in his earlier attempts at fiction,
yet it suited him, for he was a magnetic teller and reteller of stories.
In one sense. Tropic of Cancer is about the healing of the damaged
self through stories, which magnify and mythicize his own and his friends'
escapades. Anai's Nin believed that Miller's work illuminated the workings
of the psyche more profoundly than James Joyce's and, in one important
sense, she was right. For as James Joyce records the contents of
consciousness. Miller's work shows the process by which the contents of
consciousness are created by the storytelling self. Miller's avowed aim, as
he states it in Cancer, is "to put down everything that goes on in my
noodle" without self-censorship. Miller shows how, by choosing the way you
describe your life, you can create the consciousness that you desire.
Without waiting for the world to change, you can change who you are by the
stories you tell yourself and others about who you are.
But his stories are not only healing, they are entertaining. Miller adopted
the pose of a modem-day jongleur, who turned self-display into an art
form, into a carnival performance, using a narrative voice uniquely and
authentically his, one that had not yet been written down.
Though in his novel Moloch, Miller wrote that no successful work of
literature could be located in Brooklyn, or have Brooklyn as its subject.
Tropic of Cancer is written
xv
in the voice of the Brooklyn boy. It is the voice of the wise-ass street
kid, who hangs out on the corner with his friends, who trades stories with
them about his exploits, and who uses one-upsmanship to gain status. It is
the voice of the man who hides his pain behind a string of curse words, who
vulgarizes women because it is unmanly to admit how much he needs them, and
who exaggerates how callous and tough he is so that he will not be
victimized. But his longing for Mona (his wife, June) is tenderly and
poignantly described, and it forms the emotional core of Cancer
against which his posture of viciousness toward women must be read. In
expressing his disgust at the cunt-obsessed Van Norden, the narrator
concludes that having sex without passion is like living in a state of war.
Though a habitue of the streets, a literary clochard, Miller's
narrator cannot manage to hide how learned he is. In Cancer, besides
drawing upon his experiences, Miller self-consciously used such models and
sources as Knut Hamsun's, D. H. Lawrence's, and Marcel Proust's
fiction,21 Shakespeare's and James Joyce's soliloquies, Francois
Rabelais' bawdy humor,22 Japanese shunga's and Indian sculpture's
explicitly profane yet sacred depiction of sex, Walt Whitman's celebratory
lists, Brassai's photography, Picasso's nudes, Anais Nin's self-reflective
diaries, and the techniques of the surrealists (including
assemblage),23 to name but a few. He describes how literature
and art can enrich the lives of the members of the working class, of people
without university degrees.
Tropic of Cancer was published in a small edition in Paris on
September 1, 1934, by Jack Kahane at the Obelisk Press with money provided
by Anais Nin, given to her by Otto Rank.24 Obscenity laws in
England and the United States prohibited publication, but "potentially
'obscene' books could be published in France if they were in
English."25 The cover of the first edition was designed by
Kahane's sixteen-year-old son to save money. It showed "a crab crushing a
nude female in its claws,"26 and Miller thought it was
"horrible." The jacket carried a warning to booksellers that Cancer
"must not be displayed in the window."27
Notes
1. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, ed. by George Wickes (New York: New
Directions, 1989), p. 15.
2. Erica Jong, The Devil at Large (New York: Turtle Bay, 1993), p.
21; see J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
3. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright (Santa Barbara: Capra Press,
1978), p. 139: Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 14^; Mary V. Dearborn, Henry Miller (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 108; and the account in Louise DeSalvo,
Conceived with Malice (New York: Dutton, 1994).
4. Ferguson, p. 81.
5. Jong, p. 55.
6. Martin, p. 18, p. 129; Dearborn, pp. 100-1; Henry Miller, My Life and
Times (New York: Playboy Press, n.d.), p. 33.
7. For accounts of this event, see Martin, p. 520; Dearborn, p. 323; Miller,
My Life and Times, p. 50.
8. Henry Miller, Moloch (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 8.
9. Ferguson, p. 208.
10. Alfred Perles, My Friend Henry Miller (New York: John Day, 1956),
p. 70; Wambly Bald quoted in Ferguson, pp. 210-11.
11. See the account in Perles.
12. Perles, pp. 70-1.
13. Perles, p. 70.
14. Perles, p. 72.
15. See Noel Riley Fitch, "The Literate Passion of Anais Nin & Henry
Miller," in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds..
Significant Others (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), pp. 155-72.
16. Fitch, p. 155; see the account of Miller's writing Crazy Cock in
DeSalvo.
17. Anais Nin, Henry and June (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986), p. 6.
18. Anais Nin, Ladders to Fire, in Cities of the Interior
(Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1959, 1975), p. 48.
19. See Dearborn, p. 128, ò. 149.
xx
20. Miller, Moloch, p. 65.
21. Ferguson, p. 69.
22. Perles, p. 112.
23. Ferguson, p. 181.
24. Martin, p. 303; Dearborn, p. 175.
25. Jong, p. 132.
26. Martin, p. 303.
27. Perles, p. 104.
28. Martin, p. 303.
29. Perles, p. 104; Dearborn, p. 173.
30. Perles, p. 142; Cendrars's review is provided in George Wickes, ed..
Henry Miller and the Critics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1963).
31. Perles, p. 171; Ferguson, p. 346.
32. Dearborn, p. 241.
33. Perles, pp. 205-6.
34. Ferguson, p. 344.
35. Ferguson, p. 345.
36. Ferguson, p. 348.
37. Ferguson, p. 350.
38. Millett quoted in Jong, p. 29.
39. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934, Volume One. ed. and
with an Introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1966), p. 66.
40. Dearborn, p. 34.
41. Jong, p. 26.
42. Jong, p. 26.
TROPIC OF CANCER
* * *
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere,
nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits
and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful
place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so
intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The
weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more
death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The
cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are
killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must
get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape.
The weather will not change.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason
I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A
year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think
about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me.
There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of
character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is
a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to
God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I am going to sing
for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you
croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a
little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a
guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song.
I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better,
more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen
to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang
too beautifully, or not beautifully enough.
It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of the date.
Would you say -- my dream of the 14th November last? There are intervals, but
they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The
world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The
world is a cancer eating itself away.... I am thinking that when the great
silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When
into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored
and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my
chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying. shedding
the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write
upon.
Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six foot penis, in
repose. The bat -- penis libre. Animals with a bone in the penis.
Hence, a bone on. ... "Happily," says Gourmont, "the bony structure
is lost in man." Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human race walking
around with a bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis -- one for weekdays
and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a female asking if I have found
a title for my book. Title? To be sure: "Lovely Lesbians."
Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski's. It is on Wednesdays
that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow,
officiates. She is studying English now -- her favourite word is "filthy." You
can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. ...
Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An invincible
combination, especially when you consider that he is not a bad artist. He
puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski,
and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is
Jewish, or half Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl and Paula, and
Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All
except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis
Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Cherie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a
Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am
writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important
to understand.
Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become
a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew.
Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Twilight hour. Indian blue water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent.
The rails fall away into the canal at Jaures. The long caterpillar with
lacquered sides dips like a roller-coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney
Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central
America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered
by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the
polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.
Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful Villa
Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is positively
appalling at times. I have asked Boris time and again to order bread for
breakfast, but he always forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And
when he comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg hanging
from his goatee. He eats in the restaurant, out of consideration for me. He
says it hurts to eat a big meal and have me watch him.
I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not agree,
for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is cunt-struck,
that's all. And he will never be a writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a
writer, though his name blaze in 50,000 candle power red lights. The only
writers about me for whom I have any respect, at present, arc Carl and
Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white name. They are
mad and tone deaf. They are sufferers.
Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar way, is not
mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood-vessels, no heart or
kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers and in the
drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink,
vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx, Anjou,
herring. Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola... .
I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in the
mirror as I write.
Tania is like Irene. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania, a
Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen everywhere -- or, let us say, a
little bit of Tolstoi, a stable scene in which the foetus is dug up. Tania
is a fever. too -- les votes urinaires. Cafe de la Liberte, Place des
Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms, Porto
Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata pathetique, aural
amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna breasts, heavy garters, what
time is it, golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers,
vaporish twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium, warm
veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs. Tania says so that
every one may hear: "I love him!" And while Boris scalds himself with whisky
she says: "Sit down here! O Boris ... Russia ... what'll I do? I'm
bursting with it!"
At night when I look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical.
O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters,
those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I
will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send
you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned
inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know
how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your
ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels
something, does he? He feels
the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have
ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams,
drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You
can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am
fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of
being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs
from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris
and spit out two franc pieces....
Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended,
their black boughs gesticulating like a sleep-walker. Sombre, spectral
trees, their trunks pale as dear ash. A silence supreme and altogether
European. Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to mark a
tryst. Brusque the facades, almost forbidding; immaculate except for the
splotches of shadow cast by the trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded
of another Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George Moore. I
think of that terrible Spaniard who was then startling the world with his
acrobatic leaps from style to style. I think of Spengler and of his terrible
pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand manner, is done
for. I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true;
it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me
the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For
the moment I can think of nothing -- except that I am a sentient being
stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All
along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the
wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears
and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I
can communicate even a fraction of my feelings....
The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants
fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense, avec des choses inouies.
Liona now, she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from down
below. Liona -- a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high
hill she played the harlot -- and
sometimes in telephone booths and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol
and a shaving mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road
with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used candles, Roman
candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her ...
not one. Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension
pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote.
She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her
permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt and no
litmus paper that could take her color. She was a liar, too, this Liona. She
never bought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whiskey bottle
and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Pool Carol, he could only
curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out -- like a dead
clam.
Enormous, fat letters, avec des choses inouies. A valise without
straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian
ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to
the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the
Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the tumbrils -- red
tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and
Mame, where the water sluices through the dykes and lies like glass under
the bridges. Liona is lying there now and the canal is full of glass and
splinters; the mimosas weep, and there is a wet, foggy fart on the
windowpanes. One cunt out of a million Liona! All cunt and a glass ass in
which you can read the history of the Middle Ages.
It is the caricature of a man which Moldorf first presents. Thyroid eyes.
Michelin lips. Voice like pea-soup. Under his vest he carries a little pear.
However you look at him it is always the same panorama; netsuke snuffbox,
ivory handle, chess piece, fan, temple motif. He has fermented so long now
that he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins. Vase without a
rubber plant.
The females were sired twice in the 9th century, and again during the
Renaissance. He was carried through the great dispersions under yellow
bellies and white. Long before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood.
His dilemma is that of the dwarf. With his pineal eye he sees in silhouette
projected on a screen of incommensurable size. His voice, synchronized to
the shadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar where others hear
only a squeak.
There is his mind. It is an amphitheatre in which the actor gives a protean
performance. Moldorf, multiform and unerring, goes through his roles -- clown,
juggler, contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheatre is too
small. He puts dynamite to it. The audience is drugged. He scotches it.
I am trying ineffectually to approach Moldorf. It is like trying to approach
God, for Moldorf is God -- he has never been anything else. I am merely
putting down words....
I have had opinions about him which I have discarded; I have had other
opinions which I am revising. I have pinned him down only to find that it
was not a dung-beetle I had in my hands, but a dragonfly. He has offended
me by his coarseness and then overwhelmed me with his delicacy. He has been
voluble to the point of suffocation, then quiet as the Jordan.
When I see him trotting forward to greet me, his little paws outstretched,
his eyes perspiring, I feel that I am meeting.... No, this is not the way to
go about it!
"Comme un oeuf dansant sur un jet d'eau."
He has only one cane -- a mediocre one. In his pocket scraps of paper
containing prescriptions for Weltschmerz. He is cured now, and the little
German girl who washed his feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr.
Nonentity toting his Gujurati dictionary everywhere. "Inevitable for
every one" -- meaning, no doubt, indispensable. Borowski would find
all this incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for each day in
the week, and one for Easter.
We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a
cracked mirror.
I have been looking over my manuscripts, pages scrawled with revisions.
Pages of literature. This frightens me a little. It is so much like
Moldorf. Only I am a gentile, and gentiles have a different way of
suffering. They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a
man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning
of suffering.
I recall distinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to
bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you -- and then you really were
frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear -- you could always turn him loose, or
chop his head off.
There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild
beasts and be mangled. They go in even without revolver or whip. Fear makes
them fearless. .. For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts.
The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is
so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators
applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the
cage. The cage, he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless,
the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not
one lion has ever heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why they can't even get their
teeth into him. "Give us meat!" they roar, while he stands there petrified,
his ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A
single blow of the lion's paw and his cosmogony is smashed.
The lions, too, are disappointed. They expected blood, bones, gristle,
sinews. They chew and chew, but the words are chicle and chicle is
indigestible. Chicle is a base over which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme,
licorice. Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is O. K. The chicleros
came over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with them an
algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met the Mongols of the North,
glazed like eggplants. Time shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic
lean -- when the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current. In
the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They embroidered the very bowels
of the earth with their language. They ate one another's entrails and the
forest closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace tufa.
Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds the remnants of a
menagerie, a brain plate covered with figures.
x x x
What has all this to do with you, Moldorf? The word in your mouth is
anarchy. Say it, Moldorf, I am waiting for it. Nobody knows, when we shake
hands, the rivers that pour through our sweat Whilst you are framing your
words, your lips half-parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, I have
jumped halfway across Asia. Were I to take your cane, mediocre as it is,
and poke a lime hole in your side, I could collect enough material to fill
the British Museum. We stand on five minutes and devour centuries. You are
the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words.
Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but there are not and
never will be enough bars to make the mesh.
In my absence the window-curtains have been hung. They have the appearance
of Tyrolian tablecloths dipped in lysol. The room sparkles. I sit on the bed
in a daze, thinking about man before his birth. Suddenly bells begin to
toll, a weird, unearthly music, as if I had been translated to the steppes
of Central Asia. Some ring out with a long, lingering roll, some erupt
drunkenly, maudlinly. And now it is quiet again, except for a last note that
barely grazes the silence of the night -- just a faint, high gong snuffed out
like a flame.
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I
write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.
Beside the perfection of Turgeniev I put the perfection of Dostoievski. (Is
there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in
one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh's
letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of
the individual over art.
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the
recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can
see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and
motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life
some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands
violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are
nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly
exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is
proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million
lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep
sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more... .
The telephone interrupts this thought which I should never have been able to
complete. Some one is coming to rent the apartment...
It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa Borghese. Well,
I'll take up these pages and move on. Things will happen elsewhere. Things
are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are
like lice -- they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch
and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused.
Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his
private tragedy. It's in the blood now -- misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide.
The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch
and scratch -- until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is
exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am
crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander
failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to
scratch himself to death.
So fast and furiously am I compelled to live now that there is scarcely time
to record even these fragmentary notes. After the telephone call, a
gentleman and his wife arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the
transaction. Lay there wondering what my next move would be. Surely not to
go back to the fairy's bed and toss about all night flicking bread crumbs
with my toes. That puking little bastard! If there's anything worse than
being a fairy it's being a miser. A timid, quaking little bugger who lived
in constant fear of going broke some day -- the 18th of March perhaps, or the
25th of May precisely. Coffee without milk or sugar. Bread without butter.
Meat without gravy, or no meat at all. Without this and without that! The
dirty little miser! Open the bureau drawer one day and find money hidden
away in a sock. Over two thousand francs -- and checks that he hadn't even
cashed. Even that I wouldn't have minded so much if there weren't always
coffee grounds in my beret and garbage on the floor, to say nothing of the
cold cream jars and the greasy towels and the sink always stopped up. I tell
you, the little bastard he smelled bad -- except when he doused himself with
cologne. His ears were dirty, his eyes were dirty, his ass was dirty. He was
double-jointed, asthmatic, lousy, picayune, morbid. I could have forgiven him
everything if only he had handed me a decent breakfast! But a man who has two
thousand francs hidden away in a dirty sock and refuses to wear a clean shirt
or smear a little butter over his bread, such a man is not just a fairy, nor
even just a miser -- he's an imbecile!
But that's neither here nor mere, about the fairy. I'm keeping an ear open
as to what's going on downstairs. It's a Mr. Wren and his wife who have
called to look at the apartment. They're talking about taking it. Only
talking about it, thank God. Mrs. Wren has a loose laugh --
complications ahead. Now Mister Wren is talking. His voice is
raucous, scraping, booming, a heavy blunt weapon that wedges its way through
flesh and bone and cartilage.
Boris calls me down to be introduced. He is rubbing his hands, like a
pawnbroker. They are talking about a story Mr. Wren wrote, a story about a
spavined horse.
"But I thought Mr. Wren was a painter?"
"To be sure," says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, "but in the wintertime
he writes. And he writes well ... remarkably well."
I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something, anything, to talk about
the spavined horse, if necessary. But Mr. Wren is almost inarticulate. When
he essays to speak of those dreary months with the pen he becomes
unintelligible. Months and months he spends before setting a word to paper.
(And there are only three months of winter!) What does he cogitate all those
months and months of winter? So help me God, I can't see this guy as a
writer. Yet Mrs. Wren says that when he sits down to it the stuff just
pours out.
The talk drifts. It is difficult to follow Mr. Wren's mind because he says
nothing. He thinks as he goes along -- so Mrs. Wren puts it. Mrs. Wren
puts everything about Mr. Wren in the loveliest light. "He thinks as he goes
along" -- very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really
very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse.
Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I am already
intoxicated. I know just how I'll begin when I get back to the house.
Walking down the street it commences, the grand speech inside me that's
gurgling like Mrs. Wren's loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on
already. Listens beautifully when she's tight. Coming out of the wine-shop I
hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and splashy. I want Mrs. Wren
to listen ...
Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still stuttering and
spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs and I'm shoving the corkscrew
in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing
between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my
veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence
to gush out of me now pell-mell. I'm telling them everything that comes to
mind, everything that was bottled up inside me and which Mrs. Wren's loose
laugh has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs and the sun
splashing through the window I experience once again the splendor of those
miserable days when I first arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken
individual who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet. Everything
comes back to me in a rush -- the toilets that wouldn't work, the prince who
shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron's
overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat
cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times. Rose
Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing the streets on an empty
belly and now and then calling on strange people -- Madame Delorme, for
instance. How I ever got to Madame Delorme's, I can't imagine any more. But
I got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the maid with her
little white apron, got right inside the palace with my corduroy trousers
and my hunting jacket -- and not a button on my fly. Even now I can taste
again the golden ambiance of that room where Madame Delorme sat upon a
throne in her mannish rig, the goldfish in the bowls, the maps of the ancient
world, the beautifully bound books; I can feel again her heavy hand resting
upon my shoulder, frightening me a little with her heavy Lesbian air. More
comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the Gare St. Lazare,
the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles on every table; a thick tide of
semen flooding the gutters. Nothing better, between five and seven than to be
pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move
along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of
contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no
program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend. Each
morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the
inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing here and there like a bedbug,
gathering butts now and then, sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly;
sitting down on a bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or walking
through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an erection looking at the dumb
statues. Or wandering along the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and
going mad with the beauty of it, the trees leaning to, the broken images in
the water, the rush of the current under the bloody lights of the bridges,
the women sleeping in doorways, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping in the rain;
everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and beggars and lice and old
hags full of St. Vitus' dance; pushcarts stacked up like wine barrels in the
side streets, the smell of berries in the market-place and the old church
surrounded with vegetables and blue arc lights, the gutters slippery with
garbage and women in satin pumps staggering through the filth and vermin at
the end of an all-night souse. The Place St. Sulpice, so quiet and deserted,
where toward midnight there came every night the woman with the busted
umbrella and the crazy veil; every night she slept there on a bench under her
torn umbrella, the ribs hanging down, her dress turning green, her bony
fingers and the odor of decay oozing from her body; and in the morning I'd be
sitting there myself, taking a quiet snooze in the sunshine, cursing the
goddamned pigeons gathering up the crumbs everywhere. St. Sulpice! The fat
belfries, the garish posters over the door, the candles flaming inside. The
Square so beloved of Anatole France, with that drone and buzz from the altar,
the splash of the fountain, the pigeons cooing, the crumbs disappearing like
magic and only a dull rumbling in the hollow of the guts. Here I would sit
day after day thinking of Germaine and that dirty little street near the
Bastille where she lived, and that buzz-buzz going on behind the altar, the
buses whizzing by, the sun beating down into the asphalt and the asphalt
working into me and Germaine, into the asphalt and all Paris in the big fat
belfries.
And it was down the Rue Bonaparte that only a year before Mona and I used to
walk every night, after we had taken leave of Borowski. St. Sulpice not
meaning much to me then, nor anything in Paris. Washed out with talk. Sick
of faces. Fed up with cathedrals and squares and menageries and what not.
Picking up a book in the red bedroom and the cane chair uncomfortable; tired
of sitting on my ass all day long, tired of red wallpaper, tired of seeing so
many people jabbering away about nothing. The red bedroom and the trunk
always open; her gowns lying about in a delirium of disorder. The red bedroom
with my goloshes and canes, the notebooks I never touched, the manuscripts
lying cold and dead. Paris! Meaning the Cafe Select, the D6me, the Flea
Market, the American Express. Paris! Meaning Borowski's canes, Borowski's
hats, Borowski's gouaches, Borowski's prehistoric fish -- and prehistoric
jokes. In that Paris of '28 only one night stands out in my memory -- the
night before sailing for America. A rare night, with Borowski slightly
pickled and a little disgusted with me because I'm dancing with every slut in
the place. But we're leaving in the morning! That's what I tell every cunt I
grab hold of -- leaving in the morning! That's what I'm telling the
blonde with agate-colored eyes. And while I'm telling her she takes my hand
and sqeeezes it between her legs. In the lavatory I stand before the bowl
with a tremendous erection; it seems light and heavy at the same time, like a
piece of lead with wings on it. And while I'm standing there like that two
cunts sail in -- Americans. I greet them cordially, prick in hand. They give
me a wink and pass on. In the vestibule, as I'm buttoning my fly, I notice
one of them waiting for her friend to come out of the can. The music
is still playing and maybe Mona'll be coming to fetch me, or Borowski
with his gold-knobbed cane, but I'm in her arms now and she has hold of me
and I don't care who comes or what happens. We wriggle into the cabinet and
there I stand her up, slap up against the wall, and I try to get it into her
but it won't work and so we sit down on the seat and try it that way but it
won't work either. No matter how we try it it won't work. And all the while
she's got hold of my prick, she's clutching it like a life-saver, but it's no
use, we're too hot, too eager. The music is still playing and so we waltz out
of the cabinet into the vestibule again and as we're dancing there in the
shit-house I come all over her beautiful gown and she's sore as hell about
it. I stumble back to the table and there's Borowski with his ruddy face and
Mona with her disapproving eye. And Borowski says "Let's all go to Brussels
tomorrow," and we agree, and when we get back to the hotel I vomit all over
the place, in the bed, in the washbowl, over the suits and gowns and the
goloshes and canes and the notebooks I never touched and the manuscripts
lying cold and dead.
A few months later. The same hotel, the same room. We look out on the
courtyard where the bicycles are parked, and there is the little room up
above, under the attic, where some smart young Alee played the phonograph
all day long and repeated clever little things at the top of his voice. I
say "we" but I'm getting ahead of myself, because Mona has been away a long
time and it's just today that I'm meeting her at the Gare St. Lazare. Toward
evening I'm standing there with my face squeezed between the bars, but
there's no Mona, and I read the cable over again but it doesn't help any. I
go back to the Quarter and just the same I put away a hearty meal. Strolling
past the D6me and a little later suddenly I see a pale, heavy face and
burning eyes -- and the little velvet suit that I always adored because under
the soft velvet there were always her warm breasts, the marble legs, cool,
firm, muscular. She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me,
embraces me passionately -- a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles,
windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us and we in each other's arms
oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks -- a flood of talk. Wild
consumptive notes of histeria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because
she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.
We walk down the Rue du Chateau, looking for Eugene. Walk over the railroad
bridge where I used to watch the trains pulling out and feel all sick inside
wondering where the hell she could be. Everything soft and enchanting as we
walk over the bridge. Smoke coming up between our legs, the tracks
creaking, semaphores in our blood. I feel her body close to mine -- all mine
now -- and I stop to rub my hands over the warm velvet. Everything around us
is crumbling, crumbling and the warm body under the warm velvet is aching
for me ...
Back in the very same room and fifty francs to the good, thanks to Eugene/ I
look out on the court but the phonograph is silent. The trunk is open and
her things are lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on the
bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three times, four times ... I'm afraid
she'll go mad ... in bed, under the blankets, how good to feel her body
again! But for how long? Will it last this time? Already I have a
presentiment that it won't.
She talks to me so feverishly -- as if there will be no tomorrow. "Be quiet,
Mona! Just look at me ... don't talk!" Finally she drops off and I
pull my arm from under her. My eyes close. Her body is there beside me ...
it will be there till morning surely ... It was in February I pulled out of
the harbor in a blinding snowstorm. The last glimpse I had of her was in the
window waving good-bye to me. A man standing on the other side of the
street, at the corner, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his jowls resting
on his lapels. A foetus watching me. A foetus with a cigar in its mouth.
Mona at the window waving goodbye. White heavy face, hair streaming wild.
And now it is a heavy bedroom, breathing regularly through the gills, sap
still oozing from between her legs, a warm feline odor and her hair in my
mouth. My eyes are closed. We breathe warmly into each other's mouth. Close
together, America three thousand miles away. I never want to see it again.
To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth -- I
count that something of a miracle. Nothing can happen now till morning ...
I wake from a deep slumber to look at her. A pale light is trickling in. I
look at her beautiful wild hair. I feel something crawling down my neck. I
look at her again, closely. Her hair is alive! I pull back the sheet -- more
of them. They are swarming over the pillow.
It is a little after daybreak. We pack hurriedly and sneak out of the hotel.
The cafes are still closed. We walk, and as we walk we scratch ourselves.
The day opens in milky whiteness, streaks of salmon-pink sky, snails leaving
their shells. Paris. Paris. Everything happens here. Old, crumbling walls
and the pleasant sound of water running in the urinals. Men licking their
moustaches at the bar. Shutters going up with a bang and little streams
purling in the gutters. Amer Picon in huge scarlet letters.
Zigzag. Which way will we go and why or where or what?
Mona is hungry, her dress is thin. Nothing but evening wraps, bottles of
perfume, barbaric earrings, bracelets, depilatories. We sit down in a
billiard parlor on the Avenue due Maine and order hot coffee. The toilet is
out of order. We shall have to sit some time before we can go to another
hotel. Meanwhile we pick bedbugs out of each other's hair. Nervous. Mona is
losing her temper. Must have a bath. Must have this. Must have that. Must,
must, must ...
"How much money have you left?"
Money! Forgot all about that.
Hotel des Etats-Unis. An ascenseur. We go to bed in broad daylight.
When we get up it is dark and the first thing to do is to raise enough dough
to send a cable to America. A cable to the foetus with the long juicy cigar
in his mouth. Meanwhile there is the Spanish woman on the Boulevard
Raspail -- she's always good for a warm meal. By morning something will
happen. At least we're going to bed together. No more bedbugs now. The rainy
season has commenced. The sheets are immaculate ...
* * *
A new life opening up for me at the Villa Borghese. Only ten o'clock and we
have already had breakfast and been out for a walk. We have an Elsa here with
us now. "Step softly for a few days," cautions Boris.
The day begins gloriously: a bright sky, a fresh wind, the houses newly
washed. On our way to the Post Office Boris and I discussed the book. The
Last Book -- which is going to be written anonymously.
A new day is beginning. I felt it this morning as we stood before one of
Dufresne's glistening canvases, a sort of dejeuner intime in the 13th
century, sans vin. A fine, fleshy nude, solid, vibrant, pink as a
fingernail, with glistening billows of flesh; all the secondary
characteristics, and a few of the primary. A body that sings, that has the
moisture of dawn. A still life, only nothing is still, nothing dead here. The
table creaks with food; it is so heavy it is sliding out of the frame. A 13th
century repast -- with all the jungle notes that he has memorized so well. A
family of gazelles and zebras nipping the fronds of the palms.
And now we have Elsa. She was playing for us this morning while we were in
bed. Step softly for a few days ... Good! Elsa is the maid and I am
the guest. And Boris is the big cheese. A new drama is beginning. I'm
laughing to myself as I write this. He knows what is going to happen, that
lynx, Boris. He has a nose for things too. Step softly ...
Boris is on pins and needles. At any moment now his wife may appear on the
scene. She weighs well over 180 pounds, that wife of his. And Boris is only
a handful. There you have the situation. He tries to explain it to me on our
way home at night. It is so tragic and so ridiculous at the same time that I
am obliged to stop now and then and laugh in his face. "Why do you laugh so?"
he says gently, and then he commences himself, with that whimpering,
hysterical note in his voice, like a helpless wretch who realizes suddenly
that no matter how many frock coats he puts on he will never make a man. He
wants to run away, to take a new name. "She can have everything, that cow, if
only she leaves me alone," he whines. But first the apartment has to be
rented, and the deeds signed, and a thousand other details for which his
frock coat will come in handy. But the size of her! -- that's what really
worries him. If we were to find her suddenly standing on the doorstep when we
arrive he would faint -- that's how much he respects her!
And so we've got to go easy with Elsa for a while. Elsa is only there to
make breakfast -- and to show the apartment.
But Elsa is already undermining me. That German blood. Those melancholy
songs. Coming down the stairs this morning, with the fresh coffee in my
nostrils, I was humming softly ... "Es war' so schon gewesen." For
breakfast, that. And in a little while the English boy upstairs with his
Bach. As Elsa says -- "he needs a woman." And Elsa needs something too. I can
feel it. I didn't say anything to Boris about it, but while he was cleaning
his teeth this morning Elsa was giving me an earful about Berlin, about the
women who look so attractive from behind, and when they turn round -- wow,
syphilis!
It seems to me that Elsa looks at me rather wistfully. Something left over
from the breakfast table. This afternoon we were writing, back to back, in
the studio. She had begun a letter to her lover who is in Italy. The machine
got jammed. Boris had gone to look at a cheap room he will take as soon as
the apartment is rented. There was nothing for it but to make love to Elsa.
She wanted it. And yet I felt a little sorry for her. She had only written
the first line to her lover -- I read it out of the corner of my eye as I
bent over her. But it couldn't be helped. That damned German music, so
melancholy, so sentimental. It undermined me. And then her beady little eyes,
so hot and sorrowful at the same time.
After it was over I asked her to play something for me.
She's a musician, Elsa, even though it sounded like broken pots and skulls
clanking. She was weeping, too, as she played. I don't blame her. Everywhere
the same thing, she says. Everywhere a man, and then she has to leave, and
then there's an abortion and then a new job and then another man and nobody
gives a fuck about her except to use her. All this after she's played
Schumann for me -- Schumann, that slobbery, sentimental German bastard!
Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don't give a damn. A cunt who
can play as she does ought to have better sense than be tripped up by every
guy with a big putz who happens to come along. But that Schumann gets into
my blood. She's still sniffling, Elsa; but my mind is far away. I'm thinking
of Tania and how she claws away at her adagio. I'm thinking of lots of
things that are gone and buried. Thinking of a summer afternoon in
Greenpoint when the Germans were romping over Belgium and we had not yet
lost enough money to be concerned over the rape of a neutral country. A
time when we were still innocent enough to listen to poets and to sit around
a table in the twilight rapping for departed spirits. All that afternoon and
evening the atmosphere is saturated with German music; the whole
neighborhood is German, more German even than Germany. We were brought up on
Schumann and Hugo Wolf and Sauerkraut and Kummel and potato
dumplings. Toward evening we're sitting around a big table with the curtains
drawn and some fool two-headed wench is rapping for Jesus Christ. We're
holding hands under the table and the dame next to me has two fingers in my
fly. And finally we lie on the floor, behind the piano, while someone sings
a dreary song. The air is stifling and her breath is boozy. The pedal is
moving up and down, stiffly, automatically, a crazy, futile movement, like a
tower of dung that takes twenty-seven years to build but keeps perfect time.
I pull her over me with the sounding board in my ears; the room is dark and
the carpet is sticky with the Kiimmel that has been spilled about. Suddenly
it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is like water purling over ice and
the ice is blue with a rising mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois
and antelope, golden groupers, sea-cows mouching along and the amber-jack
leaping over the Arctic rim ...
Elsa is sitting in my lap. Her eyes are like little belly-buttons. I look at
her large mouth, so wet and glistening, and I cover it. She is humming now
... "Es war' so schon gewesen ..." Ah, Elsa, you don't know yet what
that means to me, your Trompeter von Sackingen. German Singing
Societies, Schwaben Hall, the Turnverein ... links um, rechts um ...
and then a whack over the ass with the end of a rope.
Ah, the Germans! They take you all over like an omnibus. They give you
indigestion. In the same night one cannot visit the morgue, the infirmary,
the zoo, the signs of the zodiac, the limbos of philosophy, the caves of
epistemology, the arcana of Freud and Stekel ... On the merry-go-round one
doesn't get anywhere, whereas with the Germans one can go from Vega to Lope
de Vega, all in one night, and come away as foolish as Parsifal.
As I say, the day began gloriously. It was only this morning that I became
conscious again of this physical Paris of which I have been unaware for
weeks. Perhaps it is because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am
carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with
child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me
their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle
awkwardly; my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world.
It was this morning, on our way to the Post Office, that we gave the book
its final imprimatur. We have evolved a new cosmogony of literature,
Boris and I. It is to be a new Bible -- The Last Book. All those who
have anything to say will say it here -- anonymously. We will exhaust
the age. After us not another book -- not for a generation, at least.
Heretofore we had been digging in the dark, with nothing but instinct to
guide us. Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the vital fluid, a
bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the world. We shall put into it
enough to give the writers of tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their
poems, their myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for
a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its pretentiousness. The thought
of it almost shatters us.
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And
not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put
a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is
rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it
needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have
in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds
of the air. We are going to put it down -- the evolution of this world which
has died but which has not been buried. We are swimming on the face of time
and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. It will be enormous,
the Book. There will be oceans of space in which to move about, to
perambulate, to sing, to dance, to climb, to bathe, to leap somersaults, to
whine, to rape, to murder. A cathedral, a veritable cathedral, in the
building of which everybody will assist who has lost his identity. There
will be masses for the dead, prayers, confessions, hymns, a moaning and a
chattering, a sort of murderous insouciance; there will be rose windows and
gargoyles and acolytes and pallbearers. You can bring your horses in a
gallop through the aisles. You can butt your head against the walls -- they
won't give. You can pray in any language you choose, or you can curl up
outside and go to sleep. It will last a thousand years, at least, this
cathedral, and there will be no replica, for the builders will be dead and
the formula too. We will have postcards made and organize tours. We will
build a town around it and set up a free commune. We have no need for
genius -- genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are
willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh ...
The day is moving along at a fine tempo. I am up on the balcony at Tania's
place. The drama is going on down below in the drawing-room. The dramatist
is sick and from above his scalp looks more scabrous than ever. His hair is
made of straw. His ideas are straw. His wife too is straw, though still a
little damp. The whole house is made of straw. Here I am up on the balcony,
waiting for Boris to arrive. My last problem -- breakfast -- is gone. I
have simplified everything. If there are any new problems I can carry them in
my rucksack, along with my dirty wash. I am throwing away all my sous. What
need have I for money? I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added.
The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am
the machine ...
They have not told me yet what the new drama is about, but I can sense it.
They are trying to get rid of me. Yet here I am for my dinner, even a little
earlier than they expected. I have informed them where to sit, what to do. I
ask them politely if I shall be disturbing them, but what I really mean, and
they know it well, is -- will you be disturbing me? No, you blissful
cockroaches, you are not disturbing me. You are nourishing me. I see
you sitting there close together and I know there is a chasm between you.
Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I
withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.
Tania is in a hostile mood -- I can feel it. She resents my being filled with
anything but herself. She knows by the very calibre of my excitement that
her value is reduced to zero. She knows that I did not come this evening to
fertilize her. She knows there is something germinating inside me which will
destroy her. She is slow to realize, but she is realizing it ...
Sylvester looks more content. He will embrace her this evening at the dinner
table. Even now he is reading my manuscript, preparing to inflame my ego, to
set my ego against hers.
It will be a strange gathering this evening. The stage is being set. I hear
the tinkle of the glasses. The wine is being brought out. There will be
bumpers downed and Sylvester who is ill will come out of his illness.
It was only last night, at Cronstadt's, that we projected this setting. It
was ordained that the women must suffer, that off-stage there should be more
terror and violence, more disasters, more suffering, more woe and misery.
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an
artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse
all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are
begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears
the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the
cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back
into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk.
Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to
apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places.
You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and
Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here
some time or other. Nobody dies here ...
They are talking downstairs. Their language is symbolic. The word
"struggle" enters into it. Sylvester, the sick dramatist, is saying: "I am
just reading the Manifesto." And Tania says -- "Whose?" Yes,
Tania, I heard you. I am up here writing about you and you divine it well.
Speak more, that I may record you. For when we go to table I shall
not be able to make any notes ... Suddenly Tania remarks: "There is no
prominent hall in this place." Now what does that mean, if anything?
They are putting up pictures now. That, too, is to impress me. See, they
wish to say, we are at home here, living the conjugal life. Making the home
attractive. We will even argue a little about the pictures, for your
benefit. And Tania remarks again: "How the eye deceives one!" Ah, Tania,
what things you say! Go on, carry out this farce a little longer. I am here
to get the dinner you promised me; I enjoy this comedy tremendously. And now
Sylvester takes the lead. He is trying to explain one of Borowski's
gouaches. "Come here, do you see? One of them is playing the guitar;
the other is holding a girl in his lap." True, Sylvester. Very true.
Borowski and his guitars! The girls in his lap! Only one never quite knows
what it is he holds in his lap, or whether it is really a man playing the
guitar ...
Soon Moldorf will be trotting in on all fours and Boris with that helpless
little laugh of his. There will be a golden pheasant for dinner and Anjou
and short fat cigars. And Cronstadt, when he gets the latest news, will
live a little harder, a little brighter, for five minutes; and then he will
subside again into the humus of his ideology
and perhaps a poem will be born, a big golden bell of a poem without a
tongue.
Had to knock off for an hour or so. Another customer to look at the
apartment. Upstairs the bloody Englishman is practising his Bach. It is
imperative now, when someone comes to look at the apartment, to run
upstairs and ask the pianist to lay off for a while.
Elsa is telephoning the greengrocer. The plumber is putting a new seat on
the toilet bowl. Whenever the doorbell rings Boris loses his equilibrium.
In the excitement he has dropped his glasses; he is on his hands and knees,
his frock coat is dragging the floor. It is a little like the Grand
Guignol -- the starving poet come to give the butcher's daughter lessons.
Every time the phone rings the poet's mouth waters. Mallarme sounds like a
sirloin steak, Victor Hugo like foie de veau. Elsa is ordering a
delicate little lunch for Boris -- "a nice juicy little pork chop," she says.
I see a whole flock of pink hams lying cold on the marble, wonderful hams
cushioned in white fat. I have a terrific hunger though we've only had
breakfast a few minutes ago -- it's the lunch that I'll have to skip. It's
only Wednesdays that I eat lunch, thanks to Borowski. Elsa is still
telephoning -- she forgot to order a piece of bacon. "Yes, a nice little piece
of bacon, not too fatty," she says ... Zut alors! Throw in some
sweetbreads, throw in some mountain oysters and some psst clams! Throw in
some fried liverwurst while you're at it; I could gobble up the fifteen
hundred plays of Lope de Vega in one sitting.
It is a beautiful woman who has come to look at the apartment. An American,
of course. I stand at the window with my back to her watching a sparrow
pecking at a fresh turd. Amazing how easily the sparrow is provided for. It
is raining a bit and the drops are very big. I used to think a bird couldn't
fly if its wings got wet. Amazing how these rich dames come to Paris and find
all the swell studios. A little talent and a big purse. If it rains they have
a chance to display their brand new slickers. Food is nothing: sometimes
they're so busy gadding about that they haven't time for lunch. Just a little
sandwich, a wafer, at the Cafe de la Paix or the Ritz Bar.
"For the daughters of gentlefolk only" -- that's what it says at the old
studio of Puvis de Chavannes. Happened to pass there the other day. Rich
American cunts with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent
and a fat purse.
The sparrow is hopping frantically from one cobble-stone to another. Truly
herculean efforts, if you stop to examine closely. Everywhere there is food
lying about -- in the gutter, I mean. The beautiful American woman is
inquiring about the toilet. The toilet! Let me show you, you velvet-snooted
gazelle! The toilet, you say? Par id, Madame. N'oubliez. pas que les
places numerotees sont reservees aux mutiles de la guerre.
Boris is rubbing his hands -- he is putting the finishing touches to the deal.
The dogs are barking in the courtyard; they bark like wolves. Upstairs Mrs.
Melverness is moving the furniture around. She had nothing to do all day,
she's bored; if she finds a crumb of dirt anywhere she cleans the whole
house. There's a bunch of green grapes on the table and a bottle of
wine -- vin de choix, 10 degrees. "Yes," says Boris, "I could make a
wash-stand for you, just come here, please. Yes, this is the toilet. There
is one upstairs too, of course. Yes, a thousand francs a month. You don't
care much for Utrillo, you say? No, this is it. It needs a new washer,
that's all ..."
She's going in a minute now. Boris hasn't even introduced me this time. The
son of a bitch! Whenever it's a rich cunt he forgets to introduce me. In a
few minutes I'll be able to sit down again and type. Somehow I don't feel
like it any more today. My spirit is dribbling away. She may come back in an
hour or so and take the chair from under my ass. How the hell can a man
write when he doesn't know where he's going to sit the next half hour? If
this rich bastard takes the place I won't even have a place to sleep. It's
hard to know, when you're in such a jam which is worse -- not having a place
to sleep or not having a place to work. One can sleep almost anywhere, but
one must have a place to work. Even if it's not a masterpiece you're doing.
Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy. These rich
cunts never think of a thing like that. Whenever they want to lower their
soft behinds there's always a chair standing ready for them ...
x x x
Last night we left Sylvester and his God sitting together before the
hearth. Sylvester in his pajamas, Moldorf with a cigar between his lips.
Sylvester is peeling an orange. He puts the peel on the couch-cover.
Moldorf draws closer to him. He asks permission to read again that brilliant
parody The Gates of Heaven. We are getting ready to go, Boris and I.
We are too gay for this sick-room atmosphere. Tania is going with us. She is
gay because she is going to escape. Boris is gay because the God in Moldorf
is dead. I am gay because it is another act we are going to put on.
Moldorf's voice is reverent. "Can I stay with you, Sylvester, until you go
to bed?" He has been staying with him for the last six days, buying
medicine, running errands for Tania, comforting, consoling, guarding the
portals against malevolent intruders like Boris and his scallywags. He is
like a savage who has discovered that his idol was mutilated during the
night. There he sits, at the idol's feet, with breadfruit and grease and
jabber-wocky prayers. His voice goes out unctuously. His limbs are already
paralyzed.
To Tania he speaks as if she were a priestess who had broken her vows. "You
must make yourself worthy. Sylvester is your God." And while Sylvester is
upstairs suffering (he has a little wheeze in the chest) the priest and the
priestess devour the food. "You are polluting yourself," he says, the gravy
dripping from his lips. He has the capacity for eating and suffering at the
same time. While he fends off the dangerous ones he puts out his fat little
paw and strokes Tania's hair. "I am beginning to fall in love with you. You
are like my Fanny."
In other respects it has been a fine day for Moldorf. A letter arrived from
America. Moe is getting A's in everything. Murray is learning to ride the
bicycle. The victrola was repaired. You can see from the expression on his
face that there were other things in the letter besides report cards and
velocipedes. You can be sure of it because this afternoon he bought 325
francs worth of jewelry for his Fanny. In addition he wrote her a
twenty-page letter. The garcon brought him page after page, filled
his fountain pen, served his coffee and cigars, fanned him a little
when he perspired, brushed the crumbs from the table, lit his cigar when it
went out, bought stamps for him, danced on him, piroutted, salaamed ...
broke his spine damned near. The tip was fat. Bigger and fatter than a
Corona Corona. Moldorf probably mentioned it in his diary. It was for
Fanny's sake. The bracelet and the earrings, they were worth every sou he
spent. Better to spend it on Fanny than waste it on little strumpets like
Germaine and Odette. Yes, he told Tania so. He showed her his trunk. It is
crammed with gifts -- for Fanny, and for Moe and Murray.
"My Fanny is the most intelligent woman in the world. I have been searching
and searching to find a flaw in her -- but there's not one.
"She's perfect. I'll tell you what Fanny can do. She plays bridge like a
shark; she's interested in Zionism; you give her an old hat, for instance,
and see what she can do with it. A little twist here, a ribbon there, and
voila quelque chose de beau! Do you know what is perfect bliss? To
sit beside Fanny, when Moe and Murray have gone to bed, and listen to the
radio. She sits there so peacefully. I am rewarded for all my struggles and
heartaches in just watching her. She listens intelligently. When I think of
your stinking Montparnasse and then of my evenings in Bay Ridge with Fanny
after a big meal, I tell you there is no comparison. A simple thing like
food, the children, the soft lamps, and Fanny sitting there, a little tired,
but cheerful, contented, heavy with bread ... we just sit there for hours
without saying a word. That's bliss!
"Today she writes me a letter -- not one of those dull stock report letters.
She writes me from the heart, in language that even my little Murray could
understand. She's delicate about everything, Fanny. She says that the
children must continue their education but the expense worries her. It
will cost a thousand bucks to send little Murray to school. Moe, of course,
will get a scholarship. But little Murray, that little genius, Murray, what
are we going to do about him? I wrote Fanny not to worry. Send Murray to
school, I said. What's another thousand dollars? I'll make more money this
year than ever before. I'll do it for little Murray -- because he's a genius,
that kid."
I should like to be there when Fanny opens the trunk. "See, Fanny, this is
what I bought in Budapest from an old Jew ... This is what they wear in
Bulgaria -- it's pure wool . .. This belonged to the Duke of something or
other -- no, you don't wind it, you put it in the sun This I want you to wear,
Fanny, when we go to the Opera ... wear it with that comb I showed you ...
And this, Fanny, is something Tania picked up for me ... she's a little bit
on your type ..."
And Fanny is sitting there on the settee, just as she was in the oleograph,
with Moe on one side of her and little Murray, Murray the genius, on the
other. Her fat legs are a little too short to reach the floor. Her eyes have
a dull permanganate glow. Breasts like ripe red cabbage; they bobble a
little when she leans forward. But the sad thing about her is that the juice
has been cut off. She sits there like a dead storage battery; her face is
out of plumb -- it needs a little animation, a sudden spurt of juice to bring
it back into focus. Moldorf is jumping around in front of her like a fat
toad. His flesh quivers. He slips and it is difficult for him to roll over
again on his belly. She prods him with her thick toes. His eyes protrude a
little further. "Kick me again. Fanny, that was good!" She gives him a good
prod this time -- it leaves a permanent dent in his paunch. His face is close
to the carpet; the wattles are joggling in the nap of the rug. He livens up
a bit, flips around, springs from furniture to furniture. "Fanny, you are
marvellous!" He is sitting now on her shoulder. He bites a little piece from
her ear, just a little tip from the lobe where it doesn't hurt. But she's
still dead -- all storage battery and no juice. He falls on her lap and lies
there quivering like a toothache. He is all warm now and helpless. His
belly glistens like a patent-leather shoe. In the sockets of his eyes a pair
of fancy vest buttons. "Unbutton my eyes. Fanny, I want to see you better!"
Fanny carries him to bed and drops a little hot wax over his eyes.
She puts rings around his navel and a thermometer up his ass. She places him
and he quivers again. Suddenly he's dwindled, shrunk completely out of
sight. She searches all over for him, in her intestines, everywhere.
Something is tickling her -- she doesn't know where exactly. The bed is full
of toads and fancy vest buttons.
"Fanny, where are you?" Something is tickling her -- she can't say where. The
buttons are dropping off the bed. The toads are climbing the walls. A
tickling and a tickling. "Fanny, take the wax out of my eyes! I want to
look at you!" But Fanny is laughing, squirming with laughter. There is
something inside her, tickling and tickling. She'll die laughing if she
doesn't find it. "Fanny, the trunk is full of beautiful things. Fanny, do
you hear me?" Fanny is laughing, laughing like a fat worm. Her belly is
swollen with laughter. Her legs are getting blue. "O God, Morris, there is
something tickling me ... I can't help it!"
* * *
Sunday! Left the Villa Borghese a little before noon, just as Boris was
getting ready to sit down to lunch. I left out of a sense of delicacy,
because it really pains Boris to see me sitting there in the studio with an
empty belly. Why he doesn't invite me to lunch with him I don't know. He
says he can't afford it, but that's no excuse. Anyway, I'm delicate about
it. If it pains him to eat alone in my presence it would probably pain him
more to share his meal with me. It's not my place to pry into his secret
affairs.
Dropped in at the Cronstadts' and they were eating too. A young chicken with
wild rice. Pretended that I had eaten already, but I could have torn the
chicken from the baby's hands. This is not just false modesty -- it's a kind
of perversion, I'm thinking. Twice they asked me if I wouldn't join them.
No! No! Wouldn't even accept a cup of coffee after the meal. I'm
delicat, I am! On the way out I cast a lingering glance at the bones
lying on the baby's plate -- there was still meat on them.
Prowling around aimlessly. A beautiful day -- so far. The Rue de Buci is
alive, crawling. The bars wide open and the curbs lined with bicycles. All
the meat and vegetable markets are in full swing. Arms loaded with truck
bandaged in newspapers. A fine Catholic Sunday -- in the morning, at least.
High noon and here I am standing on an empty belly at the confluence of all
these crooked lanes that reek with the odor of food. Opposite me is the Hotel
de Louisiane. A grim old hostelry known to the bad boys of the Rue de Boci in
the good old days. Hotels and food, and I'm walking about like a leper with
crabs gnawing at my entrails. On Sunday mornings there's a fever in the
streets. Nothing like it anywhere, except perhaps on the East Side, or down
around Chatham Square. The Rue de l'Echaude is seething. The streets twist
and turn, at every angle a fresh hive of activity. Long queues of people with
vegetables under their arms, turning in here and there with crisp, sparkling
appetites. Nothing but food, food, food. Makes one delirious.
Pass the Square de Furstemberg. Looks different now, at high noon. The other
night when I passed by it was deserted, bleak, spectral. In the middle of
the square four black trees that have not yet begun to blossom.
Intellectual trees, nourished by the paving stones. Like T. S. Eliot's
verse. Here, by God, if Marie Laurencin ever brought her Lesbians out into
the open, would be the place for them to commune. Tres lesbienne id.
Sterile, hybrid, dry as Boris' heart.
In the little garden adjoining the Eglise St. Germain are a few dismounted
gargoyles. Monsters that jut forward with a terrifying plunge. On the
benches other monsters -- old people, idiots, cripples, epileptics. Snoozing
quietly, waiting for the dinner bell to ring. At the Galerie Zak across the
way some imbecile has made a picture of the cosmos -- on the flat. A
painter's cosmos! Full of odds and ends, bric-a-brac. In the lower left-hand
corner, however, there's an anchor -- and a dinner bell. Salute! Salute, O
Cosmos!
Still prowling around. Mid-aftemoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now.
Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over
the lace facade. They hang there like an idee fixe in the mind of a
monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some
Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and
the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud. Book store
with some of Raoul Dufy's drawings in the window. Drawings of charwomen with
rose bushes between their legs. A treatise on the philosophy of Joan Miro.
The philosophy, mind you!
In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one: the man in the
eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in the eyes of his mistress.
Chapter three:--No chapter three. Have to come back tomorrow for chapters
three and four. Every day the window trimmer turns a fresh page. A man
cut in slices ... You can't imagine how furious I am not to have
thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who writes "the same in
the eyes of his mistress ... the same in the eyes of ... the same ..."?
Where is this guy? Who is he? I want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had
brains enough to think of a title like that -- instead of Crazy Cock
and the other fool things I invented. Well, fuck a duck! I congratulate him
just the same.
I wish him luck with his fine title. Here's another slice for you -- for your
next book! Ring me up some day. I'm living at the Villa Borghese. We're all
dead, or dying, or about to die. We need good titles. We need meat -- slices
and slices of meat -- juicy tenderloins, porterhouse steaks, kidneys, mountain
oysters, sweetbreads. Some day, when I'm standing at the corner of 42nd
Street and Broadway, I'm going to remember this title and I'm going to put
down everything that goes on in my noodle -- caviar, rain drops, axle-grease,
vermicelli, liverwurst -- slices and slices of it. And I'll tell no one why,
after I had put everything down, I suddenly went home and chopped the baby
to pieces. Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupe en
tranches!
How a man can wander about all day on an empty belly, and even get an
erection once in a while, is one of those mysteries which are too easily
explained by the "anatomists of the soul." On a Sunday afternoon, when the
shutters are down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of dumb
torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind one of nothing less
than a big chancrous cock laid open longitudinally. And it is just these
highways, the Rue St. Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple -- which
attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around Union Square or
the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was drawn to the dime museums where in
the show-windows there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs
of the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal diseases. The city
sprouts out like a huge organism diseased in every part, the beautiful
thoroughfares only a little less repulsive because they have been drained
of their pus.
At the Cite Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat, I pause a few
minutes to drink in the full squalor of the scene. It is a rectangular court
like many another which one glimpses through the low passageways that flank
the old arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of decrepit
buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another
and formed a sort of intestinal embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging
slippery with slime. A sort of human dump-heap which has been filled in with
cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift
from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bistre, from cool dead grays to
pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window
blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces
and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor
seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress Europe -- medieval,
grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B mol. Directly across the street the
Cine Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis.
Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was reading only the other day.
"The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by
plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat
them; the black death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and
the English came marching on; the while the danse macabre whirled
about the tombs in all the cemeteries ..." Paris during the days of Charles
the Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I'm still enchanted by
it. About the patrons and prodromes of the Renaissance I know little, but
Madam Pimpernel, la belle boulangere, and Maitre Jehan Crapotte,
I'orfevre, these occupy my spare thoughts still. Not forgetting
Rodin, the evil genius of The Wandering Jew, who practised his
nefarious ways "until the day when he was enflamed and outwitted by the
octoroon Cecily." Sitting in the Square du Temple, musing over the doings of
the horse-knackers led by Jean Caboche, I have thought long and ruefully
over the. sad fate of Charles the Silly. A half-wit, who prowled
about the halls of his Hotel St. Paul, garbed in the filthiest rags, eaten
away by ulcers and vermin, gnawing a bone, when they flung him one, like a
mangy dog. At the Rue des Lions I looked for the stones of the old menagerie
where he once fed his pets. His only diversion, poor dolt, aside from those
card games with his "low-born companion," Odette de Champsdivers.
It was a Sunday afternoon, much like this, when I first met Germaine. I was
strolling along the Boulevard Beaumarchais, rich by a hundred francs or so
which my wife had frantically cabled from America. There was a touch of
spring in the air, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to burst from the
manholes. Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter,
attracted by certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister
splendor when the light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to
take up their posts. The Rue Pasteur-Wagner is one I recall in particular,
corner of the Rue Amelot which hides behind the boulevard like a slumbering
lizard. Here, at the neck of the bottle, so to speak, there was always a
cluster of vultures who croaked and flapped their dirty wings, who reached
out with sharp talons and plucked you into a doorway. Jolly, rapacious
devils who didn't even give you time to button your pants when it was over.
Led you into a little room off the street, a room without a window usually,
and, sitting on the edge of the bed with skirts tucked up gave you a quick
inspection, spat on your cock, and placed it for you. While you washed
yourself another one stood at the door and, holding her victim by one hand,
watched nonchalantly as you gave the finishing touches to your toilet.
Germaine was different. There was nothing to tell me so from her appearance.
Nothing to distinguish her from the other trollops who met each afternoon
and evening at the Cafe de l'Elephant. As I say, it was a spring day and the
few francs my wife had scraped up to cable me were jingling in my pocket. I
had a sort of vague premonition that I would not reach the Bastille without
being taken in tow by one of these buzzards. Sauntering along the boulevard
I had noticed her verging towards me with that curious trot-about air of a
whore and the rundown heels and the cheap jewelry and the pasty look of
their kind which the rouge only accentuates. It was not difficult to come
to terms with her. We sat in the back of the little tabac called
L'Elephant and talked it over quickly.
In a few minutes we were in a five-franc room on the Rue Amelot, the
curtains drawn and the covers thrown back. She didn't rush things, Germaine.
She sat on the bidet soaping herself and talked to me pleasantly
about this and that; she liked the knickerbockers I was wearing. Tres
chic! she thought. They were once, but I had worn the seat out of them;
fortunately the jacket covered my ass. As she stood up to dry herself, still
talking to me pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing
towards me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately,
stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it. There
was something about her eloquence at that moment and the way she thrust
that rosebush under my nose which remains unforgettable; she spoke of it as
if it were some extraneous object which she had acquired at great cost, an
object whose value had increased with time and which now she prized above
everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it
was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent
treasure, a God-given thing -- and none the less so because she traded it day
in and day out for a few pieces of silver. As she flung herself on the bed,
with legs spread wide apart, she cupped it with her hands and stroked it
some more, murmuring all the while in that hoarse, cracked voice of hers
that it was good, beautiful, a treasure, a little treasure. And it was
good, that little pussy of hers! That Sunday afternoon, with its
poisonous breath of spring in the air, everything clicked again. As we
stepped out of the hotel I looked her over again in the harsh light of day
and I saw clearly what a whore she was -- the gold teeth, the geranium in her
hat, the rundown heels, etc., etc. Even the fact that she had wormed
a dinner out of me and cigarettes and taxi hadn't the least disturbing
effect upon me. I encouraged it, in fact. I liked her so well that after
dinner we went back to the hotel again and took another shot at it. "For
love," this time. And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom
and magic. It began to have an independent existence -- for me too. There was
Germaine and there was that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately and
I liked them together.
As I say, she was different, Germaine. Later, when she
discovered my true circumstances, she treated me nobly -- blew me to drinks,
gave me credit, pawned my things, introduced me to her friends, and so on.
She even apologized for not lending me money, which I understood quite well
after her maquereau had been pointed out to me. Night after night I
walked down the Boulevard Beaumarchais to the little tabac where they
all congregated and I waited for her to stroll in and give me a few minutes
of her precious time.
When, some time later, I came to write about Claude it was not Claude that I
was thinking of, but Germaine.... "All the men she's been with and now you,
just you, and barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of
life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and
after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the
fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you." That was for Germaine! Claude
was not the same, though I admired her tremendously -- I even thought for a
while that I loved her. Claude had a soul and a conscience; she had
refinement, too, which is bad -- in a whore. Claude always imparted a feeling
of sadness; she left the impression, unwittingly, of course, that you were
just one more added to the stream which fate had ordained to destroy her.
Unwittingly, I say, because Claude was the last person in the world
who would consciously create such an image in one's mind. She was too
delicate, too sensitive for that. At bottom, Claude was just a good French
girl of average breed and intelligence whom life had tricked somehow;
something in her there was which was not tough enough to withstand the shock
of daily experience. For her were meant those terrible words of
Louis-Philippe: "and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have
closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat
hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth."
Germaine, on the other hand, was a whore from the cradle; she was thoroughly
satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact, except when